In my article on Top 10 Customer Relationship Management Software, I had highlighted one of widely adopted open source software - Sugar CRM. Here I want to share the review of the Sugar CRM software. Sugar CRM offers commercial open source customer relationship management applications for various companies around the world. There are two commercial products offered by SUgar CRM - Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.  Sugar CRM seems to be designed for the budget conscious businesses looking to support the technology and business model without making a major investment in the first place. After the release of its version 4.5,  the application can also run with Microsoft's Windows Server operating system and SQL Server database. This has proliferated the acceptance of the application. Let's delve into it's features to discover more about the software. Full article (936 words) »

Cyn.in (pronounced as sign in) is a web based enterprise service which is a blend of blog and wiki (preferably called bliki by them). It is a group collaboration software created by Cynapse, that inter-connects your people with each other and their collective knowledge. So tol elaborate,It helps teams to create collective knowledge by sharing workspaces, applications, documents, files and digital content within a secure, unified environment. cyn.in combines the capabilities of collaboration tools like wikis, blogs, file repositories, micrologs instant discussions and other social applications into a seamless platform. The new version of Cyn.in 2.1, released in December include- an integrated microblogging application (twitter), the introduction of an activity stream, and a simplified user interface.

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Db4o is an excellent open source object database for Java & .NET platform by Carl Rosenberger's team. I highly recommend it for rapid prototyping and RAD. It transparently handles object storage and retrieval. Today I will talk about the single biggest gotcha in Db4o which is bound to stumble any newcomer as well as pros who haven't been using it in a while.

In Db4o you can create an complex objects with other objects as its member and Db4o will save them all like a champ with a single set() (now store()) method. So intuitively you try to use the same concept for updating the database. This is where you will stumble. Db4o by default doesn't recurse when updating an object.The stranger aspect is that when you save it to the database with a store or set and then retrieve it again it will appear to work fine. However after you close and re-open the database your data will be lost! This is the single most baffling feature I found in Db4o.

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