The EOL spells the demise of this once inspirational application, however, don’t worry, you won’t need to rush out and upgrade to SugarCRM Professional quite yet.

Here are facts you need to know:

SugarCRM CE – SugarCRM Community Edition is one of the longest standing Open Source CRM applications. In 2013/2014 it was announced that SugarCRM would no longer be releasing Open Source versions of the community edition, it would be a bug fix only. So, for the last 3 years there have been no new features, innovations or version releases, just security and bug fixes.

What does EOL mean? End-Of-life means that the specific version of the software will no longer be supported or maintained by its authors. Once the EOL date has passed (15th of July 2107) Sugar will no longer provide any updates or support for the product.

As of July this year, if you find a bug you have three options: live with the bug, hire a programmer to fix it for you or migrate to a supported CRM application.

EOL is not to be compared to the “Y2K“ or “millennium bug” situation where the fear was that after this date your program/application would suddenly shut off and not work. EOL means that you will not receive any maintenance patches, bug fixes, updates, support or security fixes. The application will still work.

Looking more closely at vulnerabilities, the application will not suddenly become a major security risk, however, it is never recommended you continue with a system after End-Of-Life. From a security point of view, the application will be more vulnerable to hackers etc. There have been a number of security issues flagged up about SugarCRM CE over the last year.

A recent blog post by Egidio Romano who has a real passion for computer security has identified and highlighted a vast array of vulnerabilities with the SugarCRM platform especially the CE Edition. Most of these issues have been addressed but there are a number which remain outstanding and now will never will be fixed. As time passes these vulnerabilities will increase as Sugar CE will become the target of choice for malicious hackers and script kiddies. There is little in the way of high quality support from third-parties, community support and now no support from the vendor come the 15th of July 2017.

All is not lost. SuiteCRM, like Sugar, can be deployed on premise or SAAS. SuiteCRM is a fork of SugarCRM and it too is an Open Source application and available to use free from charge. Unlike the community edition, SuiteCRM has innovated and expanded on the SugarCRM code for the last 3 years. Nothing on SuiteCRM is hidden behind a proprietary backdrop. Everything is made available from the enterprise ready CRM from the onset.

With SuiteCRM sharing the core code with SugarCRM it means that the transfer between both applications is less troublesome than moving to a completely different CRM. SuiteCRM have also resolved more of the security bugs which were identified by Egidio and will continue to provide updates and patches. The great news is that last month SuiteCRM published its LongTerm Support strategy for the product. We are guaranteeing our support of our Open Source CRM product beyond the next 5 years,  giving you peace of mind and assurance that SuiteCRM is here to stay.