Posted by yautja_cetanu on September 3, 2011 at 3:05pm
Start:
2011-09-09 15:00 - 15:30 Europe/London Organizers:
Event type:
User group meeting
A bunch of us have been going seperate ways working on a Drupal CRM solution. There are so many different ways it could be done that at this stage its best to keep it that way. But we're going to aim to meet up regularly (possibly twice a month) to do brief status updates on where we're at.
We'll meet up in #drupal-crm at 3pm GMT and then all go onto skype.
Just a recap of the different initiatives:
DropCRM guys: Yautja_cetanu and rlmumford are working on it once a week, chriscohen and joachim are quite involved in this.
CitizenKane: Building a CRM almost full time for a client, needs something that is finished
Allie Micka: Particularly interested in making the CRM data transferable.
Comments
Skype Meetup Schedule
This sounds like a great idea! I too am working on a CRM solution for Drupal.
What day(s) would you propose meeting? You mentioned 3pm GMT but did not specify a day of week. If we meet twice per month, perhaps the first and third Wednesday would work, as Wednesdays are rarely on a holiday?
Could we get a firm date/time set for the first meeting?
Thanks,
captaindav
Meeting
Hi, I'm interested too... I'm a newbie but hopefully can be helpful. My interest is with regard to maintaining a list of church members for a church website I'm creating.
Ruth
Friday 9th September
Hi ruth! I'm Jamie from the Drupal for Churches bof :D!
Captaindav
The first meeting is on friday 9th of september. Its on the group event page but I'm guessing that that information didn't get sent out in the automatic e-mail. I think you can even sign up :) (although I'm new to this). I'm sure in the future we could change round the dates for that. The reason why I went for friday is that we (Me and Rob) are only able to dedicate one day a week to working on CRM stuff and we just randomly decided to pick friday. We've got other stuff to work on so we thought we'd try and keep the day free regularly to focus on CRM things so that we could talk to people on IRC and that others might know we're around then. So thats the day we aim to be commiting actual code.
Just wondering captaindav if we met before, were you at the Drupalcon CRM sprint at all? This particular meeting is just a short "status update". However, I'm around on #drupal-crm (and #drupal and mainly #drupal-uk) throughout the week so if you wanted to chat a bit more feel free to ping me on IRC :)
Ruth, as you know, me and rob are definitely aiming to solve your particular use case! We're aiming to get something usable by 25th of September (although by usable, we are talking incredibaly basic functionality which should be fine for what you want), again ruth feel free to say hi on IRC.
Friday works great
Hi Jamie,
Friday works great for me too, I look forward to discussing my efforts with everyone on September 9th!
I was unable to participate in the Drupalcon CRM sprint, so I am new to working with everyone in the CRM group.
I have started work on a module that creates the basic entities needed for a CRM system. I was starting with a Person entity and Organization entity, using the Model module as a starting point. I am not sure if this is a duplication of other CRM related efforts.
Thanks,
captaindav
Sorry. Cannot make it but
Sorry. Cannot make it but will follow with interest.
X
X
This is a great idea! Hope to
This is a great idea! Hope to be there :)
Look Forward to it
I am working on a D7 site for a restaurant client in Seattle here.Working with Drupal and CMS coincidentally at the same time. I have worked with Salesforce briefly, and I am finding a widespread disdain for SAP, Salesforce, etc al. I think you all are onto something great, and I know my client is eager to make use of the new data we pull in.
Ryan
Seattle, WA
Ryan Michael Hell
Business Information Systems Developer
Seattle, WA 98003
ryan.h@nwtronix.com
First Meeting Notes. Next Meeting 3pm 23rd Sep
Recap of Meeting:
Participants: Allie Micka (Vauxia), CitizenKane (from Trellon), rlmumford, yautja_cetanu (me, James Abrahams), joachim
Kyle:
Joachim:
From IRC:
you mean the thing about a second table per relationtype?as any type might want that data
[03:33.19] <joachim_> basically I reckon it would do this:
[03:33.53] <joachim_> 1. when you create a rel type, it creates a denormalized table for justthat type, with 2 cols per endpoint (entity type, ent id)
[03:33.56] <joachim_> and 1 col for the rel ID
[03:34.09] <joachim_> 2) in a relation hook, add data into that table when a rel is created
[03:34.14] <joachim_> 3) delete it when a rel is deleted
[03:34.19] <joachim_> there's no need for update even!
