Forums / Extensions / Looking for CiviCRM in Exponential
Sebastian Schoeller
Friday 11 July 2008 1:00:50 am
Hi all,
I am volunteer for a charity organization in Germany. We have been deploying Exponential since maybe around 1,5 years now. Recently we have identified the need for a NGO-orientated CRM extension to out intranet section.
I came across a CRM called CiviCRM (civicrm.org), which looks very interesting to us. My question now whether there has been created any CRM extension to Exponential similar to CiviCRM that I am not aware of? SugarCRM and TinyERP do not fit our needs, since they are too complicated for us to customize. CiviCRM integrates into Drupal5 and Joomla, but we'd rather stick with Exponential due to the clarity of structure.
I would be very grateful for a response. Best wishes
Sebastian
Mark Marsiglio
Wednesday 25 February 2009 1:51:27 pm
We are also looking at a potential project that would benefit from integration with CiviCRM. According to their website:
CiviCRM can work within virtually any content management system (what we call a "user framework"). We have determined it is feasible for CiviCRM to work within Plone, but no one has dedicated the time or money to make it happen. If you would like help making CiviCRM work within other content management systems, send a message to the developers mailing list for CiviCRM .
I am sure that the open nature of the two systems would make it a viable project. Has anyone else been considering such an integration lately (or already begun one)?
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Bruce Letterle
Thursday 26 February 2009 6:57:10 pm
My firm is familiar with CiviCRM and I do not see why you would need an extension built to provide this functionality. CiviCRM has four modules that load onto Joomla or Drupal. They are Contribute, Event, Mail, and Member. Most of their features are already included in eZ's eCommerce, Calendar Content, Newsletter, and User systems. It would not take much work to complete the extra features.
Bruce
Bruce Letterle Creative Web Technologies www.creativewebtech.com
Thursday 26 February 2009 8:31:19 pm
It is true that Exponential can be customized to do just about anything, but sometimes customizing to recreate functionality is not as good as wrapping existing functionality in via extension. This has been done with other CRM systems that are more purpose built (i.e. SugarCRM) for functionality other than content management.
In this case, after reviewing the code today, we don't think that integrating the two will be terribly difficult.
From a sales perspective, it allows us to position ourselves as deploying a best of breed open source solution for both CMS and CRM, rather than pushing one system to do something it was not designed to do.
gaga 66
Friday 27 February 2009 11:42:21 am
I've worked with Exponential and also Drupal CiviCRM installations.
CiviCRM has a standalone version that can be run without a CMS. This may be feasible for your needs.
Of course there are advantages to integrating it with a CMS. With Drupal, Shared registration for example allows you to create a Drupal & CiviCRM user when a user signs up for an event through CiviCRM. This allows you to provide privilaged content to event attendees after registration.
I'd be very interested to see an integration take place between CiviCRM and Exponential. At the moment I have clients that need CiviCRM using Drupal because of its integration.