SugarCon 2015: UnCon Recap

At SugarCon last week, W-Systems had a number of our developers in attendance. UnCon provided an opportunity for our Sugar Developer’s to hack side-by side with SugarCRM core engineers and learn from some of the best and brightest stars in Sugar Engineering and the Sugar Developer Community. 
 

It wouldn’t be possible to write the word “UnCon” without mentioning and giving a huge thank you to Matthew Marum who handles Sugar Development Enablement at SugarCRM. Thank you Matt!

There was a packed schedule of UnCon sessions with topics ranging from: Sugar 6 to 7 Migration, SugarCRM Mobile SDK, Sugar Logic, Shadow, Process Author and more.

The full schedule can be viewed at: bit.ly/uncon2015agenda

Show off what your teams have built in the #SugarCon #UnCon hackathons at 3:45 in Plaza B, Lobby Level. pic.twitter.com/xsT8JEDTkM

— SugarCRM Developers (@sugarcrmdev) April 22, 2015

In the photo above (second to left), Adrian Moldovan from W-Systems is pictured at an UnCon roundtable session.

From our developers point of view, there were three topics that stood out to them:

1. Improved Global Search Support in SugarCRM 7.6
2. Process Workflow Manager
3. Mobile Framework SDK

Improved Global Search Support in SugarCRM 7.6

As of now, SugarCRM uses Elasticsearch as its own search engine for Global Searches only. Only a little part of the ES capabilities are being used within Sugar, but this use will be expanded in the upcoming versions (starting from version 7.6 and up).

Elasticsearch is a Lucene based full text search engine with impressive capabilities in terms of performance, monitoring, scalability and extensibility, widely used by small or large corporations.

We had the opportunity to take a deep dive into the improved architecture and implementation of the new SugarCRM search API and its usage of the Elasticsearch engine. The following new capabilities will be coming soon that we found quite interesting:

• Search within files and search within archived files support (i.e. documents with various file types, including PDF file search support). These will also show up as results in Global Search, while using a free add-on, Elastic Attachments with the new Sugar 7.6 search API framework. We do hope that by the time of 7.6 release the functionality of the above plugin will be directly integrated with the Sugar release.
• Geocoded search capabilities through the use of new Elasticsearch framework SugarCRM API and also through another free add-on, Geo Contacts Dashlet for Sugar 7.6.
• Improved integration of the monitoring capabilities from Elasticsearch into SugarCRM.
• Improved SugarCRM Global Search query support API. This allows better extensibility and customization of the global search query syntax and overall global search queries controlled from within SugarCRM.
• Extended SugarCRM configuration options for Elasticsearch integration in relation to how data is being indexed and stored, but also related to clustering capabilities allowing SugarCRM to address very large databases.

Future Elasticsearch (ES) improvements:

• A welcomed and promised usage of Elasticsearch in list views and subpanels searches (this will probably be released in Sugar 7.8).
• More Query Framework API support for query syntax customization in version 7.7 and 7.8.
• Improved performance.

Process Workflow Manager

In SugarCRM 7.6 Enterprise Edition there is a new and integrated world-class standardized workflow designer.

This allows customers to design and update their internal business workflows in SugarCRM as easy as creating new leads, thus making the path from the business model to the actual implementation much shorter and more flexible than ever.

Support for adding new action types and nodes in the workflow designer is already available, but only for on-premise systems (for now). More API support will be added from version 7.7 and up.

More information about the Process Workflow Manager can be found in the links below:

• SugarCRM News: SugarCRM Gets BPM, Workflow Suite with Open Source ProcessMaker
• SugarCRM News: SugarCRM Introduces Sugar 7.6; Integrates World-class Business Process Management Directly into CRM

Mobile Framework SDK

SugarCRM announced plans for Mobile CRM SDK that will allow customers and developers to greatly extend the SugarCRM mobile possibilities. The SDK will help partners and integrators to customize and extend the mobile version of SugarCRM, including specialized SDK support for each of the targeted platforms (iOS and Android). Mobile development is near and dear to our hearts at W-Systems so we are looking at this development with great anticipation.

Did you attend UnCon last week and see something that we missed or have thoughts on some of the notes we posted? Reach out to our team here.

** A huge thank you to our Adrian Moldovan for his detailed notes throughout SugarCon and research into authoring this blog post.