Sugar 9.0 for on-premise is available now for installation. Sugar’s new policy of yearly on premise release bundles all the previous On Demand releases and a few more enhancements. The rapid feature enhancement and testing them with on demand customers helps SugarCRM stabilise its yearly release model.
There are feature enhancements and performance improvements in Spring ’19 release but Sugar 9 is all about the performance boosters throughout the product.
Sugar 9 for On Premise includes Spring’19 features and enhancements along with the roll-up of Summer ’18, Fall ’18 and Winter ’19 quarter releases.
Spring ’19 Feature Updates
SugarBPM
Sugar workflow engine that is available only in Enterprise and Ultimate edition is enhanced with lot of new capabilities and rebranded as SugarBPM. BPM stands for Business Process Management. There are three major enhancements for the workflows / process flows using SugarBPM namely
1. Import / Export
2. Tagging Support
3. Process Termination Enhancements
Import and Export of SugarBPM Module Records
One of the major task of development and customisation is moving the changes / customisations from dev / staging instances to production environment. Till this release most of the customisations in SugarCRM can be exported as package from dev / staging instance and imported to production environment. Except for workflow rules but the new SugarBPM comes with the export / import features to ease the movement of business processes from one SugarCRM instance to another Sugar instance.
SugarBPM supports export / import functionality for records in all modules except Processes module which contains the running instances of process definitions. Process Definitions, Process Email Templates and Process Business rules are exported to appropriate proprietary files ending with .bpm, .pet and .pbr and are formatter properly to link them.
Exporting SugarBPM Records
When you export the Business Process Definitions records to .bpm files the Process Email Templates and Business Rules assocated with the Business Process Definition are automatically exported.
The export features is also provided List View mass update area, Business Process record view and dashlet export area.
Importing SugarBPM Records
Now you can easily import a business process definition (.bpm) , email template (.pet) and business rule (.pbr) to a Sugar instance that has been exported from another Sugar instance. You will see the new Import menu item in Actions section as well as on Dashlet menu.
When importing a Process Definition record, if .bpm file was exported with related email templates and business rules, the system prompts to check if you want to import them.
The process definitions along with email templates and business rules will be created in the instance. However we have to ensure the two systems are clones of each other in terms of the modules and fields so that the business processes find the corresponding fields for process enablement.
Tagging Support for SugarBPM
SugarCRM has introduced Tags feature in 8.x for on premise customers. It supports most of the moduels except Workflow Engine modules. Now with Sugar 9.0 we have complete support for Tags in SugarBPM modules namely Process Definitions, Process Email Templates and Process Business Rules.
Tags module helps better organisation and navigation of SugarBPM modules.
SugarBPM Other Enhancements
Some of the areas Sugar features are enhanced in the SugarBPM area are
1. Sugar Event Support for “All” or “Any” related modules.
2. Multi-layer Module Relationships.
3. Activity Elements in Event Based Proceses
4. Enhanced Operators for “Listen” Events
5. Recipient Lists in Email Templates
You can access comprehensive documentation on SugarBPM here
Group Outgoing Email Support
Many companies want to handle the common emails through group access for more than one employees. For example if all the website leads are being captured at sales@company.com , that email id should be available for capturing the emails as well as sending as.
Now Sugar 9 comes with Group Email support so that individual users can send emails from SugarCRM from their own configured email id or shared email id or system email id. This feature helps both Sales teams and support teams.
These outgoing email accounts are shared using team based access.
SugarCRM Platform Improvements and Performance Enhancements
Sugar worked hard to improve the performance testing apparatus from 8.0 to 9.0 and used the results to improve application performance.
3x to 7x faster Filter API performance improvement from July 2018
Sugar Filter API is the commonly used API in list views loading, dashlets, subpanel views and data integrations. The filter API has been improved 3x to 7x in Sugar 9.0 when compared with Sugar 8.0
Average API response time cut by more than half
The average Sugar 9.0 response time across 15000 requests in a well defined test suite is less than 40% of the Sugar 8.0 response time. This brings significant improvement to the integrations that are done with Sugar.
And also Sugar 9.0 is 70% faster than 8.0 thus reducing your hosting costs if you are hosting on your own cloud.
You can see more details about the performance metrics here
Bhea is SugarCRM partner for over a decade with extensive expertise in SugarCRM implementations. If you are looking for upgrading from your older version to newer version, do not hesitate to contact us for a complimentary review of your instance.
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