CRM data migrations for Enterprises

by

When implementing a CRM system for an established Enterprise organisation, there are many systems to gather data from, to be able to provide a comprehensive customer view to the end-users of the software.

The 360 degrees customer view is normally obtained by combining real-time integrations with external systems (such as accounting software, ERP, recommendation engines etc.) with an extensive process of data migration including data mapping, data scrubbing, manipulation and import from existing systems that will eventually be decommissioned.

Today I will focus specifically on the subject of performing a sizeable initial data load from a system to Sugar’s CRM system.

Read more

Automated REST API testing with Chakram

by

Every business nowadays relies on integrations through REST APIs. It can actually be very costly to not realise when your integrations stop working due to an undetected API issue. Might those API be internally developed and maintained or external API totally out of your control (eg: a bespoke company facing knowledge sharing system, a special dashboard your executives require to monitor daily, your cloud ERP, CRM and accounting software etc.).

When building any software project and its integrations, it is essential to know that the various components of the application can safely rely on fully tested and working back-end APIs. This is especially true when the components might change and quickly evolve over time. The solution to this problem is pretty simple: you should make sure your API’s business logic has fully automated regression testing, so that you know what can break, before every new release.

Read more

SSO authentication on SugarCRM with SAML

by
Okta Login Screen
Okta login screen

Today I am going to guide you through the steps to get Sugar up and running in the easiest way possible with Okta, the SAML identity provider of choice for this article.

The business goals are:

  1. Centralise authentication. Less headaches when changing password and even when decommissioning users and no need to maintain local usernames and passwords
  2. Better user experience for application access, with Single Sign On between applications within the organisation

Read more

Powerful customisations with Sugar’s ACL

by

Today I want to explore a customisation possibility that is so powerful and still often neglected: customising Sugar’s ACL framework.

The Actions and field visibility part of the ACL in Sugar is normally applied through the use of Roles within the application’s UI, while the visibility of a record is applied through the visibility framework that either allows a user to see a module’s entry or not.

There are two important nuances about Roles in Sugar that I should mention:

  1. Most restrictive prevails, if a user happens to be assigned to more than one Role
  2. Roles do not apply to Sugar Admin type users

The power of the ACL framework is due to the fact that it applies both to the back-end of the system (eg: the API will not allow writes) and to the UI as well by driving buttons and visual screen elements that would allow the user to perform or not the actions.

Read more

Arduino Temperature Driven Fan

by
Schema of Arduino controlled two speeds fan with LCD
Schema of Arduino controlled two speeds fan with LCD

This project is about driving a two speed fan with an Arduino, based on the environment’s temperature.

The project has been designed to help automating an existing fire-based heating system. The idea is that the environment will be warmed faster, by driving heated air into the room with a multi speed fan, while the fire is hot and the surrounding environment not yet.

I wanted to make it a little more interesting by adding a LCD display to show temperature, humidity and fan status, and four buttons to increase and decrease the two temperature values that drive the fan speeds.

Arduino Prototype of Temperature Driven Fan
Arduino Prototype of Temperature Driven Fan

When the temperature is below the lowest temperature threshold, the fan will be running at full speed. With temperatures between the lowest and the highest threshold the fan will be running at half speed and with temperatures above the highest threshold the fan will be off.

This project demonstrates the use of an Arduino (or compatible) micro controller with a temperature and humidity sensor to drive outputs, it demonstrates the usage of a LCD display, push buttons and EEPROM memory storage.

Read more

SugarCRM – Team security query caching

by

Following up on my previous article about Sugar’s Team Security implementation, I thought it would be interesting and useful to discuss and mention a new setting to improve it.

Prerequisites

For this article I’ve used:

  • Sugar Enterprise v7.6.0.0
  • The infrastructure setup described on my previous article Setup a Debian Based Sugar development environment (or similar)
  • In-memory caching is enabled using memcache/memcached (my current preference) depending on the linux flavour used

Introduction

Some time ago, I was analysing the performance of the Team Security query. The slowest part of the query seems to be caused by the subquery with joins between the tables team_sets_teams and team_memberships within listview queries.

Then I thought: Sugar caches most of the semi-static data (vardefs, language files, etc) into whatever caching mechanism is used by the system, why don’t we run an IN() condition using the cached list of ids per user, instead of a subquery on every listview load?

Read more