SugarCRM follows Salesforce strategy

SugarCRM, an open-source Salesforce alternative, is trying to keep up with its rival. The newest version SugarCRM 5.5 is focused on the same areas as latest Salesforce versions: platform, social tools and mobile access. Of course, the most significant upgrade is the new integration platform Sugar Cloud Connectors, that allows to link SugarCRM to third-party business applications using Web services. As an example, the company introduced the LinkedIn connector, that allows to display LinkedIn-profile data on contact page inside SugarCRM. The new activity streams module Social Feeds is very similar to the recently unveiled Salesforce Chatter. In addition to short message exchange and status updates, it allows you to receive notifications about various actions in the system, such as invoice creation or customer data change.


To optimize mobile access to the system, SugarCRM developers have created the mobile interface editor Mobile Studio. The editor contains several templates and themes for the mobile client, but user can customize these patterns and display information and controls in the most convenient way on the screen of mobile device.


In addition, the new version allows to insert widgets (Sugar Dashlets) to the dashboard. These dashlets may contain information from external sources or from SugarCRM database.