Good News for Sugar On-Premise Customers, a lot of Cool Stuff is Coming your Way
You may recall that we adjusted the product release process for Sugar, our core Relationship Management offering last year. Beginning with the Fall ‘17 release, we moved to a quarterly delivery schedule for our cloud customers. Correspondingly, Sugar on-premise customers moved to a predictable annual release model, aligning the cloud and on-premise offerings with each year’s Spring release. Each year, the on-prem release rolls up new features from the preceding Sugar Cloud releases.
While Sugar On-Premise customers benefit from the certainty of an annual release in coordinating their upgrades, we understand that it can be a long wait for the new innovation coming out of SugarCRM.
Well, we are happy to report the wait is almost here. We’ve already detailed some of the brand new data protection features that are schedule for Sugar 8.0. But, what about the other stuff you’ve been waiting for? Here’s a (partial) list of the new and/or improved features coming your way:
A brand new look for Sugar – We are pleased to introduce a visual restyling of the user interface that will meet the expectations of the modern workforce. SugarCRM has strong belief that the high-quality and efficient experience that consumers enjoy on their phones, tablets and laptops needs to replace the legacy designs of enterprise applications. For years, we’ve focused our energy and expertise to bridge that gap through our commitment to delivering the most intuitive and beautiful CRM application in the marketplace, and we’re very pleased to present the next big step in the user experience of Sugar.
The Product Catalog Dashlet – The new dashlet provides a simplified view of your available products for sale, an easy method of adding products to a quote by simply clicking on a line item in the catalog – and all this without ever having to leave the quote you’re working on.
Drill Through Charts – Users will be able to click into a specific segment of the chart, pulling relevant data without the need of building a separate report. Not only does Drill Through save users a great amount of time, but also adds a visually appealing interactivity to report creation. Furthermore, users can modify data right from the list view. Drill Through marks the next phase of reporting improvements that started in Sugar 7.9.
Shareable Dashboards – Administrators and individual end-users can now share dashboards throughout their organization, and provide a clean and consistent Sugar experience across the board – dashboards can be shared, duplicated and defaulted. Thirty (28 for Sugar Professional) default dashboards are included across various roles, saving users a great deal of time in personalization and configuration, and this list will continue to grow over time.
New emails module – The new module, built from our own Sidecar framework allows users to filter, tag, and preview email content with ease. One of the most important advantages of Sidecar, aside from UX and performance, is access to the Intelligence Pane, which once paired with Drill Through Charts adds an additional level of convenience to emails in Sugar like never before.
Additional enhancements include:
- SAML Enhancements
- We will offer support for a wider set of Identity Providers (Okta, OneLogin, ADFS, GoogleSSO) and have also provided a unified SSO setup experience on Sugar Mobile and core Sugar giving users a simplified user experience – users can now log into Sugar from Okta (or other Identity Providers).
- Metadata Improvements
- System wide changes made by the admin such as modifying labels, changing currency settings etc should no longer trigger metadata cache rebuilds resulting in reduced number of times the end user will be logged out of the system.
- User Experience Improvements
- The Contracts, Currencies, Shipping Providers, Tax Rates, Contract Types and Manufacturers modules have been migrated to Sugar’s Sidecar UI framework.
- Advanced Workflow business rules have been given a new design and now have drag and drop reordering functionality giving users a productive way to create and update rules as business policies change.
All this new innovation hopefully feels a bit like Christmas morning, but there is a catch (there’s always a catch). To have access to these new features, on-premise customers must upgrade to Sugar 8. Upgrading to the newest version of Sugar is always a sound idea, in addition to new features, you will always have access to customer support, maintenance patches and bug fixes.
-Andrew