SugarCRM 7.0 promises to be an exceptional release. A new, highly improved and unique user experience that sports more efficient workflow and new intelligence features highlight what will be a great product upgrade. That being said, it also introduces the need for some immediate planning and changes for some existing Sugar users. Based on our early reviews, we’ve identified 5 key areas you need to evaluate in your SugarCRM instance and possibly update to be ready for SugarCRM 7.0. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good starting point you should consider when planning for your upgrade to version 7.0.
If you are a Sugar OnDemand user, it is even more critical you start this process now. Sugar will be introducing a compatibility mode for existing users for a period of time, but the duration that backwards compatibility to some old interface metaphors will be available isn’t known yet, so planning and executing the necessary changes now is a prudent step.
Key items to address and questions to answer:
- Do you have custom behaviors on your edit or detail views within any modules? If so, it’s time to start planning to make changes. The model of having two different views is being replaced with a new, more efficient and easier to use model. This will require you to begin preparing changes for view based actions triggered by on field change events.
- If you are using SugarOnDemand and use anything other than the SOAP or REST API’s for integration, you need to begin making changes now. Absolutely no integration approaches other than API calls will be honored. If you are integrating large data sets (such as a 100k file of customer records daily), you will need to likely architect or implement a tool to integrate this data through the API in a throttled or controlled way. A better solution is to start designing logic to minimize the # of API calls needed (only update records that really need an update vs. a complete refresh). The updated API’s in Sugar 7 are fully extensible allowing you to create customized web service calls to meet your specific integration requirements. This is a best practice you should follow regardless of the upgrade, but it is being highlighted now.
- If you have an extension or plug-in from a third party, consider it suspect. If it affects the user interface at all, you’re likely going to have to make changes.
- Carefully evaluate the business logic hooks you have in place. These are not absolutely guaranteed to be impacted, but it is not uncommon for these to somehow impact the user interface. Hooks that do this need to be reviewed and updated. Sugar 7 includes a vastly improved development architecture that may affect how your current hooks
behave. All hooks need to be reviewed and updated
- If you have built custom, client side code (AJAX, JavaScript, etc.) that is not applied and controlled via Studio, you will need to recreate or rewrite this. Do it now. With the change of the approach to the views, these elements will likely be impacted immediately
The best thing you can do to prepare for what will be a tremendously valuable, but impactful upgrade is to do a health assessment or upgrade audit in advance. Build a plan to respond to the changes and make sure the key parties in your company are on board and in place to support updates that may be needed.
Disclaimer: The company I work for is partners with several vendors - http://levementum.com/company-information/partners/
Though SugarCRM offers various CRM features, but some of the important features of CRM are available in Professional version only.