There are a lot of different CMS’s (Content management systems) out there. Nearly half of all websites today are said to be maintained with the help of a CMS. In short, a CMS makes it possible for the owner/editor of a website to maintain the content by themselves, without any knowledge of programming. Publishing and editing content in pages, products and blogposts are some of the basic things you can do with a CMS. On North Creations Agency, we are using a CMS called SilverStripe in nearly all of our projects, a very robust and powerful CMS.
Customer Relationship Management
One of our clients wanted a custom-built CRM (Customer Relationship Management) where they could handle all documentation regarding their company. Managing events, clients, customers and generating confirmation emails were some of the things on their specification of requirements.
In this case, rather than using SilverStripe as a CMS, where the intention is to publish content that visitors of the website can see, we used the admin part of SilverStripe to create a custom-made CRM. The content is made for admin-purposes only, and can only be seen in the SilverStripe-dashboard as a logged in member.
One of the key features that our wanted was that their own clients should be able to sign a booking digitally, instead of emailing a contract to sign by hand, we created a digital solution where the client could agree to the terms by signing a digital contract. This would save both our client and their clients a lot of time, since their clients did not have to spend time on scanning the signed document and emailing it back.
Integration with Fortnox
Another key feature that our client wanted was to integrate the CRM with Fortnox, a web based platform for handling invoices, accounting and salaries. With this integration, we made it possible for our clients to create an invoice in Fortnox from the CRM. Our client also wanted us to integrate their Fortnox customer-list with the CRM, making it possible to add customers to both the CRM and Fortnox at the same time.
By integrating the CRM with Fortnox, our client could focus on maintaining all their info in one place, the CRM. Creating invoices in Fortnox and connecting them to specific events and clients in the CRM would still be possible without this integration, but would also be more time consuming.
One or the other?
By using SilverStripe as a CRM, it does not mean that you could not use it as a CMS at the same time, quite the contrary, combining the two would work perfect as well. In this particular case, our client already had a functioning website, and was not on the market for a new one. This case really shows the flexibility in SilverStripe, and how we can implement it by ease on a broad variation of different needs.
