CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

I am currently evaluating CRM solutions. After some research, the 2 solutions that might fit our needs are VTiger and Civicrm. between the two, CiviCRM seems to be more open and looking at the forum, the community seems to be more active.

Here is our environment:

We are a small foreign Governemental Office in the US (French Office for Science & Technology) and our activities includes keeping in touch with our scientifc diaspora.

- We are already using Mailchimp to send out our newsletters, so I need the CRM to be able to sync contacts/lists with MailChimp

- We are using Google Apps accounts, so I need to sync Civicrm contacts with the Google Apps shared contacts directory

And our need would be to

- Build a database of shared contacts amongst our organization

- Build on top of that database, a map of collaborations between individuals and organization (for example: individual_1 working in organization_1 is collaborating with individual_2 in Organization_2, or organization_1 is collaborating with organization_2). Here is an example of such a map: http://ambascience.co.uk/coop/

From what I understood, Civicrm would allow me to do all that (although I am not sure about the organization to organization relationship).

Our current website is built on SPIP CMS (http://france-science.org), and we do not plan to move away from spip anytime soon. Since there is no Civicrm module available for this CMS, what version of CiviCRM would you recommend for a standalone use?

I don't want our users to be confused, so ideally, I want the access of the tool to be as simple as possible. I briefly tested the 3 versions with the demo account. The interface on the Joomla version is cluttered with the Joomla admin menu, the Wordpress version is a little bit better, but still, when I logged on, I ended up on the Wordpress user profile, and the version that seemed to be the more seemless was the Drupal version.

Any advice is welcome  !

Fred20016, the standard editions of CiviCRM which are supported by the community require a CMS. If you have no preference, I recommend Drupal as it has the best integration and is the most flexible, in my opinion. You can easily configure it to take users to their CiviCRM home page after they login.

Mailchimp integration is available.

I am not aware of a publicly-available tool to "sync Civicrm contacts with the Google Apps shared contacts directory." nicolas, can you let us know more about this tool and if you plan to publish it so others can also use it?

I think all of your other requirements are in core CiviCRM, Fred20016.

Quote from: Hershel on January 29, 2014, 05:49:58 am

I am not aware of a publicly-available tool to "sync Civicrm contacts with the Google Apps shared contacts directory."

This extension seems to be able to to that : https://civicrm.org/extensions/google-apps-sync

You are correct--I didn't know about that. Thank you.

This sounds interesting, but I read that the standalone version of CiviCRM was dropped in 2010.

That is correct.

I am curious of how difficult it is to follow the updates of the official Civicrm.

Not at all. Just follow the blog and join the newsletter. Blog is https://civicrm.org/blog and at the top left there is a way to join the newsletter.

I'm interested to hear why people want a stand-alone version of CiviCRM.

@Nicolas - CiviDesk

Do you have any plans to update Google Apps Sync to CiviCRM 4.4? 


Thanks,
TriStar

I am interested to hear why a standalone version of CiviCRM was dropped in 2010- it seems like the Civi community would like an agnostic approach that is less tightly-coupled to Drupal, Joomla or WP CMS, for reasons Nicolas G. pointed out, as well as performance/resource requirements of those CMSs.  If your application can use, say, just Google Apps or whatever, why have a Drupal install, which is 62 MB, 9,884 files just for core install?

would be great for you and nicolas (and others) to collaborate with each other and help support and maintain the standalone release. Folks who want it, need to help make it happen

It was dropped since the main org maintaining it did not want to continue doing so

lobo