some newbie questions

I have looked through the forum and did not see these questions addressed.

Am currently considering a move to SuiteCRM. We have three salespeople with fairly simple needs. Contact/Company list with linked meetings/tasks/notes. I’ve viewed some YouTube videos and reviewed the demo. Seems that SuiteCRM is more than up to the task. Before I venture too far down the rabbit hole, I want to understand some things.

  1. I understand that SuiteCRM is accessed via a browser. Data seems to be in an SQL Database on a server. All good so far. What about data access when offline with no web connection? Is this possible? Is any data stored locally or is there no data access at all when there is no internet access?

  2. Do the contact, task and/or calendar modules interact with other calendars contacts? CalDAV, CardDAV, iCal, Google Calendars, etc.? Our current solution allows for contacts and calendar items to be “subscribed to” by other clients. This allows for personal contacts/calendars on a local device to be viewed alongside business data. It also avoids the need for #1 above since those synced contacts/calendars are stored locally.

  3. I see that SuiteCRM allows for reminders to be set. How are the notifications sent to the user? Does the user need to be online for these to work?

  4. Is there a list of developers that can assist with SuiteCRM installs/customizations?

Thanks in advance

Hi, welcome. I will follow your numbering to answer each question:

  1. It runs as a web app, and won’t be available if you don’t have network access to the server. But you can host it inside your company, and that way you won’t be dependent on Internet access. If you decide to use a mobile app, some of them do have “offline modes” where some data is stored locally. I know QuickCRM Pro does this, maybe others also.

  2. There’s a Google Calendar 2-way integration which is being developed and will probably land on the version coming out about a month from now (depending on how development and tests go). You can also check on each user’s profile, Advanced tab, scroll to the bottom and you will find some calendar features (publish iCal, etc). This last feature is already in the released product.

  3. There are several kinds. The ones that show in the browser, on the top toolbar. (you can also allow your browser to show these directly on the desktop, integrated with other Windows notifications, for example). These will only be seen when you go online. Then there are email notifications, which serve different purposes. You can also use Workflows to make some additional actions generate emails.

  4. A list… no. But I can start by asking one of SalesAgility’s representatives to contact you for a Quote. And other people in these forums provide that sort of service.

Thanks.

Thank you for the quick and informative response.

[quote=“pgr” post=71503]

  1. It runs as a web app, and won’t be available if you don’t have network access to the server. But you can host it inside your company, and that way you won’t be dependent on Internet access. If you decide to use a mobile app, some of them do have “offline modes” where some data is stored locally. I know QuickCRM Pro does this, maybe others also.[/quote]

When inside the company, access wouldn’t be an issue. I was thinking more along the line of travel. On a flight or in a remote area with bad/no internet access. I guess that would fall under the mobile app heading… the ability to work with the information when on the road.

I will look at QuickCRM and see if there are other options with this ability.

I’ll dig deeper into the demo. I missed the publish iCal option. This should do what I was looking for.

I figured that the browser could handle notifications when online. My concern was more in an offline setting, specifically some mechanism that would propagate to other devices (phone/tablet/etc.) and trigger whether or not the user was online at the time. Workflows might be the answer to that. If not, perhaps an email notification with either manual entry or a script to set a reminder/notification through Google or Apple.

I have reached out to SalesAgility via the online request form. I have also found some developers via a Google search and reached out to them as well. I was thinking there might be a list of “recommended” or “certified” developers or something like that. Oddly, a web search doesn’t turn up as many options as I expected.

Thanks again. The info is much appreciated.

The iCal option has a known problem - when you go to Google and tell it so subscribe a calendar by URL, Google will only update that information every 24 hours or so. This really sucks if your calendar is updated often.

Just to add to your offline options: you can have lots of reports, exports etc, to take some files around with you. This won’t have the latest information but can be a practical solution to a lot of problems - checking a customer’s address, for example.

Thanks for contacting SalesAgility, you will be contacted soon, I expect.

You mentioned that iCal support is current while Google Calendar support is likely for an upcoming version. Does this current update issue affect Apple iCal events, Google Calendar events or both? Once/24hr updates would be a problem for me.

The current feature:

  • SuiteCRM writes an iCal file on your local SuiteCRM server
  • you tell some external server (say, Google Calendar, or Apple) to pick it up whenever it wants to
  • but Google only checks into once a day, which really sucks. They have like hundreds of complaints from people begging them to improve this, but it’s been years and no change.
  • note that this integration is strictly one way: Google showing events from SuiteCRM, but you can’t edit them in Google (unless you copy them to your personal Calendar).

The upcoming feature:

  • two-way sync between SuiteCRM’s Calendar and some Google Calendar you select. This uses the Google API and does no rely on the iCal mechanism.
  • Changes can be done on both sides and are visible soon on the other (originally this is set to every 15 minutes, but you can configure it).
  • there might be some limitations to this - I don’t know if recurrence is getting synced, for example.

Note that you can go on Github and grab the new feature right now. You can help us test it.

https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/pull/6146