SugarCRM Extension

Looks like you did a great job, and bridged what I believe to be a big gap between a great CMS and a widely used CRM.

I see it’s for EE 1.6x. Is there a plan to bring it to EE 2 as well?

I would really like to implement this, but I think I’d like to put the effort into EE 2 at this point. I’m unclear as to how much of a jump it is from 1.6 to 2 and what the architectural differences and challenges might be to bring the SugarEE module over.

Thanks!

I’m with you on developing w/ EE 2 and we definitely plan on bring SugarEE over to 2.0 as soon as possible. We’ll keep the site and forums updated.

Here you go: SugarEE - http://sugaree.me/

I’ve had a look at the module description and docs on your website…

From what I can see, the module can pull data from SugarCRM database and that’s about it.

Can you please explain why should I pay you $99 to accomplish something I could do in 15 minutes with 4-5 lines of PHP code?

– please delete – (double posting)

Hey Milan, you’re right on, that’s what it does. It creates a EE-ish way to easily pull data, via SugarCRM’s SOAP API, and display it on your website.

I don’t think I can explain it to someone with your expertise 😉 but for the many others who aren’t up to your level of development talent, I think it’s a big help and a justified price. We are definitely going to be expanding the module to do more, so stay tuned.

Me senses a slight dose of irony there 😊

I was actually looking for a solution to interface EE/SCRM and when I saw your post I got excited… until I read the feature list (3 times).. and got disappointed.

If your product is to grow into a nice extension that would keep EE/SCRM data in sync, that would be well worth $100 and I’d be one of your first & most frequent customers 😊

But at the moment, I can accomplish the same effect by using something like this:

$dbc = mysql_connect("host", "user", "pass");
$result = mysql_query("SELECT FROM some_scrm_table WHERE something = 'something'",$dbc);
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) { /* do stuff here */ };
mysql_close($dbc);

There you go - 4 lines of PHP code 😊

Haha, nice. Yes, that’ll get you started. Using the official SugarCRM API would be the next step (and better step for several reasons), of which the SugarEE module uses the PHP SOAP or NuSOAP library (if your PHP build wasn’t compiled with php soap).

My philosophy with CMS and CRM data is not to keep it in-sync though, but to have it live in only one place, CRM. In the use cases I’ve had with my clients, I just don’t see the push and pull sync being necessary. Maybe you’ll come to see my side of the philosophy? I’d love to have you as a frequent customer 😉

The next version is already in the works. Here are the next couple of things on the roadmap:

1) Edit Views - Easily create a form to accept data (leads, registrations, etc.) that automatically create records in SugarCRM 2) Relationship Data - Pull related records from other modules. For example, say I’m listing out events from a custom “Events” module in SugarCRM, but then I also want to display the people already attending. You could pull through the “Registrant” records in the “Events” module loop

Would love to hear your’s and anyone else’s thoughts on feature requests! 😊

If you do not keep CRM and CMS databases in sync, the quality of data in both systems will degrade over time (become inaccurate & decrease in value).

How’s that a good business practice (or philosophy as you call it)?

I think our definitions of “in sync” is throwing us off a bit. The data being displayed on the website that is also CRM data should always be “in sync”. The data can be “in sync” by using one of the following methods: 1) like you suggest, the data lives in the CRM and CMS database with scripts/hooks in place so that if you update data in CRM the CMS gets updated and vice-versa, or 2) like I suggest, for the data that you want on the website that also belongs in CRM should only live in the CRM database, and the website pulls it via SugarEE when it needs it. I like my method best, because it’s simpler to accomplish and all the data lives in CRM only.

In the end, no matter the method used, the website should reflect exactly what CRM shows at all times.

Does that make more sense?

Due to nature of the EE, member (customer?) data sit in the CMS database, where customer can (and does) update them when they feel like it (so update email, correct name spelling, change gender hehe etc).

On the other end you’ll have company employees fiddling with user data via CRM.

Because you have 2 databases and changes are not delegated to both, they will soon go out of sync and data will become inaccurate.

Arguably, you could keep customer data in CRM only, but that seems somewhat inconvenient if your website has features requiring customer to login.

The balance of what data sits where is debatable, but I think at the bare minimum you should have 1-to-1 relationship between CMS member and a contact in CRM.

Than again, that’s just my view 😊

If the website doesn’t require customers to login, that your module would be useful… though I still think it’s overpriced - for comparison CartThrob costs $99.

Ok, it’s making more sense why you see things that way. I think we’ve had different use cases in mind. I think I would lean towards your point of view when talking about maintaining EE members with SugarCRM Contacts (or customers, whatever you want to call it), because you’re right, the natural way EE works wouldn’t allow all the member data to live in SugarCRM’s database, there would have to be something extra to sync things. I definitely see the need here, and today SugarEE doesn’t solve this particular problem. Definitely a good idea to add to the development roadmap.

I’ve been using the SugarEE module to do other things, like displaying events, business partners, team members and things like that on the website. In these cases there isn’t a need for that data to live in the CMS database, it can live in the CRM database.

Does that clear up my point of view a little? 😉

If you wait a very little while i believe philsturgeon is going to release a REST module for EE. Being as SugarCRM now has a REST interface you could simply use phils module to pull in whatever data you like from sugar and use it in templates however you want.

Very nice indeed.