A First Look at OroCRM and Extending with Bundles

CRMs are a tricky business. What some devs consider to be “just log everything about the user” apps, others know to be incredibly advanced and convoluted business apps that not only monitor your interactions with the user, but improve both your communication with them and their experience with you - without either of you knowing that explicitly.

What’s a CRM?

Customer Relationship Management apps are often underrated and underused, and far too frequently “included” in the base of a company’s app. If you’ve ever worked in an office cubicle for a large company doing menial work day in day out, chances are you’ve had the company’s (ancient Java) app running in front of you on Windows XP, and if something important about a customer you were just talking to came up, it would be marked in a silly comment box next to their name in an obscure corner of the screen, if that.

CRM is much more than what you’re usually lead to believe - it’s not just semi-relevant and subjective information about a person you once did business with - it’s a collection and collation of all the knowledge about your interactions, and a presentation of all the parameters that statistically help you gain the favor of your correspondent.

OroCRM

Though the CRM field of the PHP world isn’t madly ripe, the recent flurry of developments from Oro had my interest piqued enough to make me take a look. OroCRM is a multi-language CRM built on PHP 5.4+ with the Symfony framework. It’s a behemoth in its own right, and is tuned nicely for cooperation with the Oro Platform, a business application skeleton you can use to build your own custuom business apps that take advantage of the data OroCRM provides. That’s a bit much for this piece, though, so we’ll just take a look at OroCRM this time. Note, however, that an OroCRM installation brings with itself an underlying instance of the Oro Platform, which it is based upon.

OroCRM was also announced on the Symfony2 blog, so give it a read if you’re interested in its youth - it was only four months ago.

Among other features, OroCRM boasts with their marketplace for third party plugins and extensions, their customer segmentation, and import of data from various established tools like Magento. Let’s see how it stacks up in a locally deployed demo app.

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