Sugar CRM Adds AJAX to Customer Relations

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Thursday, July 27, 2006; 05:04 AM

SugarCRM Inc., provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced the beta release of Sugar 4.5, an AJAX-suported, fast-growing CRM solution. Sugar 4.5 introduces new functionality such as personalized views, internationalization and support for Microsoft Windows Server products.

Sugar CRM Account Management screen.

Sugar 4.5 marks the eighth major release for the company in two years. Since that time, Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 800,000 times and localized into more than 40 languages. The new version introduces deep internationalization functionality, including support for multi-byte character sets and UTF-8. More than 5,000 developers have contributed over 220 extensions -- ranging from email response and presence awareness applications to Voice Over IP (VoIP) and computer telephony integrations -- to a community of over 15,000 members. Today, SugarCRM serves over 800 commercial customers.

Sugar 4.5 uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology throughout the application so end users can drag, drop, edit, add and remove objects from pages within the application to reveal only the information important to their job. AJAX is employed extensively within the revamped Sugar Studio, where business and technical users can control the look, feel and accessibility of the application in a few simple steps.

Following a five-month technical collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, Sugar 4.5 offers improved support for Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Active Directory and Microsoft SQL Server to more effectively serve joint SugarCRM and Microsoft customers.

SugarCRM will also release a new Sugar distribution under the Microsoft Community License beginning with Sugar 4.5. This license is part of the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, a program through which Microsoft shares source code with customers, partners and governments worldwide.