Google Calendar User? Maybe your CRM is personal – maybe you use Google Apps for your whole team. Wouldn’t it be useful to see your meetings, calls, even tasks in Google Calendar? Now you can using our newest SugarCRM Module.
Functionality
- Store your Google Credentials on a per-user basis. Every user will utilize his or her own Google Calendar.
- Meetings and Calls will be copied to all of the invited users’ Google Calendars (Tasks only go to the assigned-to User)
- If a user updates or deletes the event in Google Calendar, the corresponding event in SugarCRM will be updated or deleted appropriately. Of course, this triggers the updates to any and all other users’ affected Google Calendar events.
- Security – No users can access Google Event Data or Google Credentials, not even the Admin.
Maybe you sync your Google Calendar to Thunderbird? Or Outlook? or your iPhone calendar? Yes, your SugarCRM events will be shown there as well!
Technical Notes
Software will be delivered as an installable SugarCRM Module, intended to be used with Sugar’s Module Loader.
Package is upgrade-safe, tested with SugarCRM 6.1 Community Edition, Professional and Enterprise and SugarCRM 6.2.0 Community Edition, Professional and Enterprise.
Changes made to events from Google Calendar will synchronize back into SugarCRM via a Scheduler event which is created when the module is installed. By default, the scheduler runs constantly throughout the day (every 1 minute of every day) to avoid a backlog of updates. If bandwidth becomes an issue, the scheduler event’s timing can be changed as necessary.
Events must be created originally in SugarCRM; events created outside of SugarCRM will not be imported. Recurring events are not supported.
Current Version
We’re at version 1.2, which features a handful of necessary updates for SugarCRM 6.2 (based on 6.2RC1).
Grab it while it’s hot by contacting our sales department (1 866 515-9959).
Screenshots
Initiate Setup Process from Calendar Menu (also accessible from Activities Menu)
Enter Google Credentials and Select Calendar
Create a new Meeting (or call, or task)
Check Google Calendar and find the event.
Check other platforms set to Sync with Google (iOS on iPhone is depicted)
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Buy it Now
Use Paypal to purchase the module now for $40/user. When checking out, please adjust the quantity field to reflect the number of users in your system. Once we receive your payment, we’ll email you your module and the documentation
2 Comments
Hi,
Did you by any chance found some way of syncing *new* events created in Google Calendar to SugarCRM? As you state in the documentation the plugin only updates events that were originally created in SugarCRM and than keeps them in sync. I understand why, because Google doesn’t require all the (structured) data that is needed to create an event in SugarCRM.
Do you have some (beta?) code or an example of how to read users calendars in Gmail to look for “new” events (events not present in SugarCRM) which are than inserted in Sugar (only once preferably, since from that point the plugin will probably keep things in sync). Or do you just advise me to use Google’s calendaring API and create such code myself?
I know it’s just a long shot, but since you are the experts and have probably looked into this in the past (and than decided not to include it in the plugin, which I understand) I thought it worth the effort to just ask if you could give me some pointer as to how to solve this
Kind regards,
Matthijs
Definitely a legitimate question, Matthijs. We do not currently have any code (even internally) that checks/imports existing Google Calendar events. I’ve thought about it a lot, because I think there are folks that would appreciate it, but the logistics are difficult for an all-purpose/for-the-masses module. People use Google Calendar in too many different ways to interpret the data in a way that everyone would appreciate.
For the initial phase of moving to Sugar and the integration, you can always export your Google Calendar into an iCal file; use a tool to convert it into a CSV, then import the CSV into SugarCRM as Meetings. Those meetings then sync to Google Calendar. You’ll have duplicates on the Google-side at this point unless you point the integration to a new Sugar-Sync calendar (recommended) and/or remove the existing calendar entries. See? even that simple step plays heavily against user preferences!
As for a continuous bidirectional sync, the prerequisite questions to answer are
Once you have the process mentally mapped out with those respects, you could set up a new poll (similar to the check-for-updates poll) that grabs new events (events on the calendar that we do not have a matching Meeting for) and create meetings for them. Alternatively, you could modify the existing poll to do the same, but if I were to send you an update to the module, your enhancements would be overridden.