State of CRM projects

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Building a CRM system that is flexible enough for everyone, yet supportable for the long haul is a pretty big challenge. There are several different development initiatives, each with a different perspective on the problems, and each with a different set of developers.

In the interest of forward progress, we've agreed that it is OK to continue developing these projects independently, even though they might duplicate or even conflict with each other. But each of these developers values the idea of coming together to find common ground and areas for collaboration. There is a regularly-scheduled meeting for CRM developers to discuss their progress and ideas.

Getting involved

Everyone: If you are interested in following the progress of these CRM projects, please join the CRM group on groups.drupal.org. Announcements, invitations to test new releases, and other end user-oriented updates will be posted here.

Developers: Please join the CRM group and the CRM API group. This will help you understand and participate in conversations about users needs, and also give you a place to comfortably discuss parties and entities and API's and use other foul-sounding language as you see fit :). If you are actively working on a project and would like to start collaborating with other CRM developers, please add/update your project status on this wiki and join the regular calls.

Participating projects

We try to keep this section up-to-date as a definitive current state of each project.

Party Module:- This iniative has a "party" entity which is just the generic entity for "stuff" in the CRM. A Party can be an individual, organisation, family, etc. It is using the Profile2 module to store all the data. Whilst Parties can be related to a user they do not have to be. We are currently working on building views to view this information and working on the concept of Data Sets and Party Pieces [#1302682]. The next step is Party Hats are different types of individuals (Teacher, Developer, Student) that can be both placed on a party and taken off later. Most of the work here is conducted by Joachim and rlmumford although CaptainDav is about to get involved.
Development on this project can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/party

Contact Module:- This is an fully entity-based approach to CRM. There is a contact entity where fields can be attached to it like any other entity. A UI has been fleshed out to view contacts, add contacts and create multiple contact types. Everything in this iniative is based on revisions and so changes to data is also stored. Currently they are working on "activities" so that different methods of interacting with contacts (such as a phone call) can be recorded.
Development on this project can be found here: http://drupal.org/sandbox/citizenkane/1260982

Red Hen CRM:- RedHen CRM is similar to CRM Core in that it bundles its own custom entity types for contacts, organizations, and affiliations. It provides a set of developer tools and APIs for building custom CRM solutions. The feature set is largely based around "association management" needs. It provides tight integration with the Entity Registrations module. It also ships with "groups" functionality similar to Organic Groups, as well as an "engagement scoring" feature. A sandbox install profile can be found at: http://drupal.org/project/redhen_demo. You can learn more at: http://thinkshout.com/blog/2012/06/sean/redhen-crm-part-1

Comments

I'll leave it as it is for

yautja_cetanu's picture

I'll leave it as it is for the moment but I think I might put a very short summary of the "State of each" project at the very top soon so it will appear on each group page at a glance.

Right now it would read:

Party Module: Doesn't do anything yet (will on friday)
Contact Module: Can add contacts, contact types, have revisions and work is on activities.

Red Hen CRM

Mick E's picture

I am just getting started but would be inerested in this initiative "Red Hen CRM:- Not much is known about this iniative". It would be good if Red Hen could gain some weight.

Yeah, we've just started

yautja_cetanu's picture

Yeah, we've just started talking, but there is not much to report apart from this: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179339

RedHen update

seanberto's picture

Hi folks,

Because abstraction of RedHen CRM as a contributed solution is being paid for by our client work, we've been a bit heads down these last few months and have not been engaged in this group. Commits to RedHen are happening on a daily basis and we will be rolling our our first client sites with this solution this summer.

As of today, a handful of nonprofit distros are looking to integrate with RedHen. There's still a lot of code to be written, but we feel strongly that the project provides some pretty unique solutions to common CRM-related problems in Drupal. Please bare with our minimal communication at the moment - and check out our code!

Cheers,
Sean from ThinkShout, Inc (the RedHen team)

RedHen CRM demo install profile

seanberto's picture

Due to some versioning changes, this sandbox was offline for a while - but now it's back up and running.

If you want to check out RedHen CRM, try this demo install profile:

http://drupal.org/sandbox/seanberto/1490420

Cool thanks for the heads up

yautja_cetanu's picture

Cool thanks for the heads up sean! :)

Cool thanks for the heads up

yautja_cetanu's picture

Cool thanks for the heads up sean! :)

Cool thanks for the heads up

yautja_cetanu's picture

Cool thanks for the heads up sean! :)

ERPAL

drupal a11y's picture

I am just new to this group, but did anyone recognize the ERPAL project?
http://drupal.org/project/erpal

It´s from a german company and maybe you should check where to combine the forces and work.

For me especially the DMS / DAM is an issue where Drupal should be improved a lot.

Diversity is a good thing!

seanberto's picture

"CRM", "ERP", "Project Management Tools" - these are all very broadly defined features/functionality. At this point, the maintainers of CRM Core and RedHen CRM agree that diversity in approaches to native CRM, with continual dialog between developers of course, is a good thing.

See the discussion at:

http://drupal.org/node/1504758.

We are of course excited to see ERPAL develop and grow!

CRM API

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