SugarCRM 6.3 enhances importing in Community Edition

SugarCRM has announced an update to the Community Edition of its customer relationship management software, adding enhanced contact importing, mass update capability for administrators and the ability to import and archive email. SugarCRM's community manager, John Mertic, said the new release provides users with "more robust tools and significant feature enhancements". Mertic highlights the addition of custom import connectors as a major enhancement for Sugar developers.

Other improvements in the new release include an ability to handle activities while engaged in conversation with a lead; also, the SugarLogic expression engine administration front end can now import data, create formulas, rename modules and is able to apply mass updates to all modules. The user interface has been improved with an enhanced "quick edit" feature added to listviews, subpanels and reports. There are also performance improvements in the user interface, as Sugar 6.3 switches to an AJAX-based user interface, avoiding full page reloads; this is said to give a 40 per cent improvement in response times.

SugarCRM says there have been over ten million downloads of its software since 2004, and has seen over 1,000 extension projects created to complement its functionality. The company develops the community edition alongside its proprietary commercial edition.

The updated version 6.3 will be generally available to download from 9 November from the SugarCRM site which, at the time of writing, is offering a third beta of 6.4 and binary installers for version 6.2.4. SugarCRM's community edition is licensed under the AGPL3.

(djwm)