Project of the Month - December 2011

Gravatar Integration

Description of project

With this module, Contacts and Employees in your SugarCRM application will automatically display their public Gravatar profile picture. Gravatar profiles can be created at http://www.gravatar.com

Trove Info

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

SugarCRM is a great application framework that is constantly evolving. I find the framework rich with areas where contributions by partners and individual developers can extend and add new functionality.

NEPO Systems, provides solutions for customers that would like to extend SugarCRM to meet their business needs. At times, our customizations are rich enough for the whole community to find benefit.

I spend time in the SugarForums, trying to provide developer's with help to their questions. I feel that my expertise should be shared with others.

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

My largest and most complex project available via SugarForge is the Marketo Cloud Connector. The Marketo Cloud Connector provides realtime bidirectional integration between SugarCRM and Marketo.

• NEPO Systems has a host of other other projects that are not yet available on SugarForge:
• Chitter, SugarCRM's answer to Chatter
• Phone Number formatter: Enter a phone number in and the display will automatically format it for display
• AjaxValidation : When you save, have the server do some validation. This allows for integration with 3rd party system. Validation in other modules, etc.
• Hide/Show: The search panel on the List View. Do you have a lot of search boxes on a List View and is it taking up too much space. Just hide the search panel and reclaim the real-estate. When you need the change your criteria, just show the search panel again
• 1-Step SugarCRM Update: Why in the world do you need to download the latest SugarCRM patch when you can just press 1 button and have SugarCRM not only download the correct patch but also apply it for you.
• Authorize.Net integration
• LiveDocx Integration : create documents on the fly
• Inbound Fax integration: Receive a Fax via Fax.com, eFax.com, GoldFax or Microsoft Fax Server and have the fax get associated with the correct Contact and Account

What inspired you to create this project?

We have worked with a couple of business that really want to know what their customer's look like. A couple of our clients, send their customers a URL to web form asking them to upload a picture of themselves and another uses their phone to take pictures of their contacts.

We found that in this social era, many people already have an online profile and photograph of themselves so we thought it would be best if we tapped into the rich data that people are already sharing. Gravatar provides users with the ability to upload photo's of themselves and have their photo be shared in many different applications. This also also empowers the customer themselves to manage their own photo.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Specifically we are taping into our social nature and wanting to know what our customers look like. It is a lot of work to collect and manage photo's of each of our customers, integration with Gravatar augments the built in picture capability already built into the commercial version of SugarCRM and adds a new feature to the community edition. For both the commercial and community editions, we have added Gravatar images to the Leads module where picture fields are not usually present.

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?

Upon installation, the product automatically adds the Gravatar image to the Leads module in both the List View and the Detail View. For the contacts module, the picture field is added to the List View (both commercial and community) and added to the Detail View for community users.

In order to view the Gravatar image the Lead or Contact must have an email address. We utilize the well document and publicly available API to retrieve the users' gravatar.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

We are working on integrations with CardDav, Ringio, and GovWin IQ