Last week we attended and presented 2 sessions on Sage CRM for a group of developers in Germany.

In our first presentation we showed how to customize Sage CRM system pages by moving on screen elements whilst also retrieving server side generated blocks and pie charts for insertion on the screen.

The image on the right demonstrates the changes made to a Company summary screen.  The Contact block has been moved and a pie chart inserted showing data from a 3rd party demo system.

In our second presentation we demonstrated how to create a dynamic lookup field by taking data from a 3rd party table and displaying this in the drop down (selection control).

This workshop style coding was finished off with the announcment of our new open source project called “Io for Sage CRM”.

The project is hosted on google code at http://code.google.com/p/io-for-sage-crm/.  It is in component format for easy install.

The code is a framework for extending Sage CRM beyond the norm, allowing developers to fulfill any project requirement.

The objective of having the code structured in open source is to encourage other Sage developers to join the project, benefit from it and of course to contribute regularly.

Io is still a work in progress and has been tested only on 7.1.  Support for 7.2 will be coming and will include the ability to extend the new CRM client side object making the component future proof.

If you would like more information or to get involved, log into http://code.google.com/p/io-for-sage-crm/ or email us directly on sagecrm@crmtogether.com