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Customer relationship management specialist SugarCRM announced the
release of Sugar 6.3, an upgrade to its Community Edition. The latest
platform enhancements include support for deeper integration with
third-party applications, faster feedback for real-time collaboration,
and tighter administrative control for a 360-degree view of all
activities and projects. Sugar Logic now has the ability to import
data, create formulas, rename modules and manage mass updates to all
modules, and update control allows administrators to arrange either
role-based or policy-based access.

Built for customization and to fit with a variety of third-party
applications and different solutions, the latest version of Sugar 6 can
integrate data from more sources. Sugar 6.3 has an Import Wizard and
the ability to import Google contacts. Users can also do more inline
editing due to the improved quick edit feature in ListViews, subpanels
and reports. Users can also import and archive external emails into
Sugar 6.3.

“Being open and flexible is in SugarCRM’s heritage; we provide a
free and open source platform that developers can use to build their
own applications,” said John Mertic, community manager at SugarCRM.
“The newest release of the Sugar platform is dedicated to our community
and provides them with more robust tools and significant feature
enhancements. It’s imperative we build together, so as the community
grows, so does SugarCRM as a company.”

The new platform also allows SugarCRM’s open development process to
gather continual feedback from customers and users. For example,
through the company’s Open+ Developer program, Sugar 6.2.4 had a record
10 percent of the bug fixes that came directly from community
contributions, and there have been nearly 100 accepted code
contributions this year. As with all Sugar offerings, users can run
Sugar 6.3 both on-premise and in the cloud and can make unlimited
changes without restriction. The platform also offers an upgraded AJAX
user interface, resulting in an average of 40 percent performance
improvement with faster response time, according to a company release.

“By participating in the SugarCRM Open+ Developer Program, we have
had the opportunity to contribute to code sprints and to co-innovate
alongside other members of the community and SugarCRM engineers,” said
Vincent Rollin, CTO and co-founder of Synolia a SugarCRM partner based
in France. “The program lets us have a larger voice in SugarCRM, and we
are effectively able to shape the future of the Sugar product family.”