Sugar Spring ’18 and Sugar 8 have been released and are now available for all cloud and on-premise customers. These releases represent the next step in Sugars core quarterly feature delivery model, providing accelerated delivery of new innovations for cloud customers, as well as greater predictability for Sugar updates for on-premise customers. Coinciding with Spring ’18, the Sugar 8 annual release is a “roll-up” of the features and enhancements included in preceding quarterly releases including Fall ’17 and Winter ’18 as well as Spring ’18.

Chief Marketing Officer and SugarCRM Co-Founder Clint Oram, highlights the key features available in Sugar Spring ’18 and Sugar 8 in the following video. Additional exciting updates are explained in more detail after the video.

Spring ’18 (Cloud)

Spring ’18 will significantly benefit customers running in the cloud environment with the following feature updates:

Data Privacy Enhancements
SugarCRM has always held a strong commitment to openness and transparency. In light of increasing consumer demand for data privacy rights and data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, Sugar is excited to announce a completely new set of features that enable customers to work in accordance with data privacy regulations within Sugar.

  • The new Data Privacy module allows users to record and track data privacy requests and events.
  • A new out-of-the-box Data Privacy Manager role gives designated users the ability to close data privacy records and permanently erase personal information.
  • Fields can now be designated as personally identifying information which enables them to be permanently erased and included in the record’s View Personal Info option.
  • Data Privacy Managers now have the ability to immediately and permanently erase personal information fields from their Sugar database via the Data Privacy module.
  • The View Personal Info screen shows the record’s personal information fields along with the current field value, source of the value, and date the value was set.
  • The Data Privacy module includes the ability to track the gain or loss of consent, allowing users to record the business purposes to which an individual has consented in the new Business Purposes Consented For field.
  • Available via Admin > System Email Settings, admins can configure whether new email addresses added to Sugar records default to opted-in or opted-out.
  • An opt-in checkbox now gets added to web-to-lead forms containing email address fields to allow visitors to explicitly indicate that they wish to receive marketing emails.
  • Admins now have the ability to stop activity streams from displaying or storing new entries.
  • The change log is now called “Audit Log” and includes the following improvements:
    • Audit logs now capture the setting of fields starting at record creation.
    • Audit log now captures the source from which each field change originated.
    • Email addresses now have a separate audit log which records when the address is marked as opted-out or invalid.
    • Users can now view the Audit Log for records in the Targets module.
    • The audit log header now displays the name of the current record to better identify which record’s audit log you are viewing.
  • More detail about data privacy and how it affects Sugar customers can be found in the Data Privacy & Sugar community space.

Additional Enhancements

Product Catalog Dashlet Enhancements

  • The Product Catalog dashlet can now be added to other Sidecar modules and the home page. The dashlet will be read-only when added to the home page, a module’s list view, or, for Enterprise and Ultimate customers, a module’s record view that does not contain a Revenue Line Items subpanel.
  • Enhancements have been made to the user experience of the dashlet including the addition of a scroll bar (for Chrome), a cursor that changes when hovering over actionable elements, and an updated font style to match Sugar’s new look.
  • Easily find and add products from the Product Catalog dashlet as revenue line items as you create and edit opportunity records (Enterprise and Ultimate Editions only).
  • More detail on this dashlet can be found in Product Catalog Dashlet: Available everywhere soon!, written by Sugars Senior Product Manager for this feature, Drew McDaniel.

Advanced Workflow (Available in Enterprise and Ultimate Editions)

  • The History window for Advanced Workflow processes has been optimized for better readability.
  • A Sugar date variable labelled “Run Time” has been added to Add Related Record and Change Field actions in Advanced Workflow. The Run Time variable is essentially a “now” option, as it represents the moment that the action executes (e.g., change a date field to Run Time + 2 weeks).

Saved Reports Chart dashlet

  • The Select a Report field now allows users to search and select their desired report when adding/editing the Saved Reports Chart dashlet.

