SugarCRM recently announced Sugar 7.6, the latest version of its CRM software. This version is the next step forward that shall fulfil Sugar’s Vision of making customer relationship extraordinary. Sugar 7.6 comes with flexibility and other user experience related enhancements to help automate complex business processes.
For now, Sugar uses its own ‘Elastic Search’ for Global searches only. Elastic Search is an open-source search engine, that can search and index files in diverse formats. It is a full-text search engine that performs near real time searches. Widely used by multiple organizations for its performance, scalability among other features.
In older versions of Sugar, only a little part of the Elastic Search capabilities were being used. Sugar 7.6 and up will start using more of those capabilities for better results.
Let’s take a look into the improved architecture and implementation of the new SugarCRM search API and its usage of the Elastic search engine.
SugarCRM Global Search new features
- Search within files and archived files support (i.e. documents with various file types, including PDF file search support) has been provided. With the ‘Elastic Attachments’ add-on, the results will show up in Global search in Sugar 7.6.
- Pop-up results will begin appearing once you enter in at least one character. In older versions, pop-up results would appear only when you would enter at least 3 characters.
- Geocoded search capabilities through the use of new Elasticsearch framework SugarCRM API and also through another free add-on, Geo Contacts Dashlet for Sugar 7.6. With geocoding, you can convert an address or place name to latitude and longitude. For e.g. if you know the address of a certain place, you can get the co-ordinates for that location to use on a map.
- Improved SugarCRM Global Search query support API. This lets you customize global search query syntax and other global search queries controlled from within SugarCRM.
- Extended SugarCRM configuration options in relation to how data is being indexed and stored.
- Improved monitoring capabilities from ElasticSearch onto SugarCRM.
The above new features improve Global search a whole lot better for the users. More improvements will keep coming up with every new version of Sugar. Future Elasticsearch (ES) improvements include:
- Elasticsearch that can be used in list views and subpanels searches
- More Query Framework API support for query syntax customization in future versions.
- Improved performance.