Vtiger Integration (Page 1 of 2)

How did this go - any luck?  Also what about osCommerce integration ?

We have prepared an extension manager for release 2.1. Look at the sticky topic in this forum. We do not have the resources to develop these types of extensions ourselves, but concentrating on the accounting core. This is our main duty.
A couple of companies have been interesting in making a CRM extension to FA and at least one is almost ready. They are waiting for the release 2.1 Beta to ship next week.
I guess they will tell us more when time is ready.

/Joe

I would like to just have a script that would allow someone to search the products by location, category, etc.  And be able to see what is in stock, the retail price, description, and photo, without have to login.

This way a customer could check stock and price before they make the trip to the store.

AM

Is there any documented API that extensions can use to perform common actions?

I am guessing that an add-on could provide an access point for osCommerce/Vtiger/etc could interface and the add-on code would convert to the internal API

I too an interested in osCommerce. I am also a "retired" osc core developer

tom

Is there any update on the proposed Vtiger integration mentioed above?  What is the current status?

Thanks

Coding skills are of course necessary to finally integrate any two different pieces of software, but it is long way before anything have to be coded. Most time on integration is spent on designing exact way how the two programs will cooperate. Is it really integration, or database synchronization? Both FA and Vtiger has overlapped some functionality e.g. sales orders, sales invoices, so which one should be used to record this documents? If the choice is Vtiger - what about inventory control? etc,etc..
All this can be done without writing one line of php code, but it is very time consuming and require some database structure recognizing skills. I fully agree that some kind of integration of superb Vtiger CRM would be very usefull, and probably this is the best CRM candidate for it.
But  I'm affraid FA development team is too small to  turn all FA community wishes into new features. There is still a lot of basic accounting software features not implemented in  FA, or simply buggy. We can promis knowhow help on FA side for anyone who want to take over Vtiger-FA integration, but we cannot do it ourself. We want to focus on turning FA into flexible, bulletproof accounting application in some visible future.

Janusz

Hello friends

I am new to FA.

What different routes one can take to integrate FA with vTiger?

a. Using Web Services

b. Seamless integration at the code level.

c. Any other ...

Can someone integrate it at the code level i.e. taking the appropriate portions of vTiger code and place it in the FA. I believe there are 2 issues relating to this approach:

a. The vTiger code base is too huge to handle.

b. FA is GPL based and vTiger is MPL based and one cannot combine the MPLed code with the GPLed code according to the rules stated in the GPL. I may be wrong b'coz I don't know much about the licensing conditions? What do you say? An early reply will be a welcome.

Thanks

>Vtiger provides web services and REST APIs I believe - I don't think Frontaccounting does yet.
You are right.

>Maybe the new Extension Manager (see sticky topic) can be used?
No idea about how to use it.

>I wasn't aware of the licence problem - what about the other way around - combine the GPLed code with the MPLed code - does which way this is viewed make any difference?
It is almost confirmed that we cannot combine the these 2 different licenses at the source code level. Combining the GPLed code with the MPLed code and vice-versa are one and the same thing.

>One big hurdle is that both products provide the same functionality in some areas - invoices,quotes,stock control/inventory.
Stock control and inventory in vTiger are too basic to use. FA is much better.

Janus has given some good hints on how to integrate these two big Open Source programs. Read his post in this topic itself. I can give a try integrating them. There are so many hurdles to cross. I believe it will take about 2-3 man months to produce a stable integration. Had this been a week time, I'd have started immediately. But investing so much time is directly proportional to the money involved :-)

We already have vtiger, our website and frontaccounting integrated to some degree.

We used vtiger's "Custom Workflows" to do this.

However, if you don't know how to program "Custom Workflows" in vtiger, then integration would be really tough.

We have been heavily posting on the vtiger forums to try to get the vtiger team to add some functionality to their core that would make it easier for us to program and share "Custom Workflows" with the community that would let others do a similar integration.

Here is a link to a post that lays out what needs to happen in vtiger to make it easier for others to integrate like we do now.

http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=30821

Right now what we do is have custom workflows in vtiger send data from vtiger to Front Accounting.

Items such as Products, Accounts and Sales Orders are created in vtiger and then automatically also created in Front Accounting.

We basically just get all the Sales orders and that information put into Front Accounting as Sales Orders and then manage the Sales Orders, Invoices, etc. from there with Front Accounting.

There are only 2 downsides to this approach:

#1 It is one way integration.   Because Front Accounting doesn't have a "Custom Workflows" feature like vtiger does,  when we make changes to things in Front Accounting, it does not make the changes in our vtiger system.
So we just get used to doing all our data entry for our customers info, products and sales orders in Vtiger only.

#2 It is still a little time consuming to use Front Accounting for processing all those sales orders, because we have to go through them individually and do the "Delivery Against Sales Order", "Invoices against Sales Order", and "Customer Payments" all separately for each sales order we send from Vtiger.

