SugarCon 2009: Top Ten Lists

[Rich2]

SugarCon was awesome. I learned a ton and only wish I could have attended every breakout session. I talked to some people Wednesday evening and gleaned some other highlights from the conference that I wasn't able to personally attend. So in light of that, I thought I would publish my 'top ten list' (OK, it's just the first ten things that come to mind) of highlights from the conference. And if a few other people do the same, it would be great. So here it is, in no particular order:

1. I learned that Sugar is opening an office in Munich, huge for us a German HQ company.
2. Michael Lewis' story of moneyball and the idea of "recording what ought to have happened and comparing it to what did happen" as the Oakland A's Billy Bean used to find value in the market of ball players. Great concept implementable everywhere.
3. From John Malone's talk: to disable search upon entry to a module (performance improvement):
   in config for listview:
   $sugar_config['save_query']='populate_only';
4. In Majed Itani's 6.0 Technical Preview we saw a taste of the "calculated fields" wizard. Looks very cool and has nested if/then capability. And dependant drop downs. (They call this 'Rules Engine') Can't wait.
5. Also in Majed's talk he mentioned that full text search is being considered for 6.5.
6. I got to meet Chris Raffle and Erin Fetsko, two of the best Sugar Support Engineers I have worked with on the telie. They gave great overviews of Workflows and Email systems. Workflows: Idea which Sugar uses: After a case is created use a 5 minute time lapse and then fire off an email to notify the customer that the new email has been created. Emails: Use SMTP or you'll get flagged as Spam and make sure the notification box is checked for workflows to function.
7. I learned in the Convatec breakout session that everybody has to deal with corporate politics and mergers, so deal with it. Well, you know what I mean. Also, he noted that after 6 months of working with their sales team and going through offline clients and G3 access cards they determined that both are a headache and account managers can just enter data when they get internet access. And I learned in that session to be very careful when deploying on two datacenters(or in two locations) to properly manage the code bases to keep them synchronized.
8. On that note I learned from Geoffrey Mobisson from Levementum in a sidebar conversation that they helped a company setup a system which runs on both sides of the pond from one common system. This we will strongly consider as it seems paramount to have one system if collaboration of data is a key for European and North American operations.
9. Mark Leslie's talk was very insightful on the 'enterprise sales learning curve'. I'd really have to show you the graph... So maybe sugar will post a webinar thing for his keynote.
10. In Module Builder Internals (compliments David Wheeler) I learned way more than can be typed here. But one highlight: Use module builder whenever possible as opposed to Studio, this way you have a nice "package" to keep a record of your changes/deployments, among other things.

We'll that was a quick summary of some of my highlights. I'd love to see others.

Rich Trahey
ThyssenKrupp System Engineering (Sugar-customer)

[susiewilliams]

Hi Rich,

Great post, and I'm glad you picked up a lot of good information at SugarCON.

Most of us at Sugar are finally recovered from our months of planning, followed by one long week of SugarCON, a Partner Tech Bootcamp, and a lot of meetings throughout the activities. The feedback we got from our attendees and the press was overwhelmingly positive, too, which is great!

I don't have a top ten list, but I want to say how nice it was actually meeting customers, partners, and Sugar community members in person. Everyone was genuinely nice, very interested in the events, and just a good group of people to talk to. I look forward to meeting and hanging out with you all again next year!

[wjohnson]

That post mentioned that full text search was in consideration for 6.5. Was that a typo? I thought it was going to be included in 5.5?

[malcolmh]

Unfortuantely it isn't a typo

[Bryllins]

I do not have a list of the top 10, but the fact that sugar individual say community members and customers, partners, as well meeting. Both events are really interested in a very nice guy and spoke to a group of Nice. I meet you all next year and look forward to the game!