InsideCRM’s Top 20 blogs of 2008

December 30th, 2008 by sanjay
Categories: Architecture, Customer Stories, News, Top CRM Blogs 2008

2008 is nearly gone. This is the time when we all sit back and thank to all those who made 2008 happy and memorable year.

Our own blog had on and off kind of flow this year. We promise to dig deeper into the internals of SugarCRM and share with our readers power tips. SugarCRM is a leader in open source CRM and have successfully made CRM affordable to many organizations. They deserve praise and support as well. Beyond SugarCRM, CRM practice is gaining social media steam as more and more bloggers contribute to the public knowledgebase. Chris Bucholtz at InsideCRM, has an excellent list of top 20 blogs.

Authors of these blogs did an extremely good job of highlighting issues and opportunities. You are highly recommended to visit Chris’s blog and read his comments. I think that list should be Top 21 to include insightful InsideCRM blog.

1. Chris Bucholtz at InsideCRM
2. CRM 2.0: The Conversation by Paul Greenberg
3. Church of the Customer Blog by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
4. Mercury Rising by Scott Annan, Scott Lake, Jeff Meldrum, Creighton Medley, Michael Marker, Andrew Milne, Jud Rasmussen
5. Brent’s Social CRM Blog by Brent Leary
6. Beagle Research Group by Denis Pombriant
7. CRM Outsiders, Martin Schneider and Colin Beasty
8. The CRM Consultant by Richard Boardman
9. Destination CRM Blog by Marshall Lager, Christopher Musico, Jessica Tsai, Lauren McKay, Josh Weinberger
10. Social Customer Manifesto by Chris Carfi
11. Customer Insider by Graham Hill
12. Michael Maoz’s Gartner Blog
13. 1 to 1 Media Blog by Ginger Conlon, Kevin Zimmerman, Jeremy Nedelka, Mila D’Antonio, Elizabeth Glagowski, Martha Rogers, Don Peppers
14. CRM Views and Trends by Wouter Trumpie
15. The Perfect Customer Experience by Louis Columbus, Randy Saunders
16. CRM Mastery Blog by Jim Berkowitz
17. CRM 2.0 by Guido Oswald
18. B2B Lead Generation Blog by Brian Carroll
19. Duct Tape Marketing Blog, John Jantsch
20. First Coffee by David Sims
21. Project VRM Blog by Doc Searls

SugarCRM 5.2.0 GA version is ready for download

December 20th, 2008 by sanjay
Categories: Architecture, Migration, News

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SugarCRM product management team is busy catching up with recent industry trends. We have seen strong interest in cloud computing initiatives, along with massive buzz around micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer.

Not to be left behind, SugarCRM has come out with feature rich version to capitalize on these trends. From Readme notes:

Connectors to External Data Sources
Sugar provides a connector to LinkedIn. Additional connectors to other data sources can be obtained and installed using Module Loader.
Sugar Feed
Sugar Feed enables users to be informed as soon as a user creates a new contact, lead, opportunity, or case. Users can add a My Sugar Feed Dashlet on their Home page so that when a user performs any of these actions, a message displays in the Dashlet on their Home page. Users can also be notified when a lead is converted, when a case is closed, and when an opportunity is closed.
Additionally, users can post status updates, external links, images, and YouTube videos for other users to view within the Dashlet.
My Portal Dashlet
Sugar provides a My Portal Dashlet that presents product information and news about SugarCRM on your Home page. You can add additional My Portal dashlets to view information from external web sites and applications directly within your Sugar instance.

OpenAppDotOrg team will digging deeper into these modules. Let us know how imaginative you want to get with cloud connectors. Some users we discussed this are pretty excited about cloud connectors. There were muted concerns around security and performance but I am sure those will be taken care of eventually.

Are you ready for 5.2.0 GA? Download from SugarForge. Also check out release notes. Let us know all the pros and cons of upgrade exercise.

How to generate unique Sugar id in the database?

August 24th, 2007 by moses
Categories: Architecture, Customer Stories

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Suppose if you have created/uploaded a custom module in your SugarCRM instance and want that custom module to work as the other modules in the system. You want the custom module to have the ACL/Roles actions accordingly as the other modules are having. At the same time you want to update the database with the unique SugarCRM id in the database. Now the big question is “How to do that man?”

Let’s create a php file which will do the same and name it createID.php. This file will create random SugarCRM unique id of 36 characters.
/*In this portion of code we give the login credentials of SugarCRM database which is to be updated.*/


global $host, $username, $password, $database;
$host = "localhost";

$username = "sugar";

$password = "sugar";

$database = "sugarcrm";
/*This portion of the code will create a MySQL connection that will connect to the database.*/
$server = mysql_connect($host, $username, $password) or

die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($database);
/*This portion of the code will crteate the 36 character unique SugarCRM id.*/
function create_guid()

{

$microTime = microtime();

list($a_dec, $a_sec) = explode(" ", $microTime);
$dec_hex = sprintf("%x", $a_dec* 1000000);

$sec_hex = sprintf("%x", $a_sec);
ensure_length($dec_hex, 5);

ensure_length($sec_hex, 6);
$guid = "";

$guid .= $dec_hex;

$guid .= create_guid_section(3);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= $sec_hex;

$guid .= create_guid_section(6);
return $guid;
}
function create_guid_section($characters)

{

$return = "";

for($i=0; $i<$characters; $i++)

{

$return .= sprintf("%x", mt_rand(0,15));

}

return $return;

}

function ensure_length(&$string, $length)

{

$strlen = strlen($string);

if($strlen < $length)

{

$string = str_pad($string,$length,"0");

}

else if($strlen > $length)

{

$string = substr($string, 0, $length);

}

}

/*This portion of code will select the all the records of the table mentioned here.*/

$query = "select * from custom_module";

$result = mysql_query($query);

$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

if($num_rows > 0)

{

while(($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) != null)
/*This portion of the code will check if the condition is true(meaning data is there in the table mentioned above) then it will create the unique id and update the existing records.*/

{ $opp_proid = create_guid(); $id = $row['id']; $query2 = "update opportunities_products set opp_proid='$opp_proid' where id ='$id'"; echo $query2; mysql_query($query2); } echo "completed"; }
Wow!! The table is updated with the new unique id.