Ken Brill takes the stage and instantly highlights how 5.0 has made “mashups” soo easy for developers. However, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Its a great point and it’s also Ken’s first point: Not all mashups are match made in heaven. Consider Dr. Pepper’s Cherry Chocolate Mashup – HA!

Plan your mash up (does it make sense?):

1. Plan your database – what fields you need
2. Is it a whole module in Module Builder or part of another module
3. How are you getting data from your source (api, screen scrape, etc)

Ken then goes into an elegant solution of sucking documents out of Google’s Documents and then saves it as a record. Wow this is great stuff. First, Google Docs is sweet anyhow, right? But, how great is it to have your document creation software integrate with your CRM and document management!?

The second demonstration was a simple example of how flexible the dashlets framework works. Ken mashed up Google Gadgets with dashlets. In less than 4 lines of code, he was able to have a Gmail inbox, a currency converter, and a clock.

Finally, he created a custom Menu.php file in ./custom/modules/Contacts/ and was able to create a custom menu that displayed a particular contacts local time based on Zip. He really brought home that if you create custom code, even though it’s upgrade safe, we have to remember is the old custom functionality still have a place in the new version of Sugar.

This really got me thinking about my next mashup. I want the currency to automatically update conversation rates daily. Has anyone done this? Does any one know of a web service that does currency conversions for free?

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