Here are the key things that are needed in Front Accounting in my mind for the Ultimate Small Business Solution:

1. Front Accounting needs a "Custom WorkFlow" solution similar to vtiger's.
That would allow us to Insert and Update any other system with data changes made in Front Accounting like we do in vtiger right now.

2. Front Accounting needs to have a way to do "Direct Invoicing" on "Sales Orders" in the system, so that it is faster to process the Sales Orders that we send into FA from vtiger or any other system.
(We currently send all our orders (from website, and sales reps)  into vtiger so all our orders can be managed in one place and then we use workflows to send that data into FA to process the accounting side of things)

I imagine that those people who are using the "OsCommerce Import" module for FA right now would also benefit from these two features in FA because they could quickly do the accounting for orders they import and then also send data back to their website database for any changes they make in FA that they also want to have in their Website database.

So basically if those 2 features were added to FA and if the vtiger team would implement what I have suggested on their forum, then in my opinion you would have the ultimate system that would let you integrate FA with your CRM system and your Website in an even better way than we have already done.

Thanks, Janusz

I understand that the workflows would be a big project. 

As for the direct invoice from Sales Orders,    you mentioned that this would be an easy task.

Is it something that you would put in the core, or is it something that you can give me some guidance on to help make it happen for our own installation?

It would really help speed up our accounting processes for the orders we are sending into FA from our website, POS, and crm systems.

Thanks,
Dave

PS. not sure what happened to my post on vtiger.  I have several others still on there talking about this same thing, so maybe the moderators felt like they had enough on the subject.

You get my vote for direct invoicing and maybe you could sweet talk Tom into modifying his OsCommerce module to add a "Change OsCommerce Order Status" button. Purpose of button would be to send data back to OsC about order status. eg. Delivered/Invoiced etc.

There in an interesting interoperability standard in the printing industry called JDF (Job Definition Format) and buried in that is another standard called JMF (Job Messaging Format) JMF is designed to do exactly what you guys want to do. send a message back to another system to change a job status (eg. from order to delivered to invoiced). The JMF message is a small packet of XML usually either sent to a hot folder ot posted to a URL.

If such an interoperability standard was developed for the current OsC extension, it would be a great base to develop a standard for these sort of updates, particularly if it avoided direct table updates and relied on a interoperability mechanism.

I think the OSC part would be a fairly small project but a step in the right direction.

coooolers,

Just wanted you to know that you would have our support if the project were to accomplish the following:

Integrate vtiger and frontaccounting  WITHOUT changing the core code of either vtiger or frontaccounting.

The reason this is important to us, is we would like to have the ability to take advantage of the awesome updates that both Front Accounting and Vtiger come out with in the future.

It doesn't make sense for us to try to compete against FA or vtiger with another ERP system that is a fork of both.

I think Front Accounting should specialize in what it does best, Accounting. and vtiger should specialize in CRM.
That way you get the best overall system when these two are integrated together.

I have several posts in the Front Accounting and Vtiger forum about this, but let me just summarize what needs to be programmed for vtiger and front accouting to be integrated nicely and still keep the power of being able to use vtiger and front accounting updates:

Front Accounting needs the following things:

1. Ability to add Custom Fields to the various modules, like vtiger already has now.

2. Ability to add Custom Workflows to work off of the modules, like vtiger already has now.

Vtiger needs the following things:

1. Ability to add a Task that Updates specified Fields to a specified new value  when a workflow is performed. (Right now you have to program this into your custom workflow and it can be difficult to manage.)

2. Ability to trigger a workflow when a field value is changed.  (Right now a workflow can only be triggered when the Save button is hit.)

If those things are added to vtiger, then the rest of the integration is easy because it just requires writing custom workflows for both systems that would keep the database tables in both systems in sync.

We have already done a lot of this with our own system.

We currently have vtiger and Frontaccounting working together by programming our own workarounds. That is why we already know exactly what is still needed in both systems to make the integration perfect.

We already have programming done to make a single Login for Frontaccounting and Vtiger.
It was as simple as doing some minor changes to the database config file in each system and then making our own simple login form.

We already have vtiger running multiple companies.  All that took was adding one simple table to the vtiger database and the changes we made to the database config file.

Anyways, my point is simple.  If the things that I have mentioned above are put in place, then you get the best of all the worlds.   The best CRM system and the best Accounting system fully integrated with the ability to keep supporting both vtiger and frontaccounting without trying to compete against them.   Better to cooperate and combine resources rather than to spread yourself thin.

One other last point about our system that is worth noting.
Not only does doing it our way make it possible to integrate FA and Vtiger, but we are able to integrate any system easily with FrontAccouting and Vtiger.
We currently have our website (based on Joomla/Virtuemart) integrated with Vtiger and we have our Mass Mailing System (PHP List) integrated and we have our custom POS system integrated and we have integrated other shopping cart systems like osCommerce, Magento, and Zen Cart.

So we are very anxious to have the features that I have mentioned in this post  be added to Vtiger and Front Accounting, because it would make it so we could make our integrations we already have, much more seamless and much easier to manage.
It would also make it easier for us to share our integrations with the community so others could do what we have already done and more.