Project of the Month - September 2007

ZuckerReports

Description of project

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

Sugar is a rather versatile platform to build unique applications on top of where a customer-centric view of information is required. Most of our customers see Sugar as kind of a "data warehouse", an interface between customer databases, accounting, erp, web portal software and more - that's what I personally like about Sugar. Due to our involvement in the community and our SugarForge projects, we are considered "Sugar experts" which is a priority in the eyes of our customers. Customers have approached us because of our positive reputation in the Sugar community and because of our well-known SugarForge projects.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

Mainly ZuckerDocs, project of the month in January 2006. We started some other projects as well, but are now focussing on ZuckerReports and ZuckerDocs.

What inspired you to create this project?

I've been using JasperReports for quite a long time, in my opinion it is the best reporting tool for Java environments, with an excellent balance between features and complexity. Reporting has to be an integral part of a CRM system (or "data warehouse", as described above), and so we decided to bring together Sugar and JasperReports.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

I would not like to be impudent - the Reporting Module in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise is basically a list designer and cannot compete with the capabilities of the JasperReports platform, especially when thinking about the iReport designer ... JasperReports provides enterprise class reporting for free, and ZuckerReports makes it available to Sugar users.

You were gone from the forums for a while; care to let us know what you've been up to?

We've been working on other projects in the past year, with a strong focus on Business Intelligence. Besides, my first son was born one year ago, so there was not much time left for our Sugar activities ...

What should the community be expecting with the upcoming release of ZuckerReports?

We incorporated most of the features people asked for: some ZuckerReports dashlets for displaying reports directly on the front page, time-triggered reporting using the Sugar scheduler, sending reports as e-mail attachments, ACL and team security (even for Sugar Open Source users).

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in these modules? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

The new features described above don't seem too spectacular, but when thinking about combining some of those features, the new ZuckerReports is way more useful than previous release: think about a dashlet showing all project tasks your team has to handle within the next week, it takes just a couple of minutes with new ZuckerReports. Daily activity report of your stuff, sent to the boss every morning, also just an easy configuration task.

The community around Sugar is the main reason why it can compete with long-estabilished, closed-source CRM applications.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

Currently we are doing a ZuckerDocs rework. Afterwards, we will extend Sugar with Business Intelligence by integrating a whole Business Intelligence platform into ZuckerReports (just in discussion with providers). Besides we are working on an iReport plugin which makes it more easy to design, manage and deploy reports for ZuckerReports and Sugar.