Project of the Month - August 2007

GrinMark MS Office Addin 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?

Since August 2006, GrinMark has been closely involved with SugarCRM solutions implementation. After having some experience with it we realized that with the appearance of SugarCRM the world has changed. The open source nature of SugarCRM significantly simplifies it's customization and support. The well thought out concepts of modules and beans help different vendors work on different parts of the system, and community members help improve the modules by providing fresh ideas, bug reports, feature requests and language packs. This also gives ideas for new modules that may be required by potential customers. Community editions of any module help keep the module up-to-date. Feedback from community members leverages the quality and scope of a module.

What inspired you to create this project?

In general, at GrinMark we are publishing components that were developed in the scope of some previous projects. MS Office integration was done to fulfill the requirements of one of our customers. Then it was adopted for another customer. So we finally decided to make some generic version available to the community. Also our intention was to create a highly extensible and customizable module that can be easily adapted to different customers needs.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

There are a number of points.

1. Many people do use Outlook. It is much simpler to adopt to their habits rather than support the migration to any other email client.
2. Employees usually have huge email archives by the time SugarCRM appears in their organization. So some tools are required to be able to archive important history into SugarCRM.
3. In some organizations only a certain percentage of email messages correspond to something in SugarCRM. Other messages are SPAM, communication between employees inside organizations and other internal activities not related to customer relationships.
4. Our Add-in is highly customizable. For example, it is useful to deal with custom fields (search, set) from the Add-in itself. We also provide language packs for it.
5. Our Add-in is extensible. We have experience in extending it with various features. For example, it is possible to create a new product in SugarCRM based on Email specification without leaving Outlook Application. It is useful for creating orders directly from Outlook. So for some sorts of work the Add-in may become the main working interface.

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.

• Press a button in Outlook and current email is archived in the SugarCRM.
• Press a button in Excel and spreadsheet is uploaded to the SugarCRM.
• Press a button in Word and a document is archived to the SugarCRM.
• Select document template, select contact and your agreement/letter/specification is filled for a given customer.

Simple and useful.

Tell us about your other projects on SugarForge?

GrinMark: Travels Calendar: Allows planning of travels, days off and vacations. There are various uses of this module, such as planning employee trainings and other multi-day events. It provides a visual calendar that allows us to see who is available or away from the office at any day within coming months. It is customizable - you can edit it in studio, add custom fields and change layout.

GrinMark: Machine Parks: Manage assets of your partners and customers. This is useful for selling spare-parts, additional components and services related to equipment available at a customer side. Such information helps suggesting renewal, maintenance and upgrade services to specific customers.

GrinMark MS Office Addin for SugarCRM: The Add-in described in this article.

GrinMark: Activities Monitor: Is to appear within few days. Will describe it in more details below.

Of those projects, which is your favorite and why?

The favorite one is always current one. We have a pool of various modules here in GrinMark that are planned to be prepared for publishing at SugarForge.org. We developed them because we did not find appropriate ones at SugarForge.org at some moment.

Where do you see the future of your projects going?

At GrinMark we have three goals related to support of our modules at SugarForge.

1. The first goal is to keep supporting currently published modules.
2. The second is to publish new ones.
   
3. The third is to add requested features to existing modules.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Want to become a millionaire? Help the SugarTeam to become a billionaire. It is a win-win relationship!

I have a history that is common with many of programmers. A few years ago we were involved in a project. We developed an outstanding product composed of great tools. We were proud to be working on this product. And at some point of time "The Boss of It All" decided to close all work on this project, move development to Taiwan or find the cheapest place in the world somewhere else. We did not have any copyright rights on the product and derivative works so that finally we appeared to have nothing that we own. And now while talking with someone we can only say that we did a great amazing thing that we don't have anymore! The moral of this story is. Any contracted work can always be alienated from you. Something that is contributed to the community is always yours! It is your pride and joy.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

GrinMark: Activities Monitor: A messenger-like tool displaying activities for you and your team. It shows notifications in the windows task bar whenever some Call and Meeting is pending. Many customers want their employees to be notified about pending Calls and Meetings, and managers like to monitor activity for a number of employees. In some cases it is useful for one employee to cover all activities of another one during his day-off. We expect this tool is to be extremely useful.