the Future of Work

Sugar CRM with Apps on a Plane

by Danny Kolke
published on: 04/26/2007

Before I begin, I must warn you that this post will be brief. I am in the middle of a launch of the new Developer Program for CRM for Google Apps and wanted to pause a bit to respond to all the questions that I have been getting about Google Gears and how does Etelos' Apps on a Plane compare.
 
 

Google Gears from my perspective seems to be a pretty neat and simple way to build and host an application that can run online and offline. It seems that much of the movement to enable online/offline access to applications is around tools like Google Gears. Adobe has Apollo, which also looks promising. However, my issue is the energy and time I have already invested in an application.  I don't want to start over.

That's really my biggest complaint that I've seen from all this is that as a maker of an application. Do I have to rebuild or re-engineer my application to get it to work in this new environment?  With Apollo, if I want to create a method whereby my users can sync data and I don't want them to have access to all the data - I have to engineer that in.  With Google Gears, its seems that this works well for simple applications where I can cache my data and then have it available online or offilne. But I want something more. I want my real application... with all the security, etc. that I expect.

  

So, instead of getting into too much detail, I thought I would give you a screenshot of my new toy that I am playing with.

SugarCRM as an Offline Application - installed with Etelos's Apps on a Plane

click image to enlarge

What you are looking at above is a screenshot of SugarCRM running in my browser as a normal web application, while my computer is very disconnected.  I don't have my airport on and my ethernet is unplugged (hence the screen pops on the right side). I wanted to assure you that this is no trick.

AOP (Apps on a Plane) is about a 50MB installable application that enables applications that work on the Etelos Application Server, to run offline - and then sync online. Best of all, it only took a couple of hours to port SugarCRM to work on Etelos.  And once there, it was easy to get it to work with Apps on a Plane.

To me that's the benefit. I am taking web applications I value, where I want them to be. Imagine running any PHP web application as an online/offline app.  Imagine running JSP or .Net web apps too in the same exact way.  Real applications...  ported, not rebuilt. 

More soon...  This is just a preview of what's up.  Expect big news in the next few weeks.

Oh, and for those of you who are skeptical, here is a quick screencast of SugarCRM offline, with Apps on a Plane.

http://www.etelos.com/videos/sugarcrm/sugarcrm_on_aop.mov 

;)