Cleversafe Funds Integration of Plone CMS with SugarCRM

Cleversafe leverages and invests in open source software, community, and culture as a major component of its business model, and as part of that approach has provided funding for Contextual to develop a connector add-on product for the Plone CMS that allows for a seamless Plone-and-SugarCRM experience.

By leveraging the SOAP (Simple Object Application Protocol) standard, and the APIs that leverage this standard in Python and Plone, as well as in PHP and SugarCRM, a user logged into a Plone site never has to leave that Plone site to access his or her appropriate information from SugarCRM, the leading open source customer relationship management tool.

This integration also allows CRM data to be inserted into and edited within SugarCRM, from the interface of a Plone website, without any need for redirects from the Plone site to the SugarCRM site.

Through this SOAP web services approach, both applications are able to make requests to one another and give responses to one another over a standard Internet connection, allowing Plone and SugarCRM to be hosted in completely different geographic locations, if necessary, as well as allowing the option of internally hosting Plone, while leveraging the 'leased' SugarCRM hosted option (SaaS, or Software as a Service model), or vice versa.