GeoTools: Geolocation services for vtiger CRM

As many of you know already, our company Libertus Solutions does quite a lot of work with the open source CRM called vtiger. It’s a very competent and accomplished product made even more so by its well thought out extension capabilities.

In this post I’m really pleased to announce our first open source vtlib module for vtiger called GeoTools.

It was derived from another project on the vtiger forge called Maps, which we have taken and extended in true open source style. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that…

GeoTools introduces Geolocation features to vtiger in a standard vtlib module package. It adds the ability to perform distance-based searches on your data.

GeoTools uses the Google Maps API to gather positional data, that’s latitude and longitude coordinates, for the entity records that have been configured in the GeoTools Settings area. Once we have acquired this positional data we can then perform location-based calculations to display the results on an embedded Google Map, and as a list view of entity records.

Anyway enough of the words already! Here’s a video:

As soon as the forge site is up I’ll update this and provide links to the code.

Update: Here we are: This will be a moving target for some time yet – it’s still rather “beta” grade code…

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11 Comments

  • Danny says:

    Does this plugin also work in VTiger 5.2.1?

    • Alan Lord says:

      Gosh – I don’t know. Never tried it. It could probably be made to work with a bit of effort I guess but my main concern for the near term will be porting GeoTools to work with vtiger 6…

      5.2.1 is a pretty old release of vtiger.

      • Danny says:

        Hi Alan,

        Well the thing is:
        – it installs
        – the configuration tool can be opened in the module manager
        – but when I click on it in the menu Tools it goes to the page but the pages remains white….

        I guess it is something small. If you would have 5 minutes to look at it, it would be great.
        We plan also to upgrade to 6.0. I am looking forward to it. I read about new gui stuff.
        This upgrade will be performed by a company. We made quite some changes here and there to get more data
        into the modules.
        But for now it would be nice to see the Geo tool already 😉

        • Alan Lord says:

          Hi Danny,

          A blank screen is not terribly useful unfortunately. Try enabling debug from vtiger and turning up the error_reporting in php.ini and getting some logs of what is going on.

          Then report a bug on the forge project http://forge.vtiger.com/tracker/?atid=1447&group_id=373 and when I have time* I will look into it. But it seems to be working just fine for most users.

          We have not started looking at migrating GeoTools to vtiger 6 yet. That will be a fairly major piece of work I think.

          * It is *never* 5 minutes 😉

  • Adrian says:

    Can we also see address information for any other modules but for contacts? I have vtiger open source and would like to see the organisations as points on the map.

    • Alan Lord says:

      Yes. Just configure Organisations, and/or any other module, in GeoTool’s settings area.

      Then wait for some data to be geocoded…

  • Cool! I hope you’re planning to make it vtiger 6 compatible, next version is coming at the end of december (according to viter blog 🙂 )

    • Alan Lord says:

      When I get chance I may do that. But please feel free to grab the code from the forge and have a go yourself. It is going to require a total re-write from the ground up.

  • dan says:

    Alan, thanks very much for the work on this. We’re now adding the GeoLocations and expect to be done early 2022 (not really).

    What would be useful for us is to be able to have different coloured pins for organisations that are ‘existing customers’ and ‘potential customers’. These are sub-categories (?) in our organisation module. Would we be best creating a custom module for each category? Or is there a simpler way to do this?

    • Alan Lord says:

      It would probably be easier to simply use a picklist/multi-select picklist for your categories and then add a little bit of code to intercept that and load the right marker icon per organisation.

      Certainly possible. we are available for consultative work at Libertus Solutions.

  • Abhijit says:

    Hello Alan,

    This is a great tool, wish it work with Vtiger 6.0. I would like to use Geo Tools for Vtiger 6.0, can you please suggest if the current release will work? If no, any likely dates for vtiger 6.0 supported module?

    thanks and best regards,
    Abhijit

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