A new project in the „Mayflower Labs“: D2SBridge

Idea

For several months, we are using Drupal for our web page (mayflower.de) and SugarCRM Professional Edition for managing our customer relations.

On mayflower.de, we provide various forms for our customers helping them to get in contact with us. Before using the D2SBridge, the forms were sent to an internal email address and added manually to our Leads and Contacts. We were thinking of how we could improve this workflow and consequently started to develop the D2SBridge.

“D2SBridge” stands for “Drupal to SugarCRM Bridge” and has the aim to connect these two products.

Description

The D2SBridge enhances the webform module of Drupal to provide additional settings:
You can activate the D2SBridge for every form directly in the form’s settings menu. If activated, you are able to choose the corresponding SugarCRM fields for each form element. It is possible to define preselected values for form fields, as well as to create templates for the resulting SugarCRM entries. SugarCRM standard fields can be used but also Custom fields.

Every time an entry is made, the D2SBridge takes the submitted values and stores them in the Drupal database. First of all, we were thinking of adding the entries directly from the Drupal module to the SugarCRM via SOAP but we dropped that idea for an important reason:

We do not want the SugarCRM to be reachable via the internet and we do not want our webserver to be able to access our intern network – both for security reasons.

Keeping this in mind, we decided to invert the process:
An additional process on a machine in the internal network gathers the data from the webserver and submits it via SOAP to SugarCRM. With this approach, we reach a high level of security while maintaining the wanted functionality.
The submitted data is attached to an existing lead or contact as a note. If there is no corresponding lead or contact yet, the D2SBridge creates one and attaches the note to it.

Key Features already implemented

• Comfortable admin interface within the Drupal menu
• No loss of data if the SugarCRM server is offline for a while, the data entered meanwhile gets submitted when the SugarCRM is online again
• Secure transmission from and to SugarCRM
• Creation of leads and contacts
• Attachment of notes to leads/contacts
• Relating of leads/contacts to target lists and/or campaigns
• Periodic email notification about incoming entries and their status
• Autocomplete functionality for some of the preselection fields