A while back, I’d heard of the Ubercore initiative – a group of developers working to bring Ubercart to Drupal 7 (there was quite a delay between the release of Drupal 6 and the availability of Ubercart for Drupal 6.)  That initiative is now called “Drupal Commerce. (other site here.)” It is basically meant to be a rewrite of Ubercart for Drupal 7. It looks to be something to watch. Gregory Heller of CivicActions wrote an interesting conceptual piece on the integration of Drupal Commerce and CiviCRM that’s worth a read. (By the way, there is a module done by DharmaTech that integrates CiviCRM and the current Ubercart.)

The place to find reports on what happend is on the wiki. Also, check out the twitter stream for the #omc09 hashtag.

I was especially interested in the issue of mobile data collection. (I was so interested, I facilitated a session.) And, even more specifically, I’m interested in how to leverage CiviCRM and mobile devices for a range of interesting applications. There are a number of ways to get data from mobile phones into a CRM – and all have advantages and disadvantages, depending on a lot of things.

• Globally, what you can basically depend on is SMS. Smartphones haven’t made it into most of the developing world, nor have 3G networks. So how do you get SMS data into a database system like CiviCRM? You need an SMS gateway, and systems such as RapidSMS to gather data
• Use J2ME to write applications for mobile phones, and send the data via SMS to a central database.
• A tool such as EpiCollect, which is an Android app.
• A slimmed-down, simplified webform to be used on mobile browsers.

One thing that would facilitate this would be a more robust API system in CiviCRM – access to the data via REST or JSON, which would allow CiviCRM to talk with some of the tools out there like Mesh4X.

I learned a ton. Thanks to MobileActive.org and the Open Mobile Consortium for a fabulous event.

First, the core team shared some of the new stuff coming out in version 2.3, and it is awe-some. One of the major reasons CiviCRM gets dinged as a CRM/DMS is that it doesn’t have reports. Well, that problem is about to go away with the release of CiviReport in 2.3. There will be a number of canned reports, and some really nice ways to create reports. Plus charts! Yay! There were some pie charts, and regular bar charts. I don’t have the new svn trunk of CiviCRM installed, otherwise, I’d show some screenshots, but it looked really nice. (I’ll be installing CiviCRM from svn in the next week, and I’ll probably blog more as 2.3 develops.)

There are some really nice usability improvements coming up in 2.3 as well – to make the basic contact pages much easier to navigate. And there is a new menu system, which will make things a lot easier. And, for Drupal users, some sweet Views 2 and CCK integration.

CiviEvent is getting waiting lists, registration approval, and user-modifiable registrations, and some other improvements.

The Alpha of 2.3 should be out by July.

I also learned about CiviCase, which is actually present in 2.2. I saw the example of it used for the Physician Health Program in Canada. It’s quite good, and there are some useful docs to see it at work on the CiviCRM wiki. I’d love to find an organization, such as a small human services organization, in need of case management software, that could use CiviCase – it would be a great, and relatively inexpensive alternative to current offerings out there. And more organizations using CiviCRM for case management would help CiviCase get even better.

I also dug into some of the internals and code of CiviCRM, and feel better equipped to start contributing more than ideas and feedback to the project.

I’d love to meet new folks and see as many old friends as possible, so I figured I’d share where I’ll be during these days, and perhaps we can meet up. You can email me, @pearbear on twitter, or give me a text message or call … if you know my cell, that is. :-)

• Saturday: Penguin Day!
• Saturday evening: NTEN Board Dinner
• Sunday morning: NTEN Board meeting
• Sunday afternoon: Torn between Drupal for Good and Google APIs (somehow, there seems a lesson there.)
• Sunday evening: Science Fair and reception
• Monday morning, way, way too early: Convio Partner Breakfast
• Monday Morning:Clay Shirky’s Plenary, and the debut of Holly’s version of “Put a ring on it.” I can’t wait!
• Monday 10:30: Open Source CRM session (David Geilhufe is moderating, yours truly is a speaker)
• Monday 1:30: So you want to be a consultant… (Robert Weiner is organizing a great group of consultant types, including me.)
• Monday Evening: Afterparty @Mezzanine
• Tuesday morning: Gotta hear Eben Moglen!
• Tuesday 10:30: Open Source CMS (Laura Quinn’s got that one. I’m just going to be in the peanut gallery. Update: She roped me in to participate, so I’ll be answering questions…)
• Tuesday 3:30: So you want to be a consultant, part II
• Wed – Thursday: CiviCRM Developer Camp
• Friday: Collapse

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.