ShoreTel CRM Integration
April 8th, 2009
Every business desktop seems to have some type of customer or ticket management software solution.  Outlook and Notes are very common personal contact managers, but other popular solutions include Salesforce, Goldmine, ACT, Microsoft CRM, Time Slips and the list goes on and on.    Having a "record" pop up on your desktop based on Caller ID is the most common integration request we see.    How about doing a reverse look up on an incoming phone call, to learn the identify of the caller.   Google can do this, but how do you feed the Caller Id to the web application?   Basically, there are three strategies for doing an integration of this type: DDE, Triggers and XML.  Two of these methods (DDE and Triggers) are relatively straigh forward and within the ability of a competent system administrator.  XML generally requires a product development commitment and software development resources.  Fortunately we have been able to get ShoreTel to pass a wide range of system parameters to an external application using both DDE and Triggers.  This makes everything an "Easy Pop"!