CRM

Are any of you CRM gurus attending the Oct 14 PNW Summit meeting? I'm surprised to not see any proposed sessions related to CRM development/integration.

I'm involved in CRM integration for churches/nonprofits, initially using CiviCRM but want to hear from the voice of experience and see a comparison of strengths/weaknesses of the upcoming solutions (Red Hen, dropCRM, churches CRM, etc) vs established ones like CiviCRM. As a newcomer to the CRM discussion, I'm looking for a bird's eye view of what's happening.

Any chance of a meetup in Portland? Will CiviCRM have a presence?

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.

I would like to propose the following approach to a Drupal based CRM solution:

Functionality would be provided by three projects as follows:

1. CRM-Biz: Features needed by organizations that market a product.
2. CRM-NP: Features needed by non-profit organizations.
3. CRM-Common: Features common to both CRM-Biz and CRM-NP.

This would be a pure Drupal solution, with the goal of growing the projects into robust, full featured, CRM products.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this approach?

Olás
Gostaria de saber as vossas opiniões sobre estes temas no Drupal:

1) Gestão de equipas e projectos
2) CRM
3) ERP

Presentemente é possível implementar todos eles, de várias maneiras, com menor ou maior funcionalidade e dificuldade.

Win a free copy of the Using CiviCRM book by participating in Likesh's contest at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,19378.0.html.

If anyone's interested, xTuple has done quite a bit of integration between Drupal and our own open source ERP system (which has been the #1 most active project on Sourceforge for almost two years). It's productized as the xTuple Web Portal, and includes Customer Support functionality integrating with a CRM backend, and Business to Business Sales for order management. There's also an Ubercart connector for business to consumer shopping cart applications.

Cheers,
Ned Lilly

CEO, xTuple
www.xtuple.com

Hi all. I'm now just joining this group and wish I had been at DrupalCon Copenhagen to see its inception. I am inquiring as to the status of this project. I see that there's been much discussion on its architecture (http://groups.drupal.org/node/89779) and goals (http://groups.drupal.org/node/92294), and issues raised regarding whether this should be a collection of modules or an actual API to achieve basic CRM functionality. But has there been a consensus reached as to which direction to take, and has any development been done so far?

I'm doing some research on the various CMS options out there that integrate with SalesForce. What I'd like is a CMS that can be hosted outside the Force servers (so Force Sites isn't really an option), but that allows both pushing and pulling information to/from the SF database.

One of my favorite clients are looking to migrate their contact information (address, email, etc) database from an MS Access database (a jet-based database with the Access-based GUI, bless their hearts) to something more robust. They also wish to move a Drupal 5-based contact information (who called whom, when, where and the results of the contact) database and merge the two models into one solution, as we current have two address databases. Sounds like low-hanging fruit, given what a disaster the jet database is. BUT, this is a golden opportunity to rework the business model to incorporate standard best practices into what is essentially a Customer Relationship Management problem and solution.

My employer is currently looking at CRMs to act as a membership database for our organization. We are a non-profit, membership organization. I am most familiar with CiviCRM and although I like that it is geared towards non-profits and not sales organizations, I'm not sure if it is the best choice for us in terms of other functionality.

Some of the key features we're looking for:

• The ability to generate a report of incomplete or out-of-date fields for contacts so we can solicit focused updates from contacts