Project of the Month - January 2006

ZuckerDocs

Description of project

Trove Info

Why and how did you get started?

Originally, we looked for an all-in-one software solution for SMBs, providing address book, document management, email client, and other standard features. It quickly was clear that Sugar had most of the required features and was very easy to extend and adapt, and so we simply did it. However, we weren't really happy with Sugar's document management features at that time, so we decided to integrate it with KnowledgeTree, a full-blown free document management solution.

What is the software's intended audience?

I'm sure there isn't a single company which doesn't have any documents to maintain - invoices, letter templates, offers etc. By using ZuckerDocs it is possible to manage various documents within workgroups, including document history and a locking mechanism. Additionally, it provides features for building up a Knowledge Base and interlinking it with other Sugar items. In other words, it provides a semi-structured way of managing knowledge about your customers.

How many people do you believe are using your software?

This is rather hard to say for sure, as surely not everybody downloading the software will actually use it in their production environment. However our commercial version, which includes the ZuckerDocs Client that enables access to documents in Sugar directly from Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office applications, has been licensed several hundred times. I assume there currently are around one thousand installations of our Sugarforge-hosted products.

What has been your biggest challenge?

The initial development wasn't hard to do, as the Sugar interfaces are rather easy to use. I think the most challenging task is to keep up-to-date with the Sugar release cycle and ensure that our products are always compatible with all available major and minor releases.

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

It is absolutely important for us to have a working and growing Sugar community. The more Sugar users there are, the larger the target group for our commercial products and consulting services. By contributing to the Sugar community ourselves we ensure that potential Sugar users are not left alone with startup problems, thus increasing satisfaction with the product in a whole.

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

ZuckerMail is a POP3 and IMAP client integrated into Sugar. ZuckerFeeds enables common newsfeed aggregators to be notified on changes to your customer data managed by Sugar. And the Zucker Firefox Toolbar provides fast access to your Sugar installation directly from your Mozilla Firefox Browser. By the way, I would like to encourage Sugar developers and users to enforce usage of the rich feature set of Sugarforge.org, especially the discussion groups. Currently, all issues are discussed in the main forums at forums.sugarcrm.com, leading to a complex thread system rather hard to follow. Even worse, questions and contributions, which aren't of interest to a large amount of forum users will disappear from the main view very fast, never to be seen again. By posting questions and issues directly to the project page at Sugarforge, it is more likely to receive a good answer from qualified developers.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Before ZuckerDocs came out, it simply wasn't possible to have a shared document repository within Sugar, so we filled the gap. Especially for companies migrating from other CRM packages to Sugar it is very important to provide an easy way of importing document repositories and linking it to Sugar items. Therefore we decided to extend ZuckerDocs with a client application providing these features and thereby saving a lot of time for Sugar users.

Where do you see your project going?

Honestly spoken, I don't see much need for a product like ZuckerDocs in future Sugar releases, as the native "Documents" module will likely grow in features and stability. Personally, I wouldn't use a 3rd party extension like ZuckerDocs if the default product contains a better integrated module with nearly the same features. Therefore, we presumably will concentrate on better desktop integration, for example with easy-to-use "Checkin"/"Checkout" functions directly from Windows Explorer.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Sugar users have to learn that their input is very important for future development. Everyone has the possibility to make suggestions to the SugarCRM core development team, and the best ones find their way into the next Sugar relase. Unlike other software vendors, SugarCRM seems to appreciate feedback from the community, and allows it to drive core development.