ryan jauregui, iamoso » sugarcrm

Migration Complete, Now Feature Adding

Ryan Jauregui — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:30:12 +0000

So after weeks of test migrations, data integrity checks, and end-users testing functionality we finally went live with SugarCRM, replacing the Goldmine database the company was using for 9 years. Each time we did a test migration something changed drastically adding a bit more time to the actual conversion. It was riding right around 4 hours, not bad, but that decided to change on me at the last second. On the live migration everything decided to break, even though I had done it the same way four times before. It took me about 12 hours of my time last weekend to make it happen for the Monday launch. After stressing and getting some grey hair I fixed everything and got it done.

This week has been crazy though, because there were a lot of things the end-users did not catch the first couple times around, so we had to be creative to fix the import issues. In the end, everyone is fairly happy with the transition, though I have about 10 feature requests pending. At least that means I have work to do! Heh.

It was definitely a cool experience. It feels good to be congratulated by the owners when they were skeptical about the migration. I have learned a lot about how SugarCRM works, so that is great. I have learned to love portions of it, and hate others, which is a big change from hating it altogether.

Anyway, more work to do!

It’s like know what you are doing…

Ryan Jauregui — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:53:22 +0000

Is what one of my buddies said to me the other night after I recoded a chunk of the admin section on his site, which allows for him to better manage his user accounts without having to use phpmyadmin. It is funny that I am now where I am at, as a developer, as opposed to being the IT guy. When I was in school, I hated everything about development because it was hard for me to grasp, but somehow my mind evolved and brought me to where I need to be. It is definitely a change of pace and it is cool not having to work with the end user; on top of that I get to learn more as I go along.

At work we are migrating from GoldMine to SugarCRM, and what a chore that is. I have had a love-hate relationship with SugarCRM for years now, emphasis on hate, but now that I am diving into the development aspect of it I feel more love for it. It is a really great platform, though it seems a little overly complicated to do some things, but with some time on my hands it helps that I can poke around and break things. Today I was able to write some custom logic hooks for the custom payments module Nick wrote. Basically, if a payment comes through that was rejected, a call is scheduled for the assigned user for the next day after the data import. I know what I wrote is probably a cinch for the guys who work with sugar more than I, but I was proud I could get something working.

Anyway, I have to get back to work, maybe I can detail things later.

Sugar, Bitter…

Ryan Jauregui — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:13:32 +0000

I have been playing around with SugarCRM for the past week or two, trying to write some easy custom additions. I am bitter for the fact that it has taken me two weeks to figure out how to accomplish what I need. It seems like there is a bit of a lack of hand-holding for custom code (that works with the current version) and the people who know how to do it, want to charge you a shit load of money to get it done.

I figured out the database relationships between tables fairly easily and wrote my query to count the number of leads assigned to user accounts between specific dates, those dates being pulled from the advanced search in the Lead area. That took me no time at all, but trying to figure out how to put it into the output of the left, shortcut bar, well that stupidly took me hours of time, and some money to get it done, may I add a week late. I posted the job on oDesk to get some quick help so I could be done with it, and I had some a-holes from India wanting to charge me $600 for 30 hours of work to get it done, with my query and logic included. Apparently they think I am a fucking idiot. I know for a fact, a guy who works with SugarCRM even occasionally could get it done in less than an hour.

So I ended up agreeing to pay someone $100 to get it done in a rush (the same day). Let’s just say, it took a fucking week, because obviously they just do not care. When I finally got the code, for testing purposes, and found out they edited maybe 10 lines total in a theme file to get it done, it only reinforced my statement above. I do not mind paying a bit of money to learn something for future work, but the fact it took them a week with no communication to create 10 lines of code, not happy. On top of that they did not use my query, which was far superior to theirs, so I had to go back in integrate it. I am going to guess it was a major language barrier…

Well anyway that is all over with, I got it working and that’s that. On other news I learned quite a bit about the SOAP API in the past couple of days. It is very powerful, and once you learn how to use it correctly, it can make interfacing with SugarCRM quick and not so dirty. You just have to really study examples and whatnot to get it right.