RFQ for Higher-ed CRM project based on Drupal

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Anonymous's picture

Cal State Monterey Bay is looking for a great team to help with a CRM project for managing student relationships. Our team is committed to Drupal; however, we just have so many projects that we need your help to get this one out the door!

We are expecting to release this project as an open-source install profile after we've tested it on our campus, and we hope that interested firms are equally excited to do work that will benefit both our campus and other universities and colleges as well.

Note that this is just an RFQ (Request for Quotation), so your proposal should really focus on who you are, why you are great, and giving an accurate picture of how much working with you will cost. We don't expect large proposals.

Project Overview

California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) seeks a professional firm to develop a Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool for tasks, notifications and case management to track student communication and progress. The project should be developed using Drupal, a framework the campus has adopted for all web projects. The CRM should be focused on a simple, accessible (i.e. Section 508), and intuitive interface, and should meet the functional requirements outlined in this RFQ. The firm should also deliver the project as a complete Drupal install profile that could be released as open-source software to the community. The university already retains staff knowledgeable in managing and developing Drupal projects, and will be actively involved in the development process.California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) seeks a professional firm to develop a Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool for tasks, notifications and case management to track student communication and progress. The project should be developed using Drupal, a framework the campus has adopted for all web projects. The CRM should be focused on a simple, accessible (i.e. Section 508), and intuitive interface, and should meet the functional requirements outlined in this RFQ. The firm should also deliver the project as a complete Drupal “install profile” that could be released as open-source software to the community. The university already retains staff knowledgeable in managing and developing Drupal projects, and will be actively involved in the development process.

Read the full RFQ and other documents

Bids are due on Friday, September 23, 2011, 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

If you have any questions regarding this bid, please contact Greg Pool (webfolk+crmbid@csumb.edu).

Comments

Very interesting project

jromine's picture

This project looks very interesting. We've been building something similar in Drupal 6 at UC Irvine, and it'd be great to be able to use what you come up with.

John Romine

CiviCRM team is a good fit for your project

vtitarchuk's picture

Have you considered to take CiviCRM as base Drupal module for your project? The developers of CiviCRM have a great team and would love to create some custom modules according to your specifications.

CiviCRM already has basic CRM with Case Management, but no Project Management with Tasks that will enable instructors to use it as a tool for keeping students on track with their assignments and communications.

CiviCRM is a very mature Drupal module. Also, it would be nice for community to get an educational version of CiviCRM as a profile, because it take so much work customizing CiviCRM for educational use.

You should definitely make a more specific Statement of Work for your project, because CiviCRM team would need details to give you an estimate.

Also, some of their staff (lobo) is in S.F. Perhaps,their visit to your campus for your staff's training might be an option.

I highly recommend you consider them, because they have been working on it over seven year or more.

ServanTek
Serving with technology
http://servantek.org.ua

Thanks

kevee's picture

Thanks, vtitarchuk,

We have had experience with Civi in the past for fundraising and don't believe it's a very good fit for our project. We are really focusing here on a unified and simple user interface, SIS integration, and lots of custom case management work. Civi seems very tuned to it's use case and not very flexible if you want to do other things outside of that box. Especially since most of it's functionality is stuff we're I'm open to folks saying they can do all this in Civi, but it might be more work to force Civi to do this instead of building on core.

Plus we're really hoping this can be a D7 project ;)

The scope of work is all covered in those two docs linked to in the post.

Curious as to why u believe that ..

lobo's picture

Curious as to why u believe that civicrm is not a good fit for the project.

Would appreciate your feedback and comments as to why u think its very tuned to its use case and not very flexible.

Civi 4.0.x does integrate quite nicely with drupal 7. We also have some pretty deep integration with Views3, Rules and WebForm which gives folks a lot more flexibility from drupal land :)

lobo

Revisit Civi

DavidMoreton's picture

Hi Kevee
I'd suggest you revisit Civi: it's moved on a long way in the last couple of years and has an improved UI and functionality. It's capable of pretty much all your requirements without much customisation, has awesome views and rules integration with Drupal plus a load of other modules that tighten that integration in ways you may not need right now. The record view layout you suggest would need some fairly simple template customisation and you might want to modify some other screens to tie in further with bits of your Drupal install for a really unified UI. It does case management and tasks (activities) out of the box, requires minimal config to pick up emails sent to a contact and cc'd to it. It also has a good API to expose what you need to other systems such as your SIS or to custom Drupal modules you might develop.
Try it out at
http://d7.demo.civicrm.org/
or
http://civisites.com/
where you can actually play with your own site for a while and set up custom fields etc. - like DrupalGardens

Hope that's helpful

DaveM

To clarify: we are not

kevee's picture

To clarify: we are not against using CiviCRM for this project, and we dont' explicitly mention or exclude CiviCRM from either our project specs or our RFQ. We've revisited CiviCRM and still believe that our needs are so simple in certain areas and yet complex in other areas that are not covered by Civi that it's possible it might no be a good fit; however, we're focusing here on the functionality meeting our needs, and whatever solution works is fine by us.

D7 is fine for CiviCRM

petednz's picture

Hi kevee - CiviCRM 4.x is built and stable for Drupal 7 so no problems there. Will take a look through your docs.

pete davis : fuzion : connect + campaign + communicate

reliability's picture

David Moreton assessment of the relative value of the CIviCRM API may be need to be revisited in light of the latest assessment by the API's core developer.

CiviCRM API vulnerabilities are outlined in a rather frank assessment, entitled, "What's the point of the API" . The post seems to question the durability and sustainability of the API without additional support.

API reliability

eileenmcnaughton's picture

Hi,

I see that my post has been highlighted above

"The post seems to question the durability and sustainability of the API without additional support."

I think that the durabilty & sustainability of the CiviCRM API, like any open source project is reliant on support & time commitment. And yes, we need more support in order to maintain the api - not so much in terms of more people on the API team or short-term crises - but in terms of people implementing API changes when they make other changes.

However, there are a number of metrics around showing that developer involvement with CiviCRM has been steadily rising - and it was obvious at the last CiviCon that the API is being heavily used and we are seeing patches committed regularly.

The API is also heavily tested & the core api functions have very high code coverage.

http://tests.dev.civicrm.org/trunk/results-api_v3/

I posted the question about the point of the API because to my thinking the key objective of the API is to provide external consistency when the schema / internal code changes. So, to my thinking anyone who makes a change that would affect the API inputs and outputs should also patch the API so that the inputs and outputs are unchanged. At the moment I don't seem to have convinced everyone else of this and am having to try to play watchdog on it.

There is definitely room for improvement in the API and in our soliciting buy-in for what we are trying to achieve with it.

However, I don't think that should constitute concern with the reliability as the original team of people who created the API v3 are still involved and more people have become involved.

Given that the account used

bonobo's picture

Given that the account used to create the comment is about 4 hours old at this point and is pretty anonymous, it raises some questions about the motives of the poster. Given the level of competition in the CRM space, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the poster has a vested interest here. Knowing more information about the poster, and their rationale for getting into the conversation, would help provide some background.

Personally, I'm always glad to see a software project engage in candid, open analyses about areas where they would like to improve. So, kudos to the Civi team for keeping this conversation open and transparent.