Hello everyone following the CRM API stuff,
A while back there was a "Drop CRM" initiative from Copenhagen where people tried to put together a framework for people to build CRM systems on top of Drupal. At DrupalCon London a bunch of us met together and decided to go our separate ways (work that needed to be done right away for clients took precedent over trying to do something now that pleased everyone in the CRM community).
The core of the difference between the party module and the other initiatives is that the others tended to make a separate "Contact" Entity at the heart of their projects whereas we tried to imagine a way that Drupal core could do it by splitting up a "User" into a "User + A Party Entity".
We created this entity called a "Party" which was an entity that represented someone or some thing in real life. Essentially a "Party" in the legal sense (could be a person, organisation, household, etc). This did not contain any information for itself but connected all the data sets which stored information about that person together. The attached entities could be provided by lots of different modules across Drupal (The Core User Entity, Profile2, potentially subscriber entities or customer profiles) using our Data Set Controller.
This is what we are proposing to move into Drupal Core. We're planning to separate the User Entity into a "User + Account" Entities where the User can by an anonymous user without an account. Also Profile2 is going into Drupal 8 Core which we have already used for our "data sets" and so we'll possibly help that along as well.
The primary motivation of the Core developers for being involved in this is so that the comment module can handle anonymous users correctly.
This is NOT bringing a CRM system into Drupal Core. Lots of work will have to happen in contrib to turn Drupal into a full fledged CRM system. Which is a good thing because there are hundreds of different ways a "CRM" system could be built. However, I do think we want to make use of Drupal 8's fantastic plugin architecture and general flexibility so that lots of the things that we might want to do in contrib will be possible without too much insane hackery. In the google doc I am documenting all the things we will want to do in contrib and then discussion can happen about what happens in core or not...
Note this is very early days because it is still more then likely none of this will happen in drupal 8!
We will start working on this on Monday 15th of October. The Issue is here http://drupal.org/node/1806514 where we also have a google doc. If anyone wants to talk to me I am on IRC @ #drupal-crm and also available to talk to people on skype.
This is a call to the other CRM initiatives just so that you guys can get involved if you want to and need your voices heard.