SMB Tech Roll-up: Google Offers Android Apps for All, Microsoft to Preview New SMB Servers

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jul 15, 2010

For SMBs that are looking for CRM, but don’t have huge budgets, the general release this week of SugarCRM 6 after four months of beta should be good news. Google Android is also in the spotlight this week with the release of App Inventor, which enables everyone to develop apps for Android devices.

SugarCRM v6.0 on General Release

SugarCRM (news, site) is officially out of beta and now on general release. When it was originally released in April — in beta — SugarCRM 6 introduced a new user interface that focused on speed, simplicity and interoperability with other web applications and mobile devices.

The company also announced at the time that it had made the primary source code repository for Sugar Community Edition publicly accessible.

But the v6.0 release also comes with dozens of other features in two categories aimed at improving user efficiency. These include:

Sales and Reporting: New tools, including enhanced dashboards, to give users better insights into how their enterprise is performing internally, and how their clients are responding to sales initiatives. Sales forecasts analyze targets, trends and how the enterprise is performing in respect of each.
Information control: Enhanced information access controls including automatic workflow controls that streamline the flow of information across designated departments and users. Data protection is also enhanced.

It also comes with complete data integration for profiling customers as well as enhanced mobile access for external users.

According to the company, Sugar 6 was developed with the idea that CRM does not have to be complex to deploy or use, nor too expensive for growing companies, so pricing should be well within the range of most SMBs. If you want to find out more you can sign up for a 7-day free trial.

Android Apps for All

There’s been a lot of action recently on the Google Android front and in the mobile apps market in general. However, the release of Google App Inventor, which enables anyone to develop apps for Android devices will enable even the smallest companies the ability to develop personalized apps for themselves.

To use App Inventor, no developers are required as it requires no programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, users visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

App Inventor also gives you access to a variety of phone features you can include in your app such as GPS, accelerometers and integration with Web-based services such as Twitter.

With App Inventor, Google may also be able to close the gap between it and Apple iPhone. At the moment Google's Android Market has more than 60,000 applications while the iPhone offers more than 200,000. With this, Android’s number looks set to increase dramatically.

If you want to find out more, and you like your jazz uninterrupted by explanatory commentary, check out the video below.