SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source CRM software, available in both an On-Demand and On-Premise version and comes with a GPLv3 license. What most people don't realize is that SugarCRM is also a very extensible and easy to use business application platform. In this talk we'll explore the platform and what all it provides, and show how easy it is to customize it from the GUI as well as through writing PHP code.

1. Build Your Business on SugarCRM John Mertic ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Business Software Common characteristics Deals with interactions with their customers Company information Contacts at the company and their information Manages the growth and activity of their customers Activity History ( Calls, Meetings, Emails, Services, etc ) Scheduling of upcoming calls or meetings Forecasting of upcoming services needed Provides reporting on their customers and services Formal, structured reporting Quick glance “dashboards” Powerful searching capabilities Simplifies communication between different areas in the company. 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3. Business Software ( Developers Perspective ) Common characteristics User authentication / management ACLs / Granular Security User preference customization Ability to group users together into teams Track user actions CRUD style user interface ( Create Retrieve Update Delete ) Support Import/Exporting of data Customizable interface to accommodate future growth needs 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4. What is CRM? “Customer relationship management (CRM) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.” (Wikipedia) Goals Centralized database of all customer information. Tool to simplify communication between different departments. Enables easier planning of future interactions with a customer and aids in forecasting their growth. CRM seems like the logical solution to business software 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 4

5. Problems with typical CRM software Expensive Licensing costs Implementation time Training Software is complicated Difficult to customize/extend to match your needs High learning curve for end users Very proprietary Few or no documented extending abilities / limited APIs No easy way to get your data back out Based on old and antiquated technologies Lots of client/server architected systems – very few web-based 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 5

6. What’s the solution? ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved.

8. What is SugarCRM? World’s leading provider of open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Founded as an open source project in 2004. Over 5 million downloads. Currently serves over 500,000 users in 75 different languages. ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 10/23/09 8

9. SugarCRM Open Source Edition Sugar Community Edition Fully GPLv3 open source Provides the core sales, marketing, collaboration, and support tools for any organization of any size ( best suited from less than 10 users ) No restrictions on number of users Allows users to add dashboards that provide employees and managers real-time information about leads, opportunities, accounts, and other types of records. Allows integration with external applications via a web services API. Provides rich module and interface design and customization tools 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 9

10. SugarCRM Commercial Editions Sugar Professional Adds support for managing teams of users Advanced reporting tool Mobile client Workflow management Granular ACL of fields and module access Sugar Enterprise Support for building a customer portal frontend to your Sugar instance Richer SQL based reporting tools Oracle database support 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 10

11. What is SugarCRM ( for developers) ? Built using PHP on a LAMP architecture Runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows Uses MySQL or SQL Server as a database ( Oracle supported in Enterprise version ) YUI used for most of the rich UI / AJAX effects. Comes with Web Services API to enable other applications to easily connect to it SOAP Rest ( new in Sugar 5.5 ) Cloud Connectors Easily extensible Built-in GUI tools for changing built-in functionality and adding new functionality Also extensible thru PHP code 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 11

12. Why use SugarCRM? It’s GPLv3 Open Source  Open to any customizations Top quality CRM implementation Sales Automation Marketing Automation / Campaign Management Support Automation Easy to deploy Can deploy on local server or shared hosting environment Saas offering with Sugar Open Cloud Can easily get data in and out; no vendor lockin Lots of support channels Community Partner Network Sugar Support / PS 10/24/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 12

13. Why build on SugarCRM? Easily extensible framework Structured using the MVC pattern Customizations can be made without breaking upgradability Easy to connect new components to existing ones Contains many OOTB features that you’ll want/need User management/authentication Import/Export capabilities User customizable homepage Multiple timezone/language/currency support Very active development Maintenance releases every month; security patches ASAP New major version 5.5 coming really soon ( currently RC2 ) Active community 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 13

14. Core Structure Each portion of the application is divided into modules. Example: Modules exist for Accounts, Contacts, etc. Uses the MVC pattern to structure a module Model - each module has a bean class which handles the main data store interactions and interfaces into the database structure View – each view in the module ( edit, detail, list, etc ) is can be built using custom code, or based upon metadata. Controller – default one exists for the application, only need to override if you are doing something different than normal 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 14

15. Customizing SugarCRM SugarCRM is very customizable for developers and end-users alike For end-users, Studio is a tool for customizing most aspects of a module easily Add fields Change the metadata driven views Add relationships Change language strings Demo 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 15

16. Customizing SugarCRM with PHP Code Can customize most part of Sugar by placing files in the custom directory in the application root Custom/modules for module customizations Change module language strings Add/alter module views Change metadata definitions Custom/include for application level customizations Change application language strings Add/Change application level views Interject additional logic into the MVC Custom/themes for theme customizations (new in Sugar 5.5) Anything put in the custom/ directory is not overridden by Sugar upgrades/patches 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 16

17. Building on top of SugarCRM Leveraging already built add-ons SugarForge 700+ projects that have added valuable functionality to SugarCRM Integration with other applications Standalone functionality Themes Language Packs Aimed at developer community as a place for projects to be developed in the open SugarExchange Marketplace where any Sugar user wishing to extend core Sugar functionality can choose among hundreds of module extensions, themes and language packs provided by Sugar community members and partners. 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 17

18. Building on top of SugarCRM Custom module development Can build a module on top of Sugar using PHP code Refer to SugarCRM developer guide for specifications http://developers.sugarcrm.com/docs/OS/5.2/-docs-Developer_Guides-Developer_Guide_5.2-toc.html Using Module Builder Tool for building a module for SugarCRM, including all fields, primary data entry forms, language strings, and relationships Can deploy the module to the local Sugar instance or a remote one. Can use to scaffold a module and then add custom PHP code on top of it Demo 10/23/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 18

19. SugarCRM Resources SugarCRM – http://www.sugarcrm.com Sugar Developer Zone - http://developers.sugarcrm.com/ Sugar Forums - http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/ Sugar Wiki - http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/ SugarForge - http://www.sugarforge.org/ SugarForge 2.0 - http://new.sugarforge.org/ Upcoming Book – “The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications” – Coming Nov 2009 10/24/09 ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 19

20. Questions? ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved.

21. Thanks for coming! ©2009 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved.