Drupal CRM as Installation Profile

Our nonprofit organization is embarking on a new crm project and is considering using Drupal. We are still in the planning/budgeting phase and are looking at a variety of options including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a home-grown MS Access database, etc. I know there are a variety of threads that discuss integrating Drupal with existing crms (VTiger, XRMS, etc.) and I have looked at CiviCrm. Though we are a nonprofit, CiviCrm does not really fit our business model; instead of focusing on donations, our primary lines of business involve providing financial consulting and loans to other nonprofits. As for integrating with another crm, I think it would be better to use existing modules (CCK, Views, etc.) as well as develop new modules that would allow us to create a crm “installation profile”. In other words, I would like to create our crm by simply configuring the necessary core and contributed modules.

So, why am I posting this? I want see if any Drupalers are interested in working on this project. The first phase would involve matching our requirements to existing Drupal modules and determining the best way to utilize what’s already available. The second would be commissioning the development of new modules. And finally, we would flesh out our specific system as well as create a more generic “crm profile” that other organizations could leverage. And, by the way, we have budget for this project.

As an initial, half-baked step, I think that the following new functionality would be required:
- A module that would allow for parent-child relationships between CCK-created content types. For example, a parent type might be an “Organization” or “Account” and its children might include “Opportunities”, “Staff”, “Loans”, “Notes”, etc. This module should allow the admin to enforce referential integrity between parent-child nodes. Node Relativity as well as a few other modules might do the trick with a little work.

- A module that improves display of node add and edit forms. Ideally this would be something like Contemplate (this might be a place to start).

- A reporting module that can take Views results and create aggregate information and charts. Views 6.x has the ability to group results but, as far as I can tell, cannot create sums, averages, etc. for these groups. Charts might provide a starting place for the graphically inclined. I also think Flex 3’s charting/OLAP capability along with the Services module would be another approach.

Let me know if you’re interested and if you have questions, suggestions or critiques about this approach.