Sage CRM 2020 Release 1 was made available in February of this year and Release 2 has just recently been made available (August 2020) for download. Let’s take a look at some of the top new features that are now available and one reason you may need to do it sooner than later.

Exchange Integration with Exchange Online

The most important item relates to the Exchange Integration with Exchange Online (Office 365) feature as it will no longer work after October 13th 2020 due to Microsoft’s decision to turn off Basic Authentication in Exchange Online.  The good news is that with the 2020 release you will need to use a new authentication protocol called OAuth 2.0 which is more secure as it doesn’t use user credentials for authorization.

Mailchimp Integration Improvements

The next feature will appeal to users of the Sage CRM Mailchimp integration. It has been enhanced to make it easier to prevent and fix duplicate email addresses in groups sent to Mailchimp. Mailchimp identifies records in a group by email address and if a group is sent to Mailchimp with two or more records with the same email address, the group gets rejected. I know firsthand how much this can slow down your process as you try to figure out what duplicates your list may have. Release 2 has gone a step further by adding the automatic detection of duplicate emails such that you cannot create two Person records with the same email address.

Updated Document Drop & Outlook Plugin

Some of you may remember when certain Sage CRM functionality was only available in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser which has now been rendered mostly obsolete by Chrome, Firefox and other browsers.  Sage CRM 2020 now has a new document drop which is available in all browsers. The technology behind the feature, previous based on Microsoft’s Active X technology has been replaced with a JavaScript-based solution supported by all browsers which also allows you to drag and drop emails right from Outlook.

The installation of the Outlook plugin is one of those features that could only be installed from Internet Explorer due to the Active X technology.  Happily, it has also been updated to work in any browser.

Support for Newer Microsoft Versions

Sage CRM now supports the latest versions of Windows Server 2016 and 2019 as well as SQL Server 2017 and 2019.

For more specifics, watch the video or visit Sage CRM’s easy to remember help center at help.sagecrm.com.