Proposal Generator?

[Sugar-Daddy]

Experts,

I've searched, but come up empty. Can SugarCRM act as a proposal generator in any form (and any version)? I have SugarCRM 5.* and my company is thrilled with the idea of a proposal generator, and I don't want to be the one to say "No!"... :)

I guess the simplest form might be to have prepared, approved texts sitting in the same/different database, then call that text up, in the right order, and present it in a format suitable for presentation to a prospect/customer. This could be MS Word (mail merge for 1?), PDF, or a format that would allow itself to be pasted into MS Word with formatting intact.

Ideally, a rep would select the opportunity, and hit "Generate Proposal", and everything would come out nicely, including any documentation specific to the type of opportunity, or the things being sold (example bring just product would have different terms than just proserv, etc.).

Icing on the cake? The generated file is attached to the oportunity, saving my reps the chance to forget to do so...

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[kbrill]

Can it do it out of the box, probably not perfectly. You might be able to put together some sort of mail merge that would suit your needs maybe but since SugarCRM is open source it would be very easy to fashion exactly what you need. You just need someone who can write PHP code, the description you give is a fairly simple project for anyone who has programmed against SugarCRM before.

[Sugar-Daddy]

Kenneth,

Thanks for replying. I won't have any trouble with the PHP part, but the SugarCRM part is new. Also, I guess I was hoping someone would tell me about a wonderful way to create MS Word documents from the data in SugarCRM and a module's PHP code.

I could see grabbing portions of generic text from the database that is templated (macro/variables in the body) and running through them in PHP to replace the variables with the values from the DB, but I'm trying to find a way to allow those templates to be edited as content in Sugar's interface.

The way I see it, I'll need to create a table of proposal 'sections', so each can be directly edited in the Sugar interface. Other columns (attributes) would be the conditions under which that section would be included, and perhaps even it's order (unless taken care of by the 'generator' part of the module's code.

This way, a single table would have as rows all possible sections of all types of (in this example) proposals. As long as the required hidden variables matched the row's logic, it would be included-once parsed to insert the record's values.

I guess the only thing left would be how to get the string(s) into an MS Word format, then finally inserting it back into the correct table for the opportunity.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[kbrill]

Thats a pretty complex module you have planned there. There are lots of ways to fill in a Word document from PHP, I have used a mething like this

http://klewos.wordpress.com/2010/04/...ent-quick-tip/

before, but actually editing those templates in SugarCRM is a much harder bar to clear. I am sure its possible but it is going to be quite a project.