Comments on: I Want a Web Event Broker

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 01:06:50 +0000

Jon,

I could not agree more.

I will forward to the folks at SugarCRM.

By: Jon Price

Jon Price — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:35:41 +0000

We’ve been dealing with this very issue for years. Wait until you have a slew of companies that buy a booth or combination of media products from a constantly-changing CAD file on your site in order to complete your “item” field that generates the invoice/sales order — it gets pretty complicated connecting these annoying gateways, as you said.

Not to plug Salesforce.com, but there are a couple of interesting ways that we do what you describe above through their service. In theory SugarCRM could replicate the connectors like iBiz or Saleslogix that synchronize with your QuickBooks sales orders. QuickBooks (I know, the online version is crap) has the abilitity to generate the invoice from the sales order that Salesforce.com creates and passes to QuickBooks, and then out to the customer. Once the customer gets the invoice via email, they can pay directly inside the invoice securely, and that passes back to your QquickBooks system through a merchant account or PayPal.

Again, it’s a bunch of duct tape to get the gateways talking, but it actually does work for us. For the initial part of signing the documents, it is a big help to have a DocuSign or EchoSign, but invoicing, payment and accounting for it all is a huge pita that we’ve sort of solved. Still making plenty of trips to the P.O. box and bank to do the analog check thing though.

The thing that frustrates me the most is the lack of interest in connecting CRM to accounting data for sales order processing alone. My guess is that accounting types just aren’t as interested in the notion of online data as a salesteam would be — as much as the integration of the two would save them per year. NetSuite is about the only thing out there that is fairly integrated on this front, but has it’s challenges too. It would be awseome if there was a SugarERP or SugarQB in the works to fix this disconnect.

Anayways, great site, and congrats on the success of the show, sounds like it was awesome.

By: IT|Redux » Enabling Complex Workflows with Office 2.0

IT|Redux » Enabling Complex Workflows with Office 2.0 — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 14:59:03 +0000

[…] Once the sponsorship agreement has been signed, with the optional sending of a W-9 form and invoice, we need to get paid. For this, we’ve used three payment methods: PayPal, wire transfer, and plain old check mailed to our P.O. box. For the PayPal transaction and the wire transfer, we received email notifications, but found no easy way to link that back to a SugarCRM object without having to do some custom programming. This is where I could see a need for a new service that would provide simple wizards to create web services connected to specific email accounts. In fact, I need some kind of a web event broker. […]

By: Den’s Enterprisey Foghorn / The death of packaged applications - part deux

Den’s Enterprisey Foghorn / The death of packaged applications - part deux — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:57:23 +0000

[…] Edge stuff. Absolutely. I like edge stuff. The BBC for instance has been running a bunch of excellent ‘edge’ projects but which now need an enterprise makeover for the whole thing to come together in a coherent manner. Especially if they’re serious about leveraging their media assets. Many companies are in a similar position. But. I think there is a hidden danger we’ve yet to understand. Many of these edge projects are trying to leverage XML based technologies of the kind so many (including myself) are getting excited about. Where are the integrations that allow organisations to capitalise on the overall potential value of extending business processes? Which is where enterprises should be going. Ismail certainly knows about this. I’ve recently tip-toed into this discussion with some of my Irregular friends because to be frank I’m out of my depth technically though I do understand the business issues very clearly. […]

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:01:58 +0000

Dennis,

As far as I can tell, such a solution would only work for synchronous events when a user is sitting in front of a web browser. For asynchronous events, you need some kind of a broker I believe.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:57:05 +0000

I’m nowhere near as geeky as you Ismael, but I would have thought something like SELECT -> POST that is done with a series of either radio buttons or drop down inputs fed from a pre-defined selector list would be promising. Or am I talking nonsense?

By: Short Notes

Short Notes — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 02:00:14 +0000

[…] I Want a Web Event Broker: good requirement specification. […]