Today, I was reading up on what the Plone community has done with integrating their CMS with Salesforce.com. I am thinking that this might be a good model for how we can do it with Drupal, but that’s a subject for another post.
(from Plone/SF Integration group)
There’s a good overview of the integration on the developerforce wiki. There are 5 components to the integration:
- a couple of toolkits that provide the basic back-and-forth between Plone and Salesforce.com (they talk to Python and Zope)
- an auth plug-in that allows for Salesforce.com objects to be Plone users, credential checking, caching of user data, and syncing of data from Salesforce.com and Plone
- an integration of PloneFormGen with Salesforce.com for web-to-lead forms, etc.
- an event management product that connects with Salesforce.com
- A PayPal integration product
This is a pretty robust set of channels for data to move back and forth from Salesforce.com to Plone. There is a Plone/Salesforce.com Integration group, that keeps working on this, and a number of organization, including ONE/Northwest, have invested huge amounts of time and resources to working on this integration.
This is, for sure, one of the most robust open source CMS to CRM integrations out there, and one that seems to be getting pretty close to providing very powerful integration “out-of-the-box” – instead of having to piece things together and do customized code, which is more common than not.
I haven’t gotten my hands on this to try (not being a Plone person, I doubt I will), but folks might want to talk in comments about how straightforward the integration is, given differences in data for different instances of Salesforce.com. I don’t know how much code tweaking is required to really get this going. But in any event, it’s great that it exists, and it’s a great benchmark for CMS/CRM integration.
Tagged as:
CMS,
CRM,
plone,
salesforce
This morning, I looked at both Salesforce.com, with the second nonprofit template, and CiviCRM with a small group of colleagues. All of us implement, or have used, one or both of the systems. But each of us has expertise in only one of the systems.(I’m one of the CiviCRM folks).
It’s pretty interesting to compare them. The nonprofit template has certainly helped to make it easier for nonprofits to do the brain surgery required to use a for-profit sales tool for nonprofit CRM purposes. Salesforce.com is, of course, much more sleek and polished. And the power behind the application is pretty unassailable. And, there is a huge ecosystem of add-ons available for Salesforce.com that doesn’t exist yet for CiviCRM. But there are significant modifications, both in the way nonprofits think about data, as well as the way data is manipulated, that have to take place in order for organizations to use Salesforce.com. CiviCRM is really intuitive for organizations to use out of the box.
Donation pages, and event registration are built in to CiviCRM, but have to be added into Salesforce.com. It’s way easier to create relationships in CiviCRM – you can create any kinds of relationships you want. Can create groups and smart groups easily in CiviCRM. This is harder in Salesforce.com, and smart groups don’t exist in Salesforce.com.
Anyway, there’s lots more, and you’ll be hearing lots more about both of these tools from me in the coming months.
Tagged as:
civicrm,
CRM,
nptech,
salesforce
It’s been a few days since I got back from Drupalcon, and I’ve had time to let all of the things that happened settle in. It was a great time, and I’m really happy I went.
We had a fabulous (and quite large) nptech/progressive exchange/community organizing BoF. There was a show-and-tell session for nonprofit websites (which I didn’t make it to). I went to some interesting sessions on Ubercart, Organic Groups, and a BoF on Drupal in churches (where I wondered about the theological spectrum, and guessed was populated mostly by evangelicals.) I met lots of great people, and saw old and new friends.
I think, also, I’ve completely drunk the Drupal koolaid. I’m psyched to be working with Drupal more intensely (I’ve got 4 Drupal projects going at the present moment.) There’s lots of new things to learn, and challenges to face, but I’m excited about digging in a lot deeper. I’m sure I’ll have more to say as time goes on. And I’m looking for good excuses to go to Paris for Drupalcon Paris!
There were lots of great talks, and the videos are up!
Tagged as:
CMS,
drupal,
drupalcon,
nptech,
opensource
At the end of day one, I figured I’d give a little report on how DrupalconDC is going for me. I’m having a good time, and learning a lot.
I went to three pretty intro talks (two of them were a bit too intro for me, but I got a few good tips) and one advanced panel.
