SugarCRM: More power through plug-insThe SugarCRM application began in 2004 as a simple way to manage a business's data about customers and quickly found venture capital backing after becoming one of the most popular projects on SourceForge. The current version, 5.2, now organizes the interaction between a sales force and the customers who want to purchase things. It stores leads, manages sales campaigns, organizes accounts, and produces reports and graphs to track all of this activity.

The architecture doesn't hide much of the table structure. There are tabs for the major entries like contacts, leads, and accounts, and each tab has similar buttons for creating new entries or searching the old ones. There are a few wizards in some of the areas that need more hand-holding. One for generating e-mail campaigns, for instance, checks a number of configuration options to make sure the messages go out correctly. I wouldn't be surprised if the tool is most heavily used to send marketing messages.

The software is written in PHP and tuned to MySQL, although it can be adapted to work with other databases, including Oracle. The community edition comes with all of the basic features for filling out the tables with names of people and the meetings between them. The dashboard keeps a constant tally of the new leads and what happens to them. The system has always had a sophisticated plug-in structure, and there's one site, the SugarExchange, devoted to cataloging these open source and professional plug-ins.

One random estimate cited in Wikipedia says that the community edition includes 85 percent of the features of the professional versions, a fact that's probably based upon the number of tables in the database, not on the coolness of the features. The professional and enterprise editions come with some of the fancier enhancements, like more sophisticated reports, a customer portal, and mobile access. Most of the sophisticated plug-ins come at a price.

It's easy to get the impression that the community edition is being eclipsed by the professional version, especially because most of the marketing copy on the front page of the SugarCRM site is aimed at getting people to try and then buy one of the professional versions. And if you're already running the community edition, SugarCRM is ready to make it simple for you to upgrade to the proprietary ones. But there are substantial resources devoted to the community edition, including a number of forums and SugarForge, the repository for the main project and many plug-ins.