CRM Primitives

The goal here is to come up with some way of sharing data between competing CRM implemetations (DropCRM, Kyle's or Allie's) and even CRM systems outside of drupal (CiviCRM, Salesforce, etc) or other datasharing techniques (vCards, QR codes?)

The proposed solution is to come to a comprehensive list of "crm primitives". These are basic CRM data types that all forms of contact management needs. This means at least most of the important information can be shared whilst still allowing for the flexibility of drupal (Users can create their own fields and link them to a primitives, Distributions can provide a base number of fields without having to include all the primitives that are irrelevant to them).

By coming up with a comprehensive list we can undertstand the issues faced with their implementation.

Smaller Primitives

• Name
• Address
• E-mail
• Phone
• Country

Larger Primitives

• Organisation
• Contact
• School

Discussion

• I think there are "small" and "large" primitives that in Drupal seperate into Fields and Entities. These primitives are likely to be implemented very differently a better name is needed.
• I think many of the smaller primitives should be solved at the Fields level, not CRM level. For example Address Field: http://drupal.org/project/addressfield Kind of solves much of this for addresses.
• We could turn every primitive into a special custom field. This would fit in the Drupal's UI but would also mean we'd have to add a large number of fields.
• We could build a UI on top of fields that allows us to link things to a primitive (But this is very CRM specific)
• We could build a generic UI that deals with RDFa and helps the user with a bunch of potential standards they could use for implementation. (Or helps a site builder)