With the new release of SuiteCRM Version 7.8, SalesAgility continue to innovate on their award-winning open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. The headline-grabber in this release is the inclusion of Workflow Calculated Fields functionality, pushing SuiteCRM firmly into the functional scope of the proprietary monoliths like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.

The code for Workflow Calculated Fields was donated by SuiteCRM’s long-standing German partner, Diligent. It is a tangible demonstration of the benefits of open source: Core functionality can be appreciably extended in partnership with the open source community and ecosystem that surrounds a project. All the major open source projects (Linux, Apache, OpenStack) benefit from external contributions and SuiteCRM is increasingly becoming established as one of those major projects.

Sascha Krause, Managing Director of Diligent commented: “As one of SuiteCRM’s original partners, Diligent has contributed to the success of the award-winning open source CRM application through various developments and code contributions in recent years. Diligent is now especially proud to donate “SweeterCalc” to the SuiteCRM community; a powerful tool for calculated fields within the scope of workflows. “SweeterCalc” leads to a major extension of the SuiteCRM functionality and offers users numerous new ways to automate processes in SuiteCRM.”

The inclusion of “SweeterCalc” functionality into SuiteCRM provides users with the ability to calculate field values, add up values, set a text value based on multiple other fields values and more. It also enables the automation of other processes in SuiteCRM which further increase and improve user interactivity and efficiency.

Greg Soper – CEO of SalesAgility; the authors of SuiteCRM – added: “We are delighted that such a powerful tool as “SweeterCalc” is now integrated into our core product. The donation of the source code from the Diligent Team shows their commitment to the success of SuiteCRM project and we’re really grateful for this and for all the other contributions and bug fixes our community provides.”

In addition to calculated fields, the SuiteCRM Team have also extended the inspirational SuiteP theme that was so successfully launched last year. Not only will this improve the user experience, it makes SuiteP more stable and easier to manage, modify and extend.

As with all releases, there are numerous less headline-grabbing updates, bug fixes and subtle enhancements. Primary amongst these is that SuiteCRM now supports PHP 7.1, demonstrating the project’s commitment to stay abreast of the core technologies that underpin the application.

SuiteCRM can be downloaded from the website free of charge under its existing Open-Source license.