SugarCRM or, more accurately, SugarCE (community edition) is opensource customer relationship management software, or CRM software.

Like other CRMs available, its purpose is to make it easier for you to keep track of your customers and your company's relationship with those customers.  You can do that by keeping track of leads, sales, and so on.

Now I've just spent over 10 hours today trying to install and run SugarCRM but I continuously encountered issues where it would hang for minutes at a time and generally be very useless. 

I checked my logs, checked the other applications on my web server and everything seemed fine.  In fact, more than fine, being a Sunday afternoon, everything was running extra fast.  Every except SugarCRM, that is.

"Not a problem, I'll go to the forum", I thought.

Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha.

I encountered a number of people experiencing the same issues I was but here is where it gets interesting, threads were being opened but never answered.  I must have found over 7 threads relating to the issues I was having without any one of them having a single answer posted.

That's terrible.

In my (extensive) experience with OpenSource, questions get answered in hours or days.  They don't get left there for you to battle with by yourself.

To me, the problem is NOT the community but in the way that the Sugar company itself runs it's forums and the rest of it's company.  It would appear that no one is employed to moderate the forum, much less provide added support.

They might step in at this point and argue that the community edition of their software isn't supported but this level of UNsupport leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  The sort of bad taste that ensures that I never try the commercial version of their software.

I'm bitterly disappointed in SugarCRM.  If this was someone's first experience with OpenSource can you imagine them ever coming back? I don't think so.