We’'ve been poking around SugarCRM lately, and it occurred to me that one “holy grail” extension of the Asterisk plugin would be to leverage the (forgive me[/i]) business intelligence sitting in a CRM to make it as available as possible to users, and to make it easy for users to add to that knowledge.
I see two potential functions here:
Match CallerID to SugarCRM record[/b]
For any inbound call (or outbound, for that matter) Asterisk-IM/Wildfire would attempt a lookup against SugarCRM for any associated records. If found, the notification window could display additional information about the contact, and then provide a clickable URL link to the Sugar contact/account. If no match is found (other than “PRIVATE” calls), the user would have the option of creating a new Sugar record, taking the CallerID alpha and number as starting fields.
Call Log[/b]
At the end of any call, inbound or outbound, a “call log” box would appear (you should be able to configure it to force it up or not) to allow/encourage the user to write some notes about the content of the call, which are then attached as a “note” to the Sugar contact or account. It would be nice to have the option not only to attach it to an existing record, but also to attach the call log to a different Sugar record (different contact, case, bug report, etc.).
Since SugarCRM seems to be the open source CRM of choice for now, and many projects are working to integrate their offerings with Sugar (it says something that Asterisk@Home uses SugarCRM by default), Wildfire/Spark/Asterisk-IM would be a great way to get that functionality to the desktop.
I realize that this is a non-trivial task, but it could add a tremendous amount of value to the Wildfire server and Spark client, and position it as the obvious compliment of SugarCRM (you could certainly extend it to other CRM software if there were interest).
What do you all think?
–Aaron
Addendum:
Looks like others have thought about this too. The Asterisk Desktop Manager has received a contributed plugin that ties it together with VTiger CRM (a SugarCRM derivative) to display user info for incoming calls: http://adm.hamnett.org/
Message was edited by: ahathaway