Project of the Month - December 2007

KlipFolio Dashboard 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?

To begin with, we were using SugarCRM internally for more than a year with our KlipFolio product to display metrics and alerts from SugarCRM on the desktop. It helped us track changes, accelerated adoption for our team, and led to us getting more value out of SugarCRM because we used it more often.

Then one day one of us said "I'll bet other people would benefit from this too." There was this long pause as we all realized just how true that was and then we went right to work turning this into a product.

We attended the SugarCRM developer conference, met with Julian, Reem, Andy, partners, and other folks from the SugarCRM team. We told them what we were building and when we had a trial version we e-mailed it to them to try out and give us their feedback. The SugarCRM community got a sneak peak at the product and in return we got some great feedback.

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

This is our first application on SugarForge.

What inspired you to create this project?

Experience is the best teacher and by using KlipFolio internally with SugarCRM we had the value of real-time awareness of our CRM data demonstrated to us on a daily basis.

For example, we're alerted when a new lead comes in or when a change occurs on a support case we are working on. According to the folks I've talked to who have tried the KlipFolio Dashboard for SugarCRM, they're benefiting in the same way.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

SugarCRM does a pretty good job of providing you with a dashboard, but it's a purely web-based application. This means you're not seeing your data if you're not logged into SugarCRM.

This gap in your awareness leads to a real problem on those occasions when you miss something important. This could be a support agent not calling an important customer back in time, missing updates to an RFP response you're working on, or having a sales agent calling a customer for more business without being aware of a major support issue. Add up the impact of all these little errors and your business really begins to suffer as a whole. And there's no need for it.

KlipFolio Dashboard for SugarCRM ensures that you don't miss changes to information you care about in SugarCRM - period.

What are the benefits of testing your product on SugarExchange/SugarForge instead of going directly to the market?

The SugarForge community's mix of SugarCRM enthusiasts, technical folks and evangelists gives us the ideal combination for testing and improving our product. It's rare to have such easy access to a broad group of people that is knowledgeable enough to help, honest enough to tell you the truth, and generally supportive of your efforts.

What other benefits does your business derive from using the SugarExchange/SugarForge environment to distribute products?

We intend to graduate our project from SugarForge to SugarExchange in early 2008. We benefited from the developer-friendly feedback in the SugarForge community on how to improve our product. The bottom line is that because we were able to get this level of feedback early on, we'll have a stronger product when we launch our next version on SugarExchange.

Is there anything else that the users should know about your product? Something hidden or new?

One standard but little known gem of working with KlipFolio is that it can draw on a wide variety of data sources. So in addition to extracting your key SugarCRM metrics you can monitor other enterprise applications and data sources. This includes operations, finance, and marketing-oriented data.

As a result, customers have their own 'ah ha' moment when they realize they can monitor more of their enterprise data with the same product. For example, last week a recent customer commented "You mean I can get our corporate blog on the desk of all our sales reps - Cool!"

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

I'd urge the community to continue promoting the benefits of being a SugarCRM developer to everyone. The more developers there are on SugarForge, the better the feedback is going to be for all of us.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

Because KlipFolio is a desktop dashboard it can do things a web-based product can't.

For instance, we've been cooking up some cool ideas such as real-time search of SugarCRM data and offline access to your SugarCRM contact database. We're also looking at shortcuts for streamlining some SugarCRM capabilities so you can make changes from the desktop such as changing the state of a new lead or opportunity.

Our ultimate goal is to build a product that increases SugarCRM customer ROI. If we can increase the value of SugarCRM to a customer, we think we have a winning product.