Ken Wasetis: Sweet CRM/CMS Integration with Plone and SugarCRM

A talk at Plone Symposium East 2009. Track A, 2:30pm, May 29.

link to video

I will present a web services integration of a Plone-managed website that makes SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) method calls to a hosted SugarCRM service (a PHP-based application used to for Customer Relationship Management.)

Both Plone and SugarCRM are open source tools that can be downloaded and installed/hosted locally by an organization, or can be hosted as services by other vendors, on the same or different servers at different locations.

This allows for a complete open source stack for both managing a website, as well as for managing customer leads, contacts, accounts, and reviewing an organization's pipeline of new customers/constituents.

The presentation will include a demo of the functionality as well as a high-level code review (interaction diagram level) of the key integration pieces, including: ElementSOAP, pysugar, the SugarCRM SOAP API, and custom PloneFormGen adapters.