Projects of the Month - January 2007

January's Project of the Month is more like 40 Projects of the Month. This is the number of Sugar projects for which Ken Brill is either directly or indirectly associated. Quite an amazing accomplishment and yet, according to Ken, the best is yet to come.

In this interview we discuss how Ken managed to achieve his legendary status in the Sugar community. Among the topics we address are:

• How Ken interacts with other Sugar community developers, for example like the Lampada folks (David O'Keefe) who created the Brazillian language pack
• That Ken has made a cottage industry of refactoring projects to be upgrade safe and to interact cleanly with other modules using the logic hooks that Max promoted heavily in our first SDUG and other techniques. This includes the Gantt project and Power Prospecting modules that Ken has assumed leadership over.
• Ken's interaction with people worldwide and the satisfaction he derives from working with other Sugar community on a global basis.
• A discussion of Commodores, Amigas, bulletin boards and ... Sugar 2.5.
• How Ken will provide commercial versions of some of his projects on SugarExchange
• How "SugarExport", a spin-off of "SugarPrint", is in heavy demand but that Teams OS is still the most fun to work on.
• While Sugar's come a long way towards supporting upgrade-safe modules, but that metadriven Detail/List/EditViews (planned for Release 5.0) will be a significant boost.
• How it'd be nice to see more themes produced by the Community.
• The way that weekends are again fun and challenging and how Ken's looking forward to more opportunities in the future.

Ken's Projects

Screenshot Not Available	Google Calendar Integration Google Calendar integration into SugarCRM
Screenshot Not Available	CRMUpgrades SugarPrint SugarPrint replaces the default SugarCRM 'Print' function. It creates better formatted HTML or PDF printouts from your Sugar data.
Screenshot Not Available	SugarCRM Project
	CRMUpgrades: Google Maps A Module that adds GOOGLE maps to your accounts and contacts WITHOUT overwriting your customized detail pages!
	Ken Brill: MyBirthdayDashlet A dashlet that displays contacts birthdays. It is upgrade safe and OnDemand compliant and compatible with all versions of SugarCRM.
Screenshot Not Available	Project Module Upgrades My personal Project module enhancements.
	CRMUpgrades: In/Out Board A Nice simple in-out board upgrade. Works from the Employee Module and is now TeamsOS aware.
Screenshot Not Available	SugarCubed: Admin Tools A collection of admin related tools and upgrades.
Screenshot Not Available	SugarVacuum - Helps Sugar clean up It did not take long to find that Sugar does not always clean up after itself. So I developed this script that can be run before the prune function to help keep a Sugar install lean and clean.
	TitleBar Changer This module changes the titlebar of SugarCRM to reflect what module you are in and what record you are looking at. In version 3.0 it also alters the TitleBar icon for each module.
	CRMUpgrades: SugarSearch Upgrades to all Advanced Search Panes. I have added date ranges, Soundex searches and a complete rewrite of how sugar searches phone numbers. Check out the development site at http://sugarbeta.multi.com
Screenshot Not Available	Listview Quicklinks Upgrade Adds 4 icons to each line of the listviews for Leads and Opportunities
	CRMUpgrades: FCKEditor Upgrade Adds the FCKEditor to all TextAreas in SugarCRM
	Module Enhancements Various upgrades
	SugarCRM Cleaning and Optimizing Tools These tools will help you keep your SugarCRM running smoothly.
	Sugar Open Source Documentation SugarCRM user manuals, developer guides, installation notes and more.
	Ken Brill: HomePage Manager Allows you to create a default home page for new users adding the dashlets that you want to use in the order that you want them to show up. Also allows you to change everyones home page (add dashlets, reorganize them whatever) based of of a template.
	Language Sync Tool A tool to help language translators to create distributable language packs
Screenshot Not Available	SugarSOAP Debugging Tools Allow the SOAP interface to produce debugging information in the log file. Will log all SOAP commands to the SugarCRM.log file at 'warn' level.
Screenshot Not Available	SweetTools SweetTools is probably the greatest module ever for the novice or semi-professional SugarCRM administrator. SweetTools seamlessly installs phpMyAdmin a MySQL browser interface, eXtplorer a file browser and a copy of phpinfo() onto your SugarCRM system.