Re: SugarCRM?

On 5. Jan 2005, at 05:12 Uhr, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> I think the objects exist in OGo already to do CRM,  CRM is all about
> relationships and categorization (which may of course require more 
> tables :)

Hm, why, as long as we think in small-to-medium businesses, we can use 
extended attributes and links. Tables would only do good for speed, not 
for flexibility.

> For instance, say I have a user with an OGo account that is a 
> salesperson?  How
> do I indicate given enterprises as his customers and given contacts as 
> his
> responsibility (call it a "call list" if you will,  we are big on call 
> lists
> here)?

Using a link which points from the person to the link.

> There may be contacts in the system associated to one of the
> enterprises that don't have anything to do with the sales relationship.

IMHO this is the task of the UI. IMHO that CRM thing seems to be just 
wrapping a different UI around existing functionality.
If the user enters the groupware, he can add arbitary links, well, 
thats generic groupware (the admin could disable groupware for accounts 
not allowed to do so).

> There are several ways but none are really clean.  For one because I 
> only want
> salespersons to have 'customer' associations,  a site manager 
> shouldn't be able
> to have 'customer' associations.

I don't think such enforcement is required in small-to-medium.

> The current linking mechanism only defines
> what type of object may be on one end of a link,  real CRM 
> relationships I
> think would require the ability to link two objects to be more 
> sensitive to the
> context of the object.  Such links are also rather a pain to create.

Not sure what you mean. The context of the link would be defined by the 
UI. That the links are implemented using obj_link - the user doesn't 
need to care about that.

>> 4. additonal graphics output capabilities
> It is pretty hard to avoid ending up building a report 
> builder/generator if you
> go far in that direction.  Perhaps something can be done with 
> XML/XSLT/FO?
> Maybe beyond the scope of this discusion.

Should be a different thread. I think there are standard OpenSource 
tools which do that. Personally I think that this is just eye-candy, 
more practical would be a reasonable Excel export so that the Sales 
guys can builds charts in that.

>> 5. discussion board module
>> 6. user generated forms capability
> And how/where to put the data?

Not sure of the context. For me it would be interesting what SugarCMS 
does here. OGo has enough flexibility for data storage. But 
implementing user defined forms is more difficult than just reproducing 
the forms I can see in the SugarCMS demo.

Greets,
   Helge
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