Third to last in my series on CMS and CRM integration (next up, Joomla and Salesforce, followed by Drupal and Salesforce) is using web forms.
I wanted to talk about this because it is arguably the most common form of “integration” between CRM and CMS that’s out there (besides the manual kind). You’ve got a CMS, and you’ve got a CRM somewhere else, and you need some way for data from users to make it to your CRM. Of course, it’s not really integration – there is no sharing of data between the CMS and the CRM in any useful way. But webforms can really help you get things done. Here are some examples of things I’ve done and seen done:
- A custom donation page that’s sitting on a service like Network for Good that is linked from the website, or framed within it
- The HTML for a “Web to Lead” form from Salesforce.com pasted into a CMS page
- The HTML for a event registration form or donation form that goes to a hosted service
In the first option, the form isn’t hosted at all on your site. In this option you have the least control over look and feel – the vendor controls the look and the behavior. An example of this I’ve run into is when an organization uses Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge, and wants to have online donations via NetSolutions, their older (and much cheaper) “integration” tool. They provide a page, which hooks directly into the users RE installation. But you can’t customize the page in any useful way, so if you’ve just designed a brand-spanking new site, this page is gonna look like crap. (Luckily, at least Network For Good’s donation pages look snappy and nice, but are going to look a lot different than your website.)
The other options are much better for look and feel – you can take the HTML, and, in most instances, style it to look like your site. You can even sometimes include Javascript for validation or other functionality. But this is still strictly one-way communication – the form data goes directly to the service (and does not pass go.) You don’t get any of it.
This is a great start to integration, if your budget doesn’t allow for true, deep, two-way integration between CRM and CMS. And it’s a great way to get your feet wet in thinking about what you might want to do with CRM and CMS. And, in some instances, depending on both CRM and CMS, it might be your only option.
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I’m enjoying following your CMS-to-CRM integration posts. I’ll be presenting Plone-to-SugarCRM integration for my company, ContextualCorp.com, both at the CMS Expo next week, and at the <a href=”http://plone.org/events/regional/plone-symposium-east-2009/plone-symposium-east-schedule” Plone Symposium East at Penn State at the end of May.
We’ll be having a development sprint immediately after the symposium at Penn State, with a target of June 1 as the open source release date.
In case anyone following your posts is interested in using open source tools for both CMS and CRM (which both Plone and SugarCRM are, as opposed to Salesforce.)
This integration approach allows for querying information from all SugarCRM modules (Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Cases, Opportunities, KnowledgeBase, etc.) by the Plone website, and filtering that information down to just what the currently logged-in user should see. This isn’t just the ‘web-to-lead’ form type ‘light integration’ approach. We’re referring to this new connector for Plone as the ‘SweetCRM’ connector for SugarCRM.
If you’d like to find out more and can’t attend either talk, one or both should be online after the conferences, or we can discuss the details in-person. I just wanted to get the word out that there is an all-open-source option to CMS-to-CRM integration.
Thanks for what you do! Keep it up!
Cheers,
Ken Wasetis
President
Contextual Corp.
Sorry – the link to the Plone Symposium East conference schedule should have been:
http://plone.org/events/regional/plone-symposium-east-2009/plone-symposium-east-schedule