Project of the Month - November 2011

iCal Patch

Description of project

Extends the vCal functionality of SugarCRM to enable publishing of iCal compatible vCals including Tasks and ProjectTasks as todos, attendees, and URLs to get back to the SugarCRM record.

Trove Info

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

I contributed to SugarCRM because I'm a supporter of open source projects, had developed extensions that were generic enough to be used by a broad audience, and felt that the community might benefit from using them. It's great to be able to give something back to the people who helped me learn about and develop for the project.

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

Invoices, LDAP Authentication, and Sugar Portal

What inspired you to create this project?

Personal and client needs.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

It can be difficult for users to transition all elements of their organization's workflow to a single system at once, so the extension provided an easy way to see SugarCRM activities and project tasks in familiar calendar clients rather than forcing conformity to a specific interface that might not be convenient in all circumstances or devices.

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?

After installing the extension you can simply subscribe to the SugarCRM iCal URL and see all activities, tasks, and project tasks in any iCal compatible client. Attendees, parent projects, and a SugarCRM URL for the record will be shown in the item's detail. See the README for full details.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

If you've created something useful, give it back to the community. You might end up getting some great new ideas, development help, or even making a few new friends.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

Tighter integration with a few other applications and services.