San Francisco - Sugarcrm has kicked off its third annual customer and developer conference.

"Sugarcon is going to be a remarkable show," Sugarcrm John Roberts told IT Examiner. "We nearly tripled attendance from last year and increased the number of tracks and sessions accordingly. We have close to 100 sessions across six tracks, a range of keynotes from authors like Michael Lewis and Paul Greenberg and business leaders such as Jonathan Schwartz and Mark Leslie."

The company is also showcasing a number of new solutions, including an improved web services framework, upgraded user inteface layers and advanced mobile customisation options.

Sugar's updated web framework streamlines performance of service calls and helps third-party developers create CRM integrations. In addition, a recently introduced representational state transfer interface (REST) facilitates the design of Sugar-related services.

Sugarcrm showed off a new framework for the creation of application themes based on interface layers that offer various style, color and navigation options. An advanced WYSIWIG framework allows users to design new themes via an integrated cascading style sheets (CSS) solution.

Finally, Sugar's mobile studio editor offers advanced mobile customisation options such as pre-built layouts and views for specially designed modules. Customers are now able to easily configure layout fields for wireless clients within the application's administration console. 

Martin Schneider, director of product marketing at Sugarcrm, told IT Examiner that Sugar's open source architecture had successfully evolved into a "web based interface desktop replacement" capable of adapting to any business environment, including a mobile one. Indeed, Sugar 5.1 offers native support for a variety of mobile devices and even automatically adjusts its browser display to match the size of a user's screen. X