- Themers Toolkit- I’ve only done a few themes, and modified a few, but I guess that was enough for this panel to be too beginner for me. But I did learn a few tricks I didn’t know, so it was useful. It was a good talk.
- Totally Rocking Your Development Environment – also covered mostly stuff I knew, but I did learn a few tips (and also learned a little from my next door neighbor. It was a great talk by an incredibly enthusiastic speaker. I can’t believe though, that she suggested using Makefiles for Drupal!
- Organic Groups – since I haven’t personally implemented OG, I didn’t know a lot about the innards, and how it really works. It was a great introduction, and I’m totally sold on it. He gave some sweet examples of it’s use (like teamsugar.com) which is amazing, and made me totally rethink using Elgg.
- Advanced Theming Techniques - A nice talk given by two folks from CivicActions, once of whom I’d worked with jointly on a client project. I learned a fair bit, and now have some good techniques to think about using as I start doing more serious theming (although, truthfully, I’d like to eventually be able to hand that off to folks who have a better visual sense than I.)
Dries‘ keynote was fun, and it was great to hear a bit about the history, and also the ideas about where Drupal is going. One thing he said in particular stood out: “Start thinking of the internet as one big machine.” The idea is that as barriers to the movement of data come down, doing things that were never possible before become a lot more possible. And there is some really cool stuff coming in the future like OAuth, Job Queues, RDFa output, XMPP, and Activity logs. Really neat.
I missed a couple of talks I’d wish I could have made, like the Drupal SEO talk, and Install Profiles. I was glad to see that there are a significant number of women here, and a number of women presenters, too.
I hung out with Drupalchix for lunch, and met new folks, saw some colleagues, and generally have been having a good time. I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow.
Tagged as:
CMS,
drupal,
drupalcon,
nptech,
opensource
I get a lot of email all the time from people hawking various wares, fundraising ideas, new ways to use Web 2.0, or this and that. I’m sure that this post probably won’t make much of a dent, since I suspect that at least 70% of the people who send me stuff (I get 6-10 emails a week that fall into this category) have never read this blog (even though they might say they love it.) I realized, in getting this stuff, and trying to figure out what to do with it, that I needed to be better at understanding myself what I was doing, and articulating that clearly. Once I get this blog post done, I can clean out that “To Blog” inbox.
In the realm of things in my life that this blog is meant to cover, I have two passions: data, and moving data around, and open source software. Of course, I talk about both of these things in the context both of nonprofit technology and the sector in general, as well as in my role in the sector as a provider of ways and strategies to use the latter to handle the former. It really is these things I want to focus most on.
I’ll always be talking about CMS and CRM, and increasingly the integration between them. I’ll always be talking about open source software, particularly as it relates to web applications, but more generally as well. I’ll probably be talking a lot about Drupal. I’ll also be talking a fair bit about SaaS CRMs in the coming months, for reasons that will come apparent relatively soon. I’ll always talk about what it’s like to do the work that I do, and talk more about how I do it.
I still will like to throw in the occasional post about Web 2.0, particularly as it relates to moving data around. And you’ll always get a bit of shiny from me. And, you will get the occasional promo post about something the organizations that I am on the boards of (Aspiration and NTEN) are doing.
I won’t blog about fundraising or communications strategies, or campaigns, or skittles. I won’t talk much about communications, except as it relates to data, or open source. I won’t explain how or why to use twitter or facebook, unless you are trying to put a twitter stream into a Drupal page (moving data, open source.) Although I will talk about what kind of data you should keep and move, and why. I won’t post information about what nonprofit has adopted what shiny software product, unless it’s my client, and it is to illustrate a specific point, or it’s a case study (and I generally don’t use my client’s names.)
So, if you are part of that 30% that reads this blog and sends me stuff to post, you have an idea of whether or not I’ll use it.
Also, FYI, I blog at Idealware, and sometimes I cross-post, but most often I don’t. My blog posts there tend to be geared more toward Idealware’s audience, and somewhat less technical. And, more balanced and less snarky. :-)
Tagged as:
nptech