DataSync Business News

SugarCRM and DataSync have implemented the open source software package for the largest free music festival in the nation – LifeLight. LifeLight brings over 300,000 people each year to a full 3 days of music and ministry.

We have spent the last few months building a dynamic web data management platform base on SugarCRM to manage all the data that 300,000 attendees generate. This has been a huge project for us, mostly due to the fact that we’re dealing with a highly dynamic, high growth organization that needs a lot of custom work.

DataSync has already built over 12 custom CRM modules to manage all the information LifeLight depends on. In addition, the entire infrastructure is linked to LifeLight’s website, allowing for interaction and e-commerce to integrate directly with SugarCRM.

For more information, see the LifeLight case study on DataSync’s website.

Today our recent Blackberry/Zimbra integration got picked up on CNET.com. We’re one of the first companies to offer Zimbra/BES integration, and the service is starting to get traction. Keep in mind that support is still in beta mode, however it’s a great solution that works well. We have many users already on the system with great results.

There’s a few quirks to work out yet, but Zimbra and RIM (Research in Motion – the company behind BlackBerry) are doing a great job on making the changes necessary to bring this integration into full production, hopefully in the near future.

If you’re interested in using your BlackBerry with Zimbra, check out our website for more details.

We’re finally ready to commit to a timeline for our first landmark feature for DataSync Suite: Zimbra email archiving to SugarCRM. You’ve been asking for it, we’re going to deliver. It’ll be open source and up for grabs in a couple months.

We’ve been focused on developing the single sign-on and account management portions of DataSync Suite. Now that we’ve made some progress there, we’re going to focus on a cool new feature over the next few weeks: developing a plugin that allows users to archive their email in Zimbra to SugarCRM.

We’ve already seen this done in desktop clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook, but no one has done it in the web interface of Zimbra. We’re doing this to remove the need for a desktop client to move information between SugarCRM and Zimbra.

In the future we’re also going to add contact, task, and calender syncing to the plugin. We’ll probably take a break and work on some other aspects of DataSync Suite (such as the integration bus) before we tackle that. However if there’s a group out in the community who would like to help us out, that would be much appreciated

DataSync is excited to launch full BlackBerry BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) support for Zimbra and SugarCRM. We’ve been in testing for a long time (thanks to all you beta testers!) and have confidence in our backend systems. BlackBerry support is a key part of our ongoing strategy to mobilize our applications, and Zimbra and SugarCRM are the first apps to jump on this trend.

Zimbra is currently in “beta” BlackBerry support mode, however we have had a very solid response over the past 30 days in our test environment. We’ve decided to offer this service commercially because of the overall stability of the system. Even though it isn’t 100% solid yet, it’s a massive improvement over NotifyLink’s software (which regularly angered DataSync and our users). So in light of the move forward, we’ve decided to pull support for Notify and move our users exclusively to BES.

On the SugarCRM front, we now have numerous options for managing CRM on your BlackBerry. If you’re in a high-speed mobile network, you’ll really appreciate the funcionality. If you’re still on 1x or a slower mobile network, the connectivity will be slow. We don’t have EVDO here just yet, but I still take advantage of the ability to look up contacts, log cases, and track accounts on my BlackBerry. If you’re interested in mobile SugarCRM options contact us and we’ll give you the scoop on our experiences.

Mobile devices are a growing part of our client’s lives. Managing email, calendars, contact lists are becoming a regular part of business. We’re committed to doing our best to provide our clients with the latest mobile technology to set their workforce free.

DataSync is proud to publish our updated DataSync Suite architecture document in our wiki. This document is currently under heavy modification as we start publishing our strategy for future development of DataSync Suite. Right now we’re working hard on our understanding of Zope and how it ties into our application, and are finding that our “DataSync Core Services” application will be split into two parts:

1. Application Server - This will be heavily powered by Zope, and will be focused on communication and managing plugins with supported applications.
2. Integration Bus - This is the ground-level communication layer. We’re working to make this a scalable protocol that allows our application to scale to enterprise levels.

Overall the document is a skeleton model for how we’ll be building our application out. Right now we’re still looking to the community for input, so we’d like to hear your thoughts about the direction we’re taking. Also check out or roadmap for information on what we plan to build and when.

After a ton of research, we’ve decided to use Zope as the application framework that will drive the future of DataSync Suite. Zope is a widely accepted standard in the open source world that has an army of developers working on improving it. It’s also extremely flexible, actually one of the most flexible application frameworks out there in our opinion.

Our internal guys have already started working on moving some of the portal over to Zope, and will be working on layering in the Integration Bus. Our transition to Zope will probably be done over the next few months gradually. However our move to Zope is an important strategic decision that will help us make DataSync Suite more flexible and robust. One of the biggest features we’re looking forward to utilizing is Zope’s plug in features. We want to make it extremely simple to add applications to the suite, and Zope allows us to do that.

If you’re interested in more about ongoing development of our suite, feel free to contact us.