Lev Tsypin joins me for the second (of four) installment of CRMs in Drupal. He's been involved with the development of the Redhen CRM, and here's what we talked about.

RedHen

• I had Dave Greenberg on the show not too long ago to talk about CiviCRM, but incase anybody listening didn’t catch that one, can you start out by briefly explaining what a CRM is?
• Why would someone want a CRM since the Drupal user entity is fieldable?
• How is RedHen different from other CRMs?
• (Twitter)
  • Why did they decide to build RedHen instead of going with CiviCRM?
  • The Drupal CRM space appears quite fragmented - did they evaluate and consider combining efforts with other Drupal CRM modules? (http://groups.drupal.org/crm-api, http://drupal.org/project/crm_core, http://drupal.org/project/crm)
  • RedHen seems to be the front-runner (in my opinion because they are the most active) native Drupal CRM solution - is RedHen gaining support from other CRM Drupal developers (meaning - can we get all these disparate Drupal CRM modules consolidated into one solution, namely RedHen?
• I understand that RedHen doesn’t do much out of the box. What kind of configuration is necessary to setup a functioning CRM?
• Is there documentation somewhere?

Use Cases

• Who should look into RedHen?
• What size of company is RedHen ideal for?
• Do they have any clients that are live on RedHen right now? (Even if they can't name the client's names)

Questions from Twitter

• @TGroff: I see they do have an installation profile, is that basically the same as a "RedHen Distribution"?
• What was the motivation behind creating "RedHen Groups/Organizations as Groups" rather than using OG? They mentioned, in blog post #2 that "the relationships between Drupal user records, contacts and organizations were too complex to cleanly build this feature on top of both RedHen and Organic Groups", can they elaborate on that point?
• How will RedHen handle paid memberships, donations? I'm assuming via Drupal Commerce integration?
• How does RedHen handle duplicate records? ie - will there be "de-dupe" tools?
• Does RedHen have now, or plan to have reporting tools such as - Top Donors, Income Reports, SYBUNT ('Some Year But Not This Year' donor report), LYBUNT ('Last Year But Not This Year' donor report)
• Do they have plans for a bulk e-mail tool, or what would they recommend for bulk e-mail? Seeing that RedHen can take advantage of all Drupal modules I imagine it would be easy enough to just use whatever Drupal bulk e-mail tool your prefer - SimpleNews, MailChimp, etc.?