[03:34.31] <joachim_> oh and 4 ) delete the table when the rel type is deleted
Allie
Jamie and Rob
Decided to have the same meeting again on 23rd of September at the same time 3pm on IRC and Skype.
My comments:
Is the call still on tomorrow?
It might be good to send a reminder out if that's the case.
Yes, its happening again at
Yes, its happening again at 3pm on IRC and skype. Again this is just an update.
We will start by talking a little bit about the charter and things like that. And then at least there are a few things we'd like to bring up on the day.
Summary of Meeting:Vauxia -
Summary of Meeting:
Vauxia - Has not yet managed to put time in it but has scheduled some calender time for involvement in CRM
CitizenKane - Was not able to make it but appears to be putting particular effort into getting "activites" to work
Joachim - Managed to submit a patch into the entity api and with Rob has gotten around the issue of lots of duplicated in views so work can progress.
CaptainDav - Joined us again, particularly interested in Company to Company CRM where its unlikely users will be updating their own stuff. Interested in CRM behind firewalls. Has so far considered using the model module and making contacts entities which is a similar route to CitizenKane's work. We updated him on where to find information and we may be getting further involvement.
Rivemy - Has been looking through the party module, suggested the name "partie" instead of Party and is going to be looking at making an admin ui for what Rob has done. We all reiterated the advantage of at least thinking of things in terms of "party" (even if the name changes) to make it more generic then "person" and Organisations are not people.
David Spencer - https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/375125 <--- Showed the group his pivot tracker. Whilst the group felt that g.d.o should be the main location for collaboration there is a significant amount of work put into there. There is another place for requirements http://groups.drupal.org/node/142079 here but the interface for drupal groups is not great.
Yautja_Cetanu and rlmumford:- We have been playing with CitizenKane's code and implemented it on our church website. We've got some users using it to see how things go. We've made it so that users and citizenkane's contacts can be linked using an autocomplete widget. We've also fixed the issues we've had and moving forward on our approach. We've so far found the main limitation with our system is that we want for bits of data attached to an entitiy to have different permissions (Some fields should be editable by a user, some by manager).
It seems there are 2 approaches to implementing CRM
1) CitizenKane's Approach :- mainly making use of entities. The contacts are entities and data is attached via fields
2) rlmumford and yautja_cetanu with joachim:- making use of partys and profiles2
We are trying to figure out what is the difference and advantages between these 2 approaches. We have come up with 2 personas
Andrew Tanner the vicar: - Extreme beginner end-user who is just looking for a small database for his church
Joachim:- A hardcore drupal developer putting CRM implementations for his clients.
We're making descisions based on these 2 personas but they are limited as we have very little experience in the world of business. The other thing is we discussed how User stories would be useful
Main Plan of Action
By 2 Weeks we need to decide where to put these user stories:
1) We could put them on drupal.org/projects/crm - This gives us an issue tracker which is nice. But these will never really be "Closed" as the stories drive development of everything
2) We could make a wiki page - but this has a difficult interface
3) We can have an issue tracker in a random sandbox we make to hold this stuff
4) Host it externally to Drupal - we didn't like this idea.
Need to decide by next week.
Also I have spoken to the maintainers of the crm-api group and hopefully one of us can be granted the ability to edit this group and put information at the top.
We will be meeting again at 3pm GMT 7th October.
These notes are very helpful!
Hi Jamie,
These notes are very helpful! Thank you so much for continuing to organize and follow up with these meetings. I think that time will show that this is the key to a forward-moving and productive CRM initiative(s)!
I have an idea for future meetings: can you make a new event as part of your followup for the current one, and then add the notes to that meeting when it happens? Doing so will keep each meeting on the CRM API sidebar, and it will keeps the notes and discussions in context week by week, leaves the most current discussion at the top of the CRM-API river of news, and makes the missing recurring functionality on GDO a feature :)
Sounds good, think thats a
Sounds good, think thats a good idea. Will remind people and may attract newcomers :)
It does mean to see an evolution of events it will be a bit more difficult... but I don't think thats a big deal.