SugarCRM is coming out with a much anticipated new version – 7.0 for all their new and existing customers, and we are really excited about it. Everyone here at BrainSell has played around in the Sugar 7 demo instance and we have loved all the improvements they made.

1. Brand New Look

The most striking difference in Sugar 7 is the new UI (user interface) – it’s even more sleek and modern than previous instances of SugarCRM. The layout is clean and intuitive with a more comprehensive navigation bar at the top. What I like most about this new UI is the more open layout – I find it easier on the eyes with a less cluttered feel than previous versions.

2. Speed

Another really welcome surprise for me when using Sugar 7 was just how fast it was. The jump between Accounts to Contacts to Reports was in the blink of an eye. Older versions of Sugar have been reasonably quick, but Sugar 7 blows them all out of the water. We live in a day and age where internet speed is a no brainer – my mother likes to remind me that our generation is burdened by the need of ‘instant gratification’, and she’s right. No one likes when a page takes longer than .01235 milliseconds to render which is why Sugar has done themselves a favor in greatly speeding up their processing time. Now, you can literally update sales records in the blink of an eye.

3. In Line Editing

Another really user friendly functionality that my colleague Sonja and I were really pleased to see was ‘in line editing’ capability on all dashboards, accounts and contacts screens. What exactly does that mean? Instead of scrolling to the top of the page to hit ‘edit’ on an account record or contact record now all you have to do is hover over an area and click in it to edit it right from there instead of going in on a back end. This cuts down user time drastically and improves the end user experience overall. We were really pleased to see this functionality added to Sugar 7.

4. Hash-tagging

Sugar has also harnessed the idea of hash-tags as search functions. Now you can ‘tag’ any account, contact or opportunity with a hash-tag. You can then search the whole database for that hash-tag and find all contacts/work orders/attachments and other relevant information tagged to that opportunity. This is just another example of Sugar’s out of the box thinking on this new release. Other CRM systems like Salesforce have used the concept of hash-tagging in the past – but we found Sugar’s to be much more comprehensive and effective.

These are just some of the cool new features we were really happy to see added in SugarCRM 7. I’ve taken some screenshots of SugarCRM 7 and added them to a gallery so you can see first hand the new look, they are at the bottom of this post.

All new users of SugarCRM will be getting SugarCRM 7 on October 1st – so if you want to get a head start on seeing using the new interface join us for our webinar, we’ll be showing great tips and tricks for navigating and customizing your instance.