Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Hi all,

We're hearing some renewed interest in a Zimbra-Sugar integration and want to help both communities (Zimbra's and Sugar's) make this happen.

We are initially thinking that a Zimlet in Zimbra would be a good first step, very similar to what the Salesforce Zimlet does. We could also explore the idea of a Sugar dashlet as well.

Please reply to this post if you fit one (or more) of these criteria:

1. You are a Sugar and/or Zimbra customer who would like to see the integration become reality. If your company is interested in contributing to a bounty fund to help pay for an integration, please note that.

2. You are a Sugar and/or Zimbra developer and you're willing to work on the integration.

3. You have ideas regarding what the integration should encompass (features/functions).

The fine folks at Zimbra can provide developer information to get you up to speed on their product if you're unfamiliar with its development structure; the folks at Sugar will do the same for Zimbra developers.

Let's turn this great idea into reality!

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Susie,

Thanks for the renewed attention on this valuable project. I'm happy to report that I had a very productive conversation with another sugar user (ddt3net) interested in working on integrating these two platforms. At the moment, we're putting our project plan together to tackle the zimlet first. Deeper integration will come later.

I'd like to welcome all comers to this project. We can use as much help as we can get. While both ddt3net and I are both good project managers and I'm a good PHP coder, neither of us has experience with writing zimlets yet.

Susie, are we planning on replacing the existing project (the miezimbra one) or creating a new one?

Matt Kenigson

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

I think the easiest is to create a new project. I have taken a somewhat "hands off" approach to managing projects... since I am not in regular communication with most developers, it's hard to tell whether a project is dead, dormant, or just really really hard (so it takes a while before anything is posted). I am planning on doing a "housekeeping" pass soon to retire projects that are truly dead, and I can close out that project at that time.

So, go ahead and create a new project on the forge and I'll approve it. The Zimbra folks are very interested in getting this going, and have offered to help out as much as possible, so if you get stuck on anything, just let me know.

They did suggest that the easiest way to get up and going on a zimlet is to just look at one of the samples in their hosted demo environment. You can see how everything works.

Good luck!

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Scalix integration is more important to us since we use Scalix :)

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Blipper,

Just saw this on the front page of sugarcrm.com: http://www.sugarexchange.com/product...hp?product=345

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Blipper,

I can appreciate that. Scalix is a good product and we nearly went with Scalix but switched to Zimbra when Scalix was acquired by Xandros. In the second stage of our project we will be concentrating more on ways to do back-end integration which will most likely not be implemented through a zimlet. Much of the work we do on that side of things could probably be generalized and extended for use with Scalix. I don't imagine we'll get started on that for several months unless someone steps up to take over that project before we get done with the zimlet.

Eggsurplus: That is the SugarExchange page for Scalix itself. There is not currently a "direct connector" for Sugar and Scalix but by using their Outlook connectors, you can make Outlook the go-between to sync information from one to the other. There are some challenges to that approach but it is a great starting point.

You can do the same thing with Zimbra using their Outlook connector. For now, that's the easiest way to get sync done. Part of the reason for building a zimlet, however, is to cut Outlook out of the mix. Our management is very focused on making Sugar the central app for our sales staff and there is a feeling that if we allow them to continue using Outlook some data will never make it into Sugar. By portalizing Zimbra and adding a zimlet we get one step closer to avoiding that. Once we have automated back-end integration, we'll be all the way there. :)

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Put me down for a category 1.

Big user of both. This project makes a ton of sense.

Any timeframes set yet?

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Category 1 applies for my company as well. We are currently implementing both of these fine products and integration and syncronisation of things like calendars would be great.

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

We use SugarCRM and Zimbra internally, plus we are planning to offer implementation services for these solutions to local clients.

We have the two applications working together using existing functionality, and it seems to work reasonably well. Here's how we do it.

.: Login to Zimbra
.: Create a folder named CRM
.: Login to SugarCRM
.: Go to My Account
.: Edit your Account
.: Scroll to the bottom and edit your settings using your Zimbra information and set the folder to CRM
.: Click Test Settings
.: If you'd like to leave the messages in the CRM folder within Zimbra, click the Advanced button and check the related box.

Now try it out by moving a message to the CRM folder in Zimbra. You must ensure the message is marked Unread in order for SugarCRM to see it.
.: Go to SugarCRM and click the Get Mail button from your SugarCRM Inbox.
.: You should see the message there now. You'll see that there's a Quick Create drop-down that allows you to convert the item to a Case, or a project Task, plus a couple other less used options.
.: You'll see when you create a case or task, the e-mail is attached to it; so you can modify the verbiage of the case and know that you'll maintain the connection with the original e-mail.

This approach seems to work quite well. I'm sure you could trim a few seconds off the process by creating a zimlet. What other functionality did you have in mind for a zimlet? I do really like the idea of getting these packages better integrated.

By the way, there is a script which will integrate your SugarCRM addresses with an external LDAP database for use in the GAL of Zimbra. We instead decided to extract the data from SugarCRM and then import it into a shared Zimbra address book so that the addresses are easy to browse. If someday the GAL allows for browsing, then we'd probably use the script.

What other ideas do people have for zimlet functionality and integrating the two packages. I may be willing to either contribute programmer time or some money if the ideas are good.


cheers,

Darryl

Re: Zimbra Integration with Sugar
 

Some nice ideas there Darryl - like you I am interested in a better integration of these two -

how about a Dashlet that shows the Zimbra inbox? Or a simple My Portal page for iFrame integration - which might be useful for some users?