Today, we made Sugar Community Edition available through the Windows Web App Gallery in order to make is easy to get Sugar up and running on Windows easily. If you aren’t familiar the Web App Gallery, check it out. It’s a great tool for getting many of the most popular PHP and ASP.NET open source web applications, such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Gallery, up and running in minutes. Combined with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which installs and configures all the IIS/SQL Server stack components such as FastCGI, PHP, and IIS Rewrite, you can get your Windows box ready to serve any of these popular web applications without breaking a sweat.

You can install SugarCRM via the Web Platform Installer using the link below:

Currently, we support installing Sugar Community Edition on IIS 5.1 and above (Windows XP and later) and using MySQL as the database. In the future, we plan to expand to support installing it on SQL Server as well.

SugarCRM and Windows – Where we are going

Our upcoming 5.5 release will be adding support for SQL Server 2008, as well as Windows Server 2008, to our supported platform matrix, keeping us current with the latest products on the Windows platform. We are also currently testing the new Microsoft PHP SQL Server Driver and plan to have beta support for it in 5.5, with full support upcoming in a 5.5 maintenance release (stay tuned for more information about this). Also for 5.5, we will add full support for using FastCGI under IIS, which should bring performance and stability improvements to all Windows users, and in the process we are removing support for the buggy and slow ISAPI module used with PHP under IIS in previous versions.

With these platform changes, and the upcoming features and stability improvements in 5.5, Sugar is now a premier application for those on deploying stacks.

We have some great projects coming down the pipeline, but we want to get them out sooner rather than later. That is why we are looking for developers who would like to work with Sugar Developers on bringing these projects out. Here are a couple of the projects we are currently working on.

Subpanels 2.0:

We are turning our Subpanels into Dashlets and would love for you to help out. The idea behind this project is to give users the same flexibility that they get on the home page. A couple of big benefits will be that users can set filters on the subpanels. For example you can say “I only want to see cases that are not closed in this dashlet” . Another big benefit is the amount of flexibility that developers gain. We already have prototypes of a Google Maps dashlet that will map out addresses as a subpanel and RSS News Feeds that search for an account name. It is also all AJAX based so you’ll notices faster load times. This project is heavy on the PHP and JAVASCRIPT side.

AJAX UI:

Along the same lines of performance, we also have a project to revamp the UI with an enhanced AJAX UI. The idea is to reduce the time between clicks and seeing the results. This is going to be accomplished by starting out with a simplistic method of initially just loading what has changed between page loads. From there the project will branch out to the point that the HTML is generated client side and only data is being transfered back and forth.This project is heavy on the JAVASCRIPT side and light on the PHP side. It will utilize the REST API available in Sugar 5.5.

Theme Builder:

Themes allow you to work in an environment where you truly feel at home, but it’s always been a lot of work to get that “Just Right” feeling. With Sugar 5.5. themes get a major over haul. Now we want to harvest that over haul and make it a cinch to build the theme of your dreams.This project is heavy on the Java Script side.

Language Manager:

Think wiki-style collaboration on language packs. If you find something wrong with the German language pack fix it and everyone will have your fix right away. It will also allow for creating regional dialect based language packs. This project is heavy on the PHP side.

If you would be interested in working on any of these projects just go to new.sugarforge.org and register. Not all the projects are up yet though. Also if you don’t want to develop, but want to check out any of the functionality feel free to and remember to give us feedback.

Recently we sent out our Sugar Developer Buzz mailing, which contained a really, REALLY important message.

Pretty please test your project on the 5.5 betas and release candidates!

While its not easily seen or heard outside the walls of SugarCRM, we’re focusing on addressing one of your biggest concerns: quality.

This isn’t an easy task and there’s a lot to do, changing status quo isn’t easy.  Especially when there’s a considerable amount of infrastructure in place to support the current practices.  So little by little, we’re doing what we can… and we need your help

We are going to start a new release cycle as our initial change in quality assurance.  We will be releasing Sugar 5.5 Beta 2 at the end of July.  Shortly following, I *REALLY* want to organize a TestFest to pick apart Beta 2.

What we need from you, our community, is to test the apps that you’ve built in Beta 1 and Beta 2.  Most importantly, with the introduction with a revamped webservices API, we need you to test your programs with Sugar 5.5.  Look at it this way, you can test now or pay later

To further our commitment to getting a solid GA, we will be considering our Release Candidate to be “production-ready”. So RC is the new GA – get it?   The 5.5 RC will be fully supported by SugarCRM.

I will be organizing a TestFest and if you would like to participate or have ideas/comments, please let me know.  If you have ever partipated or hosted a TestFest, please contact me – I would LOVE to hear what you know.

Digg recently dug into why users are using IE6. Their results are quite interesting.

Of course, this only represents users thar are going to digg with IE6, but their results do tell us “IT departments prevent users from using a modern browser.”  Why are IT departments doing this?  Laziness?

Consider this:

IE6 just had two new vulnerabilities confirmed by MS in the last six weeks… even after 8 years of development.

YouTube announced it is dropping IE6 support … will the market dictate the end of life for IE6?

Sugar is NOT going to drop IE6 support in 5.5, but we’re going to introduce an IE6 only theme.  So grab your chaise lounge, sit back, and tell us how you feel.

Is PHP ready for the Enterprise? I’d love to get your reactions to this virtual round table on PHP in the Enterprise at InfoQ (one of my favorite sites, btw).

Zeev Suraski, Co-founder of Zend Technologies which oversees PHP advances, makes a pretty good point (even citing Sugar):

“…the sheer amount of large, complex websites (Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr) based on PHP, sheer amount of complex off-the-shelf apps (SugarCRM, OpenPro, CMS’s) based on PHP and enterprises relying on PHP for either their corporate websites or their internal systems – is a testament to the fact that PHP’s feature set is mature…”

I think it’s pretty clear that PHP is enterprise ready  - the reason why I believe that is basically because of sites like Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr.  Aside from that, here a bit closer to home, we have numerous large scale implementations that are successful.