SugarCRM Inc. is kicking off its annual SugarCon conference in San Francisco this week with significant updates to its Relationship Intelligence product, which gathers data about customers and prospects from a broad range of social and business sources to help sales people more quickly establish relationships.

The company is also previewing a new intelligent digital assistant that integrates with a smartphone calendar and is extending its mobile software development kit. The enhancements to Relationship Intelligence include expanded geographical support and new features for SugarCRM Hint, an intelligence product that automatically scans public and licensed data sources to build social profiles.

Working only from a name and email address, SugarCRM Hint automatically searches and tunes personal and corporate profile details for that contact and loads it into the CRM profile. The new version of Hint now provides recent news articles about the contact’s organization with automatic updates. The original version, which was introduced in June, worked only on U.S. news sources. That has been broadened to include support for contacts in the U.K., Netherlands and Canada.

The new personal assistant application uses a smartphone’s calendar to provide logistical and strategic information about each scheduled meeting.  For example, users can schedule the app to display a meeting’s subject matter, directions to the location and time. It also provides a summary of the contacts who will participate and profiles that encompass social and public information via Hint.

Hint is compatible with Sugar 7.8 or later. The new version of SugarCRM including the upgraded Hint will be available on Oct. 5 for an introductory price of $15 per user per month. The intelligent mobile app will be available next year.

The enhancements to the company’s company’s mobile software development kit enable customers to customize the mobile client with features such as integration with enterprise mobile device management tools; custom fields, views and buttons; use of native device capabilities like global positioning system and camera; and custom styling, themes and navigation. The Sugar Mobile app, which includes features such as offline storage mode, single-sign on connectivity and mobile device management capabilities, is available for all Sugar Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate customers.

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