SugarCRM, Asterisk PBX and Android...

Due to some power cuts recently I lost some of my asterisk PBX hard disk to corruption. It messed things up which kind of forced my hand to upgrade to a more recent Linux distro, something which was on "My List" of jobs to do.

I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu server 9.04. I then installed the latest 1.4 branch of Asterisk and all the bits that go with it from source. I wanted to be able to upgrade easily again in future without wondering what I might mess up on TrixBox (my last asterisk distro).
I had some fun initially as I ended up compiling asterisk without zaptel support, and only dahdi support, this messed my Sangoma A200 card setup but eventually I sorted it and was back on track.

I then installed the latest SugarCRM community edition and imported all my customer records in to this, fairly painless.

Next I wanted to be able to get a browser window opened in SugarCRM when a customer telephone and their phone number was already in my sugar database. I achieved this with  Notein. 
The local browser window opening is controlled by  the Asterisk Desktop Manager, a java program that you install on your desktop computer. 
Once you have installed the Notein files on your sugar server you need to configure the ADM 'Manager' menu with the hostname and other details of your asterisk server. Make sure you modify the manager.conf file on your asterisk box to allow connections from your PC's IP address.
Then you need to  add the setting in the 'Browser Popup' menu of ADM to tell it what URL to connect to when  a call comes in. The documentation on this is sparse, it needs to be in the format:-

http://192.168.1.30/syrup/pp_index.php?number=%number%

Replace 192.168.1.30 above with the IP address of your Asterisk server. Now when a call comes in it should open a browser window and show details of the customer phoning in.  If the number is withheld or not in your sugar database then you will be displayed with an error.

Next I thought it would be neat to be able to access my SugarCRM from my recently acquired G1 Android smartphone. Yes I could use the standard web browser on the G1 to access it but I felt sure there must be a 'proper' application to do this? Searching on the Android Market drew a blank, then I did some searching on the web and came across SugaDroid. It was written by Pierre-Yves Ricau whilst he was working as a trainee at his employers. They wanted an application to use internally, they allowed him to develop it and release it as open source.

The next thing I am working on is getting SugarCRM to connect to Google calendar and have it automatically create entries in the google calendar for my appointments and tasks, I'll report back soon.