SugarCRM has evolved rapidly over the last couple of years with some interesting major and minor releases. You can find links to a demonstration of each recent release on this page.
Sugar 4.5, released in July 2006, brought the concept of "Dashlets" and greatly increased the users' control over their environment. Although some may view this as superficial, "ownership" is an important part of user-adoption and user-adoption is a critical component of CRM success.
Sugar 4.5.1, was released in November 2006. There were many enhancements but the greatest strides were towards simplified marketing modules. What had worked well before but was clunky and unwieldy, was now driven by user-friendly and very understandable wizards.
We waited a long time for a SugarCRM 5 production release date and it arrived in December 2007. It was the first major release in a year and brought huge advances. From the user perspective, the most obvious changes are in the email functionality. The email module now behaves like a standard desktop email client with full archiving, search, multiple folders and drag and drop functionalitty - very smooth.
For SugarCRM software enhancement companies like SalesAgility, release 5 also included functionality to build new modules for clients. This was something that we could do already, but it was complex. Now it's faster .... and therefore less costly.
You can see a demonstration of SugarCRM 5.0 by clicking Here.
Summer 2008 saw the release of Sugar 5.1. Mainly delivering functionality to system builders, this should be regarded as a minor upgrade but is interesting nonetheless and a demonstration can be accessed by clicking Here.
The most recent release, 5.2 features links to Social Networking sites and enhanced Studio functions. This release can now be viewed as ready for production and a demonstration can be viewed here.
Finally, August 2009 saw the release of 5.5 for beta testing. It will be a couple of months before it's released into production and a couple of months after that before it's fit for production use. This time though, SugarCRM has engaged with the community to do a lot of bug testing before the first production release. SalesAgility was involved in unit testing the Campaigns module. So this should be a more stable release than previous ones. You can access a demo of 5.5 here.
