SugarCRM 101

[THUFIR]

Our company currently uses a hosted Asterisk PBX with hardphone <10 phones.

At the moment I'm a bit consumed with testing SugarCRM features and reading about Asterisk itself.

How is SugarCRM integrated into ViciBox? What does it mean to integrate it into ViciDial and ViciBox?

[williamconley]

1) Vicibox is the installer for Vicidial. Thus Vicibox is not integrated with anything, Vicidial is the dialer software that would be integrated with your CRM.

2) To integrate a CRM and a Dialer you must decide what information resides in each package and why/when they should exchange information. A deep integration would be to actually share the databases, but that would require "forking" of both projects and be pointless. So the goal is to either send leads from the CRM to the Dialer or the other way around. And you must decide when this should happen (trigger event and data map).

3) A common integration is so send leads from Vicidial into Sugar at the moment of a SALE. This requires a dispo_url in the Vicidial campaign which would be a php application that accepts the lead from Vicidial and pushes it into SugarCRM for sales tracking (and/or followup from customer service ... etc).

4) There is no limit to the number of interactions between the two packages. Each integration is unique and based on your business model.

5) We (and many others) perform this as a service from a tiny first integration (#4 above) to some extremely intricate versions which exchange information in both direction based on many conditions. But make no mistake: Each time information passes from one system to the other it is a unique (and generally simple) integration process requiring a Trigger(condition) and a field map. But when you put a bunch of those together, the interaction can become quite complex (in the aggregate).