Project of the Month - December 2009

Connector Tool for Google Contacts

Description of project

This module allows Sugar users to send contact data to Google Contacts.

Trove Info

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

Actually we have two main reasons to contribute to SugarCRM community. First of all my team and me have been involved in various Open Source projects in the past. We were solving problems for customers with Open Source tools and then we contributed code or hosted a project. Secondly the company I work for (MyCRM GmbH) is a system integrator and SugarCRM business partner. Our mission is to extend Sugar with useful commercial or community extensions.

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

We release and/or manage a couple of projects; the most popular being the "Connector Tool for Google Calendar" that integrates Sugar with Google Calendar.Then we made a popular extension to integrate Sugar with Dimdim web conferencing. In my humble opinion, one of the nicest plugin is the OrgChart (informally managed, originally created by Mr. Leite from Anysoft, Brasil), where you can display the "member of" relations between companies and "reports to" relationships in a single chart. Last but least the Zarafa folks consulted us when they started the Sugar integration (Zarafa Zerge Merge framework)

We needed something for within the company that connects Sugar with Google Contacts and mobile devices easily. So we did this project for the same reason that we did the integration with Google Calendar.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Many Sugar users have Gmail as their e-mail client, and use mobile devices like iPhone. The problem is that the contacts in Sugar are disparate from the contacts in Google Contacts. This integration allows the user to create and update his contacts data in one place (Sugar) and sync it automatically to Google Contacts and Gmail. All data stays nicely up to date in all system without working.

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.

Once you have the Sugar contacts in Google Contacts you can push the data on iPhones or Android phones using Google Mobile or affordable services like Nueva Sync. This ways you can receive updates over the air on your mobile device

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

First of all I believe the concept of open source code (commercial or not commercial) and free data is superior and the future despite all the hype about some ASP platforms from the last century. Everybody who likes this notion can contribute something to make this vision sustainable by cash or code or feedback.

Secondly Sugarforge as exchange platform is already a huge asset to the community. Every day new projects are added up to the line of available tools. We want to help keep it alive.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We are planning to finish our Google Docs integration and recently decided to build a tool to integrate Google Sites into Sugar. Stay tuned.