The Other Stuff...

Last updated on
23 July 2018

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CRM Core ships with a number of other options that are not related to just administering contacts. This page provides an overview of what else is there, and what you will see during an out of the box installation.

admin/structure/crm-core

CRM Core stores all of the tools for administering entities at admin/structure/crm-core. There you will find options for managing contacts, activities and relationships. These entities are all fieldable entities, which means they can be configured in the same way an experienced Drupal administrator would manage content types.

This handbook deals with the administration of contact types in another section.

It is worthwhile to note this path and return to it when working with contributed features for CRM Core. Feature authors are encouraged to include the configuration screens for entities they define under this path as well. The list of options for what you can configure will likely grow as you work with features for CRM Core.

admin/config/crm-core

CRM Core stores all the tools for configuring the CRM Core modules at admin/config/crm-core. There you will find options for configuring user synchronization, contact matching, organic groups integration, and the like.

This handbook deals with the configuration of CRM Core in another section.

It is worthwhile to note the default options available at this path, for features developers are encouraged to use it as a tool for configuring the features they supply for working with CRM Core. The list of options available under this menu will expand as you install additional features for the system.

Reports

CRM Core provides a module called CRM Core Report.

CRM Core Report is a generic module for registering reports. What it does is provide the Reports tab on the CRM Core menu, a page for displaying all registered reports, and some permissions that can be configured for users. Internally, it provides a hook for registering reports and some theming functions for controlling the appearance of the reports page.

When CRM Core Report is first installed, users will be provided with a blank page. CRM Core does not define any of it's own reports, that is left up to features developers. This may change at some point in the future.

What CRM Core Report is not is a generic report builder. There are currently no plans to develop a generic reporting engine for CRM Core, and one will probably never appear within the CRM Core module itself. This is for the following reasons:

  • Building a generic reporting engine would be much simpler under Drupal 8. The developers have no desire to build this under Drupal 7 and need something to look forward to.
  • Views is very effective as a reporting tool for CRM Core, and there are very effective ways to overcome the gaps it can present in visualizing data. This is not to say it is always easy to generate reports using Views, but that it can be done.
  • CRM Core is built to work everywhere. Efficient data warehousing (with fact tables, data cubes, and the like) is necessary for the construction of a generic report builder and probably too much for many backends that would not be able to handle it.
  • Building a generic reporting engine would require a standards based approach to storing data in Drupal, and the standards for how this can be done are continuing to emerge through the CRM Core project and other collaborative efforts around feature portability (such as kit). Community standards around data portability continue to mature, and when they do become ubiquitous, it is unlikely the needs for a generic reporting engine would be limited to CRM Core.

Matching Engines

CRM Core provides robust support for identifying duplicate contacts in a system through CRM Core Match.

Matching engines are tools for identifying duplicate contacts in CRM Core and other external systems. Besides allowing you to identify duplicate contacts, they are also capable of modifying the contact record with information coming from a match. Great way to handle complex operations such as geocoding a contact when it is created and assigning it to a geographic region, for example.

More information about CRM Core Match is available in the administrators guide.

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