Customisation CRM, CMS and Magento. Practical case.

Working e-commerce business is the set of many parameters. How to make the online part works right? We discussed it in interview with our Team Lead, Seniour PHP Developer Oleh Koval.

How have you entered the IT industry?

I started from System Administrator in Pension Fund and was involved in pioneer project results of what were established to the whole country. After that I’ve been a software engineer in Oil-Gas Company for several years. My friend, who worked for Svitla, invited me to interview. I passed it succefully and nowadays I’m a team leader and Head of Lviv office.

Tell us about your ongoing project. What are specificities of it and how did you start?

The company, which came to us, was organized by a University Professor. He suggested to bring lectures and other teaching materials online. Students log in and can read or order paid printing copy of lectures. Some time later, even literature publishers came to them and asked their online shop to use for their publishers’ needs.
Nowadays it is a huge service company on selling any kind of educational literature.

Initially, when we started, there were only php website on Alfresco CMS with 500 000 literature catalogue and the customers wouldn’t like to change that mechanism. They asked us to choose the right e-commerce solution. We’ve done a great analysis from all existing platforms and made a choice – Magento. Also they used Sugar CRM when it was free of charge and then when it started to bring money, they switched to paid version.

Alfresco CMS + Magento + Sugar CRM were integrated together and now sales people from customer side can syncronise every update from CRM system only with one click. For example, when a manager wants to add new client or product, he clicks only one button – “Syncronize” and info gets to Magento and CMS. And if somebody buys a new book from website, this info automatically gets to Sugar CRM and Magento.

What difficulties were with customers?

We were lucky to have a great, mostly ideal customers. People from technical department, with whom we are in contact, actually started as developers and they understand all technical issues. We used to use planning poker for task estimating at the beginning of work with them. And now, when we receive new tasks for estimation, we may prove our vision if the customer has another one and they need 15 minutes to agree with our point of view.

And what is the situation inside the team?

Every person in team is responsible for its particular part of project. Thus, Andriy is responsible for Sugar CRM, Ruslan specializes in Alfresco CMS and me in Magento. Being a specialist in 3 systems simultaneously is impossible. Now we all know 3 systems but speciality is the same: Andriy knows all updates and trends from Sugar CRM, Ruslan is a back-end hacker.

Thank you for your time and all the best!