what is the groups opinion here on a new and enhanced UI. We have been developing an Angular based UI that utilizes Lightning Design and latches on to SugarCRM CE. I would assume it should be a moderate effort to also make this work with SuiteCRM since we still leverage to the largest extent the existing SugarCRM Core that is the same in SuiteCRM. Would anybody be interested in joining and supporting such an effort? Delivering a Salesforce like UI on top of SuiteCRM?
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I fully agree that the current UI is not like what you would expect from an enterprise application today. Apart of that most competitors invested a lot in the GUI and overall User Experience (see SAP Fiori/UI5, Salesforce Lightning, MS Dynamics CRM i.e. Service and Power BI GUIs etc.).
In fact we spent up to 15 days per project to offer our clients at least a better SuiteCRM custom theme and it is a very frustrating work (the frontend code and templates are just a mess…).
If Lightning and Angular would be the right choice (or a React/Bootstrap whatever based framework) should be open for further discussions. But we need definitely a clean and modern frontend stack for SuiteCRM.
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the discussion which is the right or wrong framework is most likely a never ending one. As stated we invested in the meantime an estimated effort of 10 Manyears of effort into our UI framework that latches on to SugarCE (with some adoptions). It is fully metadata driven form the backend, rolebased, a complete webcomponent based design.
It was our decision to use Angular (currently still5 just pushing to 6) and lightning design. The alternative woudl have been Google material Design but that IMHO lacks soem CRM specifics. That is why we did choose lightning desgn.
As said I assume it shodul be a modrate effort to port the UI componentes (quite some tables and some parts of the REST Interface Based on SLIM 3) back to SuiteCRM. In additon it might be needed to add a Suite Speciufic Configuration (Porting existing metadata). If there is interest I woudl support such a project to set this up and attempt to port the UI on top of SuiteCRM.
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I would massively endorse and support this. Your work with SpiceCRM is fantastic and exactly what SuiteCRM needs!!!
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IMHO: I believe that the priority of all development efforts should go elsewhere before tackling a new GUI.
Since SuiteCRM started there have been at least three major redesigns of the GUI.
At the same time there are hundreds of problems that still need to be solved for once and for all.
Some of the issues are little bugs but they are not resolved.
Some other may cause serious problems to a number of companies using SuiteCRM. In this category there are some bigger issues that have been inherited from SugarCRM as well as other things. The issues falling into this category include several parts of the project: from email, to search, enhancing the capabilities of studio, making campaigns better, increasing the number of variables that may be set via the Admin part without having to edit code and much more. SalesAgility has invested heavily into these issues but we are still fighting every month with releases that fix pending issues or, much worse, issues that reappear.
There are also other categories of issues, that are also an inheritance from SugarCRM. The main one is about permissions. The forum has hundreds or even thousands of posts due to permissions. Too much effort is wasted on a very well known issue because new (even old) users are unaware of the evil lying behind wrong permissions. I would rather invest in this instead of redesigning for the fourth time the GUI. Permissions issues have to be resolved for once and for all with automatic php / os scripts that take care for them without any human intervention (if not providing some input to a script to be run at the beginning of the install procedure).
My last priority would be a “professional” developers’ documentation. Again, SugarCRM hasn’t left anything complete. It is based by examples and the provided examples are very incomplete. The documentation, specially the develolper documentation should carefully describe all the possibilities that the system offers, including all the flows and the possible variables, the functions that may be used, their parameters, their output, etcs, with a few (complete examples). The SugarCRM developer documentation is only a high level description of most parts so any developer, in order to achieve something, he has to spend hours, days or weeks studying the code trying to understand how it works. After a few months when he needs to do the same thing again he has to start again almost from scratch. This shouldn’t be like this.
If these problems were solved then we would have all the time to invest in a new GUI.
