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Lifecycle for Office Plugins

Mark Willert

Hi,

as the Office 2016 plugins are bound to be released this year, how is SugarCRMs lifecycle policy for the plugins?

Especially since Office 2007 support was cut without a warning while Office 2007 is still in Support from Microsoft until 10-2017 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?p1=8753).

Sugar's lifecycle policy only gives EOL dates for SugarCRM, but not for the plugins (http://support.sugarcrm.com/Resources/Supported_Versions/ ).

I know the 2007 plugins still run with current Sugar version, but they receive no updates and stop working under certain circumstances (example: Sugar 7.6 on PHP 5.4 with LDAP authentication)

Greets,

Mark

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  • 0

    Hi Mark,

    i manage Plug-ins at Sugar and can help you with your query.

    There are two parts to this question..

    First, Plug-ins are tied to the Sugar Core Version as well as the Base App (MS Office in your case as you mention). And as long as you have the Base App of correct version, and required supported platform, and the correct Sugar Core working in tandem, the Plug-in should work normally. Within that context, the life-cycle of  Plug-in is connected withe Sugar Core version.   And I want to point out that Plug-in releases are incremental and building on top of each other.

    More importantly, from Plug-ins perspective, they communicate with Sugar through SOAP/REST and their working/interfacing has no dependency on the PHP versions or authentication mechanisms used for the Sugar instance. All Plug-ins care about is a working SOAP/REST interfaces with Sugar instance.

    In your case specifically, can you share which Office app plug-in are you talking about and their version? Outlook, Excel, Word? What Sugar Version does it work with and what kind of error/behavior you are seeing when you use Sugar 7.6? It could be that you are experiencing some other issue.

    Thanks.

    Best,

    Alay Desai

    SugarCRM

  • 0 in reply to Alay Desai

    Hi Alay,

    that does not seem 100% correct.

    The case we had in the past:

    We have a customer who is still using Sugar 6.5 and was on Office 2007. The Sugar Plugins for Office 2007 were discontinued early in 2014 and are not available for download anymore.

    So the plugins are not tied to Sugar Version (6.5 is still in support) and not tied to Office version (Office 2007 is supported until 2017).

    While the plugin still works with Sugar 6.5, customers rely on supported products when they make purchase decisions, and while our specific customer was able to switch to Office 2010 in time, we are worried something similar might happen again in the future.

    So the alternative question here could be:

    Will SugarCRM support the plugins for Office 2010 (supported by Microsoft until September 13th, 2020) and Office 2013 (supported by Microsoft until April 11th, 2023) for the complete lifetime of the Office products or do we need to expect an early EOL for those plugins like with office 2007?

    Sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but we need a definitve answer, especially for information we give out to new prospects.

    Greets,

    Mark

  • 0 in reply to Mark Willert

    Hi Mark,

    I'm a Sr. Director of Engineering at SugarCRM and one of my teams is actually responsible for Office Plugins . 

    Let me add a little more information on the plugins development and hopefully clarify the situation a little bit better for you. Old generation of plugins comes to it's end of life and is actually connected to Sugar Version (only works on Sugar 6.x), due to the fact that it used SOAP API (that is deprecated). It has very little to do with support of Office 2007, and I agree with Alay, that is bind to Sugar API capabilities.

    New generation of plugins is based on REST API, so from Sugar Version 7.x they should continue to work for a long while. However we won't be committing support of older version of Office for another 10 years, cause it simply doesn't make sense in terms of software development.

    While I'm not giving any official statement in terms of future support of office versions, logically it doesn't make sense for us to commit to"not-dropping" Office 2010 till 2020, it would also block us from adding support of newer versions of office like 2016.

    On the bright side, even if we officially drop Office 2010 from our supported platforms (in theory), the change in actual office plugins won't as drastic as Generation 1 vs. Generation 2, so your customers should get enough time to make a transition to a newer version of Office.

    Hope it helps!

    Kind regards,

    Alesia Khizhko

  • 0 in reply to Alesia Khizhko

    Hi Alesia,

    thank you for the insight on this topic. What I do not understand is how the plugin can be discontinued when it is tied to are core version that is still in support? Your second-last sentence makes it sound like only two generations of a plugin can be in support for a given time.

    While I am understanding the differences between the APIs and the boundaries of core product lifecycles, most customers would benefit from a more open communication about this in the future.

    The Office 2007 plugins virtually "disappeared" overnight when a new plugin release was anounced, and were not even available for download even more.

    So it might be more customer friendly to anounce the EOL as soon as it decided, tie the official support to a specific core product release and keep the download available (with a big red EOL marker). Might give everybody some more preparation time.

    Greets,

    Mark

  • 0 in reply to Mark Willert

    Mark,

    We have to base ourselves on real data and statistics. BTW old plugin (for Office 2007) should be available for download for Sugar 6.x users, and was removed for Sugar 7.x users only. Can you tell me how many customers do you have, using Sugar 7 and being on Office 2007 (in February 2016)?

    My second-to-last sentence was about having one active version of plugin being supported , and I mean in a way of "fixes will be provided" if a problem was found and rather fast. This is an "engineering goal" and it might not be fulfilled ever, but we want to be able to release faster and keep up with the technology. So, if you ask me to choose between adding support of Office 2016 or keeping support of office 2007, I'd pick 2016. What about you?

    Regards,

    Alesia

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  • 0 in reply to Mark Willert

    Mark,

    We have to base ourselves on real data and statistics. BTW old plugin (for Office 2007) should be available for download for Sugar 6.x users, and was removed for Sugar 7.x users only. Can you tell me how many customers do you have, using Sugar 7 and being on Office 2007 (in February 2016)?

    My second-to-last sentence was about having one active version of plugin being supported , and I mean in a way of "fixes will be provided" if a problem was found and rather fast. This is an "engineering goal" and it might not be fulfilled ever, but we want to be able to release faster and keep up with the technology. So, if you ask me to choose between adding support of Office 2016 or keeping support of office 2007, I'd pick 2016. What about you?

    Regards,

    Alesia

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