Open source customer relationship management (CRM) software provider SugarCRM, who has an office on Sir John Rogersons Quay in Dublin, has announced a number of new product enhancements to co-incide with its attendance at CeBIT in Hanover this week.

Founded as an open source project in 2004, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded over five million times and currently serve over 500,000 users in 75 languages. Over 4,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over lock-in based, proprietary alternatives. It partners with Provident Technology and Hosting 365 in Ireland (read more).

Zoominfo and CrunchBase Cloud Connectors

Zoominfo is a business information search engine with profiles of over 45 million people and five million companies, and CrunchBase a free database of over 14,000 technology companies and 25,000 people. Cloud Connectors for both services are now embedded within SugarCRM allowing users to obtain the most up-to-date internal and external company contact and lead information directly within SugarCRM.

SugarCRM Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to leading third-party data service providers. The additional Cloud Connectors highlight the momentum of the Sugar Cloud Connectors framework, which was introduced in December 2008 with connectors for Hoover's, Jigsaw, LinkedIn and CrunchBase. Developers can utilize the framework to build new Cloud Connectors that augment information within SugarCRM. Developers can make them available on SugarForge or SugarExchange, SugarCRM's marketplace for commercial extensions.

Web Services Framework
SugarCRM is introducing significant improvements to its web services framework that streamlines the performance of web service calls and allows for third-party developers to more easily create and maintain integrations to the SugarCRM application. In addition, SugarCRM has added a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface that allows for easier development of REST services based upon Sugar data.

Themes Framework
The upcoming release introduces a new framework for creating and managing Sugar Themes, the user interface layers that present pre-built and custom themes offering different styles, colors and navigation of SugarCRM. This new framework utilizes cascading style sheets (CSS) which allow developers to create new themes without writing code. Customers can now more easily create unique themes suited to the needs of companies or the preferences of individual developers.

Mobile Studio Editor
The new Mobile Studio Editor provides greater customization capabilities to optimize SugarCRM for mobile devices. The Mobile Studio Editor delivers pre-built layouts and views for modules that are designated for mobile use. Users can select which modules to view in the wireless client and also more easily tailor the layout and fields for the wireless client from within Sugar Studio, SugarCRM's administration console.

Dynamic Teams
In addition to the new features above, Sugar also introduced new dynamic team capabilities that enable users to add multiple individuals or teams to a CRM record to enhance collaboration on complex projects. For example, a user could assign an executive sponsor, professional services team and customer advocate to a given account. These individuals would be alerted on any communications or status changes for that specific account.

Partnerships

SugarCRM will also cement its partnership with Genuis4U and PStech who will also be exhibiting at the show.

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