CRM Core manages information about people and organizations as contacts, activities and relationships. Administrators can configure the specific way each of these are tracked in your Drupal site using tools that should be familiar to any Drupal developer.
You will find the administrative tools for contacts, activities and relationships under Admin > Structure > CRM Core section of your Drupal website. Alternately, you can access these options by going to admin/structure/crm-core. There is a simple, web-based interface for controlling these entities.
CRM Core Contacts
Contacts are records about people stored in your system.
CRM Core comes pre-configured with several contact types, including individuals, organizations and households. Administrators can edit or delete any of these contact types, or add new ones through the system.
When editing a contact type, administrators will be able to edit the basic contact type details, manage the fields associated with the contact, and manage the way fields display when viewing a contact. The controls for doing this operate almost identically to those used to track nodes.
There are some basic rules for working with contacts:
- Contact types can support any field used by Drupal.
- The name field is required for all contact types.
- The name module, by default, presents names in the following format: prefix first middle last suffix.
- You can control what parts of the name are used for each contact type through the Manage Fields page for each contact type.
CRM Core Activities
Activities are records about interaction with people. They explain what someone has done, or what you have done with someone. An activity record is always associated with one or more contacts.
CRM Core comes pre-configured with several activity types that include meeting and phone call. Administrators can edit or delete any of these activity types, or create new ones of your own.
When editing an activity type, administrators are able to manage the basic activity type details, manage the fields associated with the activity type, and so on. This is identical to the tools used for managing contacts.
Some important things to understand about configuring activity types:
- Every activity must have a title.
- There are plenty of modules on Drupal.org capable of automatically generating a title when an activity is created.
- Every activity must have a participants field. CRM Core will automatically add this for you.
- Participants are the contacts who are associated with the activity. There can be more than one participant.
CRM Core Relationships
Relationships are records about which people know which other people, and the way they know them. They are used to model real world relationships and provide some better understanding of the contacts in the system.
CRM Core comes pre-configured with several relationship types that include friends, employer and member. Administrators can edit or delete any of the existing relationships or add new ones.
Unlike contact and activities, relationships are primarily used to track information about how different contacts are related. You can add whatever fields you would like to the relationship records, but the basic configuration process is very different.
Some important things to understand about configuring relationships:
- Each relationship type must have a label.
- The label is used to indicate what kind of relationship is being created.
- A relationship can be directional. This means you are establishing a subject-object relationship between 2 contacts. For example: Foo works for Bar.
- The reverse label field is used to control how the relationship appears when displayed on the object contact. For example: Bar employs Foo.
- The source and destination select boxes allow you to identify the types of contacts that can exist at both ends of a relationship. CRM Core will only allow relationships to be created when the contact type is correct at each end of the relationship.