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The changes in Sage CRM 2023 R1 have mainly focused on extending the Email and Contact Import feature that was introduced in Sage CRM 2022 R2 and on completing the refreshment of the main user interface

There is a brand new feature called the Company Narrative that will generate an executive summary of all interactions with a company in Near Natural Language using Deterministic AI.

Some of the other changes that have been brought to Sage CRM 2023 R1 are

• Editing merged documents
• Updated SDK Installer and .NET code snippets
• Advanced Customisation Wizard updates
• Updates to the Client-Side API
• User interface refresh continued
• Accessibility Enhancements and review of Admin Screens

The new release has added support for MS SQL Server 2022 and now ships MS SQL Server 2022 Express with the installation.

All these changes have been documented in the Release Notes which will be added to the Sage CRM Help Centre

Sage CRM 2022 R2 was released on 3rd September 2022.

With a theme of simplification and automation, the changes in Sage 2022 R2 have mainly focused on the new Email and Contact Import feature along with updates to the general user experience.

The What's New Datasheet for the new release of Sage CRM is now available.

A single incoming telephone number can tell you a lot before you have even picked up the phone. Our #3CX desktop screen popping displays previous call stats from our CDR API, matches against records in CRM (#HaloPSA) with Open Ticket and Opportunity counts, Sage50 finance balance and alerts if on credit stop.

Integration also available for SageCRM, Atera, Bullhorn, Xero and Sage200.

Find out more by following us on LinkedIn

Sage CRM 2022 R1 was released on Monday, 31st January 2022.

The Sage CRM developers have continued to grind down on the bugs and claim over 30 issues addressed in this release. All these changes have been documented in the Release Notes which have been added to the Help Centre and can be viewed from the link below.

The new release has added support for MS SQL Server 2019 Express and MS Azure SQL Database.

[Support Update]
Patches for Sage CRM are now available and have been distributed to the Sage Regions. They are available for the following affected versions;

• Sage CRM 2020 R2
• Sage CRM 2021 R1
• Sage CRM 2021 R2

Please note that these patches apply to Sage CRM standalone and when integrated with Sage accounting products; Sage 50, Sage 100, Sage 200, Sage 1000, Sage 300, Sage X3 and Sage Intacct.

Sage was alerted (Friday 10th December 2021) to a critical remote code execution vulnerability within all Apache log4j versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1

https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/security.html
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/apache-log4j-vulnerability

A vulnerability rated with a Critical impact is one which could potentially be exploited by a remote attacker to get Log4j to execute arbitrary code (either as the user the server is running as, or root). These are the sorts of vulnerabilities that could be exploited automatically by worms.

The Apache Log4J 2 library is used in the 2020 R2, 2021 R1, and 2021 R2 versions of Sage CRM.

The Sage CRM Development Team has investigated this as a critical issue.

Sage CRM 2021 R2 was released on Wednesday 11th August 2021.

Sage CRM 2021 R2 imakes significant improvements to the user experience. Screens & lists have been simplified. Context menus have been rearranged to declutter the interface. A new spinner indicates when the system is working on tasks. Creating quotes & orders offers more control to users & administrators: file naming can match the quote & order references, and users can pick their template when sending quotes & orders by email.

Reporting pipelines have been updated with a modern, fresh design with fully customisable colours & styles. For customers that use multiple landing pages with email marketing they now have more control over web forms that capture leads. A new example dashboard demonstrates the power of bringing quote information to every CRM user while a new company workflow shows how processes can be controlled over all business objects in the system.

Sage CRM 2021 R1 was released on Friday 29th January 2021.

Sage CRM 2021 R1 is a significant release, delivering interface & user experience improvements, pain point elimination, and enhancing integration capabilities for 3rd party solutions.

Sage Group continues its commitment to develop, sell and maintain Sage CRM as additive to their Sage BMS products around the globe.

Creating a new Company, Address and Person in Sage CRM couldn't be easier and can be done with just a few keystrokes. The Companies House API provides access to over 4.3 million registered businesses in the UK.

With our extension you have the ability to look up any UK Company and its Officers on the Companies House register. This allows you to see information about them including whether the company is dissolved or is going into liquidation, before adding them as a CRM record.

Sage CRM's in-built reporting engine caters for simply point and click reporting that present data for on the spot analysis.

When a customer asked us to build a single report that contained top Opportunities by Forecast with multiple charts broken down by Territory, Sales Person and then Type and could we throw into the same report the number of new Leads today and total Order intake for the day so far and could this be placed on the Dashboard and updated in near real-time or emailed at intervals throughout the day.... Although technically possible to develop within Sage CRM, but with quite a bit of time and effort, most partners may have looked to 3rd party business intelligence tools.

We had this up and running the same morning using one of our prebuilt near-realtime, server side data rendering HTML5 page with javascript charts and the Sage CRM API.

Sage CRM 2020 R2 has been released today Friday 7th August 2020.

