Topic: FA with SugarCRM intergration

Hi All,
My company currently uses MYOB for overall company accounting, and it is slow and not totally reliable to use and it is MSWindows based.  I saw FA and like it. It is clean, and would suit everything we need in accounting. We are using SugarCRM for our sales team and they like using (dont wish to change)  and mixing it with MyWorkSpace for the production..  We as you can see it is a mess of non compatibility.  This leads to headaches for me, (IT mananger running Ubuntu server.. my choice), which offer comes back to haunt me.  OK now you know the back ground.

My question is, I would like to know if anyone has or if any one knows, or possibly if the integration of FA and SugarCRM.  What would need to be done, and what would be the possibility if needed to remove the module of sales and place SugarCRM into the system as an integration of the two running PHP5 and MySQL on Apache2 which is currently running.

Thank you for any help, as I am new to FA and would like to integrate this into our company.

Regards,
Sky..

Re: FA with SugarCRM intergration

As you may know SugarCRM has an extraordinarily complex database structure with meaningless keys, high levels of database normalisation and a very complex sales function and table structure. The systems are worlds apart in architecture and functionality : to be honest, I don't think the job is easily possible or commercially practical.

Re: FA with SugarCRM intergration

You have not mentioned in detail what needs to get done in your integration.

There  should normally be only minimal points of integration/data interchange between FA and Sugar CRM. If this is the case 'integration' should be possible.

You may need only to sync basic customer master data and a few additional fields between the 2 applications.

For this you can probably modify Sugar CRM to create the Customer data in FA database or use a connector (if available).

Re: FA with SugarCRM intergration

I think the level of integration is up to you.

For example in the osCommerce interface I support for following actions:

Import new osC Customers
Import new osC Orders
Check Prices
Update Prices

The FA Module basically Pulls data from the osC database.

This was easily done from FA because osC's database structure is compact and easy to work with in pure SQL.
It sounds like SugarCRM is best accessed from within it's own environment.

Tom

Re: FA with SugarCRM intergration

In a previous situation we synced our front office system with Goldmine. the front office was the master.
1. Customers added to the master system appeared in Goldmine
2. Quotes done in Master system apeared as Opportunities in Goldmine
3. When Quotes were converted to jobs, the opportunity was marked as won in Goldmine
4. When Quotes were marked as lost in the master system, the Opportunity was marked as lost in Goldmine

All opportuinty followup was done in Goldmine. All marketing campaings/follow up letters done in Goldmine.

Anyway, something like that would fairly closely define minimal interface betwen FA and a CRM system like Sugar.

Perosnally, I have found Sugar to be terribly slow and unresponsive to use when compared with FA whose speed in the interface is first class.

The CSV import features of Sugar are very comprehensive so perhaps even creating import files in FA would be a good start.

[b]RodW[/b]
Brisbane, QLD, Australia