Global Developer Conference

The Global Developer Conference, held in San Jose, CA in early May, was a rousing success! We had developers fly in from around the world for this event, and the general buzz from the conference was that people found it very informative.

Highlights included a surprise guest, Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz, who shared the stage with SugarCRM's CEO John Roberts in a thoughtful discussion of Open Source trends. Other presenters included sponsors Oracle, Hewlett Packard, MySQL, Pervasive, Sun, and Intel.

The Developer track featured a product roadmap discussion, sessions on creating custom modules, a demonstration of the SOAP API, a security talk, and other topics presented by the Sugar Engineering team. The IT Manager track featured topics on configuring and scaling the system, along with best practice discussions on Marketing, Customer Support, and the Sugar Adoption Program. Running concurrently to the other presentations was the Sugar University track, which featured several courses normally taught online.

We planned plenty of events in the evening hours for our guests, including a dinner at Testarossa Vineyards (with a fabulous performance by the Sugar Band) one night and a dinner at the Tied House Brewery the second night. We sponsored the Cat's Hill Classic bicycle race on Saturday, and treated the crowds to a BBQ at our booth.

With the success of this first-ever Developer conference, we are already planning on having another one, initially targeted for the end of this summer. Make plans to join us!

Sugar Developer Newswire

We are releasing our first-ever "Developer Preview" of Sugar 5.0 today. The purpose of this release is to allow you to familiarize yourself with the new technical and architecture directions we're taking in 5.0. New items include the metadata-driven UI and the new model view controller framework. Learn more about this release in this forum thread.
The next product feature we're unveiling in the Community Preview is the Knowledge Base. Learn more information about this feature in this forum thread. (Available only in Sugar Professional and Enterprise Editions).
Congratulations to Sugar Community member David Moceri and his lovely bride Natalie, who got married just days before the Developer Conference.
SugarCRM is hiring! We have plenty of open positions, both in our Cupertino CA office and around the world. Check out the "Careers" section of the Sugarcrm.com website for details.
Watch SugarForge.org for details on our new Sugar Bounty Program, which will be ramped up in the next few weeks. The bounty program lets you earn money for developing "bounty Items" we identify, from modules and other code to specifications and documentation.

New Podcast Series on iTunes

We're pleased to announce a new series of podcasts called "60 Second Sugar Snippets" available on iTunes and on our website.

Listen to these short podcasts to learn about various Sugar topics, from differences between the Open Source and Commercial editions to "where does my bug go?" and everything in-between! Always brief, always informative, these nuggets of information will help you learn a little more about our world.

SHINE Live Help is May's Project of the Month

This month we feature SHINE Live Help from Jason Freed Farias. The project is a real-time chat application for website sales and support. It can be used as a standalone application or it can be integrated (using the built-in Sugar component) with Sugar Open Source versions 4.2 and 4.5.

In addition to extending Sugar Open Source CRM data to the live help experience, Shine also allows sales and support operators to create new CRM records like leads, cases, contacts, and accounts directly from the Shine operator interface.

For more information, please visit the project of the month page.

Upcoming Webinars

The Sugar Dev Users Group (SDUG) is hosting several free webinars in the next few months, featuring speakers from the Global Developer Conference that was held in early May.

Speakers and topics include:

SOAP API with Julian Ostrow (May 24)
5.0 Roadmap with Manoj Jayavdevan (June 6)
State of the Community with Andy Dreisch (June 27)
Sugar Security with Rob Lackey (July 11)

To register for a webinar, visit our SDUG page.

- The SugarForge Team

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