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Upgrade process review - 2.0 to 4.0
I just upgraded our CRM from 2.0 to 4.0 and would like to provide some feedback. Some of it is negative, but most of it is positive.
(this is in reference to the open source product)
My background
During my career I've worked as a sysadmin, Sr. QA Engineer, acting QA director, release engineer, and now I'm part owner of a tech company. I've worked with a wide variety of operating systems (various *nix systems, VMS, Windows, OS/2, and of course Macs). Having implemented defect tracking and call tracking systems during my career I am very picky about the feature sets of those applications, and the workflow.
Background - our SugarCRM use and our needs
We've been using SugarCRM for a while and were considering migrating to ...... for some time. We've liked SugarCRM for what it did but back at version 2.0 it fell a bit short of what we wanted to do. When ...... fiirst implemented a defect tracking system the SugarCRM upgrade did not offer that feature set, and adding that functionality (as you're well aware) would have been a fair bit of work. However migrating data from SugarCRM into ...... has become more diffficult since the fork so we put off the upgrade.
What prompted finally moving forward was we absolutely needed a defect tracking system. I've built several over my career based on DatapultPF (a very early server-side web scripting language) and flat files, Access, Verity, and Lotus Notes. For my own company I didn't have the constraints of having options artificially limited by others' egos, but I had the freedom to choose whichever technology I wanted to use (being an owner brings freedom to your IT solutions!). In the meantime we had continued to rely on an Access-based system that I built on my own time for a previous employer and extensively extended it beyond that. In our move away from Windows wherever possible and with our growth, on both counts, Access even a stop-gap measure is not ideal. ANY competent developer or dba will tell you that Access is a beast for developing even a small-scale multiuser application without going to three tiers, let alone one which allows for growth.
So, off and on I've looked at dedicated defect tracking systems, most of them being based on the LAMP stack. Out of all of them, Bugzilla came the closest to what I needed, but in reality fell far short. To extend it to track all of the details I like in a tracking system it would have taken a fair bit of development time. During this process I decided to again revisit ...... (as you're aware it forked off of SugarCRM Open Source back when it was under a GPL/Commercial dual license) and SugarCRM. When I visited the SugarCRM demo I was pleasantly surprised to discover that not only does it now offer defect tracking, but call tracking and project management are vastly improved. So I decided to schedule in an evening an upgrade, "just in case." The schedule did not work (more to follow) - it took a day and a half, and the majority of that time was NOT the upgrade process itself.
In the end though I am glad we upgraded.
The Bad - the [i]really bad part[/b]
Upgrading from 2.0 was a bit of a chore. I realize it is an ancient release but the upgrade process could be made less painful. The painful part was not in updating the schema nor was it in migrating the data or installing the web application, but FINDING THE DOCUMENTATION.
When I downloaded the SugarCRM 4.0 project, the upgrade "documentation" (upgrade,txt) tells me nothing except to refer to http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/documentation.html
When I visit http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/documentation.html, I can find no documentation covering upgrades from previous versions. I downloaded almost every build available on the download page but each bit of upgrade information included with the builds either cover upgrading from 3.x and later (which is a no-brainer, more on that later under "The Good") or it refers to URLs which have either been redesigned or redirect back to the http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/documentation.html page, which as previously mentioned does not contain the pertinent documents. I did try running SQL scripts manually to upgrade the schema and then simply modify the installation by hand, but it broke each time.
So, I visited the messageboard and did searches on "upgrade" and "2.0" and found a few threads on the subject, however some of the replies refer to SQL scripts which are not available at the referenced URLs, and a site search on sugar forge does NOT return any hits on them. Also, some threads on the topic have no responses, or direct users to bundled documentation which either covers upgrading from later versions of Sugar, or they are simply documents which contain URLs to pages which have been either redesigned or redirected. A catch-22 situation, and it does not reflect well upon the project (sorry, it has to be said). See, in the forums Sugar reps replied "oh you just need Upgrade_to_2.5.1_SQL.zip" which would be a great answer if the files could be found on the main download page, or at minimum via a site search, but without that a URL to the specific page (and updating that info as the site changes, or at least setting up 301 redirects from outdated URLs) is pretty much a necessity with the absence of a usable search or with unintuitive site navigation.
What I did to find what I needed I resorted to querying google for "Upgrade_to_2.5.1_SQL.zip site:www.sugarforge.org" and that returned exactly what I needed, along with the relevant documentation. Out of morbid curiousity I tried to find that page again ( http://www.sugarforge.org/frs/?group_id=6 ) and the navigation to that page is by no means intuitive. On your main download page for SugarCRM (OS) you really ought to have a direct link to the page with the required scripts and documentation one needs for upgrading from legacy releases. What a waste of an evening and half a day.
Also: inbound email is a great feature, but too limited. I'll post in a new topic on that as I don't want to go off on a tangeant.
The Good
Now for the good stuff.
The upgrade process from 2.0 to 2.5 was painless. Following the documentation (now that I finally had it) I had the site upgraded to 2.5 literally in under three minutes. From here the upgrade process became more painful. How so? I found, only through searching through the messageboard, that to upgrade from 2.5 to 3.0 I had to upgrade to minor point releases (specifically to 2.5.1d), which the documentation failed to mention(!). From there I had to upgrade to 3.0, from 3.0 to 3.0.1b, and so forth. Once one gets beyond that point upgrades become easy thanks to the upgrade wizard - once one learns that one uses patches and not full releases.
Anyway, once I figured out I needed the patches, I had the site upgraded from 3.0 to 4.0 over the course of a half hour, give or take, with most of that time having been spent waiting for various builds/patches/etc. to download.
Once upgraded, I was pleasantly surprised to see what I expected
The code: SugarCRM is very well-coded. Very, very good code compared to what one has come to expect of php or open source projects. If you want a migraine, try extending OS Commerce or any Nuke variant sometime. SugarCRM is greatly refreshing in this regard because it is intelligently well-thought-out (this was true with 2.0 as well) - obviously you guys started out with a design and at least a rudimentary spec, and didn't develop by the seat of your pants. Excellent work there!
The skins: I've never been fond of the Sugar skin - it's very functional, but drab. It reminds me of the Gnome desktop. Most of the other skins are beautiful but too low-contrast to be useful (whose idea was it to put light-blue text on royal-blue backgrounds, or orange text on burgundy backgrounds in some of those skins? That is eyestrain just waiting to happen). I'm not saying this as a negative - it's great that multiple skins are included. that the skinning mechanism is well-thought out, the alternative skins are gorgeous (for the most part) but more thought has to be given to usability. My favorite is "pipeline" but I'd love to see a variant of that skin - one where the blue is a bit less bold, not quite to a watermark tone but not so bold either. With that said I set Pipeline to the default but left users with the ability to select any other theme.
Conclusion
The upgrade process is easy, once you learn what you need to do. The problem is finding this information and learning which builds you need to download for the incremental upgrade steps. The documentation needs to be updated, and URLs referenced need to contain the referenced documents and files required for the upgrade process. I did not find one single document which covered the process in entirety. For upgrading from 2.0 or 2.5 there should be one single document on your site which includes:
- complete info on the entire upgrade process
- specific information on each upgrade step
- the exact builds one needs to obtain and use for each given step
- whether the user needs the full build or the patch for each given step
I need to cut this short as I have more pressing demands this afternoon but hope to revisit this thread this afternoon or tomorrow. I hope this feedback proves useful for improving the upgrade process for others who want to upgrade from legacy releases.
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