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.