Project of the Month - November 2008

OpenQuotesAndContracts

Description of project

OpenQuotesAndContracts is a project which aims to integrate contracts into SugarCRM. It has many new features, a nice PDF creation tool, WYSIWYG (FCKEditor) included and a clear workflow from quote to contract with additions.

Trove Info

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

We originally started OpenQuotesAndContracts as a university project here at the University of Potsdam in Germany. We wanted to share our code right from the beginning. I always hoped to create a small working community around our project. Amazingly our project was immediately well received and all of the activity in our forum is what keeps this project moving forward. It is just astonishing to suddenly receive emails from around the world by people who are really interested in this project. They range from people who wrote translations to companies managing all their contracts with our system. There is also the added benefit of improved visibility, which certainly helps with job offers :-)

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

Currently, we are not involved with anything else.

What inspired you to create this project?

The partnership with the LDS as well as the general pressure stemming from the university project were the motivating factors.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The initial pain point was the management of contracts which includes versioning, PDF generation, product hierarchies and costs. Currently, we are expanding to track time spent developing and servicing products as well as notifications and reports (think Dashlets).

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.

We tried hard to generate a dynamic, user-friendly interface which enables users to "click" contracts consisting of products, legal clauses and attachments (office documents) "together". Products can be selected from product catalogs, while legal clauses can be written on the fly or defined beforehand using the WYSIWYG Editor "FckEditor". As a bonus all contracts are versioned so old versions can be viewed anytime.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

We really need help with the English translation. Other translations are also welcome. I am already proud of the participation in our forum. It is so nice to see users helping users. But further participation, especially in the codebase, would be cool. Fame awaits YOU.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

As I already hinted at, we want to release the FckEditor integration as an independent project. The next big things are Dashlets and a time-tracking module which closely integrates with the contract module.