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SugarCRM released a broad upgrade today, and some of the features resemble those found in Salesforce.com’s newest offerings. SugarCRM 5.5 features a number of real-time functionalities, but their main achievements are a service called “Cloud Connects,” and Social Feeds.

Cloud Connects is a third-party web integration with LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and Hoovers, which touts social feeds with status updates, alerts, and notifications. Sugar’s Social Feeds is the dashboard that actually displays status updates and alerts; this information can be shared between users. Leveraging Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, users will also receive up-to-date account and lead information. People weighing in note that the combination of these services resembles Facebook, and therefore are compelled to draw similarities between the two and Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce’s real-time social network for enterprise. Salesforce.com announced the release of Chatter at their annual Dreamforce conference two weeks ago, and though CEO Marc Benioff insists that Chatter is a platform for collaboration, conference attendees christened it “Facebook for enterprise.”

Naturally, that Cloud Connect’s release is two weeks after Chatter’s precludes its being Sugar’s own version of Chatter. Still, considering SugarCRM staged a relatively successful guerrilla marketing campaign outside Dreamforce, it’s easy to see how many people drew that conclusion. You can see from screen shots of Cloud Connects, the program is more fragmented than Salesforce Chatter. Cloud Connects appears to be more of modular extension of Sugar’s existing CRM platform, while Salesforce Chatter looks, well, like Facebook.

Social Feeds

Cloud Connects' LinkedIn integration

There are a few other features in this upgrade, including a more streamlined Mobile Studio (Sugar’s mobile application) that allows for more editing and creating capabilities. There’s also Dynamic Teams, which improves collaboration on the CRM platform; and My Portal Dashlet, which allows users to view information from external sites and applications from the SugarCRM platform.

It will be interesting to see what other features Sugar adds to Cloud Connects in the future. They’ve been attacking Salesforce.com pretty aggressively, and I’d like to see if they make their social networking features more streamlined (like a “Facebook for enterprise”), or if they maintain the program as it is.