By Staff Writer – John Federico (@gadgetboy)

I’ve used both Salesforce.com and SugarCRM on and off for years. You surely know of Salesforce.com and if you don’t know SugarCRM, you should.

SugarCRM has been (more or less) an open source clone of Salesforce.com. Today, they’ve come even closer to parity with Salesforce.com with the addition of “Cloud Connectors” and Social Feeds in their latest 5.5 release.


Cloud Connectors offer the ability to connect with external public social networks like LinkedIn, Hoovers and Jigsaw, to name a few.

Social Feeds provide status updates, notification and alerts similar to what you would find on most popular social networks. SugarCRM’s implementation is similar to both Salesforce.com’s Chatter or the Yammer Enterprise Updates service.

The interesting trend here is that both of these CRM systems are working to integrate public internet services and private intranet services whenever it’s sensible to do so.

And that includes mobile.

As part of SugarCRM 5.5 the company included a new Mobile Studio, enabling the deployment of applications specifically for mobile platforms – including your beloved iPhone.

I’m particular taken by SugarCRM’s concept of Dynamic Teams, a feature that is also included in the latest release. Increasingly, teams are ad hoc depending on a project, client or some other initiative. Hierarchies and responsibilities are fluid and the software allows for that. For instance, you can designate someone as an Executive Sponsor of a corporate initiative and bring actors from any part of the enterprise to work on it while SugarCRM ties them all together.

As always, the open source version is free to download and install. Professional and Enterprise editions are also available starting at $360/user/year.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0