Release Roundup: What’s New in Sugar Sell 10.2 (Q4 2020) Update

Sugar releases new features and enhancements aggressively through the quarterly releases. Instances hosted on Sugar’s cloud receive four releases per year containing new features and remove all the Bugs related to the Product. Instances hosted on-site only receive new features once a year in a release that applies to both SugarCloud and on-site deployments.

Release Roundup: What’s New in Sugar Sell 10.2 (Q4 2020) Update

Sugar 10.2 the quarterly release for on cloud customers is generally available now and is released as Sugar Q4 2020 Release in October 2020. In addition to the enhancements/features of Sugar 10.0 ( Q2 2020 Release) and Sugar 10.1. (Q3 2020 Release) the Latest release of Sugar, known as Sugar 10.2 has several remarkable product enhancements. This blog discusses the updates of the Sugar Sell Product.

The following are SugarCRM’s new enhancements in Sugar Sell  10.2 Version.

1. Sales-Focused Enhancements
2. Dashboard and User Interface Enhancements
3. Studio and Administration Enhancements
4. Sugar BPM Enhancements
5. SugarIdentity Enhancements

Sales-Focused Enhancements

All these features in this section are meant for increasing the Efficiency of the Sales Executives by reducing the time spent on updating /creating the data in the system. Mostly the Opportunities, Revenue Line Items, Purchases, Purchased Line Items, Quotes, and Quoted Line Items modules are improved drastically.

1. Coterminous Add-Ons on Purchased Line Item

There might often be a chance of adding new items to the already existing Purchased Line Items. To serve this use, Sugar has come up with a new feature called a Coterminous Add-on in the Purchased Line Items module where users can add New Opportunity or add existing Opportunity to the Line Item.

2. Updates on Opportunities and Revenue Line Items

Automatically Updated Revenue Line Items and Flexible Service Durations

Every Sales Manager wants their Sales Executives to spend less time on digging and entering data manually into the system. Sugar has reduced a lot of work to Sales Executives where they can update all the Revenue Line Item of an Opportunity at one time and increase their efficiency and productivity.

In Revenue Line Items, the most frequently updated fields are Sales Stage, Expected Closed Date, Service Start Date, and Service Duration. There might be Opportunities closing all the Revenue Line Items at same time.

To make this process simple and to save the time and energy of Sales Executives Sugar has introduced a new checkbox field in Opportunities called “Update Open Revenue Line Items” where users can check this field and update Sales Stage, Expected Closed Date, Service Start Date and Service Duration fields on Opportunity and all the Open Revenue Line Items will be updated automatically in a single shot.

This ensures that Sales Executives can save their time on manually updating the RLI’s. They also have an option of updating the service duration on RLI’s if the attached product catalogue record does not have the Lock Duration field set on it.

3. Additional Updates on Quotes, Shifts, and Shift Exceptions Modules

In Sugar 10.2, we have the flexibility of generating multiple Quotes from the same  Revenue Line Item.

From Sugar 10.2 the Shifts/Shift Exceptions Subpanels are added to Users and Employees modules which gives the flexibility of viewing all the working hours and exceptions of a user/employee in one place.

Dashboard and User Interface Enhancements

Sugar Dashboards and reports are built to give the users the most accurate, up-to-date insights on leads, opportunities, support cases, and other modules. Sugar intuitive dashboards and easy-to-customize reports have been designed to ensure the users will gain a deeper understanding of their customer’s data through quick glance in Dashboards. In previous versions, users had a limit of adding only ten rows and three dashlets per each row in the Dashboard.

But from this release to make the Dashboards more user friendly, Sugar came up with tremendous features in the Dashboards and Dashlets in this quarter release where every user using Sugar will like it. By looking at these enhancements, we can say that Sugar is improving the Customer Experience drastically in every release. Some of the Updates in the Dashboards and Dashlets Section are listed below.

Flexible Dashboards with Auto Saved Update

The Dashboards Module has been improvised a lot in this Q4 2020 Release. Now the user has the flexibility of adding any number of dashlets in each row. There is no limitation on adding Dashlets. And all the dashlets can be resizable by dragging and clicking on their lower corner, by using this user has an option of keeping the dashlets according to their flexible size. Once the user has created or resized by adding new dashlets on the dashboard the changes are automatically saved before even the user saves it.

