Last Tuesday I did a 20 minute demo of RedHen CRM at the PDUG meetup here in PDX.
This demo was based upon a sandbox sample install profile (and make file) at:
http://drupal.org/sandbox/seanberto/1490420
We'd love for you to check out the project. The sandbox is a lot like Commerce Kickstarter, in that it simply provides an example of what you can do with RedHen.
A quick run down of what you might want to check out in the distro:
- Ability to manage custom entity bundles for contacts and organizations.
- Ability to add fields to these entity bundles.
- The custom "RedHen email" field (similar to the email field in CiviCRM)
- EFQ-based listings of contacts and organizations.
- Ability to manage relationships between contacts and other contacts, organizations and other organizations, and contacts and organizations.
- Integration between contact records and Drupal user accounts.
- Ability to manage custom entity bundles for both individual and organizational memberships.
- Ability to set Drupal user roles based upon both individual and organizational membership status.
- Fieldable "notes" system.
- Customizable "engagement scoring" feature.
- Integration with Entity Registrations module (allowing anonymous event registrations to be tracked in the CRM)
- Ability to "groupify" organization entities (think "organic groups")
We're still working out some of the kinks in RedHen CRM - particularly related to some of the more complex features, such as setting Drupal user roles based upon a contact record's relationship to an organizational record associated with one or more organizational memberships. (Doesn't that just hurt your brain....) That said, RedHen is stabilizing quickly and we have our first production sites launching on it in the next 4-8 weeks.
Comments
Very cool, looking forward to
Very cool, looking forward to seeing this in a complete release guys!
Great! and a question about features
I am so glad this is finally coming together, and really looking forward to getting this onto our production site, even if it is just in beta at that point.
I really need to know something that I haven't been able to find out yet: Are there going to be built in features for tracking leads and a standard sales process?
From the playing I've done with the dev version so far, it seems like the priority is replicating the non-profit focused nature of CiviCRM. However, if that were all I wanted, I feel like CiviCRM is pretty mature and effective at this point.
I'm looking for a CRM that can help our company and other clients get a handle on the critical tasks of sales management and customer relations management. It's becoming untenable to use a million apps and adding something like SalesForce or SugarCRM just adds too much overhead to operational logistics.
Is RedHen going to meet this kind of need?
Yes, it should handle this now - with some configuration
ThinkShout's first priority (based upon our own client needs) is to provide a suite of "association management" (AMS) features for nonprofits. You are right that a lot of the functionality we've developed is already baked into CiviCRM. But then, there are also a lot of limitations to CiviCRM, such as the fact that it requires setting up and configuring a separate application, theming across CiviCRM and Drupal forms is extra work, etc. Especially with the increased importance of responsive design and mobile - having public-facing CRM features built natively into your Drupal site presents a lot of opportunities.
Even though we're currently focused on nonprofit use cases, RedHen is a great starting point for sales pipeline management. Check out the notes/engagement scoring features. Out of the box, you could use these tools to "score" incoming leads as they move through your sales workflow. Our engagement scoring feature also has an API, so you could extend it to create a "case management" or "opportunity management" feature. (This is on our radar too - but we need to tighten up the core feature set first.)
One final point - we're also using RedHen as an integration point with 3rd-party CRMs, such as Salesforce. Our thinking is that RedHen can provide a lightweight front-end for 3rd-party integrations. This could lead to all sorts of great opportunities, such as linking in with other Salesforce integration services (like SF's QuickBooks integration).
Okay
Well, it's good to hear the process, and I'm encouraged and excited to hear things are really hitting some big milestones now.
I am disappointed there isn't a sales-focused feature right on the horizon. In my mind, things like, say, order lists in Commerce, are easy to build DIY in Views -- b/c I know what I want them to have on it.
But sales workflow is actually a "thing" -- it's a standard process with best practices -- and worse practices. It's a perfect example of a place where users can benefit from it being turnkey. Otherwise, you can spend a lifetime trying to build an interface for it yourself -- or worse, not have the experience to know that there is more of an interface to build that you haven't -- and you will experience a concrete loss of sales and revenue. We're not expecting every site to build its own ecommerce, yet there is no bonafide sales solution from within Drupal.
Plus, some of the features of this kind of use case can't simply be built using views -- it really does require developing modules to add the functionality, like you are doing with AMS. I'm not in a position to do that kind of programming.
I have not yet taken on the task of paying for Sugar or Salesforce and basically devoting months to "ripping it off" so there's a Drupal version of it. Any chance anyone in your team is planning to build in sales management workflow -- even if it's a few months from now?
Or are you saying you think the tools provided by RedHen will allow one to custom configure those kinds of Views and other UI right away without custom developing additional modules?
We're likely to build out a pipeline management submodule...
...at some point. ;)
Or, if someone would like to contribute a solution, that would be great too.
Please feel free to ping me offline if you are interested in sponsoring that work, which would allow us to focus on it more in the short term. I'd imagine that a first pass at a pipeline module would require ~20-30 hours of development by a developer who's familiar with how RedHen's setup.
Thanks for the feedback!
Really Interested in this project, great stuff
Hi Sean,
This project looks great, I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves. I was looking at the project, and at the red hen logo and thought there was just one thing that it needed. The hen should be drupalized. 8) Hope this isn't annoying, I was messing around in photoshop and added the druplicon goggles to the hen, and adjusted the wing slightly to accomodate the goggles.
I like it!
Very cool - looks good to me!
That's really fun
Thanks Dustin,
That's pretty clever! That said, /not/ branding RedHen as a Drupal product was an intentional choice - and an attempt to broaden our messaging beyond the Drupal community. Don't get me wrong, we love the Drupalicon. But we're also pretty happy with our bird and the work of our design partners @ Muscle + Bone:
http://musclebonedesign.com/
Again, thanks for taking a strong interest in the project!!
Glad you liked it.
I figured that it would be a fun thing rather than a business choice. Makes sense to brand something for a larger audience than just a Drupal crowd. Is there a story about the naming? Something about the sky falling I hope. 8)
BTW, I shared RedHen with our members at the SacDUG tonight and there are some people really interested in it. One of our members even commented that she hoped it was good so her company wouldn't have to spin one up from scratch. Keep up the good work.
Dustin
The name originated with the
The name originated with the story of the Little Red Hen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Hen
Ahhh right....
I was getting my hens all mixed up. I know this story. Doing the work and enjoying the benefits. Gotcha. 8)
Yes, thanks to Sarah P for the naming inspiration!
And that's great to hear that you demo'd RedHen to your user group, Dustin.
Now that RedHen is largely stable and about ready to go into production, we'll be doing a lot of community documentation. We'd love to demo the tools to other developers/teams/user groups that are interested. Just ping me offline.
Cheers,
S
Drupal username and password for redhen demo
I downloaded the demo and when I used my drupal UN and PW I was denied. Am I doing something wrong?
Perhaps, Steve...
The demo's being used by a lot of folks - and we rebuild our sites with it every day. Please hit the D.O. issue queue with any questions you might have. I'm sure that folks would be happy to help!
Cheers,
Sean Larkin