OroCRM’s Beta5 release comes stacked with some great new features. While this is an important milestone that amplifies customization opportunity, it’s only the beginning. The 1.0 release of OroCRM is just over the horizon, and we can’t wait to break out as the open source CRM for Commerce.
While marching down that path, here are a few of the most interesting features!
Create Your Own Reports
Beta5 improves our reporting functionality, allowing you to dig for the data you need to understand and run your business. You can begin now to create the reports you need to make the most of your sales and marketing opportunities. 
The basic tables, filters, and sorting featured in this release are the first step towards complete user customization. Extensive filtering, detailed charts and out-of-the-box reports like “Customer Lifetime Value” are on the way!
Logging Calls
Beta5 gives you the option to log a phone call and important details like call time and duration, notes, and prospective feedback.
If you’re a Sales Professional or Customer Service Expert, you will find this especially helpful in keeping track of conversations with your potential customers. Coming soon are the ability to set tasks and record notes along with sales opportunities or single customer service interactions.
And of course, you can generate reports around this information as well.
Improvement to Extended Entities
Why spend more time digging for the right data when you can create it yourself?
While OroCRM will continue to provide the most effective default options throughout the system, a business needs unrestricted possibilities to build and track relevant information. Beta 5 gives you the freedom to do this, by letting you create your own fields of data through Oro’s pre-defined entities.
The options of these entities (Users, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Leads) can be changed to accommodate your business needs. This includes added support to select or multi-select attributes, adjust the order of list options, and modify default values.
For example, storing birthday information provides a nice way to reach out to customers, but a car dealer would find it even more helpful to recall what style of car their customers prefer. By creating a “Favorite Car Style” option, they can add this information to each of their Contacts and foster more sales opportunities.
Bonus Feature: Go Ahead, Talk about the Weather!
A nice little bonus to our map functionality is now a display of the actual weather at a contact’s address . . . just in case you need an option to avoid any awkward silence in your conversation.) This bonus feature was my personal favorite.
With all the excitement of Beta5, the best is yet to come, to be sure! Given our rapid release cycle, check back often to keep up with the latest and please leave us your feedback in the comments section.
