The Domino Bridge is Available
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Date: 14 November, 2005 - 08:13

The Domino Bridge has been made available for sale. The final testing is complete, all known bugs have been resolved, and final coat of paint is dry. ;)

If you're not familiar with the Domino Bridge, let me give you some quick background:

CaseySoftware and numerous other organizations use dotProject on a day to day basis to track projects, assign tasking, and manage the overall operations of their projects. I have personally been involved in dotProject installations supporting teams as large as 120 people working on 90+ projects throughout the year. It is a solid system supporting Gantt Charts, project calendars, integrated ToDo lists, and a host of other things. But don't just believe me, I'm a core developer and therefore biased. Go check it out yourself. SugarCRM is the leading Open Source CRM solution. Hundreds of organizations are actively using it to manage their sales forces, their customer accounts, and their on going opportunities. CaseySoftware is and has been one of those organizations for well over a year. We have a series of SugarCRM modules scheduled for release over the next 6 weeks, but I'll discuss that later.

The way most integrations work is that developers attempt to build a single interface to handle the functionality of all underlying systems. While this works when you have close control of the underlying systems - such as internal development - it quickly fails when Open Source projects are being integrated because each of the underlying systems moves in ways not whole predictable to outside users.

The Domino Bridge does takes a completely different strategy. We catch the data at the database level and handle the syncrhonization from that point of view. Since this happens at a much lower level, the total modifications to each system were the addition of four lines of code. Yes, you read that correctly. Four lines of code. This means that the data synchronization requires much less maintenance than any other solution currently available. Which is more important?

[Systems temporarily offline.]

They can both be accessed using the credentials admin/passwd on both systems. The UI's are not integrated in any way, but whenever something is created in one system, it is automagically mirrored in the other system. The relevant areas are:

Sugar Tasks to/from dotProject Events
Sugar Users to/from dotProject Users
Sugar Accounts to/from dotProject Companies
Sugar Opportunities to/from dotProject Projects
Sugar Contacts to/from dotProject Contacts

The databases automagically restore themselves to their base condition every 6 hours and as new releases of Domino become available, this demo will be updated, therefore the above systems are unsuitable for anything beyond testing usage.

Once again, if you have any questions, please let me know at keith @ caseysoftware.

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batch processing

What you have done is indeed remarkable and useful. In particular I think you went for the solution that fits the typical use case, which is to synchronize the systems periodically. A live integration would have been much more difficult and would have tied the projects at the hip and created all manner of integration issues going forward.

I think this type of solution has a long precedent in the financial sector, where disparate system frequently merge data sets together on a nightly basis. Kudos for seeing the simpler path and not getting distracted by the lure of building live integration.

Actually...

It sync's the data as the data is used and not a batch job at all.

One of the Use Cases of a customer was to allow for near realtime reporting.

Once again Casey Software shines

Once again Caseysoftware shows it's stuff with this product. I think this is a GREAT contribution and is only going to bring more attention to the fine work this group does. I am sure they have more good things in store for us.

$3000 dollars!

A bit steep?

Depends

How much would you save if your sales and project teams could share information without effort?

How much time is wasted by re-keying data multiple times? What happens when mistakes are made?

How many many times has new information not made it back to the relevant people? How many delays and misunderstandings has that caused?

How long would it take your team to develop something like the Domino Bridge? How long would it take your team to understand the inner workings of dotProject? What about SugarCRM? What happens as those systems change and grow?

We have the expertise.
We have the experience.
We offer updates and bug fixes for a year.

Can't get Events Working

Hi,

I am, like many others very interested in this project as I use Dot Project and SugarCRM a lot.

I have tried the demo sites but their appears to be some issues with the integration.

Are you currently experiencing some problems with the demo site?

The areas with probles are
- Creating Events in Dot project
- Linking a Contacts with a Customers from DP doesn't linkl in SugarCRM
- Linking a new Projects doesn't create an Opportunity
- Deletion of Anything doesn't link across (I'm assuming it's not meant to)

Kind Regards,

Ryan

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