offline support

[riniker]

hi

a realy nice CRM system you already have!!
I like also the features you planing to add.
but one important feature I am missing in the schedule:
the offline support!
that means: the salesman can create a db snapshot of a account-selection to have it on his notebook
and afterwards he is back in the office he can resychronize the modifyed records back to the main db!


thank you for yout interest in my idea!

werner riniker

[fred]

Yeah, that certainly would be useful. ..kinda tough to do with a web application, but perhaps someone could write a MySQL level sync engine for Sugar. The sales person would then have to run MySQL/Apache/PHP on his/her laptop which would not be entirely convenient, but I have heard worse ideas before!

Alternately, a Palm/Blackberry sync might suffice. I swear I read somewhere on the feature roadmap that Palm Sync was coming, but I have not seen it yet. Perhaps I am not looking hard enough .

--
Fred Read
Web In Motion
webinmotion.net

hi

a realy nice CRM system you already have!!
I like also the features you planing to add.
but one important feature I am missing in the schedule:
the offline support!
that means: the salesman can create a db snapshot of a account-selection to have it on his notebook
and afterwards he is back in the office he can resychronize the modifyed records back to the main db!


thank you for yout interest in my idea!

werner riniker

[darnock]

Why not to try MS Excell as Siebel Crm ondemand did?

Not sure if it's easy but working fine. And what's most important - it allows not only to have a snapshot of your records, but asures to make point upgrades. i.e. you can connect to your crm and download all records that have been assigned to you while working offline.

[julian]

Hello all,

Database sync for disconnected clients is a complex feature that will take proportionally more engineering effort than most any other feature we could build into Sugar Sales. When the Sugar Team builds this feature, it will be in response to overwhelming customer demand.

We are moving toward support for remote access by PDAs, and expect to have these extra interfaces available by the time we release Sugar Sales 2.5 (late December). Thanks,

[aapotts]

Well, not sure how many others have already commented on this, but our company, for one, finds this feature absolutely critical in order for us to use SugarCRM ...

thanks for all the great work...

[gremln007]

Julian:

Can you elaborate on the plans for the remote PDA support? WAP front-end? Some other type of client? DETAILS please!

Thanks

Jonathan

[jvogel]

Well, not sure how many others have already commented on this, but our company, for one, finds this feature absolutely critical in order for us to use SugarCRM ...

thanks for all the great work...

We use Salesforce.com, and are about to go buy another 200+ licenses. I can't get management to support a Sugar switch because of the lacking Offline support. Salesforce gets this "easily" because their stuff is all accessible via an API / Webservices.

Salesforce just uses a bunch of ActiveXObjects in the browser to edit locally [encrypted] XML files. I don't know mySQL well, but there has got to be something out there we can use to address the DB sync issue. Basically, we need to write a Java API/WebServices frontend to address this....

If I can find some time, I'm going to investigate this.

Thanks,
Jason

[gremln007]

Jason:

Sugar uses NuSoap. Check out soap.php for details.

[jvogel]

Per SourceForge,

NuSOAP is a rewrite of SOAPx4, provided by NuSphere and Dietrich Ayala. It is a set of PHP classes - no PHP extensions required - that allow developers to create and consume web services based on SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1 and HTTP 1.0/1.1

NuSoap would allow us to consume WebServices via PHP. So if we define a WebServices "API" for our Sugar tables then we could deploy a full PHP install on each client that could then "sync up" with the online data?

laptop user to run apache/PHP/ and MySQL as a daemon on their local system for locat access?
This seems ill-advised to me, and would require a lot of overhead to run and expertise to install.

Someone made this point from another site...which I think is valid not as much from a resources standpoint, but from a how to simplify the deployment and how do we maintain its integrity? Basically, could we deploy [on Windows] an EXE kind of apporach? This needs more research.

Approaches :

1. The offline version could simply write encrypted XML files. The modified files could be logged as "ToBeSync'ed" somewhere. Then we use SOAP calls to sync with a non-existent API...
2. Install a mySQL instance on the client and then use mySQL to perform the synchronization. The problem I have here, is that I want Sugar to user PearDB to abstract to generic DB access code. We're an Oracle shop, and I want to use Oracle not mySQL. So while this option seems initially appealling, it is fundamentally flawed because we need to stop assuming a particular DB engine.
3. Write a Java offline client...painfully because the interface should match the online version...
4. Use PearDB to get to a generic DB access level, and then implement a generic DB sync API between the offline and the online DBs. If only there were a SourceForge project...look...http://sourceforge.net/projects/daffodilreplica/ except that mySQL is not included. I've posted a question here because the site talks about JDBC...and mySQL has a JDBC connector.

So I'm for 4.

I'm going to keep researching...

Jason

[Tegwin]

Like most of the people here, I think that this is important to have. Perhaps write an offline version of the CRM with aa MYSQL database and then upload the changes to the main server.

I have shown this to many of my clients and the first question they all seemed to ask is "can I use this at 30000 feet on my way across the Atlantic".. guess they are all hgh flyers