CRM

Now that the Salesforce module is almost ready for a 5.x official release in its legacy package (same functionality as the already existing Drupal 4.7 official release), joshk and I, together with others on the Salesforce issue queue, have been making a battle plan for the immediate refactoring of this module to make for greater flexibility and usefulness.

We are channeling this discussion into this group on g.d.o. in the hopes of broadening the base and thereby enriching the discussion.

Our discussion has centered on two main topics:

1. How to extend the salesforce module to support alternatives to profile
2. Whether or not we should add users as "contacts" rather than "leads"

I had been looking for a way to have a two-way reference between 2 nodes. You would need this for basic CRM functionality e.g. to be able to link a person to a company or an action to a project. This way you can go to a person and see what company he is part of or go to that company and see all the people that are working in that company.

And there we have it! The barebone skeleton of what could become a fabulous gizmo that takes all the different CRMs and provides consistent, drupal-like objects and interfaces for them.

One of the main ideas behind this module was to bring some consistency to how CRMs and drupal interact. Nothing is set in stone yet, but we picked a set of fieldnames that will remain consistent in drupal regardless of what cRM you are using.

We are happy to announce that our 1.5 Beta release is now available for download. This release includes CiviMember - a new membership management component, significant memory and speed optimizations, and Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries.

Other release highlights include:
* Log and display who last updated a contact and when
* Include mapping links in Profile search results and details
* Optional CAPTCHA validation for Profile forms
* Generate mailing labels
* Attach photos, documents and other files to contacts

..You can read the roadmap release summary here: