Have you noticed that we’re really trying to cut the time between releases?
Engineering has been busting their tails, changing up their development methodology a bit – I’ll save more information about that for another post…
Regardless, 5.2.0k and 5.0.0n was released last night and you can get it all on SugarForge.
Any feedback regarding the patches is welcome here or in the forums.
Wow, I just realized after writing that title how many obscure references there are and you have to be in the “know”. So let me break it down for you:
RC3 == Release Candidate #3
We’ve released SugarCRM 5.5 RC2 in the third week of October and we already have over 300 installations.
GA == Generally Available
As people test and use the release candidate, they have been submitting bugs and we fix them. In the next week, we’ll likely release “Release Candidate 3″, which will be the most likely candidate for a Generally Available release.
So test, test, test. Because before the end of November, we expect to release SugarCRM 5.5 GA and it’s likely going to be the same code as RC3, unless you tell us otherwise. Thanks for your help!
Editors Note: For this post, I decided to reach out to one of our most influential community members, Angel Magaña, to discuss one of his latest and very interesting projects on SugarForge.org. Expect more of these to come. Thank you Angel for taking the time. – Matt Heitzenroder.
One of the biggest challenges in deploying a CRM solution relates to the process of populating the system with legacy data. This is a challenge inherit to working with database systems in general, due to differences in structures, design philosophy and database formats, amongst other things.
SugarCRM includes tools that help streamline the process for certain scenarios, but others require specialized tools to simplify the process. A great example of such a scenario is that of someone wishing to port data into SugarCRM from an existing CRM system, in this case, GoldMine.
While it is possible to export data from GoldMine into CSV files and in turn use SugarCRM’s import capabilities to import the data, this technique is not efficient and error prone. CSV files can be difficult to import due to potential formatting issues, especially if one is interested in importing free-form text data such as that which can be found in GoldMine’s Notes tab. That type of data usually requires some level of manipulation before it can be imported via CSV files and it can be a tedious task. This is one of the primary reasons why the use of CSV files can be a frustrating experience.
An alternate and more effective approach for such a task is to read the data directly from the GoldMine database, but herein lies a challenge. SugarCRM doesn’t have any native features that allow it to directly communicate with the GoldMine database to request the appropriate data. In addition, it is also necessary to prepare the data for its new home in the SugarCRM database and that too is a task that requires outside assistance.
Enter the SugarCRM Express Conversion (SEC) utility.
Excellent news! SugarCRM Engineering team keeps rolling out the release candidates for 5.5.
Please download from the link below or try the free preview and see if the bugs that you’ve submitted have been fixed. We are really trying to get the highest quality release out to you ever. So please, if you find a bug, please report it at http://bugs.sugarcrm.com. More to come!!!!
Download the Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2
Install Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2.
Note: We plan on providing upgrade files from the Sugar 5.5 Release Candidate 2 to Sugar 5.5 GA.
Preview Sugar 5.5 CE RC 2 Online
Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise Release Candidates are also available to preview.
View the 5.5 RC 2 Release Notes for information about what has changed in 5.5 RC 2. For a full listing of what issues were fixed in Sugar 5.5 RC 2, use the Bug Tracker.
If you encounter any issues, please help us by submitting bugs in the Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-RC2″ for the “Found in Release” field.
Please also share with us your feedback and comments within the Sugar 5.5 forums.
Guess what?! Today we passed 20,000 registered developers on SugarForge. How cool is that? It’s really amazing if you think about it.
I think the best is yet to come too. I was in a meeting at Sugar today and there is a real commitment to get our Subversion trunk hosted publicly. Right now, the way our build process is for the packages we distribute (Community, Professional, and Enterprise), there’s not possible to publicly host the mainline of development. It’s going to take a lot of effort, but the commitment, motivation, and determination to make it happen is all there.
Now imagine if 20,000 developers could all be making patches and contributions to the public branch? What a difference we could make.
The user type formerly known as “Portal Only User” is now referred to as “Portal API User”. This re-naming was done to clarify the true purpose of this user type and to distinguish it from a Contact who may also be a user of the Customer Portal.
The creation of the “Portal API User” is supported in the Enterprise Edition by default. Professional Edition customers can enable this functionality by adding the following parameter to config_override.php:
$sugar_config['enable_web_services_user_creation']= true;
After this parameter has been added to the config file, an additional menu item “Create Portal API User” will appear in the Users module Shortcuts menu. This can be used to create a new user of this type.
The Sugar Community Edition 5.5 Release Candidate is now available to download!
Download the Sugar CE 5.5 RC
Install Sugar CE 5.5 RC, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar CE 5.5 RC.
Note: We plan on providing upgrade files from the Sugar 5.5 RC to Sugar 5.5 GA.
Preview Sugar CE 5.5 RC Online
Between the Beta 2 release and this Release Candidate (RC), we have raised the quality of the release even higher than ever! This RC is production-ready and has attained and even exceeded the quality of previous Generally Available (GA) releases. We are doing an additional week of QA testing of the features in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise before we release another GA-candidate.
View the 5.5 RC Release Notes for information about what has changed in 5.5 RC. For a full listing of what issues were fixed in Sugar 5.5 RC, use the Bug Tracker.
If you encounter any bugs, please help us by submitting bugs within the SugarCRM Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-RC1″ for the “Found in Release” field. Use the Bug Tracker to find the status of known 5.5 Beta 2 issues as well.
Please also share with us your feedback and comments within the Sugar 5.5 forums.
I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Ontario GNU Linux Fest on Saturday October 24th at the Days Hotel Toronto Airport. It’s a grassroots event ran by the Toronto open source community, and this year they have invited me to speak about on the topic “Build your business on SugarCRM“. The talk will center on what SugarCRM has to offer as a product out of the box for businesses of any size, and then show off on how to customize and build on top of SugarCRM using Studio and Module Builder, as well as custom PHP code. I’ll also be fielding any questions or comments folks have about SugarCRM in general.
We also have more developer and open source events we plan on being a part of in the future as well, we’ll announce those as they become more official. Also, if you are hosting an event and would like SugarCRM to participate at it, feel free to contact me at jmertic@sugarcrm.com.