By Nigeria on

I, like many others, having been looking for a nice easy way to integrate Drupal with SugarCRM. The best in "community plumbing" with the best in customer relationship management; sound like a match that was always meant to be!

Well today I came across a module, SugarOnDrupal, via the SugarCRM site (www.sugarcrm.com), which claims to give point and click integration betwen Drupal and SugarCRM.

The module can be found at http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/sugarondrupal

A tutorial video of the SugarOnDrupal intregration techniques can be found at http://nvironment.org/node/11, while the documaentation can be found at http://nvironment.org/node/2

Note: I am not the author of this module, and I am just about to test it out, so I can not categorically say that its the best thing that's ever happened. Maybe so others can test it too and report on their findings here.

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Ade Atobatele

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

kulfi’s picture

kulfi commented

You sound like a seasoned SugarCRM user. Do you know how it compares with CiviCRM?

monkeyfarmer’s picture

monkeyfarmer commented

Does it work with Sugar 5 and Drupal 5.7? Has anyone gotten this to work?

intrivious’s picture

intrivious commented

I watched the demo, and I really like the idea. I will definitely use this in some capacity.

With some extra customization, this would really be helpful with lead tracking. It would also help with getting customers to update their contact information.

The only thing that I see posing a problem is allowing a user to potentially wipe their data from their contact information. If they want to clear out their address or phone number, they would just delete it from their Drupal account and it is deleted from their sugar account info. I haven't really thought of a way to have our cake and eat it too. I want users to be able to keep their data up-to-date, but giving them the ability to remove information is bad CRM practice.

Any ideas?

ilo’s picture

ilo commented

I'm still waiting for feedback about the module to improve it's functionality. I'm not a SugarCRM user, just played a little with contacts and leads, and don't know much about it's internal workflows about campaigns and so, so any kind of suggestion in that field is welcome!

About modifying but not deleting.. There's no other way to allow your users to modify their information in realtime, and I mean.. the other way is to "request" a data modification by the user to be updated in the CRM by any other company's worker (permissioned SugarCRM user), otherwise, instead of deleting their data they could fill the fields with garbage, and there's no way to detect when user input is correct or not. So, i decided to run through two functionalities here:

  • Let the users modify their data
  • Let the users request a data modification.

The first, the most complicated is acomplished.. the second, is no more than a form filled by the user with their new personal information, and the submit of this form has several endpoints available:

  • an email sent to a random email address..
  • a validation form in the drupal site so any advanced drupal user may do the data loading of the modifications to the CRM.

This second option (drupal interface for massive uploads) has been droped due to it's complexity in design (Who may do, when will be noticed, by whom the changes are logged in the Crm.. ) compared against the simple email option.. (Just remembering the gravity 0 pen idea..)

Well.. still waiting for feedback.. ;)

rastarr’s picture

rastarr commented

Hi,

Was wondering whether this project has progressed any further at integrating Drupal and SugarCRM?
Seems like forward movement has stopped. Has anyone put it to good use and functionality that I could check out?

ilo’s picture

ilo commented

I'm a little disappointed here.. The community has not moved yet, but in the private field there are two proposals on the table.. it's not stopped, but it's not moving neither..

I'll update with news when someone moves a piece.

christian le fournis’s picture

christian le fournis commented

Drupal + Ubercart + SugarCRM = great all around integration

Nigeria’s picture

Nigeria commented

We got stuck at the Drupal stage...In other words we have not yet pushed the Drupal part out of the door yet...As soon as we do that, which should be real soon now ;) we'll be ready to hook it up to SugarCRM and give feedback...

--Ade Atobatele

Ade Atobatele

ilo’s picture

ilo commented

without problems..

Untill then.. I'll waiting.. (again! :D)

rastarr’s picture

rastarr commented

Thanks very much for the update - will wait for your next news

rastarr’s picture

rastarr commented

Bump :)
Any progress at all on this one?

monkeyfarmer’s picture

monkeyfarmer commented

Seems a bit slow on the devleopment side. I had problems before with the Joomla plugin. The plugin was behind the version I had just like with Drupal.

kevinwal’s picture

kevinwal commented

First of all, the demo is using only hard coded variables, and doesn't demonstrate the "point and click" variables that aren't working in my setup. There is alot of work to be done in this setup, but if your like me and am just learning both systems, it will take a while to figure out.

As far as I can see, the added variables that should be taken out, are not working. The variables from the demo are coming from the user table, and the $edit variables cannot identify the substr and therefor don't get loaded.

I'm using

Sugar 4.5.1
Drupal 5
Nusoap (custom)
php5.2.5

If I get it fixed, I'll post it here so that others can use this module properly.

The developer did a great job for the most part, now I just have to hack away for days until it works. It sure would have been nice for me to know that the demo variables weren't coming from the same areas, and that they were hard coded in...

kwall
www.kwallcompany.com

kevinwal’s picture

kevinwal commented

I've got it working somewhat, definitely not minimal changes to the stock module however, I'll post it here after further testing. I still need to rewrite the update sections.

** Note I'm not using the login section and will not be updating that area if it is needed.

kwall
www.kwallcompany.com

rastarr’s picture

rastarr commented

Great news to see this progressing. Drupal has a clear lack of CRM integration and being able to partner with SugarCRM will be terrific.
I for one certainly appreciate your efforts

kevinwal’s picture

kevinwal commented

I've got the posting working, and would love it if someone had time to finish the editing part. If you're interested, I'll email you the code. Otherwise you'll have to wait until I have time in a crazy busy schedule to get this done.

FYI I don't consider myself too much of a drupal developer as I had to learn tons to get this to work, but I'm sure I'll get better so please don't bash my code too much! :)

kwall
www.kwallcompany.com

benansell’s picture

benansell commented

Using Drupal 5.7 with PHP 5, MAMP

Just downloaded (from sourceforge) and tried to get the sugarondrupal module working, but got the following error:

* NUSOAP will not work if soap module is loaded in PHP5, and it is. You sould disable this module commenting the line extension=soap.so in your php.ini
* warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in drup57/includes/form.inc on line 949.

There is no such line in my php.ini for PHP 5

Any suggestions?

kevinwal’s picture

kevinwal commented

There's known issues, I'd get on google and look that up. You have to either disable SOAP in PHP5, or rename some variables in Nusoap. I usually do the latter.

http://code.google.com/p/nusoap-for-php5/

kwall
www.kwallcompany.com

rastarr’s picture

rastarr commented

Just saw this module in case anyone missed it
http://drupal.org/project/sugarform

916Designs’s picture

916Designs commented

Came across this post, some good explanations and sample code.

http://www.websitemaintenancelabs.com/dev-blog/integrating-drupal-and-su...

Edit: found updated url