HEAnet’s ClientDBBrian Boyle

Introduction

• HEAnet & Client Relationships

• Tools

• Requirements for CRM tool

• ClientDB

HEAnet & Client Relations

• Primarily people driven

• Started with informal approach (-1997)

• Then, used basic tools

• MS Exchange (1997 - 2003)

• OpenGroupWare (2003 - 2008)

MS Exchange

• Used for Email, Calendar, Contacts

• Grew without planning

• Took over as Contact database

• Data was unstructured

• Never used full functionality

MS Exchange Schema

Name Position Company Phone Email

OpenGroupWare• So we changed system to “OGO”

• Used for Calendar & Contacts

• More formal structure for data

• Primarily driven by Calendar requirements

• “Jack of all trades, ...”

• Webmail, Bulletins, Proj. Mgmt, ...

OGO Schema

Company A(Client)

Company B(Client)

Tech Contact: Conor Furlong

Billing Contact:Sadhbh Woods

Tech Contact: Oisín Doyle

Change Ctrl: Aoife Murphy

Billing Contact: Cillian Doyle

Tech Contact: Eoin O’Shea

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Assigned-to

Companies People

ClientDB• 2008: OGO hard to maintain, very

difficult to expand

• Gathered requirements for replacement

• Focused on Clients & Services

• Researched market

• Handed job to internal swdev team

Internal Development?• Why build?

• Many many CRM solutions

• but most are sales/revenue oriented

• and tend towards closed APIs

• We really required extensibility/interoperability with our tools

Requirements

• Extendable & Interoperable

• Central repository for all client data

• Track Clients, Contacts, Services

• Open interfaces (http, ldap, ...)

• Must integrate with Email, Calendar

• Potential to link to Provisioning, Tickets

Functionality

• Used for Contacts

• Linked to Client Service Agreements

• Basis for all Support contacts

• Structured data about Contacts

• Record of services/clients

• Not (yet) used for Provisioning

Resources

• Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Ubuntu

• LDAP interface to Email MUAs

• Calendar interface in transition

ClientDB Schema

DCU

ORI

Conor Furlong

Sadhbh Woods

Oisín Doyle

Mater Dei

St. Pats

Aoife Murphy

Cillian Doyle

Eoin O’Shea

ChildrenTech Contact

Change Controller

Billing contact

Change Controller

Billing contact

Tech Contact

Billing contact

ContactsClients

ClientDB

• Support for Provider contacts

• Reports to keep data consistent

• Views of data, e.g

• view clients by Finance Contact

• view of our of hours contacts

Conclusions

• We wanted a very simple system [1]

• We really wanted extensibility [2]

• We hope to integrate it with

• Calendar [3], Provisioning [4], Accounts [5]

• So far, we have 1, 2, 3.

Conclusions

• We have a small client base

• Our contacts have many jobs

• Tool can only support Humans

• We need a Human CRM