Updated User Interface Enhancements

Sugar dashlets are used by users to build specific data and useful visualisations into their Sugar views. By using the dashlets the users can visualize their data in various graphical representations. Sugar has added New dashlets and Extended the existing dashlets usability.

• Active Subscription Dashlet is the dashlet introduced in Sugar 10.x which gives information about the Account’s Purchases of Service Type. By using this dashlet users can have a glance at the number of purchases and how much revenue was made from a particular customer over a while. Until the Sugar 10.1 version, this dashlet can be pulled to only Account’s module record view dashboards. From this release, Sugar has extended its access and made it to be available on all modules irrespective of stock or custom modules. If the user wants to add an active subscription Dashlet to any module, the only thing is if the module should have a relationship with the Accounts module or the module has Accounts relate field in it.

• The Interactions Dashlet is the dashlet that gives information about the most recent top activities like Emails, Notes, Meetings, Calls made on that specific Account, Opportunity, or Leads. Users can directly Log a Call, Schedule a meeting, Compose an Email, or Create an Attachment from the dashlet itself without redirecting to a Specific Activities module. From Sugar 10.2 this dashlet is even available for the Contacts Module.
• A new dashlet has been introduced in the Knowledge Base module called Knowledge Base Search Dashlet which gives quick access to Knowledge Base articles in Sugar via a search bar and a tree-based view. Users can easily find the articles by entering the keyword in the search bar available in the Dashlet.  This Dashlet can be added to any Dashboard in Sugar Instance.
• A new dashlet has been introduced in the Knowledge Base module called Knowledge Base Search Dashlet which gives quick access to Knowledge Base articles in Sugar via a search bar and a tree-based view. Users can easily find the articles by entering the keyword in the search bar available in the Dashlet.  This Dashlet can be added to any Dashboard in Sugar Instance.

• If any field is marked as audited in the field options available in Studio, Sugar gives the history of changes made on that field in the Audit log available at the record view actions menu. Before 10.2 users can’t log the fields in the Activities modules. But from this quarter release users can enable Audit Log on all Activities modules called Calls, Meetings, Tasks, and Notes and users can also track the name of the specific logic hook if any update has been done on audit fields via logic hook.
• Users can add up to  50 list view default filters and Subpanels are customizable as per the user’s convenience where the user can resize the columns widths and the changes can be preserved. Users can also add or remove the desired fields from the Subpanel layout under any module by clicking the Gear Icon as we do in the ListView layout. This feature allows the user to quickly arrange the fields in the UI itself instead of going to Studio and making the changes every time. The below image depicts this feature.

Studio and Administration Enhancements

The administration section is the place where the admin user can customize the existing fields, layouts, and Display Labels, etc. through a Developer tool called Studio, and by using Sugar Logic they can create business logic for field calculations and the field’s values will be automatically updated based on the calculated formula given without writing the PHP code. In addition to the existing data types and Sugar Logic functions  sugar has provided additional enhancements in the Studio and Administration section as described in the below section.

Studio and Sugar Logic Updates

1. A New field Data Type called “Auto Increment” has been introduced in the Fields section, where admin users can create a field to add a unique numerical ID to module records. By using this field type no need of adding PHP code to increment the field value for newly created records. This field data type made the Developer Job easy by avoiding coding.
2. Until Sugar 10.1 Release we can only make a field as required in Studio, to make it conditionally required Developer has to customise it through code customisations. But now from this release, Sugar made this job easy through a studio where admin users can make the field conditionally required on the layout using Sugar Logic. There is a new field option called “Required If” introduced in this release which appears only if the “Required” option is selected on the fields.
3. These two updates are a good sign to indicate that Sugar is moving more to low-code/no-code platform development.
4. Sugar has introduced three new functions in the Sugar Logic to make the admin users more feasible to use the Sugar Logic and build the business logic without the Developer’s help.
5. It introduced a new function called str_replace() function which replaces the portions of text within as string.
6. The year() function which returns the only year value from the date field which helps the users to use this field for any integrations or in cases where they need only the Year from the date field.
7. The isInList() function which lets the user pass a multi-select field as a second parameter.

