Project of the Month - February 2007

Asertiva Thunderbird Extension for Sugar

Description of project

Trove Info

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

After trying some CRM tools in the market, we found that Sugar Open Source was the one that had almost everything we needed. It's a powerful tool, easy to manage, stable and the most importantly open source.

As we have done before when we got involved with other open source projects, it was our desire to return our own contributions to the project, hoping that it will also benefit the community.

One of the great things about contributing is knowing that we are helping Sugar Open Source become a better product.

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

We started a new project: ASERTIVA FIREFOX EXTENSION FOR SUGAR, with the intention of bringing some of the benefits that the extension provides to the THUNDERBIRD, to another commonly used application.

It is our intention to contribute to some of the following projects. Teams Open Source: - Provides a higher level of security

ICal Match: - Allows calendaring synchronization

Additionally, we already are active members of the DYONISOS 4 SugarCRM, at SourceForge.net, which is leaded by another member of the Giuseppe Platania Community. If you are interested in it, you may find additional information for the project at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dyonisos

What inspired you to create this project?

Mozilla Thunderbird is the email application that everybody uses at ASERTIVA. Due to the absence of an interface that allows it to work with SugarCRM, we decided to start a project that would allow all the basic tasks to be completed.

ASERTIVA THUNDERBIRD EXTENSION FOR SUGAR, now known as SugarBird, started as an inner project for Asertiva Company, depending on the different functions we achieved, it would eventually become one of our new products.

Actually the extension is an "addon", which is very important to the services that Asertiva provides to its costumers, besides giving support to different computer platforms like Apple and Linux.

It is worth mentioning that the application has almost been in production for one year and few months.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Email is probably the most important tool in the process of exchange of information between companies and their customers. SugarBird allows users to connect the email application they usually use with Sugar Open Source, directly. Making it easier to provide Sugar Open Source with all the information it needs, in an almost automatical way and without much effort.

SugarBird allows the fast creation of any Sugar Open Source object without entering the system.

It is possible to import all contacts from Sugar Open Source lists to Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as modify and synchronize them. Always keeping the same actualized information. SugarBird allows us to have the contact and leads information any time we need it.

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

SugarBird provides an important amount of features that allow users to work efficiently:

• At the moment we import an email, SugarBird, not only imports the email content text, but also allows to:
  • Associate emails (based on the sender's adress) with a contact, account, case, etc. After searching, hold down the CTRL key, and selected one or more elements from the search results; the email will be associated with all the Sugar Open Source objects selected.
  • It is possible to send the attached elements, selected, one by one, without the need to install any additional component on the server.
  • Before sending email, the user may edit the subject and content, not only at its text version but also the HTML too.
  • Users can include additional information such as comments related to the selected email, allowing it to be identified easily.
• It allows the fast creation of Sugar Open Source objects, in almost all of the modules within Sugar Open Source, without the need to login into the system. It's as easy as creating a new ThunderBird contact.
• It provides an online contacts address book, told in another way, the user may contact and search the email addresses available to Sugar Open Source at the very instant they send their emails, and select them to be sent as part of the message TO, CC, or BCC ( Online Address Book feature ).
• For users that work offline. SugarBird allows them to import all available contacts to Sugar Open Source, and to check them (optional) for the next synchronization
• SugarBird allows checking and synchronization of contacts, keeping them always actualized at the moment a connection is done.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Even though community had to wait a long time before being able to use the first public version of the extension, SugarBird has been well received, tested and used widely. Despite the efforts to make it the as stable as possible, it was with the help of the community that we have detected and solved much of the problems that we would not be able to solve otherwise.

It is important that users report any troubles they experience or leave comments of their needs or features they would like to see in SugarBird. It has been with great effort that we have tried to include the demanded features, some of which we plan on testing.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

Asertiva has a group of private modules developed for our own use and for our customers that will be released very soon for the benefit of the community.

We hope to complete the development of calendar support options that provides the fusion of Mozilla Thunderbird - Mozilla Lightning in future versions of SugarBird.

We also have maybe developing a module that allows instant messaging with SugarCRM, possibly with the use of a jabber technology.