Comments on: Integration of CRM and CMS

By: Drupal and Salesforce

Drupal and Salesforce — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:38:37 +0000

[...] things (like building a business and building new websites.) This is the last installment in my CRM/CMS integration series, that started almost a year ago (wow!) And I’m skipping Joomla/Salesforce Integration because [...]

By: CRM | CMS | Ecommerce

CRM | CMS | Ecommerce — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:17:01 +0000

Hi all,

We’ve developed XLsuite which combines CRM with CMS and includes things like blogs and forums.

We have several versions for retail, real estate, hospitality and community building.

You can install a free trail and give it a spin.

It comes with a fully functioning site that is easy to customize which can be done by any designer or we help configure it for you.

http://xlsuite.com"XLsuite CRM & CMS | Blog and Shop with SoldWith.com

By: Eoin

Eoin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:17:04 +0000

I’m interested to know which combinations of CMS/CRM are working best for people.

For nonprofit use, the clear leader seems to be civiCRM/Drupal as it looks after, content, memberships, events and mailing.

For a business with a need to invoice and have a product book, I’ve looked at ZohoCRM and like it, but don’t see references to any integration with a CMS. On some Joolma forum, I read a reference to vtiger and Joomla, but that was from 2005!

What’s working best now, please?

By: Loraine Lawson

Loraine Lawson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:31:49 +0000

Non-Profits Benefit from Integrating CRM with Content…

On Thanksgiving Day and then again in December , I shared with you the results of UK and U.S. surveys conducted by Harris Interactive for TeaLeaf, a company that specializes in customer experience management solutions. The gist was that customer…

By: David Geilhufe

David Geilhufe — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:45:48 +0000

Though I agree with Jon’s factual points about CiviCRM APIs, I am a little surprised he would take the position of not considering target audiences and their requirements before dismissing solutions out of hand ;)

CiviCRM definitely encourages you to work within its framework… the APIs are not platform neutral as Jon points out. I personally haven’t seen evidence that average charity users need or even use platform neutral APIs. I generally see consulting firms serving the top couple percent of the market using APIs to do interesting edge cases. Neither approach is bad as long as you recognize the pros and cons.

In the CiviCRM ecology, the logic was to serve small charities as our mission… make things as turn key as possible and make sure innovations were shared across all customers. We don’t need a platform neutral API to connect the CRM to mass mailing functionality because CiviMail is pre-integrated. We don’t need a platform neutral API to build custom applications because when someone builds a case management solution, we want that to be available *automatically* to our entire user base.

Platform neutral APIs tend to work against these charity capacity building goals.

And with all open source projects, we really haven’t seen the demand or user participation in expanding the APIs… it is not that CiviCRM can’t have platform neutral APIs, we’d rather focus on building things our installed base will actively use.

I suppose if there were a lot of charity focused intermediaries that wanted to build and market applications on top of a platform, then there would be a huge incentive to maintain platform neutral APIs. But so far Convio on top of Salesforce is the only publicly visible player in that space.

In the Salesforce world, those charity technology mission components are not driving forces . Hence you have many custom applications and innovations created by a wide range of charities that are not available to all other users. AppExchange provides a great platform for sharing, but I just don’t see a lot of applications show up there.

I think that platform neutral APIs can be a “make or break religious check box” for some developers when they are chosing a technology they like to work with. I’m not sure that you can support the argument that they should be a religious check box for meeting the needs of CiviCRM’s target constituents– small and mid-sized charities.

By: CiviCRM and Drupal (& Joomla)

CiviCRM and Drupal (& Joomla) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:53:40 +0000

[...] you might have a variety of reasons for not choosing one of them. Jon Stahl, in his comments on my first post in this series said: “a PHP API accessible only to other PHP apps on the same machine is simply not [...]

By: Tompkins Spann

Tompkins Spann — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:36:02 +0000

P.S. I thought my name would link to email, alas no, so please email me at tspann [at] convio.com if you’ve got a case study of online/offline campaign integration.

By: Tompkins Spann

Tompkins Spann — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:36:05 +0000

This is actually a topic I’ll be discussing at the NTC this year. Integrating online and offline communications. At many conference we hear folks discuss the communication strategies, results and benefits but rarely do we hear how it was actually done. I’m assembling a panel now and need some good case studies, so if you’ve got examples, please email me.

By: Joe Gram

Joe Gram — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:56:04 +0000

I’m currently working with a developer that has a Nonprofit Event Management SugarCRM build. We’re working with them to bridge another free open source CMS platform Joomla to it.

At the end of our adventure we should have exactly what is talked about above but able to offer it to the community completely free at only the cost of hosting/customizing/administration. You’re talking probably 50 bucks a month for each user.

@Jon Stahl – I never thought of applying for grants to get this project done.

By: Judi Sohn

Judi Sohn — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:38:14 +0000

For the nonprofit with a limited development budget, don’t dismiss the web form/hybrid strategy. While it may be ideal to have a fully integrated setup, a good stepping stone is one that feeds data directly to the CRM but appears to use the same CMS as the rest of the site. The user doesn’t seem to notice or care as long as they are comforted by a familiar template. The challenge is to design a template that travels well and can be easily and consistently updated (when our organization moved, I had 5 different footers to update).

But if full, true integration isn’t possible (our CMS is WordPress, so our options of integration with Salesforce are a bit more limited), then a well-thought hybrid strategy can work without a lot of resources.

The key, I think, is to make sure that one repository of data rules them all. If you have an email list captured by one application, a donor list captured by another, a social network in another, and you give them all equal “weight,” then you’re asking for trouble.

P.S. @Thomas, as I’m sure you know, if you’re migrating from GetActive to Convio, you can integrate that with Salesforce quite easily. The data transferred for e-advocacy isn’t quite as robust as I would like, but you get a lot more than with other solutions.