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As someone who specializes in integrations, I’m hardly ever surprised when I come across yet another CRM platform I’ve never heard of. It feels like there are almost as many CRMs out there as stars in the night sky — okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.

I was introduced to another platform while working on a small integration project: Nexudus. Nexudus is a comprehensive system designed specifically for managing coworking spaces, shared workspaces and flexible offices, whilst incorporating the features you’d expect from a customer relationship management platform.

For one part of this integration, newsletter subscribers needed to be stored in Nexudus through a statically-generated site built on Astro, hosted in Netlify. The only way to pass subscriber data to Nexudus is through their API platform, which posed an opportunity to build this integration using Netlify serverless functions.

The Newsletter Subscriber API documentation provides a good starting point for sending through subscriber details and assigning to specific newsletter groups. However, one issue arose during integration whereby the endpoint would error if a user was already subscribed within Nexudus, even if it was a subscription for different group.

It would seem how Nexudus deals with existing subscribers will require a separate update process, as just using the Add Newsletter API endpoint alone does not take into consideration changes to subscription groups. It would be more straight-forward if the Mailchimp API approach was taken, whereby the same user email address can be assigned to multiple mailing lists through a single API endpoint.

When developing the Netlify serverless function, I put in additional steps to that will allow existing subscribers to be added to new subscription groups through the following process:

1. Look up the subscriber by email address.
2. If a subscriber is not found, a new record is created.
3. If a subscriber is found, update the existing record by passing through any changed values by the record ID.
4. For an updated record, the new group ID will need to be sent along with the group ID's the user is already assigned to.

A Github repository has been created containing the aforementioned functionality that can be found here: nexudus-netlify-functions. I may add other Nexudus API endpoints that I have been working on to this repo going forward.