CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm brand new to CiviCRM, so I'm just throwing it out there:

I work for a non-profit with ~20K+ records in our Access DB. We use a variety of paid services to communicate, take donations from, and to do activities with our lists.

Looking at CiviCRM, it has a lot of the features we already pay to use, but with integration with Drupal (which we also use).

The main thing I would like to do is:

- Once the Access information is imported into CiviCRM, allow users access to their data to make updates to email, phone, address if possible (which would have to be approved by an administrator).

I'm not certain if this is possible, as the best way I can think of doing it would be for the member to input certain data (say last name and email) which would confirm certain information to the user, then email a temp password so they can gain access to view the rest of their information (contact, donations, etc) which they are allowed to update.

Anybody know if something like this is possible in CiviCRM, or know how to do it if it is?

TIA!

-Davers

Having an email should be okay.

What about giving/gaining initial access to their user profile in CiviCRM? Is there a good way to allow users to "claim" their profile? There are no current passwords set in any of our other systems that we use, so passwords could be autogenerated and sent to an email address we have on file once requested.

Thanks, Lobo! And the former is really want I want to have. Do you know if there is an auto-generated password when you input the users? I've played with the import module in Drupal for content, but not for users.

I guess in the end it's just a matter of me playing with the all the different elements to make it work properly for what I need. I'm guessing that I can also import past donations that are held in our access system and custom field data as well?

Is there a difference between importing users into Drupal and importing them CiviCRM as an individual contact? Do I need to import my membership list into Drupal rather than CiviCRM for them to access and update their information? I'm unclear how the user relationship is defined and shared between the CMS and the CRM.

Thanks again!

I'm a little confused at the user contact relationship. Currently there is only one user in our Drupal setup (the main admin) so does it make more sense just to import users in as contacts to civi?

If they are imported as contacts rather than users, can the owners of those accounts still update and modify their own records, or do they have to be drupal users to do that? Still a little confused on how they are linked and what is considered best practice.