We’re sharing a quick update on our recent progress and the upcoming plans for SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM 7.15: Release Update
We’ve been working tirelessly on the next Extended Support Release (ESR), SuiteCRM 7.15.
We’re pleased to let you know that it is currently in final testing and expected to be released in December. This is later than our initial plan due to other important releases we had to prioritise and unexpected additional time needed for some major enhancements. We appreciate your patience as we ensure everything is stable and ready.
SuiteCRM 7.15 will include some important improvements under the hood (stability, performance, etc.) as well as some valuable feature enhancements.
SuiteCRM 7.14: Extended Support
Due to the delay of 7.15, we are extending the support timeline for the current version 7.14.
Support for SuiteCRM 7.14 will now be extended until the end of March to give everyone ample time to plan for their upgrade to 7.15
Looking Ahead: SuiteCRM 8 Roadmap
Beyond the 7.15 release, our focus is on enhancing and evolving the new platform, SuiteCRM 8. We are working to improve the predictability of our releases and planning for the long term.
We are currently working on a longer-term roadmap which we aim to publish in the New Year.
A key part of this strategy, particularly for SuiteCRM 8, will be to generally move towards smaller releases, delivered a little more often. This approach allows us to deliver new features, bug fixes, and continuous improvements to the SuiteCRM 8 platform more rapidly.
We Need Your Input!
We would love to have your feedback and opinions on the planned shift to more frequent, smaller releases for SuiteCRM 8, and any general thoughts on the direction of the project.
I would really love a long roadmap on SuiteCRM 8; there are multiple phases mentioned in the SuiteCRM blog/news but only the first phases is discussed.
If you can shed some light on the later phases too, that would be really awesome!
I agree with the shift to more frequent, smaller releases for SuiteCRM 8.
It will help us get bug fixes and improvements faster and give better feedback to the project.
technically, it is a 100% correct move.
Smaller, more frequent incremental improvements reduce risks, stabilize upgrade routines and increase the quality of community feedback loops.
From experience with businesses, neither the IT nor the end user departments seem to be too keen about upgrades (unless they fix a current bug they’re very unhappy about). For tiny businesses without many structures, one would just run an upgrade rather sooner than later. For mid sized / bigger businesses manual upgrades seem to be a big disruption and cost factor. They’d often skip multiple versions.
When I see upgrades in SaaS systems, it’s really cool - the next day you’re logging in, you’ll just get a message as a user in the system “we’ve improved this here ..”, a great user experience.
Would be interesting to see, whether it would be possible to roll out some of very secure/easy upgrades via the scheduler system (for systems that can reach the internet and pass several pre-flight tests).
For the CLI upgrade itself:
It’s MUCH better than uploading 100MB zip file into the admin and hoping that everything works well!
Now that it is CLI, maybe it could be improved as well for the small business non CLI savvy admin?
Setting permissions could probably done automatically by the process?
Does it have to be split up in two parts / commands or does one command work as well for the complete process? And if it is possible to do everything in one command, couldn’t it be triggered from the UI?
I know, this is a lot of code / effort for the tech / admins and it will still be risky / not feasible for larger / customized instances - so priority for these features should be low.
However, it helps to think into this direction to increase user experience and if there are more in-system-messages about improvements, the end-user perception will improve as well.
Disregarding the tech efforts and challenges:
Great idea to deploy more frequently and to be more present with new features in the community / on the IT calendars!
Looking forward to seeing the roadmap.
After a lot of months, I just logged in to the Forum, the things are changed a lot about me. I have started my own software development company. So my focus diverted from forum to own business. Yet so happy to see that suitecrm is still alive (as I has spend more than 1 decade playing with this baby so …)
Smaller upgrades could open the door towards admin backend upgrades like WordPress, Joomla etc…
Or maybe initially consider upgrades via the Softaculous platform for those that self host on cPanel or Plesk etc…
I believe that would attract a huge quantity of new customers for SuiteCRM
. For SuiteCRM v8, we could adopt a release cadence of every 3–4 months.