Why build a CRM system in Drupal?

1. In the past, if you wanted to manage contact information collected through your Drupal site, your only option was to integrate with an external CRM system. The costs and complications of integration can be high, and maintaining the integration as Drupal and other systems evolve can be challenging. RedHen offers a different approach to the problem by building the CRM right in to Drupal.
2. There are a lot of modules available that collect contact information, but no central place to store that information, resulting in a proliferation of data silos. RedHen provides module developers with a common repository for contact information.
3. Drupal has myriad tools for interacting with authenticated user. In the contact management world, many of our contacts are anonymous users. RedHen offers a paradigm & framework for handling interactions for both authenticated and non-authenticated users.

So what does RedHen actually do?

It allows Drupal to track contacts, activities and relationships. This means it is concerned with people, what has happened with those people, and which ones of those people know which other people. It also gives you ways to interact with those people using other contributed modules in Drupal and third party services.

Is it stable?

Yes. At of the writing of this article, there are 312 sites using this module.

The developers have put a lot of time into thinking through various use cases and making sure RedHen is not going to break your Drupal site. This is one of the reasons that RedHen has so few dependencies. They did not want enhancements other modules to break RedHen and therefore your site.

Why not just use profile2? Isn't that what it's built for?

No. Profile2 is one of those wonderful Drupal tools that work with authenticated users. It does not track anonymous users.

What's this you say about anonymous users?

So, one of the weaknesses of any content management system is its inability to deal with anonymous users (AUs) as anything more than a single unit. When an AU submits information to a site, there's no continuity between that visit and any subsequent visits. This leads to a lot of fractured information about user behavior that could actually be pretty valuable if you could look at it all at once.

Think about the webform module: it creates its own tables that store information people submit to the site, but are there any other modules that can manipulate that information and feed more into it? It's not common if it does happen.

RedHen provides a centralized tool for managing information about people. It is designed to act as a central repository for information about people that can be used for all sorts of purposes. It shines as a tool for generating contact forms, handling user registration, storing information about purchases, keeping a list of petition signatures, etc.

Does it work with [ insert module name ] module?

RedHen is designed to play well with other Drupal modules. All of the information it tracks is entity-based. As long as your module works well with entities, RedHen can probably work with it.

RedHen include Views & Entity API integration code, so you can extend RedHen to work with Views and Rules. You can use Views to create custom reports about contact, organization, membership and/or engagement scoring data. Try playing with Views plug ins like Views Bulk Operations and Views Data Export to extend RedHen with bulk editing and export tools!

Why another CRM system? There is already CiviCRM, CRM Core module, Salesforce integration, Salsa, SugarCRM, etc.

Diversity is a strength of Open Source. Each of the above CRM systems has its own focus and own use cases. RedHen collaborates with other projects as it makes sense. For instance, you can easily:

• synchronize data between RedHen and Salesforce

Each of these other modules does an excellent job at what it does, and there are no clear lines between one and the other. RedHen does a good job at what it does, which is providing the tools for building a CRM system. There will be some overlap, which will become less significant over time as each system matures.

How can I connect RedHen with Salesforce (or any other external CRM system)?

The Salesforce module was written by Think Shout, the same people who wrote RedHen! You can connect RedHen and Salesforce by using the Salesforce module. It supports pushing Drupal data to Salesforce as well as pulling, or importing, Salesforce data into Drupal. Changes can be made in real time or asynchronously in batches during cron run.

RedHen is built to allow it to interact with other systems the same way anything else in Drupal would. Since RedHen stores all its contact information as entities, it’s pretty easy to:

• make that information accessible to other systems
• to import content from other systems

How can I import data from CiviCRM?

One good way is to export contact information into CSV files, then use the either the feeds or migrate module to import the data.