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you are right that any SugarCRM Derivate has to fight with the issues that SugarCRM left over. Btw most of these are stll there in Sugar7 and 8 … not much fixed under the hood. I also agree that Studio is a nightmare and that what they call permissions shoudl not even be called like that. On the UI redesigns you are talking about - I woudl say none of that was a redseign - this was all cosmetic and fights with the issue of outdated serverbased rendering of Smarty TPLs - with that you are limited by te existing code and will never change to a modern style UI.
Yet anyhow … my post was about migrating functionality for a new UI to SuiteCRM. We have done the devlopment (and what we have done thus far is massive … talking about manyears of effort) anfd I think it could be ported to be used with SuiteCRM as well. We have built a complete new UI on Angular, nothing of the old TPLs still apply. This btw might take some issue away (like some parts of Studio since the modeling approach changes totally). And it also enables to solve problems in an easier and more userfreidnly way. E.g. talking baout functions like Campaign Management or Emails or others. Our approach was to first fix the UI and then use the new capabilities to fix functionality.
but as said - I am just wondering if we can find a grop of some people who would support and drive such a project here.
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Thank you … let’s do the following - whoever is interested please send me an email to info@spicecrm.io with a reference to this post. If I get at least 3 people interested I will setup a gotoMeeting and run you through what woudl be needed. If we still think it is a valid ide we might setup a branch and check if it can be done.
As said I woudl assume that the effort to make it work shoudl be done in one week or so to make it work basically … then transversing the current config into a new reference config might take some more time. But we will see that.
When you start using a software you need to feel it can be relevant for the next 2 or 3 years as it is now, without major work. Else it is not easy to consider as a solution to be chosen by a company or a project.
If you look into SuiteCRM it looks outdated in many parts!
Its not just the problems and bugs on the software, its not just the way the software is globally managed. Those are questions that can be impossible to change.
Its the planning for the future that is relevant and where do we want to be in 2 or 5 years.
On the proposal for a new UI, not just a template:
1- I find it very important
2- I Would love to see what SalesAgility plans on that area (what software/framework would be preferable) but also know if they will be interested to include this work or it would require it as a fork.
3- I don’t have the code skills to help you in such a task
Note: I am available for any questions on the language and translation side. Will send an email for that!
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That is probalby an interesting question. In general I dont think we should fork a fork … 
… the changes our UI needs can be added to the core I woudl assume (at least to a good chunk). But the idea of this post was to check if there is interest and some people to support this effort and see how this woudl work.
btw … thanks for your email and I will keep you posted.
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@spicecrm
If you have done the work then you should contact Sales Agility because it was in the roadmap for last year to introduce Angular and (technically) redesign the UI.
The roadmap has disappeared from the site (at least I can’t find it anymore) so you should contact them to see how you could contribute withj this huge work to the project.
Having said this I believe that they should be prioritising other issues to make the system more stable. Personally I am not moving any of my clients beyond version 7.8.X (different 7.8.X versions in different clients) because beyond those there are to many things that have stopped working. 7.9.X (is just a nightmare for e-mail and campaings) and 7.10.X, although a little better, is still too unreliable. I am pretty sure that Sales Agility are well aware of this and they have been heavily working onto fixing the issues introduced with the reengineering of email under 7.9.X. Every new release fixes something, but unfortunately it, sometimes, re-introduces an old bug that had been already fixed. In any case they are in the right direction.
This is an interesting discussion, I was away for a few days but I am now following this.
@amariussi there is a Roadmap here
But you are right that the content about SuiteCRM 8.0 seems to have been lost in the site re-modelling. I’ll see about that soon.
Meanwhile let me get some more information internally before I start addressing this thread here, I want to avoid giving unreliable information. Thanks.
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We did some preliminary tests and had the UI running on SuiteCRM within about 2 hours. Still means there woudl be some work to do. But it seems even easier than I thought. If we find the time in the next days I will maybe put up a demo site. Might be interesting to see the UI Experiences next to each other.
