We have just posted the Sugar Developer Webinar schedule for June.  We have two great deep-dive developer sessions coming up on customizing SugarCRM.

In the Building Dashlets and RSS Feeds session on June 12th, Majed will take you through the details of creating both a Dashlet and an RSS Feed off of a custom-built module.

In the Adding Custom UI Field Types session on June 26th, Max will show you how to create an upgrade safe custom field type which will appear as a new field type choice in Studio and Module Builder.

Sign up now!

We are pleased to announce that the Funambol-SugarCRM Connector Project led by Phil Shotton is the SugarForge Project of the Month for May 2008.  Phil really deserves this award as he truly exemplifies the dedication and passion of a Sugar Open Source Community member and the leadership qualities of a project admin for a top SugarForge project.  Congrats to Phil!

For those of you who haven’t heard of Funambol yet (where have you been hiding?), Funambol is a top-notch technology that allows you to sync contacts, tasks and appointments between various applications and your favorite mobile phone device.  And of course this connector syncs your Sugar customer info with your mobile phone.  Very cool!

On another cool note…  Funambol is just now launching their own Funambol Forge. How long before Phil earns project of the month there as well?  ;^)

We just concluded a survey of the developers in the Sugar Community.  This was our first developer survey and it is always great to get real data to back up what we think the community looks like and wants.  In general we weren’t too surprised with the results, but we were amazed on how consistent the feedback was across the respondents.

The majority of the Sugar Developer Survey respondents are developers using the Community Edition in small companies in North America and Europe and are relatively new to SugarCRM (less than two years).  They almost all have customized the Sugar code and definitely want to see more code comments and better developer documentation.  Though there was some pointed feedback on how to improve the product and documentation (hey, this was their opportunity to say it all) they still rank us very well against other technology vendors, would recommend SugarCRM to others and definitely plan to stick with SugarCRM going into the future.

About 60% of the respondents are running Sugar 5.0, 30% on Sugar 4.5 and the rest on Sugar 4.2 and 4.0.  About 90% are running PHP 5 and 10% PHP 4.  85% are running MySQL and 15% are running MS SQL Server.  2/3rds  are running Linux and 1/3rd are running Windows.  All of the developers use PHP at work, with Java, C++ and Perl being the next most common programming languages.  Standard text editors were the favorite IDE for half the respondents with Eclipse and Zend Studio coming in at 30% and 20%.  3/4ths of the respondents had worked with PHP applications prior to SugarCRM.

The number one request was for better developer documentation.  We are already moving quickly on this with a dev guide in the works.  Stay tuned for a complete update mid-Summer to the Sugar Developer Zone site including all new developer documentation and tutorials.

I’d like to thank everybody who took the time to answer the survey and give us your feedback. In conclusion, expect to see these community-focused surveys more frequently.  Your input drives what we focus on next!

SugarForge.org hit a major milestone last week when the 500th project was registered on the site by Kenneth Thorman with the Open Office SugarCrm plugin project. Brilliant!

It is times like this when it is fun to step back and reflect on the amazing momentum of the SugarCRM community. Can you believe that SugarForge.org is only three years old? I remember in late 2004, early 2005 when the community was asking for a collaboration site where they could focus on just SugarCRM. We really wanted to get the synergy of the Sugar developers focused around one site dedicated to the Sugar community. And so SugarForge.org was launched in March 2005.

Since then, the SugarForge site and the Sugar community have taken off. Not only does SugarForge.org now have 500 projects, but is also coming up on 13,500 registered developers and 4.5 million downloads in the next few weeks. With millions of web page views every month, SugarForge has truly become the focal point of open source CRM development.

So what has happened on SugarForge.org in these past three years?

• 78.1 million web pages viewed
• 4.38 million files downloads
• 13,487 developers registered
• 3,128 different files served

Now that is open source redefining CRM software.

One of our top community members, andopes (199 forum posts in the past month!), has documented in detail in the Sugar Wiki how to configure a Linux system with Zend Core to connect to a MS SQL Server database using the FreeTDS library.

Very cool!

I was reading a PCWorld article today about an Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain who has written a new book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It . He has taken the position that closed Internet appliances like the iPhone are stifling innovation.

Quote: “Zittrain argues that today’s Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That’s because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.”

I find this interesting from a couple perspectives.

First, Carolyn Duffy Marsan, the PCWorld journalist who wrote the review, doesn’t speak once about open source. Living inside the Open Source bubble, I am amazed at times when somebody in the technology industry writes a story about the evils of closed technology without immediately praising the virtues of open source software. After all, the very core principal behind open source is to revolt against closed source software that prevents the very innovation that Zittrain fears we will lose. For shame Ms. Marsan! Keep preaching Matt Asay!

Secondly, it’s interesting to see that Zittrain’s concern is so similar to the concern that Richard Stallman expressed when he sponsored the recent update to the GPL open source license, GPLv3, and specifically drafted license language against the closed Tivo appliance. His concern, which he calls “tivoization” was that closed Linux-based appliances like the Tivo DVR both stifled innovation and flew in the face of the intent of open source licenses.

What I am happy to see is that others besides us pocket-protector open source enthusiasts are seeing that the true power of technology and the Internet is in the freedom to innovate. One of my favorite quotes is:

“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat”

I’m personally not completely convinced that the iPhone, Xboc and Tivo are going to put the brakes on innovation, but I applaud Mr Zittrain and anybody else who points out the virtues of innovation and strive to protect it.

I am here today at the Dutch JoomlaDays conference in Utrecht, Netherlands talking Joomla developers about SugarCRM. Great conference with over 200 developers at the event. Kudos to Henk and team for putting on a great show.

I’m listening right now to James Vasile from the Software Freedom talk about building a community and a successful open source project. As an open source lawyer, you would expect him to focus on the open source license as the center of building a community.

Instead his his three building blocks of building a community are:

• Freedom - create community rules that give people the freedom to build, extend and share. While few people typically read an open source license, it is this contract that ensures the freedom.
• Sharing - build an environment where sharing is cool.
• Ecosystem - Focus on growing and invigorating the ecosystem around the software.

I certainly agree with all his points. A couple things I would add are 1) build GREAT software and 2) communicate, communicate, communicate. You only attract people to your community if you build something attractive.  People will only stay if they are working within a community and not yelling into an empty room.

DragonflyMaster, one of our top posters in the Sugar Forums the past several months, has just created a great Wiki article on Building Dynamic Dropdowns. Also called dependent dropdowns, this feature allows you to link two dropdowns together such that the values in the second dropdown are based on the values in the first dropdown.

Great feature!

We have just posted a Developer Survey for the Sugar Community and are asking all SugarCRM developers to give us your feedback. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey and let us know what tools and resources you would like us to work on next for you.

The next Sugar Developer User Group webinar will be held on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10AM Pacific Time.

Join Sugar database expert Travis Swicegood as he discusses database tuning tips and tricks for Sugar.

For more information, or to register for this free event, please visit this link.