According to blogger Kate Leggett, the future of CRM, and SugarCRM’s position in that future, were very much the focus of the three-day event. SugarCRM’s market momentum has been growing since 2010, its commitment to open source development is viewed as a strength and its new relationship with IBM makes it well situated to compete with the major players in the CRM field.

Chris Bucholtz also wrote the event up on the convention’s home page. I was especially interested in his account of the “App Throw-down”, in which six competitors were given three minutes each to pitch their SugarCRM app before a panel of judges.

Next year’s SugarCon will be in early April in New York.

Activity Following. You know that the Activity Stream can automatically follow all updates to records in several different modules, letting you keep track of what is going on in your organization. But activity following is not just a one-way street – you can reply to any of these updates, turning the Activity Stream into a real-time conversation. If somebody creates an opportunity with one client that is similar to something else you are working on, you can use the Activity Stream to start a conversation on that.

User Feed. In addition to being able to reply to updates to records in Sugar, the Activity Stream can also act as a forum for social discussions within the organization on any topic. This feature can help to increase communication between departments as each department can follow what is going on in the others

Twitter. In addition to following what’s going on within the organization, you can keep on top of what’s going on outside as well by adding a Twitter feed to your Activity Stream. The Twitter feed lets you follow tweets directly from your Sugar home page, so that you can keep up with your clients and partners without opening a separate window.

Use as many Activity Streams as you want. Because there is so much activity that can be monitored, I have a dedicated Activity Stream home page tab with four different Activity Streams on it. I monitor our sales team with an Activity Stream that tracks all updates to Opportunities, Leads and Contacts. In a separate stream I monitor the work everybody is doing with a separate Activity Stream dedicated just to Cases. A third stream runs our user feed while my Twitter feed is in a fourth. I could put all this data in one stream, but I find that it gets confusing and also I sometimes miss things because the feed is too fast. This division feels more organized to me, but everybody’s needs will be different, and the power of the Activity Stream dashlet is that it is flexible enough to meet most of these needs.

Capterra, an online enterprise software directory, ran a CRM competition in March. Over the course of the month, 64 CRM applications faced off against each other in a bracket-style competition that featured five rounds of one-on-one competition, with each round based on a different metric. SugarCRM came out on top, besting high-profile competitors such Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

In each round, each CRM was measured against another in a particular category, with the winners of each bracket moving on to the following round. Featured metrics included web traffic, social media followers, number of customers, monthly Google searches and company revenue. Each round’s winners were determined 50% according to that week’s metric and 50% according to that week’s online voting. In the “Championship Game” – based only on online votes between April 2 and April 6 – SugarCRM beat out rival Pegasystems by 1352 votes to 704.

More than 7000 votes were cast over the duration of CRM Madness, and the competition got more than 1500 social media links, likes and shares. Results for the competition can be found here.