Project of the Month - February 2011

SugarCRM - MAS90 Integration Application

Description of project

This application synchronizes customers, inventory items, customer sales history, inventory sales history, quotes, and sales orders between SugarCRM and MAS 90 and MAS 200.

Trove Info

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

We think Sugar is a spectacular product, and one of its strengths is the strength of the developer community. The more we contribute to the community, the stronger the community becomes, and the more we get out of it in terms of education and in terms of our ability to provide creative solutions to clients. We believe in karma. If you give, you get.

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

Our SugarCRM-MAS90 Integration application is the first. Next will be our integration of SugarCRM with Constant Contact. After that will be integration with several other accounting & ERP software packages.

What inspired you to create this project?

We've been involved in the Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 community for 20 years. There is a huge installed based crying out for a feature-rich, customizable, integrated, cloud-based CRM solution. We're master developers in the MAS90 product line, and it made sense to develop the same approach with Sugar.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Sugar users need visibility into the financial performance of their customers. Our integration puts valuable customer sales history and product sales history into the hands of salespeople using Sugar to manage their pipelines. In addition, it streamlines workflow by automatically synchronizing customers, products, quotes, and orders between Sugar and MAS90 (the accounting and ERP software).

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

The advantage of our product is that it doesn't require anything special in Sugar or any special add-ons for MAS90. Once you install it, it just works. It can be launched manually or set on a scheduler to run with any frequency the user needs. Because we're extremely knowledgable about both the ERP side and the CRM side, we're frequently adding new features to the product. In addition, because we're also really close to our clients, we're able to roll out the new features quickly and effectively.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

We've seen community participation spark growth in many software packages over the years. The bigger the community participation is, the more credibility Sugar will have in the marketplace and the stronger its ability to compete will be. A strong and vibrant developer community is one aspect of almost every successful software company. In addition, the karma thing. The more you contribute, the more you get back.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

We're working on integration with Constant Contact and integration with several other accounting & ERP software packages.