The power of really good software - part II

My exploration of SugarCRM continues. Being impressed with what the application could do we decided to explore if it could meet the requirements of another stakeholder group. This required an even deeper dive into the application and I must say that even after taking this dive, I am still impressed with the application!! First off, let me start with what is really cool about open source. I was able to download this application, get it installed and not only try it out but dig through the code, the web services API and just about every aspect of the application. This makes the decision to proceed with an implementation much less scary because you can get a far deeper understanding of the application than any sales demo could provide. So, what did my digging turn up...well, one of the key requirements was to be able to email into the application and have those emails tracked against the Contacts that were included on the email. After reading the documentation, which is just as good as any vendor product documentation I've ever read (and once again I had access to it without having to spend a nickle), it was clear that the out-of-the-box application did not do what I needed to do. My next step was to search through the plugins and open source add-ons to see what I could find. I did find a Connector that could be integrated into our Lotus Notes client but it was to intrusive for our liking. The next option was to write a script that could read emails from a mailbox and load those emails into SugarCRM. This looked like a good option so I dug deeper. This digging led me to the SugarCRM SOAP API. This is definitely another area where I was impressed. My first thought, however, was to be very scared because I read quite a bit about SOAP and SOAP based web-services and I was expecting quite a challenge. Far from it, while dealing with the SOAP Message response objects took a little figuring out, calling the API via my Ruby script was fairly easy (I'll do another post on the power of Ruby and SOAP, following this one). The API has get_entry/set_entry methods that more or less let you create and search for any record in the application. Getting a hang of these methods basically allowed me to do everything I needed to do....and also made me think of a ton more things I could do if only I had the time! All-in-all I am thoroughly impressed with SugarCRM and more importantly I have changed the way I think about evaluating vendor applications. Having the ability to run an application through it's paces (both technically and functionally) without the need for sales reps, contracts, etc....is definitely a new requirement that I will add to my list of vendor selection criteria in the future. My guess is that this will lead me to many more open source applications!!