I recently completed a conversion of about 8 years of history from a 5 year old Blackbaud Kintera site to a Drupal CiviCRM solution. Confused yet? Don't worry, all we be revealed in time. As a way of giving back, I am planning to share my experiences good and bad, what worked, what did not, what I learned and what I will and won't do next time.

As a freelancer, here are a few notes and an overview on how I solved a client's contacts consolidation when the data came from external sources:

My Use Case
- Client had ongoing events and conferences over several years which meant there were databases and mailing lists all over the place (many of which had crossover).
- I set up ongoing JSON exports of the contact data from the external sites, which could be queried by date range to get the latest changes.

Hi,

Two weeks already since civicon, the dust has settled and Amy Dobbs and the team at skillmatters have filmed and uploaded the sessions.

Eli Beckerman is the second winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Eli is excited about the potential of CiviCRM to organize bottom-up transformations to deal collaboratively with the many crises facing the world today.

Packt has also selected a runner-up in its contest: an experienced CiviCRM user from the City Bible Forum, ken, will get a downloadable eBook copy of the book.

Here's some background on Using CiviCRM from Packt's site:

What you will learn from this book:

Sheila Burkett is the first winner of a copy of Using CiviCRM from Packt Publishing. Packt is running a promotional contest where you just have to post into the forum or email them to qualify to win a copy of the book.

Here's some more information about the book from the Press Release:

Using CiviCRM is the first commercially published book on CiviCRM, and came out in February 2011. It will teach readers to build a CRM that conforms to their needs and to integrate it with Drupal or Joomla!. Written by Brian Shaughnessy and Joseph Murray, this book will assist readers in developing an integrated online system that handles contacts, donations, event registration, bulk e-mailing, case management, and other functions such as activity tracking, grants, reporting and analytics.

Rooty Hollow is excited to announce the release of our Constant Contact Integration module for CiviCRM.  If you are not able or willing to deal with sending bulk e-mails form your host this module is for you.

A year ago or so we quietly published a module on drupal.org (sorry Drupal only at this point) to allow for synchronization between contacts in CiviCRM and Constant Contact.  Thanks to funding from Constant Contact we recently were able to work out the kinks in the module and have posted it to a release candidate just this week.  The original work on the module was  developed by Fidelity Investments' LEAP Program in partnership with the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers thanks to an opportunity made possible by Common Impact.

The webform module is a great way to collect info from your contacts, perfect for things like application forms, surveys, contact forms, feedback forms, etc. The hard part is getting those form submissions to actually link to your CiviCRM contacts... until now.

We had a lively meetup at Wikimedia Foundation HQ in San Francisco last week. Despite the super crummy weather, Carl Tashian from the Participatory Politics Foundation came downtown on via bicycle to share their experiences migrating to CiviCRM from phpList, using the Sendgrid service for mailings, and integrating CiviCRM with the Ruby on Rails application they use for their Open Congress project. This is a great example of using the REST API for tools integration. You can check out the slides from Carl's presentation here. Be sure to also check out Open Congress! Thanks Carl for a great presentation.

We also spent some time reviewing the new features in the 3.3 release. I put together a brief slide-show for this which you can download from the wiki if you're interested in viewing it or using it for a meetup.

It's really helpful to hear end-user organizations discuss their implementation process. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and are a CiviCRM user, integrator or developer - and you're interested in sharing your experiences and/or leading a discussion on any Civi-related topic .... send me mail at dave at civicrm dot org.

Join us at the next SF meetup - February 17th, 2011!

A large organization using CiviCRM is planning to switch to using CiviMail for their broadcast email needs. This is great news for CiviMail and will take it to the next level in terms of feature set and functionality. As part of their migration, we are integrating a workflow engine into CiviMail. For this version, we will be using Drupal's rules module, thus making it Drupal specific. (if you are a joomla user and interested in sponsoring this for CiviCRM on Joomla, please contact us via email / IRC). For this project, we'll be focussed on extending the CiviMail schema to facilitate workflow. Sending a broadcast email will be split into three steps:

• A user creates the email content. On creating / uploading the content, an event is triggered which informs the QA group of a new mailing
• The QA group verifies the mailing and works with the user to improve the mailing. Once this is done, the mailing is scheduled. This triggers another event which informs the production group that a mailing is in the queue
• The Production group validates the mailing and then either approves or rejects the mailing. If rejected, the mailing goes back to Step 1. If approved, the mailing enters the civimail job system where it is picked up and delivered.

Sendgrid is a relatively new cloud-based service that takes care of mailing list SMTP delivery and attempts to get the highest possible deliverability rate. We didn't want to have to manage our own SMTP server here at the Participatory Politics Foundation, so when we migrated to CiviCRM recently, we decided to take the sendgrid route for SMTP.