Author Topic: Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange? (Read 2234 times)

dproberts2025 · July 17, 2013, 01:28:35 pm

Hi, I am looking into which CRM software is best for our needs and have a question in regards to CiviCRM.

My web design team is looking to revamp our website using Drupel and have recommended CiviCRM. At the same time I am looking for a CRM platform that will integrate with Outlook and Exchange so that we have one central mailing list which we can use for emails, etc ., from our desktops, iPhones, etc.

Currently my members gain access to "certain" members areas on the website based on membership type, will CiviCRM allow this?

Maybe I am mixing oranges with apples and should be trying to keep the two (website and email contacts) separate but ideally I would like just one central database of contacts that the web accesses and exchange accesses.

Is this possible?

Thanks for any help and/or information that you can offer, greatly appreciated.

JonGold · July 17, 2013, 01:40:11 pm

Hi there,

I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can:
"Currently my members gain access to "certain" members areas on the website based on membership type, will CiviCRM allow this?"

I assume this is an unrelated question to the Exchange/Outlook question - or maybe I'm misunderstanding? Anyway - this is no problem for CiviCRM if you're using Drupal. You enable the CiviMember-Role Sync module, and then your Drupal developers will set "members only" access using traditional Drupal roles/permissions.

Exchange/Outlook integration:

There are a number of ways to achieve this; the most effective way to do this would be with an LDAP server. Nicolas Ganivet announced an LDAP server at the last CiviCon, but I haven't tried it out - I assume it's the same thing as ldapcivi, here: https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi

There's also documentation on integrating OpenLDAP with CiviCRM, but that's a solution that requires updates every time you upgrade CiviCRM, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Most importantly, the current solutions don't enforce permissions; anyone with access to the LDAP directory could see all contact info, which might not work if you're using permissioning to hide certain contacts from folks. Of course, if that's an important feature, you could probably sponsor that improvement in the code.

davem · July 18, 2013, 12:11:14 am

Hi

As JonGold says, it's easy to allow members only content in Drupal and your Drupal developers should be able to sort that out.

There is also an Outlook integration http://civicrm.org/blogs/polestar/civisync-outlook-20-beta-released-outlook-synchronization-civicrm which allows you to sync contacts and groups (mailing lists). So you need to think a bit about what you'll want to sync (probably don't want to get people's personal email contacts into CRM) and have some kind of policy on this. You also are probably better off doing the mailings from CiviCRM if it's more than one or two contacts since this can go out through CiviMail and you then get nice stats on who opened, clicked on which links etc. You can also cc/bcc a CiviCRM mailbox which will record the email sent from Outlook as an activity against the contact the mail was sent to.

Hope that's useful

DaveM

xavier · July 29, 2013, 01:56:39 am

Quote

There are a number of ways to achieve this; the most effective way to do this would be with an LDAP server. Nicolas Ganivet announced an LDAP server at the last CiviCon, but I haven't tried it out - I assume it's the same thing as ldapcivi, here: https://github.com/TechToThePeople/ldapcivi

It is the same indeed.

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Author Topic: Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange? (Read 2234 times)

dproberts2025

Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange?

JonGold

Re: Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange?

davem

Re: Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange?

xavier

Re: Does CiviCRM integrate with Outlook and Exchange?