SugarCRM said recently it plans to release Sugar 4.5, the first version of its CRM (customer relationship management) software to fully support Microsoft server products, on Aug. 15 during the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

SugarCRM will also release a new distribution of its software specifically optimized for Microsoft's Windows operating system and available under the Microsoft Community License, part of the software giant's program for sharing source code with customers, partners and governments.

John Roberts, chief executive officer of SugarCRM, stressed that the Windows distribution of Sugar 4.5 in no way represents the company moving away from its open-source roots.

"We're not leaving Linux," he said. The Windows distribution is the third optimized version of Sugar, in addition to versions for the LAMP stack and Apple Computer's Mac OS X. LAMP is an open-source Web development platform based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and programming languages PHP, Perl or Python.

Originally due to appear in June, Sugar delayed the release to polish it up, Roberts said. SugarCRM provides commercial and free open-source versions of Sugar. With its commercial Professional and Enterprise versions, the vendor charges for technical support and a variety of services. A hosted version of Sugar Professional costs from US$40 per user per month, while the on-premise version costs from $239 per user per year.

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Prashanth Rai