SugarCRM - Joomla! Bridge Bas Vredeling

Advantages of a bridge

• Best of both worlds: use strengths of 2 pieces of software

• no double data

• disclose specific information to selected users (ACL based disclosure)

Even more advantages!

• don’t update customer information yourself

• customer info quality increases

• generate traffic and content for your portal

• engage clients by letting them manage their own data

Portal or CRM?

• Don’t recreate the SugarCRM user interface

• Which functions belong in a portal?

• Which users are allowed access?

• What information do I want to publish?

Building the bridge

• Component for information exchange

• Authentication plugin

Step 1: Information Exchange

Application structure

SugarCRM

SOAP

Joomla!

SugarCRM data model

Contact

AccountAccountsModule

ContactsModule Contact Contact Contact Contact

Account

SugarSoap benefits

• SugarCRM as a Service (live data)

• Generic communication protocol

• Remote server

SugarSoap peculiars

• Php5 soap / Nusoap

• Different SugarCRM Api’s

• Query individual modules

Joomla! component

• Show lists of Contacts and Accounts

• Filter shown information to Joomla ACL and custom categories

• Let logged in users edit their own information

Information handling

Get information from Sugar

Filter the information

Create customisable layouts

Determine Joomla!-user Sugar-record relationships

Edit information and post to Sugar

Component structure

Soap logic

Communication logic

Application logic

Administration & Configuration

Presentation layerLayouts

Using the component

• Configure connection data

• Select which fields to display

• Create a layout structure

• Create CSS styling to match website layout

Step 2: Authentication

Authentication

• Joomla! 1.5 authentication plugins

• Using SugarCRM as a user database

Demonstration and Technobabble

Optional Topics

• Security

• Development process

• Universal approach over tailored solutions

• Issues

Development process

• User case: 2value Network

• Available components on sugarforge

• Getting to know undocumented code

• The Joomla! ACL in SugarCRM

• Chosing 1.0 over 1.5

• Taking the universal approach

Universal or Tailored?

• we want to reuse the component in a different setting

• we want to adhere to licenses and give something back to the community

• potential extra layers of complexity and configuration

• Customisable filters

Security

• Data validation

• User credentials sent between sites

• Overriding SugarCRM’s user assigned data access model

Issues

• Co-installing other SugarCRM components

• Speed / Scalability

• What about multiple filters?

• Advanced ACL

• Why is the presentation layer split up in css and structure?

Thank you