Hey All, Thanks for your patience and putting up with the delays in the release of CiviSync Outlook. CiviSync Outlook is the much awaited Outlook integration plugin for CiviCRM. It allows information sync between CiviCRM and Microsoft Outlook. CiviSync Outlook uses CiviCRM API. Due to some restrictions with API; at one stage we decided to use our own version of the API but it's not something we would like to run with in long term and hence dropped it fairly quickly.
CiviSync now uses the native API. A detailed user manual in creation but in the meantime Target Integration's wiki page will give you some information on how to install and use it on your installation of Outlook.
Don't forget you need four things to login to a CiviCRM instance using REST API:
- Username
- Password
- SiteKey
- API Key for the user who is trying to login. You don't need the API key but you just need the API Key be created and stored in CiviCRM database.
In order to facilitate the API Key generation for CiviSync Outlook, we developed another extension for Joomla and Drupal called CiviSync CMS which is available to download from our site as well.
The current version concentrates on providing a stable and rock solid framework which integrates well with Outlook 2007 & 2010 on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 32 & 64 Bit. The current beta release provides two way synchronisation between CiviCRM and Outlook.
There is another limitation with CiviCRM API which came up while developing this synchronisation. Outlook has address of the contact broken down in City and Country but CiviCRM API doesn't provide the broken down information and hence there is no way to synchronise back the updated/new contacts from Outlook to CiviCRM.
We are currently working on next set of features and we plan to provide a bi-weekly update to CiviSync Outlook.
So please download and give us your thoughts about how would you like to see it developing further in future.
Until next time....
Comments
Hi, To clarify: you don't need the login/pwd, just the api & site keys to run a command using the REST API. Such a project would have been a good opportunity to switch to a better authentication tool (oAuth).
As for synchronising the country/city back, you need to use the address api, not the contact one.
Hi
Yes it is true that login/pwd is not required, and we are not storing password of the user. It is used to fetch the API key and API key is persisted. In future, I can take care of it only asking for api key and site key.
Yes, you are right that we need to use address api. But the question is lookup resolution. State and country lookup codes has to resolved and then set on the address data. I have fixed it. By maintaining a local copy of the data in JSON format at the client machine. But, we haven't released it yet. We are in process to add the Group -> Mailing List. So, we will release both of those together.
Regards
Mohit Thakral
Hi Mohit
Is this compatible with Outlook for Mac? Also, any plans to have a plugin for wordpress?
Thanks
Vish
Hi Mohan
is this compatible with outlook for mac?
We are also very keen on using this with a couple of Wordpress installations.
Do you have any plans for Wordpress integration?
Thanks,
Geoff.