SuiteCRM releases new version with responsive theme

SuiteCRM is one of the world's leading free and open source CRM applications. It's a supercharged version of SugarCRM. It adds Quotations, Reporting, Workflow, Products, Contracts, Maps, Team Security, Portal, Mobile, PDF Templates and Invoicing modules to the Community Edition of SugarCRM.

Release 7.2 is an emphasis on the user interface. Re-designed from the ground up to be responsive, SuiteCRM now renders on tablets and mobile phones. The interface is modern and attractive. The clutter that was associated with the default SugarCRM installation has been cleared away and the most important information brought to the front. The result is a bright, contemporary, engaging and easy to use application.

SuiteCRM 7.2 also contains major enhancements to Projects, including Gantt Charts and Resource Management. The Reporting module has been substantially improved to enable users to create and publish attractive charts as stand-alone or Dashboard reports.

Greg Soper, CEO of SalesAgility, said "This release of SuiteCRM is a focus on the most important part of any application - the user. We wanted to create the world's easiest to use CRM as well as the most powerful and flexible one. This release is an important step on that path. By putting the user front and centre of our thinking, by removing clutter, by emphasising important information and by creating a clean, contemporary and attractive design, we think that we now have an application that doesn't just do more than most of the competition, it looks much better too."

SuiteCRM is a fork of the SugarCRM project. In the open source world, forking a project is usually only done when the community of users who are engaged with the project has irreconcilable differences with the owners of the project. In the case of SugarCRM, in response to SugarCRM announcing that they would be releasing no new code to the Community Edition, the community was faced with a decision to fork or watch the project wither on the vine. So the SuiteCRM fork was created and released by SalesAgility, one of the world's largest independent SugarCRM consultancies. SuiteCRM was first released in October 2013.

Since the initial release, there have been seven further releases, more than 350,000 downloads and a community of more than 20,000 now engages with the project on the community forums.

SuiteCRM is a completely open source project. The software can be downloaded for free from the project site (http://www.suitecrm.com) and can be used, modified and distributed. SuiteCRM is used by companies and organisations of all sizes from the SME to the enterprise and is increasingly being used by central government and regional government as a way of reducing cost and increasing flexibility.

SalesAgility has also announced that the next release will also focus on the user experience and will enable users to change information without having to edit and save a page. Users will simply change information and save the changes. It's a couple of clicks saved and couple of screen refreshes reduced and it enhances the user experience.

Soper concluded "We're on a journey and the destination is to design, build, support and maintain the world's most used CRM application. We want to be bigger than Salesforce, bigger than Dynamics and bigger than Oracle CRM. We think that open source is the future, we're deeply committed to free and open source software and we're deeply committed to the community of users that download, deploy and drive value from SuiteCRM."