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Dear SpiceCRM team,
First of all, thanks and congratulations for this amazing work.
I am very interested in supporting you in your project but I don’t have an idea about how can help you? I have a team of the developers who can do the magic in SuiteCRM and SugarCRM but we have never worked on the UI part. If you have any thing from the development side like any new feature or module/plugin development than let me know. It would be our pleasure to support you.
For more detail about us, please feel free to contact me on skype “prafullsatasiya” or visit our website http://specscale.com
Thanks
@SpiceCRM
We did some preliminary tests and had the UI running on SuiteCRM within about 2 hours. Still means there woudl be some work to do. But it seems even easier than I thought. If we find the time in the next days I will maybe put up a demo site. Might be interesting to see the UI Experiences next to each other.Very good news!
Looking forward to see the online demo.
@pgr
I think that Sales Agility should be involved in some way.
Morning!
We’ve already reached out to discuss with the team at SpiceCRM and are having further discussions this week. We are currently working on a new front end using an angular framework but obviously welcome any contribution to the SuiteCRM project which helps us realise our goals and bring the product forward.
At this moment in time there is a lot to discuss and it is still unclear what the planned licence for this UI would be which could restrict the ability for us to merge directly in the project.
Thanks,
Dale
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Many thanks for the update Dale.
We are following this every eagerly!!
Kind regards
Olof
Hi Everyone,
We’ve discussed the offer with SpiceCRM and unfortunately this is not a straight forward collaboration or contribution. After reviewing internally we feel that the way of working would not fall in line with our 100% commitment to open source and vision for the project. There is some uncertainty around the UI license and business model which does not present this as a viable option for ourselves.
Additionally, looking at the code that is publicly available we expect that the re-factoring to align with the contribution which, would not only impact the front-end but the back-end, will require considerable effort and compromise. As well as the effort to adapt the potential contribution we have also need to consider the work we have already begun and where we are going.
As amariussi pointed out regarding to the Suite8 Roadmap, we have already begun using the Angular6 framework and the work involved in that we feel will extend and overlap what has been achieved by SpiceCRM. It would take less effort to continue on with the current Suite8 Roadmap with an ETA of early next year.
This has highlighted to us that we need to be more vocal and transparent about our plans. We would like to add that there is a blog post about the Suite8 new UI we started working on, with several detailed mock-ups!
As SpiceCRM is not associated to SuiteCRM in any way and is in fact a competitive product we kindly request that we do not further discuss SpiceCRM on these forums. If we are not firm with this other CRM providers could start to do the same and we really want to avoid that.
just on a quick note I believe it is funny in the world of open source that it seems so hard to align two initiatves. In the end this might be the root cause that Open Source still struggles to compete against commercial products. As said it is an offer. I would honestly see more benfits to the community of a collaboration that trying to drive separate efforts. But that is fine. I hope it wills till be OK if we continue the prototype we have done to put our UI efforts onto SpiceCRM. And if it is OK I will post a link to a demo site we still plan to put up. With that it might be good to alos really invloce the community and leave it as an option to that.
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It is very disappointing to see two Open Source initiatives part ways from a Combined Effort. SuiteCRM has done much work in pushing the Sugar CE code to new changes yet it would have been a great joint venture to see SpiceCRM bringing in KReports and Angular Themes.
I think both codes are published under AGPLv3 license. Maybe Sales Agility is seeing SpiceCRM as a big competitor, although people have been using their KReports module on SuiteCRM happily. 
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I could not agree more … but this is the decision of salesagility.
On the UI it also is a shame since I see the amount of effort we are putting into it. This is a multi year project with serious complexity. As stated before including the work we did on the mobile App on Angular1 which also was some groundwork for the UI we are ~4 years into this. But iit will be interesting to see the concept that are getting developed for SuiteCRM. But as said before we will spend some time to make the SpiceUI an option for SuiteCRM as well - just like KReporter is a reporting option widely used.