It’s all great to talk about how wonderful the community is, but seeing the community actually meet in person is where the real fun is.

Did you make it to SugarCon two weeks ago? What a blast! The congratulatory emails have been rolling in from community members around the world who made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley for SugarCon 08. Everybody enjoyed the mix of learning, sharing and partying. Kudos to John and the marketing team for pulling off a fantastic event.

I personally enjoyed the key note sessions quite a bit. We had Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, kick off the event with the first key note. His irreverant and insightful commentary on open source and enterprise computing was a fun mix of hilarious and uncomfortable (thanks to Zack Urlocker for posting videos of Daniel’s talk and for NOT posting video 5).

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, gave a fantastic talk on the future of enterprise computing and why he bought MySQL for $1B. That guy gets open source!

Paul Greenberg, godfather of CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, also gave a great keynote about the future of CRM. He just posted his thoughts on SugarCon today in his blog and I couldn’t help but grin at his comments on the Sugar culture. But what I most enjoyed was his review of the enthusiasm of the Sugar community.

From his post…
That said, this was not just a good party but the conference itself was extremely well planned and well done and had some of that high spirited sense of community. What was particularly interesting to me was to see the genuine interest the customers, the partners and the developers had for the company, the people and the product itself. They liked it, sure, but they were INTERESTED in it and where it was going . They seemed to feel they had a stake in its success, which is as Shakespeare said somewhere, a “devoutly to be wished” position for a vendor to be in. Part of that was there seems to be an open culture and I hear from my friends at SugarCRM that they enjoy the ride they are on.
/end quote

Thank you to the Sugar community for being so interested, enthusiastic, passionate, ornery, demanding and flat out engaged. That’s what makes this “ride” so much fun!
Clint

Whoa am I tired. It’s been a non-stop whirlwind of shaking hands, answering questions, presentations, and fun. Lots and lots of fun.

At the request of many of you who, I’m posting on the logic hooks and workflow presentations.

Let’s get down to brass tacks - do you know what or where the logic hooks are in SugarCRM? If you don’t, you need to watch this video and bookmark this page.

Workflow is just a glorified logic hook. A lot of the time, I find that I get about 95% of the way with workflow, but it just doesn’t do the last 5% within the workflow UI. However, if I just tried to write a custom logic hook, it would take me longer than if could get that last 5%. Thankfully (wonderfully), Sugar is Open Source, so it’s simple to just split off a workflow and then customize it for the business.

Steps to split a workflow off to a custom logic hook:

Step 1: copy ./include/workflow/WorkFlowHandler.php to ./custom/include/workflow/ (create the directory, it won’t exist)

Step 2: edit the ./custom/include/workflow/WorkFlowHander.php

Step 2a: Rename WorkFlowHandler class to WorkFlowCustomHandler

Step 2b: change all references to the workflow directory to workflow_cstm

Step 2c: change all references to $target_class to $target_class = $focus->module_dir.”_workflow_cstm”;

Step 3: Edit the logic_hook.php file in the target module (ie: ./custom/modules/Accounts/logic_hook.php)

Step 3a: Add another $hook_array pointing to (./custom/include/workflow/WorkFlowHandler.php).

Step 3b: Make sure the $hooks_array calls the new WorkFlowCustomHandler class (see the video, if you’re lost right now)

Step 4: Copy the workflow directory to workflow_cstm, (ie: ./custom/modules/Accounts/workflow_cstm

Step 5: Change all references to the includes for the workflow directory to workflow_cstm directory. For example:

include('custom/modules/Accounts/workflow_cstm/triggers_arrays.php);
include('custom/modules/Accounts/workflow_cstm/action_arrays.php;

Step 6: Alter workflow.php to your desired behavior (ie: ./custom/modules/Accounts/workflow_cstm/workflow.php);

That’s it folks. Workflow just got split off. Word to the wise though - DELETE the workflow in the UI. Every time the definition saves, it will save the workflow.php. Best to delete it and log it elsewhere that you’ve created a logic_hook.

So you have all the power of workflow, plus more. And - it’s upgrade safe!

Day 2 of SUGARCON 2008 ended with dinner at Testarossa. The winery was originally built in 1888 by Northern Italian Jesuit Fathers and Brothers from the college at Mission Santa Clara (now Santa Clara University) as a means to fund their new seminary college built on the grounds the same year. The original 19th Century, three-floor, gravity-flow winery is still in use today to make Testarossa wines.

The entertainment for the night brought a pleasant contrast to the old-fashioned interior. SugarCRM’s very own Martin Schneider, Sadek Baroudi, Julian Ostrow and Carolyn Doolittle put on quite a show with enigmatic energy that penetrated their initially shy audience. John Roberts joined the band for a couple of songs including a Sugar favorite, “Sugar the Blue Sky.”