Configure API Platforms User Interface

  • Administrators now have the ability to add or remove custom API platform identifiers via Admin > Configure API Platforms.

This release also includes additional fixes to address issues in previous releases of Sugar, detailed in the Ultimate, Enterprise, and Professional Release Notes.

Customers hosted in the Sugar cloud environment will receive further communication regarding their automatic upgrades shortly per the Sugar Cloud Policy Guide – Upgrade Policy. Please visit the Supported Platforms page for a complete list of supported browsers and other platform information.

Sugar 8 (On-Premise)

Sugar 8 is a “roll-up” or culmination of the preceding quarterly releases, combining the features released in Fall ’17, Winter ’18, and the Spring ’18 features listed above. Among these features, users will find that Sugar 8 includes a completely modernised user experience of the Sugar application, offering a more elegant design that provides superior legibility and ease-of-use, and consistency with Sugar mobile. Read more about this and other exciting new feature updates below:

Data Privacy Enhancements
SugarCRM has always held a strong commitment to openness and transparency. In light of increasing consumer demand for data privacy rights and data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, Sugar are excited to announce a completely new set of features that enable Sugars customers to work in accordance with data privacy regulations within Sugar.

  • The new Data Privacy module allows users to record and track data privacy requests and events.
  • A new out-of-the-box Data Privacy Manager role gives designated users the ability to close data privacy records and permanently erase personal information.
  • Fields can now be designated as personally identifying information which enables them to be permanently erased and included in the record’s View Personal Info option.
  • Data Privacy Managers now have the ability to immediately and permanently erase personal information fields from their Sugar database via the Data Privacy module.
  • The View Personal Info screen shows the record’s personal information fields along with the current field value, source of the value, and date the value was set.
  • The Data Privacy module includes the ability to track the gain or loss of consent, allowing users to record the business purposes to which an individual has consented in the new Business Purposes Consented For field.
  • Available via Admin > System Email Settings, admins can configure whether new email addresses added to Sugar records default to opted-in or opted-out.
  • An opt-in checkbox now gets added to web-to-lead forms containing email address fields to allow visitors to explicitly indicate that they wish to receive marketing emails.
  • Admins now have the ability to stop activity streams from displaying or storing new entries.
  • The change log is now called “Audit Log” and includes the following improvements:
    • Audit logs now capture the setting of fields starting at record creation.
    • Audit log now captures the source from which each field change originated.
    • Email addresses now have a separate audit log which records when the address is marked as opted-out or invalid.
    • Users can now view the Audit Log for records in the Targets module.
    • The audit log header now displays the name of the current record to better identify which record’s audit log you are viewing.
  • More detail about data privacy and how it affects Sugar customers can be found in the Data Privacy & Sugar community space.

Additional Enhancements

Improved User Interface

  • Modern and sleek new design with updated colours and shapes appear throughout Sugar’s Sidecar user interface.
  • Layout changes made to record previews in the intelligence pane which have a more usable layout and updated look and feel.
  • More detail on this, including important information for developers, can be found in this blog post from Sugars Director of Developer Advocacy, Matt Marum: A new Sugar UX coming in Winter ’18.

Reports and Charts

  • Report charts are now enabled for drill-through, allowing users to click on a segment of a report’s chart to view a list of records belonging to that segment.
  • The following operations are also available when drilling through a report chart: Record Actions menu, Mass Actions menu, Favorite designation, Checkbox selection, and Refresh option.
  • More detail on this feature can be found in this blog post from Sugars Director of Product Management (Relationship Intelligence, Reports and Insights), Deepak Deolalikar: Chart Drill Through in Winter ’18 Release.

Dashboards and Dashlets

  • The Select a Report field now allows users to search and select their desired report when adding or editing the Saved Reports Chart dashlet.
  • The View Report option has been added to the Saved Reports Chart dashlet allowing users to access the originating report’s detail view.
  • Dashboards can now be shared with teams of users, pulled into their views by users, and pushed to teams of users by system admin users.

