Connecting Odoo, Zoho or HubSpot to the rest of your systems

When a website form, a portal and a CRM do not talk to each other, someone copies the data by hand, and the copies drift apart. A connection moves the data automatically and gives you one set of numbers to report from.

For each kind of record, such as customers, products, orders or invoices, pick one system as the source of truth. Other systems read from it or send changes to it, but do not keep their own version. Most integration problems start where two systems both think they own the same record.

• One way, such as website form to CRM, is simpler and covers most needs.
• Both ways means deciding what happens when the same record changes in two places at once.
• Near real time uses webhooks: one system tells the other as soon as something changes. Scheduled syncs run every few minutes or hours instead.

API access and limits depend on the plan you pay for:

• Odoo: reaching your data through the external API needs its Custom plan; One App Free and Standard do not include it.
• Zoho and HubSpot: each plan allows a set number of API calls, and some features, such as custom objects, need a higher plan.
• Compare the limits with your expected volume before you build, not after.

• Retry calls that fail, and alert a person when they keep failing.
• Log what was sent and what came back, so any record can be traced.
• Keep API keys in a secure store, under a user created for the integration, with only the access it needs.
• Watch for API changes. Odoo, for example, has announced that its older XML-RPC and JSON-RPC endpoints will be removed in favour of a newer API.

Check that names, addresses and notes in Arabic arrive intact, and that searches and reports in the CRM handle them. Test with real Arabic records, including ones that mix Arabic and English, early in the project.

We connect websites, portals and dashboards to Odoo, Zoho, HubSpot and other tools through their APIs. Tell us which systems you have, and what you want to stop copying by hand.