Many of you have probably seen the notifications that went out via email or in the forums, but today is the last day of support for SugarCRM 4.5.1.

End of Life for the support means that SugarCRM will no longer provide customer support, maintenance patches or bug fixes for version 4.5.1.

Customers and partners will still be able to run the 4.5.1 versions of the Sugar products beyond September 30, 2009. However, support and development for the 4.5.1 versions will no longer be provided by SugarCRM.

We encourage you to upgrade to the latest version, which is version 5.2.0j.  It’s been a fun ride and lots have changed since we released 4.5.1 in February 2007.  Here’s a reminder of all the good things:

•    Advanced reporting (Professional/Enterprise Editions Only)
•    More flexible importing capabilities
•    New gauge and funnel charts (Professional/Enterprise Editions Only)
•    A new feature-rich email client
•    Sugar Mobile View
•    Advanced customization using Module Builder and Studio
•    Sugar Cloud Connectors to view and import 3rd-party data
•    Module-level administration permissions for granular module administration (Professional/Enterprise Editions Only)
•    Improved performance and scalability

Thank you to all who are participating in the first TestFest.  Please take the next 24 hours to review the Beta 2 release of SugarCRM 5.5.  Try upgrading a copy of a production instance of SugarCRM, your feedback is critical to achieving a quality release of 5.5.  Here are a few other components that you can Test in Sugar 5.5 Beta 2:

• New Theme Engine, try installing 5.2 themes and see if it works.
• Password Management, try reseting your password or generating a new one.
• Webservices, try using a API tool and ensure it’s backwards compatibility.

Even though “TestFest” ends tomorrow, this is really an on going process.  We really need to make your input and testing a critical part of the development process and release cycle.

Please help make one big push and try to uncover as many bugs as you possibly can before the close of business Pacific time (UTC-8)!

SugarCRM 5.5 Beta2 was released last friday and we’ve had 8 bugs submitted.  Five of the bugs were just submitted yesterday by one person!

Your input is SUPER critical at this stage!

Developers, we need to make sure that you’ve tested the various apis so that any of the software you’ve created is compatible with 5.5 when we release it as GA.

Users, we need to test your business processes and dataset with 5.5.

*** IMPORTANT MESSAGE ***

Sugar will be closing submissions for bugs for Beta 2  on September 18th.  All bugs must be submitted before that date to be fixed for Release Candidate 1.

If you’ve volunteered for TestFest, time to kick  it in gear and test, Test, TEST!

Sugar Community Edition 5.5.0 Beta 2
Release Date: Friday, September 4th 2009

The Sugar 5.5 Beta 2 is now available to demo online and to download!

We hope to get as much feedback on Sugar 5.5 from you during the timeframe of this Beta 2 release and the upcoming RC (Release Candidate) release.

Download the Sugar 5.5 Beta 2 – Install Sugar 5.5 Beta 2, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar 5.5 Beta 2.

Note: Upgrade files from Sugar 5.5 Beta 2 to any later release will not be provided. Therefore, we recommend that you upgrade a copy of your production Sugar system for testing purposes only. We
plan on providing upgrade files from the upcoming Sugar 5.5 Release Candidate to the Sugar 5.5 GA release.

View the 5.5 Beta 2 Release Notes for information about new features in 5.5 Beta 2 that were added since the 5.5 Community Preview.

If you have not already volunteered to participate in SugarCRM TestFest, right now is an excellent time. You can sign up TestFest by posting in the forum thread or contacting Matt Heitzenroder.

Please share with us your feedback and comments within the 5.5 Beta 2 Preview forum thread.

If you encounter any bugs, please help us by submitting bugs within the SugarCRM Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-Beta 21″ for the “Found in Release” field. Use the Bug Tracker to find the status of known 5.5 Beta 2
issues as well.

Thanks in advance for helping us achieve a high level of quality in the Sugar 5.5 GA release.

I have spoken with numerous customers and partners that are eager to use PHP5.3.  The main reason is that PHP5.3 has GOTO’s… just joking.

Actually, with PHP 5.3 release, one of the fixes includes better garbage collection for circular references to objects.  If you’ve ever pretty printed a Sugar Bean, you’d likely notice the recursion of the database object on the bean, pointing to the bean and so on.

Normally, this doesn’t affect the memory consumption of PHP, especially since the process thread is terminated after the request is fulfilled.  However, this can become an issue when doing a large import or a HUGE mass update.

So the big question is, as @stuherbert asks, are you using PHP 5.3?  If you’re interested in knowing the results, just head over here.  If you’re interested in using PHP5.3 or have any experience running Sugar on PHP5.3, let me know.  I’m VERY interested.