Project of the Month - November 2009

SugarCRM Express Conversion

Description of project

Wizard driven GoldMine to SugarCRM conversion utility. Allows users to easily and effortlessly migrate GoldMine SQL accounts and contacts information into SugarCRM.

Trove Info

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

I have been an open source advocate for a number of years and also have a lot of experience in the CRM world. SugarCRM is a great combination of these two interests of mine and it motivates me to do whatever I can to make them succeed.

The benefit I see is the mutual learning experience that we all get from helping each other, as well as the growth and enrichment of the application itself.

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

There are several that I've put out, some highlights include: Candy Wrapper, Phone Formatter and the Round Robin Leads Assignment project. I've also been dabbling with some Twitter integration ideas and recently put out the CaseTwit project. Auto Prospects is another one, myself and another community member put that one together and recently made available.

A combination of factors. I'll touch on a couple. First, the process of migrating data tends to be difficult, so the easier this process can be made, the better the chances of growing the SugarCRM user base. Secondly, one thing that I often times find to be a challenge in other similar tools is the need for a user to know intricacies to how the data should be formatted, parsed, etc. in order for the process to work correctly. It goes hand-in-hand with my first point, so I tried to automate that as much of that as possible to simplify the process further. Lastly, not to sound too redundant, but I want to underscore the importance of helping grow the SugarCRM user base. Anything that can be done in that regard is beneficial to everyone within the community.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

My main emphasis was to facilitate the process for a GoldMine user to migrate their data in as simple of a manner as possible in order to allow them to more accurately evaluate their use of SugarCRM and/or migrate more easily.

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.

There are a couple of minor, yet important, features which I don't really highlight in the documentation or elsewhere. First, the mappings screen already has all the default GoldMine fields mapped. If one takes a close look, one will notice that the Contact field is mapped twice, once for SugarCRM's first_name and a second time for the last_name field. The reason for this is that SEC automatically splits GoldMine's contact field into two separate values for first and last name and maps them accordingly. Related to that, GoldMine's trio of street address fields are automatically concatenated and mapped to SugarCRM's single street field. Furthermore, SEC is aware of which fields from GoldMine are defined as date fields and automatically formats the values in the manner that SugarCRM expects them.

Finally, if one needs to stop the process somewhere along the way before it finishes, SEC is aware of where it left off and will pick up at the point the next time that an import process is initiated.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Submit ideas and look beyond just the technical stuff. There are a lot of different ways folks can participate and it doesn't always mean having to program something or breaking out the compiler. Documentation is a good example, so is testing or even something as simple as sharing concepts on how one utilizes the software.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

I've got a Skype link I've been working on for a while now. I should have a version of it available on SugarForge within the next few weeks. After that, I am not sure yet as I've got a couple of other ideas on my list and I am always searching for new ones.