The focus for this release has been on ensuring compatibility with security led environmental changes. Sage CRM has built in support for TLS 1.2 onwards and supports OAuth 2.0 authentication with Exchange Online (Office 365). Sage have also extended technical & user features, including improvements to email marketing and changes to licensing for an improved developer experience

Are you getting the most from your Sage CRM system?

Join us and many other partners on July 28th for the Sage CRM User Conference 2020 a FREE, one-day, multi-track virtual conference specifically for Sage CRM users!

A team of expert presenters will show you how to unlock the full potential of your Sage CRM and your business by introducing you to tools and tactics to:

• provide a consistent, high-quality customer experience
• increase sales per salesperson and per customer
• reduce customer turnover
• save time and money
• keep your customers and your team connected
• make your system easier to use
• customize your system to fit your unique needs
• maximize your return on your CRM investment

Technology is always changing, including how Sage software works alongside associated software including Operating Systems & Browsers. Sage CRM is impacted by changes to the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol being made to browsers and operating systems.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) no longer recommends the use of older TLS versions. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla have announced a unified plan to deprecate the use of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 early in 2020.

TLS changes will affect All CRM Installations Connected or Standalone because the application uses this protocol to connect to the SQL database and the software is accessed via a browser (irrespective of if the system is public facing or not) therefore Sage have releases patched versions of the CRM software to fix potential disruptions.

Sage CRM 2020 R1 has passed the QA process and will be released to the Sage OpCos on Monday 3rd February 2020 .

This release is focussed on improving the features of the integration with Mailchimp and ensuring a user has complete freedom to work with the browser of their choice.

By connecting Sage CRM and Sage 50 you get better business insight, greater efficiencies, increased productivity, and a single view across your entire business.

This video demonstrates how you can shorten your sales cycle by automating your “Quote to Cash” processes. Quotations entered into Sage CRM can simply be converted to Orders and with a single click posted into Sage50 Accounts for Allocation, Despatch and Invoice. No more rekeying the same order information into Sage Sales Order Processing,

Sage CRM 2019 R2 was released to the Sage operating companies on Tuesday 20th August 2019

The product and development team in Dublin is working with a 3-year rolling roadmap for the product. This has set the development path until 2021 and beyond.

Through the investment in the roadmap and this release, Sage is demonstrating a continued commitment to integrated CRM and how this enables the front office capabilities for its accounting products.

Below is a link to a fairly old but interesting article on the Sage CRM Community forum explaining how records within Sage CRM are deleted.

Imagine our customers delight when a they have accidentally deleted a record within the system and this can be restored by our support team.. Although it only takes a few moments and we have a series of precompiled scripts that also check related records across other tables, once a customer is aware of this we can find ourselves bombarded with restore requests. It's also not a task we would feel comfortable with most of our customers carrying out on their own.

Sage CRM 2019 R1 was released to the Sage operating companies on Monday 4th February 2019.

Sage 2019 R1 has focussed on incremental improvements and enhancements of existing features. The developers have continued to grind down on the bugs and the Release Notes document over 40 issues addressed in this release. All these changes have been updated in the Help Centre

Now, we've seen some major changes to the Sage CRM user interface over the last 15 years and with every release the UI is better, more responsive and cleaner in design. The calendar has undergone some major changes in the past year and we're seeing more inclusion of Telerik's Kendo UI such as the new 2018 R3 Calendar grid.

One area that hasn't had much attention is the Pipeline graphic displayed within Leads, Opportunity and Case lists. So when one of our customers asked us to add something visual to their custom entity grid in MyCRM, we could have just implemented the CRMPipelineGraphicBlock object (image on the right). Then we remembered the pipeline that made a brief appearance in the SageCRM cloud platform.

So, that got us thinking and we came up the following. Click the button to the right and take a look.

It is likely that an implementation of Sage CRM will require you to think about how users will access the system from beyond the corporate network.

In these circumstances Sage CRM's web server is likely to be placed within the organisations Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). This can be either a implemented as a physical or logical subnetwork that exposes the web server to the Internet.

Sage CRM can be set up to use HTTP/SSL to ensure still greater security when passing data and user credentials. This is a very important consideration when accessing CRM using the SOAP and SData as these pass data in plain text and so should be encrypted.

Service levels, number of calls, average hold time… are just some of the numbers that we immediately think of when we imagine a wallboard display blinking away in a call or contact centre.

However, our CRM Experts have combined these with a richer set of metrics from several sources of information, including Sage CRM, Sage 50cloud, Sage 200 and Sage Enterprise Management (Formerly X3) and have already built a readily available suite of easily deployed tiles.
We've added some tips when considering a big screen wallboard.

The latest version of Sage CRM has completed its development and has been delivered to each of the different Sage country teams around the world. Find out what's new in this release by following the links below.

You can also search and browse documentation and videos related to Sage CRM and its integrations with other Sage products at help.sagecrm.com