Emails

  • The Emails module now uses the Sidecar interface. It has been redesigned to store copies of email messages sent from Sugar or archived via one of the various email archiving options. Users can view and work with email records much like they view and work with records in other Sidecar modules.
  • Users can configure multiple SMTP accounts to send email from Sugar.
  • Explicitly related emails can be unlinked from the Emails subpanel of related records.
  • A filter has been added to the Emails list view to quickly find emails with attachments.

Quotes

  • Reintroduction of the ability for users to create quote records via duplication.
  • The original quote’s line items, groups, comments, and related account and opportunity data will carry over to the new quote.

Product Catalog Dashlet

  • Easily find and add products directly from the Product Catalog dashlet as you create and edit quote records and, in Enterprise and Ultimate editions, as revenue line items as you create and edit opportunity records.
  • The Product Catalog dashlet can be added to Sidecar modules and the home page. The dashlet will be read-only when added to the home page, a module’s list view, or, for Enterprise and Ultimate customers, a module’s record view that does not contain a Revenue Line Items subpanel.
  • More detail on this dashlet can be found in Product Catalog Dashlet: Available everywhere soon! and Coming in Winter ’18: The new Product Catalog Dashlet, written by Sugars Senior Product Manager for this feature, Drew McDaniel.

Sidecar Updates

  • Multiple team selection is now supported when filtering based on the Teams field in Sidecar modules.
  • The following modules now use the Sidecar user interface:
    Contracts Currencies Shipping Providers
    Contract Type Manufacturers Tax Rates

Advanced Workflow

  • The Rules Builder has been completely redesigned for usability with improvements that include row sorting via drag and drop, mass moving of rows, and mass deleting of rows.
  • Receive Message events can detect that a particular field has changed and, optionally, react according to the value it changes to or from. This functionality was previously exclusive to Start events.
  • The History window for Advanced Workflow processes has been optimized for better readability.
  • A Sugar date variable labelled “Run Time” has been added to Add Related Record and Change Field actions in Advanced Workflow. The Run Time variable is essentially a “now” option, as it represents the moment that the action executes (e.g., change a date field to Run Time + 2 weeks).

Additional Updates

  • Administrators now have the ability to add or remove custom API platform identifiers via Admin > Configure API Platforms.
  • Additional configuration options have been added for configuring SSO using SAML.

This release also includes additional fixes to address issues in previous releases of Sugar, detailed in the Ultimate, Enterprise, and Professional Release Notes.

Sugar 8 is compatible and supported for new installations and upgrades for customers running a MySQL, DB2, Oracle, or MSSQL stack. Please visit the Supported Platforms page for a complete list of supported configurations. Changes to supported platforms in this release include:

  • PHP: Removed support for 5.6
  • Windows Server: Removed support for 2012
  • MySQL: Removed support for 5.6
  • SQLServer: Added support for 2014 SP2, removed support for 2012 and 2014
  • Elasticsearch: Added support for 5.4 and 5.6, removed support for 1.7.5

Sugar 8 will support upgrades from Version 7.9.4 on all supported platforms. Customers hosting their Sugar instance on their own servers can review the installation and upgrade instructions for these releases, found at the following links:

Sugar Spring ’18 and Sugar 8 Developer Resources

Sugars Developer Advocacy team has made available the following resources to assist developers with the changes associated in these releases:

Additional Documentation & Release Notes

Please review Sugars release notes for the new versions using the following links and the Knowledge Base article, “What to Expect When Upgrading to 8.0,” to learn more about the new features available, as well as the additional fixes to address issues identified in prior releases:

Chloe McAllister
Chloe is Sugabytes Customer Success Manager. Ensuring our existing customers of Sugabyte continue to be successful using SugarCRM.

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