Project of the Month - June 2006

JasperReport for SugarCRM

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?

I've been involved in open source projects for some time now, and I believe that community is everything. Open source projects need a vibrant community to succeed. An obvious corollary to this is that if there are projects you really like, you should contribute if you can so everybody can benefit. I like what the SugarCRM team has done both as a project SugarCRM itselft and as business in pioneering the open source application market.

The benefits are straight forward. I'm enjoying working with SugarCRM users, finding out what they want to see added to the project, what they like, what they dislike. And of course I get to encourage folks to use JasperReports.

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

This is the only project on SugarForge for which I'm the principal developer. I am involved with several projects on SourceForge though.

What inspired you to create this project?

SugarCRM has a need for highly formatted reports. I've been in the data management and presentation space as a developer for over 20 years, and actually presenting data in a useful way is still a hard problem. CRM applications, by their nature, collect a ton of data and so reporting becomes more and more important the more you use them. You need to answer key questions such as "How is my current sales quarter shaping up" and "How is the call center doing", and you need to be able to share the answers with other folks. That is reporting.

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.

One think I'd like to emphasize is that the JasperReports for SugarCRM is not a closed system - the set of reports that I've included is just a getting started point. You can use a WYSIWYG tool like iReport to create additional reports and upload them to the system. In fact, I'm encouraging the folks using the project to contribute reports to cover other modules inside of SugarCRM, since the initial set is pretty focused on sales.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Don't feel you need to be a developer to participate. All users can work on language packs, create new reports, etc.

Oh boy, I've got to finish this project first. Right now its a report server but not a SugarCRM module. Then I'll consider working on analytics for SugarCRM.