I've written before about The Domino Bridge, but now it's official… The Domino Bridge has a release date.
The Domino Bridge acts as a complete data integration layer between SugarCRM and dotProject. Generally, when a task to integrate two systems is undertaken, most efforts take the view that anything that can be done in one system should be able to be done in the other system. In my humble opinion, this is a terrible idea. Unless you completely merge both codebases, you end up creating a huge duplication of code and/or wrapper classes that require constant tweaking as the respective systems improve.
The Domino Bridge does takes a completely different strategy. We catch the data at the database level and handle the synchronization there. 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, so this is not suitable to use for anything other than testing puposes.
It has been thoroughly tested with dotProject 2.0.1 and SugarCRM 2.0, 3.5.1 OS, and 3.5.1 Pro with minimal adjustment necessary. There has been no testing or consideration for VTiger.
If you have any questions, please drop me an email at keith [at] caseysoftware and I will answer as many of them as possible on this blog in the coming days.
It will be made available to customers starting on 14 November 2005 which is 10 days from today. The licensing terms are still being worked out and this will not be released as an Open Source component in the forseeable future. This will automatically be applied to all of our dotProject hosting customers who are also using SugarCRM.