Project of the Month - July 2011

ECalendar by Letrium

Description of project

ECalendar is a module for SugarCRM. E - it is Enhanced. It's similar to built-in Calendar but enhanced. It allows to create calls and meetings without page refreshing, reschedule using drag 'n drop, recurring records.

Trove Info

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

SugarCRM is a main specialization in our company. We have developed a not bad product and would like to share it with community. We are happy that people like it.

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

My projects on SugarForge are Editable DetailView (makes detailview inline editable) and Letrium Invoices (simple invoicing module). I've also took part in our company's projects: SimpleChat and WorkRoom.

What inspired you to create this project?

Of course Google Calendar and few other online calendars. Also we took part in development of a similar product so we had got good knowledges in this sphere.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

It's known that built-in Sugar's Calendar does not satisfy a lot of users. It's realy outdated and modern version is being expected for few years. Our ECalendar enhances abilities of standard calendar. It helps users to save their time.

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?

Users can override the configuraion file and the template of pop-up editview. Respectively 'custom/modules/ECalendar/config_override.php' and 'custom/modules/ECalendar/tpls/details.html'. It provides an ability to do changes in module in upgrade-safe way. You can add your custom field to ECalendar (this is described in guide).

Anything from a usability perspective that sets it apart from other Calendar implimentations?

It's more handy then others that I saw. It uses styles of Sugar but not own theme. Recurrence feature.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

I likes Sugar's community. I like the fact that there are a lot of powerful modules on SugarForge. But it makes me sad when good project dies. Users run into problems upgrading their Sugar when they find their favorite module doesn't work anymore.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

Maybe some Project Management/Time tracking module. We're thinking about that.