We Listened | Moving to Semi-Annual Release Cadence

After careful consideration and feedback from our valued customers and partners, SugarCRM has decided to transition from four releases per year to two for Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve. This change aims to better align with customer needs and improve your overall experience with SugarCRM.

We will be skipping the typical January Q1 2025 release (14.3) and proceed directly from the recently released Q4 2024 (14.2) to the planned Q2 April 2025 (15.0) release, with the same cadence going forward.

Sugar Enterprise (on-premises) customer experiences will not be affected. Enterprise customers will continue to receive an annual feature release, coupled with periodic delivery of issue resolution, and a two-year support cycle.

We feel that this will positively impact our customers in a variety of ways:

• More Impactful Releases: Longer time between releases will allow more time for us to deliver larger collections of features that drive tangible customer outcomes.
• Customer Experience: Reducing releases gives customers/businesses more time to test and become familiar and comfortable with larger functionality sets/collections.
• Training and Adoption: Fewer releases mean less frequent training sessions for your organization, making it easier to adopt new features in a controlled manner without feeling overwhelmed.
• Efficiency: Reduced need for continuous updates lowers associated costs and provides longer lead times for platform changes.
• Customer Satisfaction: Allows us to deliver higher quality and more stable releases.

We strongly feel that this change will improve your experience as a SugarCRM customer, and it will allow us to deliver improved products, services, and experiences to you. Please review the FAQ below for additional information. If you have any questions, please comment below or reach out to your Customer Success Manager or your Sugar Partner for more information.

FAQ

When will new versions of Sugar Sell and Serve be released?

The new versions of Sugar Sell and Serve will be released semi-annually in April and October, starting in 2025.

Which releases are being removed from the schedule?

The January and July releases will be removed starting in 2025.

How will this affect security releases or updates?

This will stay the same. If a security issue is identified, Sugar will work on a resolution. Once a resolution is produced, customers will be notified, and fixes will be applied as needed.

How will customers be notified of what is in the ongoing product releases?

There will be no change to our announcement process, just the frequency. SugarClub’s Release Central will be updated semi-annually, in alignment with the Sell and Serve releases. Upon release, the release updates and details will still be posted in the SugarClub product update blogs.

This change is for Sell & Serve. What about other solutions & addons?

There will be no change. Sugar Market, sales-i, Sugar Connect, the SugarCRM mobile app, Sugar Intelligence, Sugar Discover, Sugar Automate, etc. will keep to their current update schedules and, when released, customers can review the appropriate product update blogs.

How will this affect Enterprise customers?

This change will affect all Sell and Serve customers hosted in SugarCloud. There will be no impact to Enterprise customers as we will keep with the April annual release and they will continue to receive the annual “.0” releases.

How will this affect the process of submitting or addressing Issues and Ideas?

The change to semi-annual releases will not affect this process. Please continue to work with our Customer Support team for questions about open and fixed Issues and Ideas

Does this mean SugarCloud customers need to wait 6 months for bug fixes as well as new features?

Normally, fixes for reported issues are delivered via planned releases. When an issue is reported and a fix identified, the next available release will typically be the logical target. Depending on when the issue is discovered, this could be 6 months out. A hotfix process exists for security or critical issues, but only a subset of issues are candidates for hotfixes. Please continue to work with our Customer Support team for questions about open and fixed issues.

Will this affect innovation?

Not at all. Sugar will continue with our innovation and release new capabilities in April or October each year.

Are the names of releases changing?

Instead of xx.0, xx.1, xx.2, xx.3, we will now just have xx.0 (April) and xx.1 (October) releases.

Will this affect the cost of our Sugar subscriptions/license fees?

There will be no impact. Our customers will still receive the full value they have today, we will just deliver all the exciting latest updates and capabilities twice a year instead of four times a year.