A feature of SugarCRM 5.2 that I’ve been playing with a lot is the new My Portal Dashlet. What it allows you to do is embed any website into your Home or Dashboard page by simply providing the URL to the website. While there is a lot of web content that really isn’t suitable for being contained within a window this small, there is quite a bit out there that works great for this. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Google Talk

Google Talk is a very popular IM client built upon the Jabber protocol. One lesser known feature is that Google provides a gadget for Talk that is designed to be embedded into any web page. This works perfectly with the My Portal Dashlet in SugarCRM 5.2; simply add a new My Portal Dashlet with the URL as http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout and the title as Google Talk.

Mobile Versions of Web Sites

With the proliferation of the mobile web, many web sites have developed mobile versions of their site optimized for mobile phones and PDAs. These websites are often accessible via a normal web browser as well, so embedding them into our SugarCRM Home or Dashboard page is very simple. Below is an example of adding the mobile version of the Lifehacker website; simply enter the URL as http://m.lifehacker.com/ and the title as Lifehacker.

RSS Feeds

Just about every content site has some sort of RSS or Atom feed available, which are designed to work with many of the feed readers available such as Google Reader or Bloglines. One feature of newer browsers such as Firefox 2 and 3, Safari, and IE 7, is the ability to render these feeds directly in the browser as well. We can use this built in ability to have any RSS feed available in the My Portal Dashlet. The below image is an example of integrating the Slashdot RSS feed using the Safari web browser; we simply need to add the Dashlet with the URL http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot and the title Slashdot.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for possibilities here. Feel free to post below in the comments ways you have used the My Portal dashlet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under SugarCon, Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.