Administration Enhancements

Day by day to make the application usage more efficient with different Integrations available in the market, Sugar has introduced new Connectors and Oauth2 Authentication for Email Settings as follows.

OAuth2 for Google Mail and Exchange Online

Sugar now supports OAuth2 connections to Google Mail and Exchange Online when configuring the system outbound email, system inbound email, and user email accounts.

Introduced New Connector Called Microsoft Connector

From Sugar 10.2 the admin users can configure the Microsoft Connector if they have an active Microsoft Azure account. By using this connector, it allows Sugar to connect to the Microsoft API Services via OAuth2 to send outbound emails as well as receive inbound emails.

Changed in Default Scheduler Jobs End Date & Time

In Earlier Versions of Sugar, Stock Schedulers have a specific End Date and Time set on it by default as where the Schedulers will stop running after reaching it. If the users are not aware of this they will run havoc why schedulers are not triggering as per the Sugar Design. From this release, the default Schedulers will not have End Date  & Time fields set by default. But Users running on On-Premise Versions have to update their stock schedulers end date & time or else the stock schedulers will work no more for previous versions of Sugar.

Sugar BPM Enhancements

As we know that Sugar has introduced a feature called Business Process Management from Sugar 8.x versions where users can automate all their Business processes in Sugar, a user can easily design the workflow of their businesses in UI by a drag and drop mechanism. 

Users can easily automate the processes like Automatic lead routing, which means automatic lead allocation to the salesperson based on criteria. Not only this,  BPM is doing wonders with many advanced processes like Automated Quote Approvals. A User can also send customer email notifications on each process happening in Sugar. 

In addition to the existing features in Business Process Management, Sugar is continuously adding value to every module in every release. To increase the importance of this feature and for User’s flexibility and easy usage of the system, Sugar has also made a few enhancements in the BPM section by introducing new inbuilt designing techniques. In this release, we got a  few improvements to the Module Field Evaluations section as listed below.

1. Users can use “Is one of” Operators for multi-select fields at field level evaluations. By using this operator, the user can design complex criteria for evaluating the automated business processes.
2. Until Sugar 10.1 Users don’t have the capability of adding the relate fields created in Studio in the field evaluations section. But from Sugar 10.2 It is possible to add relate fields in BPM.
3. In earlier versions, users don’t have the capability of sending an email to multiple teams using the End Events and Send Message Events sections. From this release, the SugarCRM team designed the BPM section of adding all the teams on the target records to the recipient list.

SugarIdentity Enhancements

Sugar Identity is the feature available only for Cloud-based solutions that allow customers to securely manage user identities as well as access applications and services in the SugarCRM ecosystem. In addition to the existing features available Sugar also made some updates in the SugarIdentity section in Sugar Q4 2020 Sell Product as mentioned below.

• In Earlier versions of Sugar, regular users don’t have the option of updating their password in the Instance where the Sugar Identity is enabled. From Sugar 10.2 regular users have the flexibility of updating their password in Sugar by using the Change Password option available in the Profile actions menu.

• Sugar Instances where Sugaridentity is enabled can also update the existing user records through importing the user records into the system.
• The SugarCloud Settings link is now available on the Admin page for administrators to easily access the SugarCloud Settings console.

Conclusion

Sugar Sell is the Cloud-based Product released in 2019 and Sugar continuously adds value to the product in every quarter release by adding new feature Enhancements and also fixes the Bugs in previous versions. 

Sugar Sell enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative and affordable solution where it brings customer data into one place and builds on top of that underlying customer data a complete system for sales automation, collaboration, and reporting. With all these new features the Sugar Sell CRM is the best CRM  to improve your Sales Executives Efficiency, reduce sales costs and to drive your revenue.

Bhea is a leading SugarCRM partner with more than decade expertise in implementing CRM solutions with the best solutioning methodologies. If you are looking for a CRM to enhance your sales  then Sugar Sell is the right Product and Bhea is the right place to enhance your Business growth. You can connect with us at any time to get a quick demo about the Product and how to implement the CRM specific to your business needs.