Re: FW: Help Desk and Ledgersmb

["David F. Skoll" <..hidden..>]

Ed W wrote:

> I would love to see a bit more about how you integrated Asterisk and Sugar?

When a call comes in, we make an system() call in the dialplan to a Perl
script that looks up the Caller*ID in Sugar.  If it finds an account, it
sends a specially-formatted message on an internal IRC channel.

On our desktops, we have robots listening on the IRC channel.  When they
see a call that you've answered, they kick off "firefox -remote...." to
open the appropriate Sugar, LedgerSMB and RT pages in tabs.

[...]

> You might want to consider commercialising the integration that you have 
> done - perhaps push some of the changes upstream to stabalise 
> interfaces, etc..

We thought about it, but there are a number of downsides:

1) We use an unusual combination of software (SugarCRM, LedgerSMB and RT.)
The average business is likely to be far more Microsoft-centric....

2) ... which means we'd need to do Windows client programming.  I'd sooner
slit my wrists.

3) This kind of work is heavily consulting-oriented, and I find consulting
a hard way to make money.  I much prefer a product-oriented business. :-)

Also, we used standard interfaces (Asterisk's "system" call) in somewhat
non-standard ways (IRC as a message-bus) so there's not much to push
upstream.

Bringing this back to LedgerSMB... one of the things I'm most looking
forward to in the roadmap is an official API.  Our current integration
tools wrap LedgerSMB and SugarCRM with Rose::DB, so when the schema
changes, it's a bit annoying.  (We don't wrap RT with Rose::DB because
its schema is just too weird.)

One thing I'd like to see in LedgerSMB is triggers: Scripts that fire
when certain actions are taken such as adding a customer, posting a
payment, etc.  That would let us do all kinds of other integration
like automatically updating a customer's license key when we receive
payment.

Regards,

David.