Sage CRM 2020 R2: What’s New & Reasons to Upgrade
Bringing together every area of a business including sales, finance, marketing and customer service.
What’s new guide: Sage CRM 2020 R2
TLS Security Improvements
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is used to encrypt communications between websites and end-users, as well as securing other transmission protocols, such as POP3S, IMAPS and SMTPS.
Sage CRM uses TLS wherever web transactions are made, effecting email integration, REST and SOAP APIs, and more. Sage CRM 2020 R2 has removed any dependency on TLS 1.1, instead moving to version TLS 1.2.
Adoption of Modern Authentication for Exchange Online
Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) based sign-in is used for Office 365 apps, enabling sign-in features such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Adopting OAuth2 within Sage CRM is a step forward in use of credentials for authentication for API service users and supports the product’s strategic vision for rich integration capability. Sage CRM offers support for OAuth2 in this & future releases, ensuing readiness for market enforcement in mid-2021.
Developer Licensing Improvements
One of Sage CRM’s key strengths is the ease with which it can be extended – new tables, screens & more – that add user functionality and describe new business functions. While much customization can be done via configuration, where a behavior requires programmatic coding, this can be done using a choice of different APIs. This release includes a new SDK that relaxes the constraint of needing a special license to leverage the APIs when coding new features.
Reasons to Upgrade
The focus for this release has been on ensuring compatibility with security led environmental changes. Sage CRM has built in support for TLS 1.2 onwards and supports OAuth 2.0 authentication with Exchange Online (Office 365). In addition, there are extended technical & user features, including improvements to email marketing and changes to licensing for an improved developer experience.
If you are using a version older than Sage CRM 2018 R1, there are 3 compelling reasons why now is the time to upgrade your instance of Sage CRM:
- Adobe Flash reaches the end of life. Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after 31 December 2020 (“EOL Date”). Flash used to be used to draw the included in Sage CRM Reports and in the Interactive Dashboards until version Sage CRM 2017 R3 when it was replaced by the use of HTML 5.
- Following advice from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all announced a unified plan to deprecate the use of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in favour of TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. TLS is the protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. Sage CRM 2020 R1 is fully compliant with TLS 1.2 and patches are available for all versions of Sage CRM from 2018 R1 onwards.
- Sage CRM 2017 R1, R2, R3 all reach the end of support on 30th September 2020.
