LinkedOut – Agile CRM Forced to Discontinue LinkedIn Integration

LinkedIn CRM

As strong believers in open source development and partnerships that stretch across economic lines, the team at Agile CRM was highly discouraged to receive this recent note from LinkedIn:

“We have reviewed your application and believe that your product violates LinkedIn’s API Terms of Use. In accordance with Section I.C, you are required to be accepted into a LinkedIn Partner Programs in order to use our APIs for applications that are used for hiring, marketing, or sales. For example, employee hiring, company marketing or monitoring, lead generation, relationship management, systematic matching of people with their LinkedIn profile, or anything with a similar feature or purpose. We appreciate your interest in using LinkedIn APIs.”

linkedin-all

In a summary of the discontent among CRMs with LinkedIn’s oddly strict (and restrictive) API policies, ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan points out that LinkedIn has become much more aggressive recently in enforcing these policies, and that the business-social-media site appears to have suddenly restricted API implementation to only two “developer partners”: Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce – perhaps you’ve heard of them? 🙂

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Unfortunately, we can confirm this reading of the situation. Only those two CRM bigwigs, whose pricing is way out of reach for most of our customers here at Agile CRM (and many of whose tools, in our view, are a tad too complicated for the average user), are now able to provide LinkedIn integration. As a result, we have no choice but to discontinue our LinkedIn integration at this time. If anything changes, our users will be the first to know! We are proud to have you in the Agile CRM family, and we will continue to work around the clock to help small and medium sized businesses sell and market like the Fortune 500, even – especially – when the stakes are stacked against us.

We are working on alternatives.

UPDATE: Many Agile CRM customers now use our Chrome Extension to clip contact info from LinkedIn and other social media sites for business. The free plugin lets you extract contact details from LinkedIn with just a click, then instantly start engaging, tracking and scoring those new leads.

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6 Comments

Curtis Cook, Jr.

about 10 years ago

ROTF @ your headline... touché!! I am new to Agile CRM and look forward to discovering all of the useful features you've made available to your users... even the free ones like myself. I look forward to using your platform to build, and plan to eventually grow my way into a solid Agile CRM PAID subscription plan, before too long. Regarding the news about LinkedIn's actions, I find it quite disheartening that they have become so elitist in their behavior, and thoughtless in their actions. It is always difficult for me to watch companies that start out humbly enough, suddenly become conveniently forgetful about their own humble beginnings. Shame on LinkedIn for their myopia! I have two questions for anyone who has the answers: 1) Does LinkedIn have any competition in their arena? and if so, 2) Who are those competitors?" I would love to know! In the meantime, I'll go "trawling" on my own to see what I find. Maintaining an account on LinkedIn is not the most important aspect of my virtual existence. Again, in closing, I look forward to using Agile CRM (love the name and energy it conjures by the way). Thanks for creating quality software with the small business owner in mind. Best regards, Curtis Cook, Jr.

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Kenn Penn

about 9 years ago

rapportive has linkedin cabilities. Maybe there is a means to use their technology to bridge this hurdle. https://rapportive.com/

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Hershel

about 9 years ago

I have read some just right stuff here. Definitely value bookmarking for revisiting. I surprise how much attempt you place to make this type of fantastic informative website.

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Dallas Parrott

about 9 years ago

As much as I wanted to use the Linkedin service.. I am glad you have cut your losses and our focusing on more important things. I love all the improvements and constant updates. Thanks! I love my AgileCRM.com Pro membership!

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ME

about 9 years ago

This is a real shame as this type of information would be invaluable. Is there no way for Agile to create a workaround that doesn't violate the LinkedIn API rules?

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