Project of the Month - October 2007

Sugar Appliance

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?

I got involved with SugarCRM when my company, rPath, needed a CRM solution. After seeing the strong user community for SugarCRM in action we decided that it was a perfect way to showcase the appliance construction capabilities of our rBuilder product, so I built the Sugar Appliance. It was obvious that the place to host this project and get feedback was SugarForge, and the community there has been great in helping guide the development of the appliance.

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

I am a user of a number of different projects, including the Asertive Thunderbird plugin and Zucker Reports, but my primary involvement has been with the Sugar Appliance project.

What inspired you to create this project?

I built the Sugar Appliance as a way to demonstrate how much easier Sugar would be to install and maintain if it were simply bundled with Linux and all of it's dependencies.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

There are a lot of users out there who had trouble setting up SugarCRM for non-hosted use even if they were using one of the installers. My hope is that the Sugar Appliance is the simplest possible way to use SugarCRM for local installations. Even after folks get the components installed a lot of times they have trouble updating them to new versions of Linux, new versions of the database, new versions of php, etc. This appliance provides a single button through a web interface that updates all of that stuff at once to a known tested release that will work with SugarCRM. It turns out there are a lot of users who wanted to have SugarCRM in its own VMware instance as well, either for trial or production use, so the fact that the appliance is provided in that format as well has proved to be a big benefit.

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.

It is really simple! You can really use the appliance in one of two ways. You can either download the ISO file and burn it to CD and install it on a blank system or you can download the VMware image and simply start it up. In both case after you boot the system you get a running SugarCRM system without any configuration steps for SugarCRM. The appliance supports inbound and outbound email and scheduled actions right out of the box.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

I am always looking for help, even if it is just feedback on how you like the appliance. It is particularly hard to test every possible version of the appliance and the upgrade proecess between versions and it is hard to keep up with documentation. If anyone is interested in taking on more work on the packaging of the appliance with the rPath tools I would be happy to train you on the process.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I want to update the Appliance to include 5.0 when it is released. I have also had a number of requests to include Java components in the appliance as well as Zucker Reports. I will probably do that in the next build.