At InsightfulCRM I have been involved with SugarCRM projects of various sizes for quite few years, and I was recently asked to present at the Sydney PHP Meetup group about SugarCRM and REST integration.
Let me share the presentation I prepared for the Meetup on my blog as well:
To give you an overview, the presentation starts with an introduction about CRM and why businesses that do not have a CRM strategy should definitely consider implementing one.
I recently built a customisation for SugarCRM that required a custom footer on the metadata definition file.
This was a requirement, so that the final user was not able to edit the panel from Studio, and potentially damage the javascript intensive customisation.
To build the customisation as upgrade safe as possible, I created a custom view for the module I was customising, and inside the “display()” method, I set my own custom footer in the following way:
$this->ev->defs['templateMeta']['form']['footerTpl'] = 'custom/modules/Opportunities/mycustomfooter.tpl';
Then I coded all my business logic inside the display method and at the end, I called the “parent::display()” method.
Booya! :)
What about… moving to the cloud?
It all started more than five years ago, using SugarCRM for managing customer relationships.
Then it was immediately time to migrate to Google Apps from the dodgy local mail server sitting inside the office on a dark corner.
After that, it was the turn of the accounting software: Saasu, an online accounting suite.
I have decided I’m now over maintaining multiple Name Servers around the world, and I just need something I do not need to worry much about.
Something with the infrastructure-as-a-service model.
Now it is the turn of my DNS to be cloud based.
The other day I got a question asked, about geolocation.
How would I show a different phone number for my company’s website, based on the current user location?
There are many different ways to solve this problem.
Probably everybody is familiar with the calendar event invite features?
If you use Microsoft Windows (with Outlook) or Mac OSX (with iCal) or just a basic browser with a GMail account and you use the calendar functionality, you would have realized, that every time you get invited or invite someone to an event, you get a basic email, that adds the recipient to the calendar event.
I had to write an invitation tool that was cross compatible between different platforms and integrated with SugarCRM for a customer of InsightfulCRM (Australian SugarCRM Gold Partner) where I work.