Magento

maybe commerce with crm… or maybe both relatively independent and web 2.0 ish i mean data exchange in xml etc. module in sugarcrm for magento order mgmt maybe

I don’t think a parent/child relationship is the best way to look at it… both are equally important in a B to B environment… standard retail to consumers would lend little use for Sugar. Here are my thoughts:
1. Sugar should import new client details and ordering information. This is a good first step
2. Magento should export client details to Sugar and Sugar admin should have an easy discard option.

Inmy company we’re working to a middleware-like solution, trying to synchronize magento and sugarcrm databases with a standalone script. At the moment we user direct SQL queries for data getting and setting. First script version (in python until now) use sugar as the “master” and magento as the “slave”, but now we are trying to have a bidirectional sync.

I’d approach this question from the work flow perspective.

What kind of use-cases do we know, that require interaction of both systems?

You have retail customers buying products in magento. They enter data themselves into magento. This data might be needed by your sales team in sugarCRM. Therefore we need to sync the contact data from magento to sugarCRM.
In the other direction there could be corporate customers that are managed by the sales team in sugarCRM. The sales team might place orders they received by phone or mail in the magento system. These Orders would be handled by someone of the shop team. The shop employee should see which sales person dropped the order.
I’d like to see customer data flow from magneto to sugarCRM and a order module for sugarCRM that can drop orders into magento.
In this example it is obvious that all customer data is copied from magento to sugarCRM. Customer data from sugarCRM is only copied to magento if a order was placed from inside sugarCRM.
It would be nice if the sales Team could look up order data in magento for any customer. But here all data would stay in magento and the module for sugarCRM is only a integrated backend to magento.

I would like to see some conversation btn magento & sugar in the following scenarios;
1) Telesales have access to all customer/order info held in magento. This is so they can contact a customer who has bought/expressed interest in product A to let them know that it or a related product is now on offer.
2) When sending out a newsletter from magento, I want to know what leads in sugar have expressed an interest in product or category x so that I can target the newsletter accordingly. So, when somebody comes into the offline shop and expresses an interest in product/range x, magento needs access to this info.
3) Similarly, in sugar the sales team want all newsletter subscribers so that we can send paper a catelogue out. Perhaps this has a sales coupon. When user buys online using this coupon, sugar will need to know so that we can attach returns to marketing efforts.
4) Sales team using sugar need to know customer value/profile - how often does this customer purchase, are they worth chasing, etc? For this, they’ll need access to magento customer/order data.

What we need to remember is that many outfits use multiple sales and marketing channels. They may well have one-many physical shops alongside many websites. They may also combine physical and virtual marketing.

All these sales/marketing channels need to be combined or synchronised, so that neither magento nor sugar act as a data silo. We need mechanisms for sharing and collating this material across all these channels.

Ed

Newsletter integration is a interesting part, indeed.
But I would try to disable the newsletter function in magento. We would need a custom module in magento that allows customers to sign up to Campaigns in sugarCRM and can show the Customer to which Campaigns he already signed up.

Any progress here guys, we would be happy to join developping.