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jorditr's picture
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Hi you all.

I open that thread to see if there are some interest on having a CRM on drupal and in what degree integrated on Ubercart. CRM for drupal, commercial CRM, it's something I've been working on the design table for some months with more people. Now I want to start that project and I would like to see ideas and needs from other people.

There are other CRM out there, open source also, based on PHP/MySQL, even a somewhat called CRM for drupal, a software with very interesting purposes but very different for what it's supposed to be a CRM on the commercial world.

A CRM would be, as a big picture, a system that manages sales of a company and the team that is in charge of those sales, that would mean:

  • companies-departments-customers-workers-resellers management,
  • sales-team and its actions, costs of those actions,
  • products listing and management,
  • ordering (with or without sales),
  • next months sales forecasts, past months sales statistics,
  • calendar of events,
  • help desk for products support, cost of that support
  • emailing tools for newsletters,
  • persmission for all those tasks,
  • centralized dashboard,
  • all that, at least, on a first level

Some of those features are already on drupal through contributed modules, and build a CRM is completely possible if you want what to achive. The point would be to develop a suite of modules, maybe based on some of the present available modules, that could be called the "commercial drupal CRM" suite.

Would you like to share here your ideas, thoughts or suggestions? Smiling

Abilnet's picture
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Re: CRM: what do you expect?

Hey this is cool... just something like I've been hunting for a while! ...unfortunately I can't help too much (I'm far away from a technical person), but from business point of view, the list of needs sounds great. Something in my mind, though... it would be nice if the system can handle files (documents, brochures etc.) that a salesman can send to the prospect with one click when in phone with him (to email or via SMS to phone)

Also, SMS is coming very popular in part of the marketing etc. (integrating with Clickatel for example. Also, GPS- coordinates are coming popular also in business. Don't forget automated follow up (some programmable events (mail, SMS) happen automatically when some conditions have met etc.)

Multilingual is Very Important nowadays, specially here in Europe. There are many companies using Vtiger and offering some special modules or services with it. One example is a Finnish company here

Some like to work with SugarCRM and some with more open and intuitive fork of sugar, Vtiger

Ok, this is an old thread, but hopefully there will be some activity around this!

jorditr's picture
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Getting busy with the Ubercode.
Joined: 10/31/2007
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Re: CRM: what do you expect?

Thanks for your opinion. Well, since last message I've started to work with drupal's STORM.

pareen's picture
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@jorditr

I use storm for Project Mgmt and agree that it is really useful.

But for a CRM, how do you use it? I tried. But couldnt.

If you could please tell in brief about that, I'll be really grateful.

Thanks in advance.

brentratliff's picture
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Re: @jorditr

We provide an enterprise implementation of the open source CRM vTiger for our small and medium business customers and use it ourselves as well. We are in the early developmental stages of creating an Ubercart provisioning engine to automate new sign up as well as single sign on for Drupal, vTiger, and Exchange through LDAP authentication. I'll keep everyone posted but it is going to be a while. We have several higher priority projects. Our thoughts are that vTiger, especially the development version 5.1, is much further along than any organic Drupal CRM solution. Hope it helps.

Abilnet's picture
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brentratliff wrote: ...We
brentratliff wrote:

...As soon as vTiger 5.1 is officially released we'll take a look at hooking the two together...

That's great news, thanks!

brentratliff's picture
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Re: CRM: what do you expect?

After reading the original post again it seems the question was more in line with how to integrate a CRM instance to track Ubercart shop processes and share user information, inventory, products, history, etc. In this regard, we're looking at the Drupal 6 CRM API module integrated with vTiger. This combination with the addition of the recommender module would raise the bar in organizing customer information and marketing campaigns. As soon as vTiger 5.1 is officially released we'll take a look at hooking the two together. If anyone has already begun this process we'd love to know. vTiger has an API as well that could be useful.

Willem's picture
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CRM: what do you expect?

Any development on this? This sounds like just the thing that would work for my Drupal/ Ubercart installation. The focus on shop processes is the key ... I think vTiger is better set up for than Sugar.

I'm sure many others would be very interested too.

Willem

Willem

brentratliff's picture
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Willem, Unfortunately, The

Willem,

Unfortunately, The company that was looking to integrate U2/D6 and vTiger is no longer in business. Personally, I'm working on a native Drupal solution but probably won't look to integrate anything until D7. D7 core changes to entities and fields in core are so fundamentally different that any time spent working on a D6 implementation may have to be reinvented, at least partially. I really want to get away from trying to tie two separate systems together but believe that better analysis of sales metrics are paramount in a successful eCommerce site. I'm going to wait until an official D7 release is out to decide which way to go. I feel that all the information I need will be or can be in the Drupal database and I just need to design a method to capitalize on it.

Willem's picture
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Re: Willem, Unfortunately, The

G'day Brent, and thanks for your response.

You are spot on with regards to getting a better analysis of business metrics. The lack of that is a hindrance to developing my business.

I have been using Sugar up to date, but the focus of Sugar is different from what I need - which is the very thing you are talking about, being able to analyse sales metrics, and better understanding our customers. Plus of course the matter of double handling the info ...

Drupal 6 or Drupal 7? It seems to me that Drupal 7 is almost a different thing than Drupal 6. It has developed a long way ...

I can't wait for Drupal 7 ... so I have developed my new website WholesaleLabels.com.au in Drupal 6. I don't think D7 is ready for running an eCommerce site yet and it won't be for a while, until all the backing and filling to get it right have happened. So I do hope you get something going for D6!

I agree that the info you need will be in the database ... just add extra functionality as needed.

In the meantime I think I will run with vTiger ...

Thanks for thinking about this and for getting back to me.

Willem

mimetic2's picture
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Re: CRM: what do you expect?

anyone try highrise implimentation?

Metroecho2's picture
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Any one tried CRM core with Ubercart

I have been working with http://drupal.org/project/crm_core and am about to test it on a ubercart site. Anyone done this before?