If you are an Outlook Plug-in user, you may have noticed that the act of archiving emails into Sugar will add a flagged task to your To-Do list in Outlook 2007.  The task will have the subject of the email, and will have a category of SugarCRM. (Note: This is expected behavior for the Outlook Plug-in)

This is the mechanism that we use to denote whether or not an email has already been archived to Sugar, but you may find that it’s cluttering up your To-Do list.  If this is disrupting your normal use of the To-Do list, you can customize your Outlook views to filter out these tasks.

These are the basic steps, and please consult with Microsoft’s documentation for further detail.

1. Right-click within the To-Do Bar, and select the customize “Current View” option.

2. Choose the Filter button, then the Advanced tab.

3. Select the Field dropdown under the “Define more criteria” heading, and choose All Task Fields >> Categories from the 4. dropdown.

4. Set the Condition to “doesn’t contain”, and set the Value to “SugarCRM”.  Click the “Add to List” button.

5. Click OK in the Filter dialog window, and then click OK in the Customize View: To-Do List dialog.

6. Your To-Do Bar will no longer display the task for the email that was archived to Sugar.

You can repeat these steps for the Tasks view within Outlook.

The original email message will retain the flag in the Mail view, to indicate that you’ve already archived the message to Sugar.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, Apple (finally) included a modern version of PHP (currently version 5.2.6 as of this writing). With it comes several improvements in the areas of performance, web services support (including extensions for JSON and XML), OOP, and error handling. However, the default install of PHP that Apple included didn’t include all of the available PHP extensions. Most notable is the IMAP extension, which is used in SugarCRM for the Campaigns and Emails modules. However you can build this extension and have it loaded dynamically, without affecting the rest of the default PHP install.

First, we’ll need to compile the c-client imap libraries, which can be obtained at ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/. Notice the make command below; it has extra arguments added to be sure we are building the libraries as universal binaries, which is important since mod_php and apache are both compiled for 64-bit architecture.

$ curl -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/c-client.tar.Z
$ tar -zxvf c-client.tar.Z
$ cd imap-2007b
$ make oxp EXTRACFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os  -pipe -no-cpp-precomp"

We’ll then copy the libraries we built to the /usr/local directory, which is a place we can put any user-built programs and libraries and won’t affect the base system install.

$ sudo cp c-client/*.h /usr/local/include/
$ sudo cp c-client/*.c /usr/local/lib
$ sudo cp c-client/c-client.a /usr/local/lib/libc-client.a

Next, we’ll grab the PHP tarball for the version of PHP we are using, which is currently 5.2.6, from the source: http://www.php.net/downloads.

$ curl -O http://www.php.net/distributions/php-5.2.6.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjf php-5.2.6.tar.bz2

Now we’ll go to the source directory of the imap extension and compile it. Again you’ll notice the additional agruments added for building the extension as a universal binary. ( Edit: note that the configure line below is multiple lines; each new command to enter is denoted by the $ at the beginning of the line, although the $ is not part of the command ).

$ phpize
$ MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
CFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os  -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" \
CCFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os  -pipe" \
CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os  -pipe" \
LDFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" \
./configure --with-kerberos --with-imap-ssl
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo echo "extension=imap.so" >> /etc/php.ini

Also, you’ll want to comment out the line ‘extension_dir = “./”‘ in the php.ini file, since it will interfere with the extension loading.

Finally, restart apache and you should see the imap extension listed in the output of phpinfo().