Hey All, Thanks for your patience and putting up with the delays in the release of CiviSync Outlook. It is now available to download from targetintegration.com CiviSync Outlook is the much awaited Outlook integration plugin for CiviCRM. It allows information sync between CiviCRM and Microsoft Outlook. CiviSync Outlook uses CiviCRM API. Due to some restrictions with API; at one stage we decided to use our own version of the API but it’s not something we would like to run with in long term and hence dropped it fairly quickly.
CiviSync now uses the native API. A detailed user manual in creation but in the meantime Target Integration’s wiki page will give you some information on how to install and use it on your installation of Outlook.
Don’t forget you need four things to login to a CiviCRM instance using REST API:
- Username
- Password
- SiteKey
- API Key for the user who is trying to login. You don’t need the API key but you just need the API Key be created and stored in CiviCRM database.
In order to facilitate the API Key generation for CiviSync Outlook, we developed another extension for Joomla and Drupal called CiviSync CMS which is available to download from our site as well.
The current version concentrates on providing a stable and rock solid framework which integrates well with Outlook 2007 & 2010 on Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 32 & 64 Bit. The current beta release provides two way synchronisation between CiviCRM and Outlook.
There is another limitation with CiviCRM API which came up while developing this synchronisation. Outlook has address of the contact broken down in City and Country but CiviCRM API doesn’t provide the broken down information and hence there is no way to synchronise back the updated/new contacts from Outlook to CiviCRM.
We are currently working on next set of features and we plan to provide a bi-weekly update to CiviSync Outlook.
So please download and give us your thoughts about how would you like to see it developing further in future.
Until next time….
