Building on SugarCRM

Chapter 1. What is SugarCRM?

SugarCRM is the world’s largest open source CRM (customer relationship management) software. Founded in 2004, over 7,000 customers and more than half a million users rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers, and create custom business applications. These custom business applications can be used in a multitude of ways, such as to power sales teams, run customer support organizations, and manage customer information databases.

One of the unique things about SugarCRM in the CRM space is that it’s fundamentally an open source application, meaning that the source code of the application is available to any user, developer, or customer of the product. Whether one opts for the AGPLv3 licensed or the commercially licensed version, the application comes with all of the source code, enabling developers to customize and build upon the product with ease. This puts the control of your application and your data in your hands, enabling the freedom to deploy SugarCRM wherever you wish. This ability has given SugarCRM partners and developers worldwide the ability to customize the out-of-the-box application to fit in many different organizations, vertical markets, and locales.

But before we dig in deeper to how you could take the SugarCRM platform and build upon it, let’s take a peek at the various editions of SugarCRM, how and where we can deploy SugarCRM, and some of the components that come with SugarCRM out of the box to enable you ...