In April I went to San Francisco to attend SugarCON 2012, representing InsightfulCRM. It was actually my first time in the United States!
InsightfulCRM is currently part of the SugarCRM Partner Advisory Board, formed by 12 partners worldwide.
The aim of the PAB is to communicate to SugarCRM executives feedback and guidance from the partner community (currently there are over 400 SugarCRM partners!).
It is awesome for us to be part of the Board!
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.
I’ve been developing SugarCRM solutions for a while now at InsightfulCRM (Fonality Pty Ltd) and I never really got into interacting through SOAP with languages other than PHP until today.
There are some tutorials and documentation on SugarCRM Wiki website about it, but not really for Perl, that is the programming language I’ve chosen today.
I’m not a “rockstar” with Perl but let’s figure this out :)
First of all why Perl?
The main reason is: you get Perl with your Linux box, without mucking around too much, in any Linux distribution and doesn’t really need too much software around it. It is multi platform and it has his own package manager (CPAN) to install other components.
This is all that’s needed to get started!
Lately I’ve been involved in some work projects related to Asterisk.
I had the opportunity to play with the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) to see what can be done with it.
In a few words, it allows you to execute scripts on an action (eg: a user calling an extension), that will interact with other systems (eg: retrieve information from a database and store other input data) and trigger other actions.
First of all, given that I’m more familiar with PHP than Perl, I looked around for libraries that can interact with my loved PHP.
You can get a lot of useful information at http://voip-info.org, being more specific at: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+AGI
This will help you understand what can and cannot be done…