Project of the Month - June 2010

SugarEE - ExpressionEngine Module

Description of project

SugarEE is an ExpressionEngine module for SugarCRM; because, some stuff just doesn't belong in your CMS. Often times the data in your CMS is the same data stored in Sugar. Using the Sugar API, SugarEE enables you to display CRM data on your website.

Trove Info

What inspired you to create this project?

Many of my clients use both SugarCRM and ExpressionEngine (my content management system of choice). Often times data that lives in CRM also needs to live on the website, and there is no reason for the data to live in both places. So, I built SugarEE. SugarEE lets me easily pull SugarCRM data through to the website. When someone edits the data in SugarCRM, the website gets updated as well.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

1) Data should not live in two places. In the case where data stored in SugarCRM is also stored on your company website, SugarEE makes it easy for that data to live only in SugarCRM and the website just pulls it (via SugarEE)
2) Update once in SugarCRM, SugarEE updates everywhere else on the website that uses the SugarCRM data

One of the better use cases is as follows: A company hosts many events throughout the year. The company posts these events on their websites to promote and share the details of the events. These events are also stored in a custom module in SugarCRM so they can keep track of them internally. This is a classic example of the same data being stored in two separate places. With the SugarEE module, you are able to make changes to the event in SugarCRM and those same changes (such as the event date or description changes) are made on the website, automatically.