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[http://www.sugarcrm.com SugarCRM] is the world's leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software available with complete freedom under the GPL license. For companies that want more than freedom, SugarCRM Inc, fully backs the product with expert support, service, training and customization. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers' security, integration and configuration needs. Because CRM software captures the varied relationships between a company and it's sources of revenue, most businesses really stand to benefit from the intelligence provided by a CRM system. All companies already have 'ad-hoc' methods to track leads, contacts, customer accounts and the company interactions with these (e.g. spreadsheets, lists and email records). They may even have organized CRM solutions in place. Either way, once you decide to adopt an open and standards-based solution like SugarCRM, your first order of business will be to load it with your existing data. SugarCRM has importing (and exporting) utilities that make it easy to do this, so these wizards will not be the focus of this article. Instead, we'll focus on programmatic interaction with the system.

== Introduction ==

Typically a company will deploy the CRM system and will also create one or more pipelines which act as conduits to capture new account, and contact information. This article will show how to establish a web service, using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP SOAP] to add contacts and accounts to your [[Installing SugarCRM|SugarCRM installation]]. As an example scenario, let's suppose that a conference organizer wants to offer a sign-up sheet on their existing website. The existing website could be a [http://drupal.org Drupal] content management system (CMS) which not only manages the conference, but also adds company and individual contact details to the SugarCRM system via the web service. The details on creating the form for the capture are beyond the scope of this article but the capture routines could easily handle a form input (HTTP POST) just as easily as we read input from a file . Again our focus for today will be on the plumbing of the interaction with the SOAP server.