Raj,

I guess it depends on what you mean by "Outlook integration".

We have two initiatives in planning and development at this point:

1. A webdav interface to contacts, tasks, calendar and documents. This is only partially complete, but you can see the beginnings of it today in 3.0. With it you can share all of the above items using a native interface, which will vary from platform to platform. In the MS world, contacts, calendar and tasks will be accessed through Outlook. Documents through the file manager window. We will finish this one pretty quickly.

2. A coherent way for Centric CRM to deal with the receipt and processing of email. I don't think this is what you are looking for, but using it, we will be able to build workflows that recognize email from contacts and accounts, store the email against the account, and alert the proper individual that something has happened. This one is still in early planning stages, but we tend to move quickly.

If I haven't answered your question, I invite you to ask again and be a bit more specific about your definition of "outlook integration".

-Tom

>1. A webdav interface to contacts, tasks, calendar and documents. This is
> only partially complete, but you can see the beginnings of it today in
>3.0. With it you can share all of the above items using a native interface,
>which will vary from platform to platform. In the MS world, contacts,
>calendar and tasks will be accessed through Outlook. Documents through
>the file manager window. We will finish this one pretty quickly.

This is great news. One question regarding the outlook calendar integration. We are currently looking for a shared calendar to manage our schedules and resource (consultant) allocation...do you see Centric ever acting as an actual calendar server in that sense? Right now the calendar doesn't seem to want to store things like appointments without creating some kind of action that has a follow up.

>2. A coherent way for Centric CRM to deal with the receipt and >processing of email. I don't think this is what you are looking for, but
>using it, we will be able to build workflows that recognize email from
>contacts and accounts, store the email against the account, and alert the
>proper individual that something has happened. This one is still in early
>planning stages, but we tend to move quickly.

I like this. We don't really have any specific need, but figured i'm already typing so why not provide some input. :) Having some form of email processing where we could (b)cc: centric and have it parse the recipients and copy the email into an activity for each of them would be cool. Some alerting feature, as you said, would be nice. If the email can't be found, possibly create a new lead from the inbound mail. Email integration with the ticket module would probably be good to. I don't really use it, but things like request tracker make very good use (and probably could provide a good reference model) for email based helpdesk communication.

As far as mail server integration, a simple approach would of course just be to implement a JavaMail pop3 poller. Just be sure to implement it 'defensively', as this address would likely be the one publised on web sites and whatnot, so it _WILL_ get hammered with SPAM (possibly negating the 'new lead on unrecognized inbound email' suggestion above). Some options to scan headers and/or subject lines for spam markers (i.e. [SPAM] in the subject) would allow folks that mark the message at the server but filter it at the client get maximum use of their anti-spam technology.

Alternatively a command line script that will read the emails from standard input and post them to the Centric 'message queue' would work for folks that are using procmail or other traditional unix mail management routines.