Project of the Month - January 2009

Zarafa Z-Merge SugarCRM Connector

Description of project

Realtime bi-directional synchronization of SugarCRM and the Zarafa Groupware server, supporting Contacts, Meetings, Calls, Tasks, Notes and direct e-mail archival from Zarafa Webaccess. Changes are pushed to ActiveSync enabled mobiles (like the iPhone).

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

We love to work and communicate with other SugarCRM developers and integrators. Open source is nice, but we see a huge opportunity to create better solutions than proprietary vendors. SugarForge allows us to receive feedback from both businesses who implemented this and from developer perspectives. We call it: Development 3.0!

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

That was our first SugarForge project. As our first public release was in an already mature state, we received an overwhelming amount of positive responses.

What inspired you to create this project?

We wanted to create more user friendly solutions than existing closed source ones. Open source is well known for code related flexibility and stability. For the business user, we wanted to show that integration offers efficiency benefits without doubling contacts, meetings and tasks.

The open source universe holds some very good business solutions. Each solution has a very specific purpose; SugarCRM is mainly focused on being a CRM system, the Zarafa Groupware as a MS Exchange replacement which includes advanced compatibility with Blackberry, iPhone and Outlook sharing. Big commercial vendors always praise the huge benefits from being served by a single company. We want to show that open source can provide the same or even better functionalities and integrations. Our goal is to show to the end-users and other open source projects that a/their standalone solution might be very good, but that joined efforts could result in a huge multiplicator and has a big potential.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Replicating contacts and meetings from SugarCRM to Zarafa Groupware and vice versa. This was already possible without our solution by using different kinds of Outlook-Plugins, but it always required user interaction. Z-Merge replicates key information reliably in the background without any user interaction. Furthermore, if the user connects a mobile device to Zarafa Groupware, modified data is pushed to it in almost real-time.

Is there anything that the users should know about? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

In the last release we have introduced the handling of the private flag. By default, all contact and meeting information inserted in Zarafa Groupware or a connected mobile are pushed to SugarCRM. Private contacts and meetings (let's say the dinner with a girlfriend) should probably not be transferred to the company's CRM system. The user can mark these as "private" in the Zarafa system. Z-Merge takes care of keeping them private and, if they have already been replicated, to delete them.

About the installation: the user has to be aware that all the described functionality is not only provided by the SugarCRM module (zip file) available at SugarForge. Besides the SugarCRM-Connector there is also the Z-Merge Replication Agent and the Zarafa Groupware that have to be installed and configured. That makes the initial setup a bit more complex. We encourage all interested community members to try the online demo at http://zmdemo.zarafa.com first and to then to download the preconfigured virtual machine available at http://www.zarafa.com/content/z-merge-replication-framework to start getting a feeling for it.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

The project is near to a first release candidate stage. We would like to have more feedback from users on what has to be done to simplify the installation and initial setup. The actual replication works very reliably. As the configuration is not that trivial (SugarCRM, Zarafa Groupware, Z-Merge Agent), we would like to encourage more advanced users to configure it from scratch including the initial replication of both systems (initial merge).

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We are working on a more diversified version of possible relationships between contacts and accounts in SugarCRM. We encountered the necessity to link one contact to several accounts, each with a different role, location, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. We are even thinking about integrating these relationships later into the Zarafa Groupware.