By rubenk on

Can someone give a quickie on how OG & ciViccRM are different, the advantages of both, and why developers are trying to make them work together (i.e. advantage to using them simultaneously)?

What scenarios fit each best?
Thank you in advance!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

dgeilhufe@yahoo.com’s picture

dgeilhufe@yahoo.com commented

Organic groups drives your website, providing users with the ability to create groups on the fly. See a sample: http://groups.drupal.org/ & a screencast: http://drupal.org/node/59785

OG provides a base for innovation. At CivicSpace, we serve civic organizations, many of which have been looking for a Yahoo Groups replacement so we built OG2List.

OG2List allows every organic group to have a sync'd mailing list. The list is created automatically with the organic group. The organic group membership is always sync'ed with the mailing list membership. Emails show up on the website and posts show up on email. CivicSpace is currrently completing a revese bounty for this functionality. If you would appreciate it, please consider contribiuting. See the screencast and contribution info: http://drupal.org/node/59785

CiviCRM stores data about people. It groups people so that you can segment your audience, send them email, send them postal mail, export them to other systems, etc.

So OG_CiviCRM maintains sync between CiviCRM groups and Organic Groups. If you have a big online community, you now have all your community members in a powerful CRM system. You can see they are a member of the Horses organic group, they donated $20 to the save the horses campaign, and they bought a horsehair brush in your ecommerce store.

The key things that makes this possible is:
(1) All Drupal users are CiviCRM contacts.
(2) All organic groups are CiviCRM groups with the appropriate membership of CiviCRM contacts.
(3) Any module can write activities back to CiviCRM via the CiviCRM API. Ecommerce does this. I believe both volunteer and eventfider do this as well.
(4) CiviCRM provides tools and an interface to make sense of all this information and take action on it.

Hope that answers the question. Please consider supporting CivicSpace's continuing work to integrate CiviCRM and Drupal and to extend Drupal in critical ways. You can donate to the general (or specific OG2List) cause at http://www.civicspacelabs.com/opensource.

David Geilhufe
Managing Partner, CivicSpace

Walt Esquivel’s picture

Walt Esquivel commented

EDIT: Any feedback on this issue originally posted in early June would be appreciated. : ) Thanks!

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Hi,

Where can I find more info and the status on OG_CiviCRM? I found some info at http://drupal.org/node/59813 (which was written for 4.6) but I still have a basic question.

Is the goal to include OG_CiviCRM in OG 4.7.0, much like it's in OG 4.6.0?

Thank you!

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
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blackfox’s picture

blackfox commented

It seems that OG_CiviCRM is exactly what I'm looking for, but I can't find this module nowhere..!? I would be glad about a link to it. Does it work with 4.7.2 ?
~-blackfox-~

Walt Esquivel’s picture

Walt Esquivel commented

If you download the OG 4.6.0 contributed module, you'll find it contains 3 additonal modules in its "contrib" folder:
og_blocks
og_book
og_civicrm

I don't see the above modules in OG 4.7.0 (I checked 6/11/06 and it doesn't contain a "contribs" folder), which is why I asked about the plan for OG 4.7.0 above.

Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
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blackfox’s picture

blackfox commented

Does nobody know something about the plans for og_civicrm 4.7? It's really important for me..!
blackfox

edit: I just tryed to install the 4.6-Module on my 4.7.2-installation. I'm surprised but it seems to work quiet well :-)

pwolanin’s picture

pwolanin commented

Depending on which APIs it uses it might work ok with 4.7 (the CVS notes that it was updated to work with CiviCRM 1.4):

drupal/contributions/modules/og_civicrm

However, it's only tagged for 4.6.

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Work: BioRAFT

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

Of course, I can't speak for Killes, but this module seems to have been abandoned, perhaps for the reasons mentioned here:
http://www.torenware.com/node/64

bfbryan’s picture

bfbryan commented

I am establishing a user network with various constituencies where group A users will select buddies from group B users based on user profile criteria. Group A users will then be able to download a contact file of all their buddies to upload to Outlook. Once that buddy list is populated Group B users can see who has selected them and download a contact file of Group A users.

Is this something that Civc CRM would handle? What is the difference between using Civc CRM and using several modules within Drupal such as profile, nodeprofile and user node?

FYI - my biggest criticism of Drupal is there are several ways to skin the proverbial cat and I end up getting lost trying to figure out which is the most elegant and robust solution.