At the insistence of John Mertic - Developer Liasion of SugarCRM - whom I met in January at PHPBenelux 2011, I submitted and was accepted to speak at SugarCon 2011 next month. My session - Transparent Collaboration - covers a part of open source that drives most of us up the wall.. integration. Here's the marketing version of the synopsis:

As we've built increasingly powerful systems to run our organizations, we've entered a period where Sales is able to quickly communicate with Sales and Engineering is able to communicate with Engineering, but the groups aren't able to communicate with each other. In some cases, we've added synchronization on top or added new workflows for our people but neither solution addresses the underlying problem of disconnected systems. This session will be a case study on integrating SugarCRM with web2project, a web-based project management system, to make the best information available to the entire organization at the same time.

The developer version of the synopsis is much shorter:

Everyone wants to have good data but it's often in different systems. Copying and pasting between systems takes forever and you're going to break stuff. So forget that.. let's make it happen automagically.

The goal of this session is to show how to work with and expand upon the SugarCRM API. It will be developer-focused but I'll touch on the underlying specification that is driving development and how that came about. After all, most of the time deciding what to do and what not to do is just as important as doing it.

If you've followed this blog since ancient times (aka 2005), you might have seen mention of the Domino Bridge which integrated dotProject and SugarCRM. This presentation details the update of that and uses web2project instead of dotProject.

One of the fun things about this effort is the news about my upcoming.. no wait, that announcement will wait until my presentation.

But more important than this presentation, the development effort, and even [the unannounced thing] are the two big announcements from the SugarCRM side of the fence... but those aren't my announcements to make.

You'll have to come to SugarCon 2011 to find out. ;)