SugarCRM Extension

Hey Rik,

Thats a tall order. I’ve not looked at SugarCRM before. Spent some time looking into what it might take to create something along the same lines for CivicCRM (from drupal territory). It ended up looking like more of a project than I have had time to take on at this point.

That said I do know there are definitely organizations using EE that could use a flexible CRM that is built into EE.

When looking at CivicCRM I came to basically two different ways of possibly dealing with it.

1. Adopt the CivicCRM DB structure and then rewrite the interface from scratch.
2. Try to fit CivicCRM and it’s interface into EE.

I didn’t see a lot of hope for the second solution (EE users are likely not going to accept something that doesn’t look and function like it belongs in EE). And like I said the first one looked like it was going to be more than I could budget time for.

But this is a need in the community so I would be excited to see someone take on the task.

Jamie

Hey Jamie,

We looked at CiviCRM but decided it doesn’t cut it. It’s really meant for non-profits to manage donations, memberships, donors, etc.. We needed a CRM that allowed us to manage everything from sales to support, something like salesforce.com. We eventually discovered Sugar; installed and customized it and have come to really like it. It’s got almost everything we need except a module that connects to our favorite CMS.

We’re still exploring but I’ll keep you posted.

Rik

yes - we’re doing same. We should discuss / collaborate on this.

I would be interested to hear how this comes along and willing to pay for a custom module that integrates Sugar into EE.

We’ll keep you posted.

Thanks Rik.

Yes, I’ve just installed Sugar and Expression Engine both, and I’d absolutely love integration between the two. I’d be willing to pay for such a solution as well!

I may be interested in this as well as my organization is looking at a new crm and sugar came up. Gonna subscribe to this thread and hope something happens 😊

Jamie I have a client who has a CiviCRM installation they want to keep but a developer that has abandoned them. When you mention your 2nd option (keep the CiviCRM interface and just use it with EE), is the only reason you dismissed this because it would be visually jarring to the client? I haven’t really done more than scan the CiviCRM site and glanced through the API area, but that area seems like it has hooks to connect with CiviCRM in a lot of ways. It seems like it might not be too bad hooking it to EE as long as the client doesn’t care if they have 2 separate interfaces. Any thoughts about the technical implementation of this?

Any word on Sugar integration as well? Is there an actual open-source version of Sugar that doesn’t require monthly or yearly payments? Their ‘commercial open-source’ tagline seems like a bit of intentional misdirection. Yes, we’re open source. Yes, you have to pay a reoccurring fee to use our software!

Sugar is true open source. The commercial part is for extra modules like an enhanced project management tool. All the good stuff is GPL3.

We’re working on the integration right now. I’ll post a note when we’re done.

I just want to throw my hat into the ring here. We are very interested in SugarCRM and EE (as we use both) and have struggled with the integration.

Basically, SugarCRM (Professional - as we have) offers some of the items we need such as Case Management, Knowledge Base, Newsletter Subscription Management, Campaigns tracking, etc, but lacks the adaptability, ease of management and customization that you have with ExpressionEngine. The real issue is that we don’t want to do more customization to Sugar than it lends itself out of the box and that can be done from within it’s own interface. The reason is that CRM is very mission critical as an application and I don’t want to see an upgrade go bad (and a few Sugar upgrades have - let’s face it), which in turn disables Sales, Support and Customer access all in one shot.

On the other side of the coin is EE. We use it for forums, newsletter subscription management, knowledgebase, etc. This creates customer information in both Sugar and EE. EE is much more capable as a web portal (or multi-site portal) than Sugar is. In my opinion, a CRM is vital to your business and it doesn’t always make business sense to leverage it for all of the things you want to do.

The ideal solution for us is to have a way to use EE for everything externally facing our customers and partners and exchange information with Sugar.

So, If I correctly understand what you are doing (Rik), you are solving not only a big problem for us (and others), but making EE and Sugar quite attractive as a pair. From a cost perspective, they can’t be beat.

Each is very good at what it does, but both can get ugly if you leverage them for uses far beyond that which they were originally designed.

Count me in as an interested party.

Has this gone anywhere? Definitely looking for something just like this…

I would be interested to see how this particular project turned out.

Thanks

Is there any update between tying EE and Sugar together?