is this actually useful, or am I missing something obvious? And if you've sold Notion templates before, any advice on what actually gets sales

10+ years ago I self hosted open source sugarcrm. I like it, particularly the ability to create custom modules so I could have custom 1-1 entities with contacts. Is there something that exists today that is similar?

I’m trying to think through a field-operations architecture question.
Most CRMs and FSM systems are good at the administrative record:
customer;
work order;
technician;
schedule;
status;
invoice.
But “completed” is often still a self-attestation. The technician presses a button or uploads a photo. The system records that the technician said it was complete, but that is not always the same as independently verifying the completion.
Full disclosure: I’m the founder of LockProof. We’re building a separate verification layer rather than another CRM.
A worker receives a secure text link, opens a live camera, and submits proof tied to the job. There is no worker account or app installation. The record includes server-recorded time and location when shared.
My open question is where that evidence should ultimately live.
Option A: LockProof remains the separate evidence system, and the CRM receives a status, link and summary.
Option B: The full evidence package gets copied into the CRM.
Option C: The CRM triggers the request, but the verified record remains externally stored.
For people who implement or manage CRMs:
Which approach creates the least operational friction?
Would you prefer an API, webhook, native integration or email-based workflow?
Would copying the entire evidence record into the CRM create retention or storage problems?
I’m interested in the architecture more than selling anything. The product is lockproof.com for context.

Last week I shared about how I started exploring what Claude and Pipedrive MCP could do. I ended up sending 40 emails to deals from my referral pipeline that were lost for a variety of reasons.

Today, I took it further.

I had a pile of lost deals in Pipedrive I wanted to revisit. Instead of doing it by hand or writing scripts against the Pipedrive API, I did it directly in Claude using the Pipedrive MCP connector. Here's what that looked like.

What Claude could do with MCP connected

Full read/write access to deals, persons, notes, activities, and custom fields. No Zapier, no CSV exports, no glue code. A few concrete things it did:

• Found an undocumented custom field. I have a custom "Skills" field on Persons. I asked Claude to read notes on 40+ deals, worked out which tool each lead needed (Glide, Zapier, Clay, etc.), and bulk-tagged every person record.
• Personalized outreach using deal notes. I narrowed down for one skill. For 25 lost deals, it pulled the notes, pulled out what the person actually asked for, and used that to write specific follow-ups instead of generic "just checking in" emails.
• Applied business logic I gave it. I shared a few scenarios to explore and asked it to write personalized email based on whether they were trying to build an internal app or a customer facing app, whether they were open on rebuilding the app from scratch, or whether they had moved on to other ideas and wanted suggestions of new platforms to build this with.

The actual workflow tip: Activities, not emails

I set up a Pipedrive automation that sends an email when an Activity is marked "done." So instead of Claude drafting emails in Gmail (tried this first — works, but doubles your review work), I had it create Activities in Pipedrive directly:

• Type: custom "Outreach" type
• Subject: email subject
• Note: full email body
• Linked to the right deal and person

Now I review everything inside Pipedrive. Mark it done, my existing automation sends it. Claude never touches my inbox, and I'm not keeping the same content in two places.

Why this matters

Most "AI + CRM" demos are read-only or single-step. This was multi-step, using real CRM state the whole way through: reading deal history, reverse-engineering a schema, cross-referencing deals/persons/notes/activities, and writing back in a format that plugs into automation I already had. All through one connector, no code.

Happy to answer questions.

In context, I work as a paralegal with an attorney who is currently using at least 3 CRM with almost similar features and everything is all over the place.

One of the tools we use is google sheets (which is chaotic) We use 6-7 sheets and each sheet has 10 tabs.

We have claude and I used it to specify what I want. I just need to tidy it up a little more but I used all my credits.

I just want to know what's next?

Only the two of us will be using this.

I'm concerned about a few things.

1. Storage - How and where to store data

2. Security - how to make sure that our clients information is safe

We are very unorganized and tasks are being forgotten.

I just need help. No hate please

The election for the community-elected At-Large board seat ends 14 August at 23:59 UTC.

If you’re a member of the Drupal Association as a Ripple Maker, check your inbox for a ballot from Helios voting bot with the subject line “Vote now: Drupal Association 2026 At-Large Board Election”.

Also do take a moment to learn about the 8 candidates running, and vote for the person who you trust to advocate for the things that you believe are important: https://www.drupal.org/association/board/elections/election-2026-dates-and-candidates

To quote an awesome person from Drupal slack: “We are going through a lot of change right now. The board, our community, our entire industry globally - everything is changing. This vote matters.”

A few months ago I used the chrome extension for scanning individual profiles on linkedin to add to our Attio crm. Now all it scans when I go to a persons profile is 'linkedin.com' add company and below an option of 'creating a record manually'. Tried everything like deleting the extension and downloading it again, checking the all sites allowed, it's only on linkedin that is not working.
I tried it on my gmail inbox and it's scanning perfectly.

Sorry if this has been answered before I'm new to this thread

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!