Voice activated mobile client for SuiteCRM

Overview SuiteCRM is a hugely popular, open source customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It is used as a key business engine in a range of companies, from true enterprise to start-ups. It provides a range of functionality, similar to paid for solutions such as Salesforce, SAP and SugarCRM. SuiteCRM currently has a mobile theme. This facilitates the use of the product whilst on the move, but does not fully harness the innate potential of the current generation of mobile technologies. To this end, we have recently prototyped a mobile application. This prototype demonstrated the usefulness of tapping into the rich set of features currently available on mobile devices, such as voice-to-text and GPS mapping. Due to the success of this prototype, we are looking to develop this work into a market ready, open source application. SuiteCRM currently has a fully featured REST API, allowing for full create, request, update and delete (CRUD) operations on records as well as search and other core business actions. The mobile developer would harness these API calls from the mobile application. Key skills required Excellent grasp of the English language, both spoken and written Experience of working with REST APIs Previous experience of producing cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap / Apache Cordova Successful track record of providing projects on-time and within scope Experience of working with voice-to-text components to create voice activation actions Experience of authenticating with a REST API from a mobile device architecture Understanding of how to pass security tokens in a mobile device Experience of creating and interacting with SQLite databases Summary of work 1. Create the mobile application to interact with a remote SuiteCRM REST API. This would require authenticated credentials to be passed to the REST API and subsequent management of the security token retrieved. 2. Facilitate the full CRUD life-cycle for records. This will be facilitated via interactions with the SuiteCRM REST API. 3. Allow for email / SMS and telephone activities to be performed elegantly from the application. 4. Provide map / GPS information for records within the applications. 5. While the navigation around the application will be facilitated by a tradition graphical user interface (GUI), it should also be fully functioning from voice commands. 1. User can navigate to contacts, meetings, etc. by simple voice commands 2. User can search by voice (e.g. “find account John Smith”) 3. User can perform CRUD operations by voice-to-text, such as: 1. “Create a meeting for today with John Smith at 1PM” 2. “Change the contact number for John Smith to be 111111111” 3. “Delete the meeting with John Smith for this afternoon” 4. “Update the meeting with John Smith. It went really well and he will get back to me about supplying the service within two weeks” 5. “Send an email to the sales team saying that the meeting with John Smith was a success” 6. The application should be created using PhoneGap / Apache Cordova. This means that while able to access the native libraries of the mobile devices, the code base is abstract and not tightly coupled to any one development paradigm (for instance Android). 7. The application should be able to work off-line. This should use a SQLite database (or equivalent) to allow for the user to access data while the device is off-line. This should synchronise with the SuiteCRM REST API once a network connection is discovered. 8. Allow for the transmission of the location coordinates of the mobile device to the SuiteCRM REST API. Projected time-scale It is expected that the project will be completed within six months of project start. If the project is successfully completed on time, meeting the requirements of the specification, it is highly probable that further collaborative work will be required for a range of phase 2 advancements.