So what is the state of Drupal/Salesforce Integration? It’s not as mature as the Plone/Salesforce integration, for sure, but it is coming along nicely. There are several contributed modules:

• salesforce – main module, with API, node, and user integration possibilities. This module provides the basic salesforce API connection (via SOAP), and includes field mapping, and basic import/export
• sf_webform – Makes integration with webforms in Drupal fairly easy. Web-to-lead is quite nice and flexible with this module.
• uc_salesforce – Provides integration with ubercart orders
• parser-salesforce – Integration with FeedAPI – pulling data from salesforce into drupal nodes via FeedAPI  (I hope to start maintaining this module)
• sf_import – Import Salesforce objects into Drupal nodes (will be folded into the main salesforce module)

All of these modules are in alpha or beta, although I know for a fact that some of them (or versions of them) are working in production sites. There are a fair number of bugs that need to be fixed before there is a stable release. There are a bunch of outstanding issues that need a lot of work (like caching, for instance). There are two other modules that are related, but don’t use the main salesforce api module – one for ubercart, and one for web-to-lead (called salesforcewebform). That module has a stable release, but only provides the ability to integrate between Webforms and leads, not other objects.

Right now, the salesforce module allows for integration of contact, lead and campaign objects only. so that’s another big area that could use some work.

There is a good screencast done by one of the folks (Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed) who has worked a lot on this project.

I’d say that in a year, we’ll have a good solid module release, providing lots of features for integration between Drupal and Salesforce.com.

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.

1. painstaking manual entry
2. painstaking export/import processes
3. tools written by the same vendor designed to talk to each other (which meant that they were generally exceedingly expensive)

Although many nonprofit organizations still find themselves in this situation, there are increasing numbers of tools available to help them out of it. And as more and more organizational processes become web-based (whether “in the cloud” or self-hosted), and as more and more nonprofit-focused software includes open APIs (with some unfortunate exceptions,) nonprofit data is looking less and less siloed, and more and more like an ecosystem – many different software parts talking to others.

NTEN is trying to get a bit of a handle on this with the Data Ecosystem Survey.

I’m very much looking forward to the result – looking to see where this new set of tools that can talk freely to each other is working … and where it isn’t – where there is still work to be done. Please take time to fill it out!

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 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.

As you know, I have built a long-time expertise in open source software and web applications, particularly Content Management Systems (CMS) and online database systems, including CRM. Thomas Groden, my new business partner, has expertise in Software-as-a-Service Constituent Relationship Management Systems (CRM), as well as much more broad expertise in technology infrastructure.

All technology implementors have to choose their tools (unless they run a very large shop) and we have decided to focus on implementation of both Salesforce.com and CiviCRM as CRMs, and Drupal as a CMS. We are keenly interested in building on our expertise to integrate these open platforms in really rich ways, to allow organizations to create great online applications.

I’m excited to be a part of a team – I’ve been a soloist for a while, and it’s nice to build collaborations, and work together with people with shared ideals on larger projects than I’d be able to take on alone. And I’m really excited by the set of technologies we’re working on, and the kinds of applications we’ll be building with these technologies.

And you can follow us on twitter.

(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.

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.

Orange Leap is possibly going for what is now often called the “Open Core” business model, although it’s not entirely clear. Their new products (as well as MPX) have “community editions”  – mostly they lack services and support, which makes sense. But Orange Leap Community Edition also lacks “Domain specific fields and rules” and “Outbound Enhancements, Business Rules, and Processes”. It’s not actually clear what those are.

There is mention of a “community portal” but it’s not evident anywhere I can find. You need to request a demo of their open source tool, instead of the standard practice, which is creating an open, public demo for everyone to see and play with. On their brand new, quite lovely (and orange) website, as a developer, there is no place to find the software, interact with others, or find a way in. There is no community that is at all visible.

I like very much what these folks are trying so hard to do – provide high-quality, high-end open source applications for the CRM/DMS space. But I’m afraid they are going to be squeezed to a pulp between the behemoths of salesforce.com and Convio, on one hand, and the strong, vibrant open source community of CiviCRM on the other. Their only way out is to build an equally strong, vibrant community of developers and implementors – and that will be an uphill battle.

Yes, it might be surprising, but I got a friendly email from fellow NTEN Board Member Steve McLaughlin, who also happens to be head of all things internet (more formally, Director, Internet Solutions) at Blackbaud. He gave me a demo and overview of their NetCommunity tool, which has been around for a while, and I figured it deserved a blog entry. It is, in fact, a great example of integration of a CMS and a CRM. Originally, I wasn’t going to cover the one vendor solutions, like this because, I believed (and, honestly, I still do) that you’re not going to get as powerful a CMS as you can as the best-in-breed CMS tools. However, it is true that Raiser’s Edge, the CRM/DMS tool that this integrates with, is inarguably one of the most important tools out there. Some call it the gold-standard. For many other CRM/DMS vendors, it’s the red spot at the center of the dartboard in their office.

The demo was pretty cool. But you know me, I fall for shiny, especially when it comes to data. The integration between the web front end and the RE back end is bi-directional and sweet. There were a lot of things you could do, including accept donations, track personal donation pages, and the like. and a lot of different ways to track what your donors and constituents did, both online and off, and have those show up in really interesting ways. It is, in many ways, the kind of CRM/CMS integration that lots of organizations want and need. Organizations can get this package in three different ways: On premises – installed inside the firewall, hosted, or SaaS. Their SaaS offering is called “NC Grow”, which provides sets of fairly simple CMS templates to start with, designed for organizations that, in their words, “are ready to reap the benefits of richer online marketing and communications, but may not have the resources or expertise in place to make such a website come to life”

The big kicker, pretty much as always with Blackbaud, is the price tag. There is a $10K license fee that you have to pay if you use the On premise or hosted versions. Expect a $35-45K price tag for development and integration. Their SaaS offering, NC Grow has a $20K/year price tag. This all is, of course, above and beyond the megabucks you’re already paying for Rasier’s Edge.

I didn’t get a very close look at the CMS (I’m wishing in retrospect that I had), but the little bit I did see of it suggested to me that it was somewhat more limited than CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone. Even if, perchance, it’s not, you still don’t get the vibrant community of developers making cool modules and add-ons to do just about anything you can imagine – you’ll have to either wait for Blackbaud to do it, or, perhaps (I’m not even sure if this is possible, but correct me if I’m wrong in comments) have someone custom develop special custom features for you. And, you’ll have an automatic $10K price tag tacked on that you won’t pay with the open source tools. I have a hard time believing that that translates to $10K worth of feature value (one could argue it’s $10K worth of integration value, though, but I’m not sure about that.)

Bottom line: If you are an organization which has Raiser’s Edge, and is committed to keeping it, and you want to do sophisticated integration between it and a web front end, then NetCommunity is probably your best solution. But before you jump in, make sure that the CMS is going to have the sophistication and power you need. And know that because RE doesn’t have open APIs, you are unlikely to be able to create the kind of sophisticated integrations with a different CMS that NetCommunity provides with RE.

But, if you are not a RE user, or are considering migrating off of RE, I don’t think that the combination of RE and NC is especially cost-effective. You can get this level of integration with Drupal/CiviCRM for sure, and likely Plone/Salesforce, and Drupal/Salesforce (with a bit more work.) More on those later.