SugarCRM has announced the beta release of its new web services framework, platform improvements, and enhanced mobile features for SugarCRM. The new beta release enables users and developers to more easily create and manage customized CRM experiences.

“CRM is most valuable when it is customized to meet the unique demands of each business and integrated with other mission-critical systems,” says Clint Oram, co-founder and vice president of product management of SugarCRM. “This new release delivers the features companies require to more effectively manage the entire customer experience.”

All of these new capabilities will be available as part of the Sugar Open Cloud, and are available to the SugarCRM community to test in beta today.

New application features include features for managing SugarCRM in a mobile environment and the ability to assemble teams to collaborate on projects.

Mobile Studio Editor

The new Mobile Studio Editor provides enhanced customization capabilities to optimize SugarCRM for mobile devices with pre-built layouts and views for modules designated for mobile use. Users can select which modules to view in the wireless client and tailor the layouts and fields for the wireless client from within Sugar Studio.

The new mobile studio allows developers and Sugar users to design purpose-built mobile views into the SugarCRM system. A streamlined view of the customer support case module, for example, could help field support agents quickly and easily manage customer case information to provide faster troubleshooting for customers.

Dynamic Teams

In addition to the new features above, Sugar is also introducing new dynamic team capabilities that enable users to add multiple individuals or teams to a CRM record to enhance collaboration on complex projects.

For example, a user could assign an executive sponsor, professional services team and customer advocate to a given account, rather than simply assigning the account to an individual sales representative or sales team. These individuals, all working in different departments and with unique roles, would be alerted on any communications or status changes for that specific account.

The new release introduces new platform capabilities for integrating and presenting data within SugarCRM. These capabilities include:

Enhanced Web Services Framework

Significant improvements to the web services framework that streamlines the performance of web service calls and allows third-party developers to more easily create and maintain integrations to the SugarCRM application. SugarCRM has also added a REST interface that allows for easier development of RESTful services allowing complex interactions between Sugar and services such as e-commerce systems, billing services and social networks. For example, Sugar developers could link Sugar to services such as Amazon’s Flexible Payment Services to track customers’ product and purchase history inside SugarCRM.

Themes Framework

A new framework for creating and managing Sugar Themes, offering pre-built and custom themes with different styles, colors and navigation. Customers can now easily create unique themes suited to the needs of companies or the preferences of individual developers without coding.

Advanced Password Management

New password management features enable users to set password strength requirements, create system-generated passwords, and allows users to reset their own passwords. User passwords can be set to expire and the system can lock out users after a pre-set amount of failed login attempts.