We run multiple SuiteCRM 7 instances on WIMP stacks with MS SQL. We seem to be in the vast minority with this approach, but we’re well versed in these technologies and SuiteCRM has run well in our experience despite needing to employ the use of a few extra tricks not covered by the installation docs.
We’ve been waiting with enthusiasm for v8 but didn’t notice until recently that support for most of this stack appears to have been quietly dropped in the migration to v8. I can’t find anything about it in the roadmap or release docs, and information in forums is scarce and usually just a hint at best.
I understand some people have tried running it with WAMP but results are unclear. I understand that due to the use of Platforms - Doctrine Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) in theory MS SQL should work but that’s also unclear so far… We haven’t tried it ourselves yet.
My questions are:
Will SuiteCRM 8 support Windows, IIS, and MS SQL officially at any point?
If it will, is there any guess at an ETA?
I’d like to know if we are bidding a sad farewell to our erstwhile faithful friend, or if the fun will continue!
Just wondering if anyone from the dev team or close to it has an answer to this question? I was guessing it is a simple “yes” or “no” to answer whether or not SuiteCRM 8 will support Windows, IIS, MS SQL officially at some point. I understand there might not be a set timeline for it, but we’d like to know what the product plan is.
Also wondering this, we had setup a test environment using a WIMP stack with MS SQL server 2016.
we are doing this in an effort towards a likely migration from saleforce enterprise for $50k+ / yr to SuiteCRM with on-going paid support time.
it had worked well so far and had been VERY alike to our current salesforce usage (no workflows really).
if it now only works on a linux based stack then that would be a harder sell since we are primarily a microsoft run house, we have over 50 servers and maybe 5 are linux based.
Hi guys. Since there was no official answer, let me just throw in my 2 cents…
Maybe SalesAgility doesn’t have many resources to come up with many “officially supported” guarantees, and it’s definitely not a Windows company. At all.
Still, MSSQL has always been supported, and the move to Doctrine only makes this better. So I would say that yes, it’s reasonable to run SuiteCRM on top of Windows platforms, you just need a bit of extra care testing since your set up won’t be as thoroughly tested by a large community as the (much more used) Linux ones.
That said, I am a rare case of a person who loves and extensively uses both Linux and Windows. And I would still advise running SuiteCRM on Ubuntu, in my experience all these years I think it’s simply the best option, and saves a lot of hassle.
I’m also quite comfortable with unix/linux/as400 but the somewhat unwritten company policy has been to avoid linux whenever possible due to not wanting “science projects” (bs answer i know but whatever).
out of the 50+ servers between the on-prem hosts and our AWS cloud that i manage, i’ve only been allowed to use linux based designs when it was either the only option or the only option left.
as far as SQL that isn’t a concern, more a concern is that the 8.x archives do not really run or drop into a established IIS stack (already running a test instance of 7.12) and just run or even allow configuration (can’t even get the site to respond at the endpoint and nothing is really apparent as far as what it needs)
already confirmed that both the 7.12 instance and the 8.x instance folders and permissions in windows/IIS are identical.
Honestly, even if salesagility isn’t a “windows company”, it shouldn’t be that much of an ask to generate a basic install guide to install the system on a windows/sql stack for a product that is (or should be) largely hosting agnostic provided the infrastructure is there (DB system, PHP, webserver, etc.)
Is there any chance SalesAgility will provide an answer to this question or an indication on the roadmap or in other documentation?
Thank you @pgr for your thoughts. As a non-paying open source client (currently), our company’s expectations around official guarantees are appropriately low. The opinion of an experienced user (that running v8 on Windows is reasonable) is helpful; it encourages us to try it at least. We are of course quite aware that as a minority user, extra care and testing is needed. We’re capable and willing to do that without complaints, and happy to feed back to the community when we can. (By the way, we and our customers do support some of the community marketplace vendors commercially by paying for their products.)
That said, I think it’s reasonable to want an answer from SalesAgility. Surely we’re not the only people affected. WIMP was on the official compatibility list for 7.x. Multiple components disappeared from the official compatibility list in 8.x without any explanation whatsoever. This is despite that appearances suggest these components probably still work. That is a snub to users like us at least, and at most could be interpreted as unprofessional and/or irresponsible. Dropping support for a portion of the community and then ignoring questions about it is certainly not in line with the principles of open source and community support that SalesAgility boldly markets as being at the center of their culture.
When the official support list includes the platform on which we host, we can offer it to our customers in good commercial faith, and use it ourselves with confidence. So we did: that’s why we chose SuiteCRM over other options. When it doesn’t, we can’t. Nobody ever told us we’d be excluded from the v8 upgrade after reading marketing hype about it for more than a year (and on a personal note, getting quite excited), until it was released and suddenly a back page of documentation informed us we were excluded. So we’d like to get beyond this limbo and know whether or not we should upgrade ourselves and our customers, or move on.
@Awawrzynowicz Did you ever get a direct answer from the dev team, based on your desire to deploy SuiteCRM on Windows with paid support? By the way, as feedback for you - we’ve run SuiteCRM 7 on the officially supported Windows platform including some significant workflows and integrations, and it has run well.
By the way @pgr - I enjoyed your pages about VM hosting for SuiteCRM. We do the same (VMWare based, Windows VMs) and would certainly agree with all of your points. A plugin recently broke our SuiteCRM installation and there were some knock-on effects with data. We could quickly spin up snapshots of our CRM from multiple points in time to pinpoint what went wrong and fix it.
