Project of the Month - September 2009

KINAMU/abcona Open Asterisk Connector

Description of project

This is an adoption of the Starface SugarCRM Plugin. It handles outgoing and incoming calls. In parallel logs all calls from Asterisk to a SugarCRM internal table for reporting. It supports Asterisk and Trixbox Systems.

Trove Info

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

The main reason is to drive innovation and accelerate product development. The Asterisk integration is a great example for that since short after starting the project we had further developers join, we got the module translated and have a wide community that is testing and delivering great ideas for innovation. This is a clear proofpoint that open source works and how it works.

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

We are leading a bigger project on Outlook Integration under a free license that has a significant number of downloads and recently also started another project on integrating the Lucene Search Engine for a Full Text search in SugarCRM. There are more projects coming where we believe that it only makes sense to publish the enhancements we make and nurture the give and get culture of open source. Currently we are giving more but expect to get even more in return.

Our own SugarCRM Implementation. As Gold Partner we use Sugar internally and our telephony system is based on Asterisk. With that I was simply tired of dialing numbers by looking at the screen and then typing and also guessing who it is if somebody calls in.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The simple story of Telephony integration. To the largest extent this is a feature that sounds logical, increases the acceptance of the CRM System with the team and thus also drives data accuracy and usage up. Key criteria if you are looking at measures to make more out of the CRM. Also the convenient feature that Sugar automatically pops up with the caller and with one click lets the user create a call to that contact is a killer improvement.

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

The key to this project is that is not so much to know about it. It is simple, everybody will understand it without training and will understand the benefits immediately. For a system-admin or however implements it the nice thing is flexibility that it is easy to add further features and customize the popup on incoming calls.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Make use of it and please feed back what you enhance to make this a better and even more useful project. Good examples are out there with e.g. the translation or the linkage to Trixbox. It would be great if we could jointly develop this into a standard module to flexibly interface to various telephony systems. From the architecture this should be easily possible since the plugin is built out of two parts: (1) for the connectivity to the telephony server, one for the communication with the user.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

Enhancing our Outlook Plugin further is one priority, maturing the Full Text Search engine another one. The third one currently on my mind is building a library for custom fields. Over the time we have built a nice collection of useful user defined fields that enhance the standard SugarFields. Would be fun to start a project collecting all the various Sugarfields out there.