In the crowded field of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, SugarCRM stands out-not only for its modular design, but also for the ease with which you can develop, customize, and extend your CRM applications. This concise book provides a thorough overview of the development tools and APIs available in SugarCRM 6.2, showing both developers and nondevelopers alike how to use them to build a sample application step-by-step.

You'll learn how to bend and twist SugarCRM...s extensible MVC framework to create custom applications, including solutions for automating your business that go beyond traditional CRMs.

• Learn how SugarCRM modules interact with one another through data relationships
• Build your CRM application with SugarCRM...s GUI developer tools-without touching code
• Use built-in design templates with Module Builder to design new CRM modules
• Customize modules with the Studio tool to add new fields or additional relationships between modules
• Automate common and tedious tasks within your application, using custom PHP code with SugarCRM's powerful API
• Integrate external applications into your CRM solution through SugarCRM's web services API