SugarCRM: Being Social

SugarCRM is one of the few CRM companies that made all the right noises before Social CRM was known by that name. As I started looking into what the product can do, it was natural enough to have high expectations. Now that I have touched the surface, you will get a chance to sneak-peak as well.
Social CRM, as they say, is customer's territory. As the fact goes, the customer does not give a damn about your beautiful website and the associated paraphernalia. So being Social has been to a large extent providing seamless ways of integrating the product with the external websites that are in the business of getting people to socialize. If the product can achieve that without inflicting pain on its users, it is indeed a welcome development.

I can confidently say Sugar CRM does not disappoint one, although I hasten to add it will not pass in flying colours either. I would have to warn you - all my experiments are confined to  the 'community edition' version. To do justice I would have to go through the enterprise/standard editions one day, but I am not doing any implementation now and I am too lazy to follow-up for a trial version :). Here follows some tidbits:

• LinkedIn integration stands out indisputably, to such extent that I wondered whether there is any advertising revenue involved! Accounts within Sugar CRM are easily located, and can be processed through whatever LinkedIn offers 
• There was a lot of gaga about the Twitter integration sometime back. Was quite dismayed to see that it is only present in higher editions. However I did find something on Sugar Exchange which does exactly that, except that it just didn't do it. Well I am quite proud of writing a Twitter connector in Siebel, one of these days I should be repeating that here - with far better customization capabilities
• As one can expect on an open forum, Sugar Exchange does offer connectors to a few of the well known 'social' platforms out there. But they seem to be nothing but 'connectors' or connecting frameworks, with all the heavy lifting yet to be done to have something that will be of some use. One of the examples I quote is the Jigsaw connector.
• I tend to think about (& catalog) the 'social crm' part separate from the 'enterprise 2.0' part (sorry, Oracle Social CRM). Integration with Box.net tends to fall into both spaces, and it has a free connector for higher editions (what is with these guys and editions - not enough money in open source, sigh!). But the best and simple example is the Sugar Feed dashlet on the home page. It lets the user type a message and let the world (his world) see - ain't that cool? In the below screenshot you see the user feed below the blog feed.
• There are also more than a few small players which provide enterprise 2.0 capabilities, and have provided connectors to them. For e.g Broadchoice, and Quontext, but did not interest me enough to 'actually' test them

That is it for now I am afraid, watch this space to not see anything radical happening to Sugar CRM implementation space (you didn't miss the NOT there, did you?).