Hey all, I studied long and hard in order to bone up for the “GPLv3 and You” talk I did today. Events like SugarCon are really terrific as “forcing events” to go deep, deep, deep into a topic that may not be top of mind before the event.So, like a lawyer preparing for a jury trial, I made sure I was well-versed, over-prepared, and simply brimming with GPLv3 wisdom. After all, I didn’t have to go this deep since last July when we announced we’ll support GPLv3 beginning with Sugar Community Edition 5.0.

Well, an odd thing happened. Nobody really cared!!! A pall of silence descended over the ballroom when I finished my expertly crafted dissertation and asked, with some trepidation: “Are there any questions?”. Crickets, crickets, and more crickets.

Upon reflection, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the response. I think we Sugar types vastly overestimated the importance of GPLv3 to the average developer who, after all, is concerned only with getting their jobs done under tight deadlines back at the shop. Yes, if they ever intend to distribute, er, “convey”, his or her code … well, then they’ll think back to that brilliant dissertation they heard at SugarCon. And even then most really don’t care as GPLv3 makes it easy.

I’ve come to understand that GPLv3 is really “inside baseball” for the vast majority of our community. Lesson learned … on to the next topic.

In his talk titled “Open Source, Microsoft, and Making SugarCRM Great with Windows, IIS and SQL Server,” Bryan Kirschner, Microsoft’s director of Platform Community Strategy, shared his company’s perspectives on open source and the importance of community collaboration.

Looking Back
Kirschner brought a historical perspective on software by pointing to the unprecedented growth of personal computers and Internet users since 1995. A growth unthinkable in the late 60s when the “Software Crisis” phrase was born, reflecting the fear that software had hit a wall.

In 1995, we saw the first release of what has now become Apache, MySQL was founded, and soon after, SourceForge came to existence. The introduction of the Internet along with the increased number of PC users around the world gave birth to a culture of online collaboration. Software rose to the challenge and endless lines of codes came together to create great applications.

History Repeats Itself
With endless lines of code out there, will another “Software Crisis” immerge now that software seems to have reached becoming all it can be? With open source collaboration increasing across the world, commercial developers are tapping into the collaborative ideas open source offers. Windows is a platform for applications whether they are open source or not, a reflection of a vision about participation, and an aspiration for even more growth.

Looking Ahead
Partner businesses are increasing internationally because in order for commercial software developers to succeed and grow they must employ collaboration, open source strategy, and open business. Today, Microsoft is taking initiatives in the open source community and working with SugarCRM to make Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server outstanding platforms for shared customers.

Day Two of SugarCon has begun and we’ve already had some interesting speakers. Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light gave a great talk on how the customer, rather than the company, is in the driver’s seat and is initiating interactions in new and “non-traditional” ways. Out are focus groups, traditional market research and the whole concept of a customer being a targeted market segment. In are blogs, podcasts, community forums, and customer experiences, along with a friendly, honest two-way communication about what companies are doing and where they’re heading.

Listening to his talk, I thought to myself that we here at Sugar are at least starting to get things right, with several conduits for you the developer community to talk with each other (via the forums and the wiki) and hear from us (via our podcasts and this very blog). We’re continuing to focus on strengthening these conduits and encourage your participation. Your honest comments about what we’re doing wrong (and what we’re doing right) are more tangible and better than any artificial focus group!

Here are some pictures from the first day of SugarCon:

Andy Dreisch right before his first presentation:

Martin Schneider, during his American (Sugar) Idol Audition:

Jonathan Schwartz begins with outlining the parallels between the history of electricity and the future of the internet. He notes that all of Sun’s clients and many other vendors are focusing on the Social Utility of the network. Utility is an interesting word. I recall from economics 101, that value = utility / price. Software is the Utility and Open Source drives the price. The result is an immeasurable and infinite value. Sugar delivers this value.

As Schwartz notes, open platforms create ecosystems and ultimately serve the customer greater than just the product itself. By lowering the barrier to entry, as in terms of price, it becomes instinctual for us to consume that technology. Schwartz goes on to describe the economies of scale and the social network value of the ecosystem. It makes me think of the old quote “the value of the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts” because the market opportunity is expanding due to FOSS.

Hello friends! I’m here in my boss Andy Dreisch’s presentation, during the first breakout session of SugarCon. Andy’s presentation walks through seven upgrade-safe, executive-proof customizations that use the Studio, Module Builder, workflows, reports, and other built-in tools. So far he’s ticking off the checklist pretty quickly. We’ve got a scenario based on American Idol, and later on our singing marketeer Martin Schneider will entertain the crowd as Andy adds a custom module. Talk about a multi-media extravaganza!

Our grand finale was going to be an audience participation bit where the crowd would text message a “rating” on Martin’s performance, which would instantly show up in the newly created Sugar module. What a spectacular finish! However, we were dismayed to learn this morning that there’s no cell phone access in this room! We’re thirty feet underground in a technological cave.

So, Julian’s come to the rescue and we’re going to mimic the SMS data. We also have runners stationed at the back of the room who will sprint up the stairs to a less-dead cell spot. This should be fun!