How have people intergrated custom CRM type applications with email?
I have a Access 2003 front-end application with a SQL Server 2005 backend. One CRM
part of the application tracks the activity with the customer in a traffic
log table. Sometimes the salesstaff has communication with their customer
using email instead. What do people do to synch this up with an application?
I was thinking about creating a form to enter the initial message, so I
could save it into a table and then have the system generate a email, of
course, this doesn't handle the email communication after the initial email.
Thanks
What you need to do is setup your domain name with a free google apps account. Your sales staff can still use the clients of their choice, but since they are essentially using custom gmail accounts, every single email that they send and receive will be recorded in a nice and neat transactional format in the gmail interface. Since your sales staff is always online, they will always have access to every message they ever sent. If you want to have access to the emails, you can set it up that every single message that gets sent are automatically blind forwarded to your account. Filters can be set up to automatically tag and archive them, so you will not be overwhelmed, but you will still be able to search them. Google Apps will also give you a central contact directory similar to outlook/exchange.
Here are a few options for you:
Use web forms for all communications. When a message is sent out, the only thing it includes is a link back to the site. Responses are sent the same way.
Setup an email alias that your sales staff Cc's when they want their correspondence to be tracked. Your app would periodically read a POP mailbox, and record the traffic. Customers would have to remember to Cc the same email box for the traffic to be remembered.
Establish a single common email box, such as sales#domain.com. All outgoing mail is marked as being from that account, so all replies will go through it. To send mail, sales staff uses a web form. Messages are tagged with a key that associates them with a particular customer. Putting the key in the subject header usually works OK (that's how many support ticket management systems work, for example). Replies from customers keep the tag. Your app then reads an associated POP mailbox, parses out the keys, and stores the email accordingly.
Related
The company I am working at offers a web based calculation tool which has to be paid monthly (a fixed price for a license).
Normally, users go to our website and authenticate themselves with their credentials and then can use the application. When they cancel their subscription they are not able to use the tool anymore, obviously.
Now another company called us because they want to provide our application for their own clients. We have already fixed that they have to pay a license fee for every of their clients. But there is also a restriction: their users should not have to log in on any of our websites (only on the website of our client). But the web application is hosted on our server and is loaded as an iframe.
Now there is that problem that we are not sure whether our client tells us the correct number of people who use our application wherefore we would like to verify that in some way.
One of my ideas is the following:
Our client has to call an API for every users who would like to use our application in order to submit some information like name or an unique ID of that user
When the user would like to access our application, an ID parameter is appended to the iFrame URL
I think that this is not a very good solution because our client could use the same ID for every access and pretend that only one users uses the application. By saving the ip address and id of the accesses it is possible to determine fraud in some cases because ip address will not change frequently.
We even do not have to know WHICH user accesses the application but only the NUMBER of users per month.
I am interested if there is a cryptographic solution where it is hard to cheat. Something like an authentication method which does not require any interaction of the user.
Well you can't. You should require the partner to issue a token for each user so you know they came from the partner.
You could have the partner call an api you expose to issue a one time token for a user and specify user id and IP. You could alternatively have the partner digitally sign such a login request.
If you bill the partner per user, and the partner decitfull he could claim less users.
You can fingerprint the users, you can give long term coockies, you can check IP and fonts installed etc. These will allow you to detect most types of fraud.
If you give a declared userId a cookie and then see him again without it, you assign him a new cookie and then later see the first cookie again while the partner is always declaring same id that is a very strong indicator of fraud.
If I was the decietfull partner I would pair up geographicly close users and merge their IDs. it would look no different from a user with two devices. But this still limits the extent of fraud possible. Two devices per user is plausible. 10 less so.
Find business partners you trust.
I have an account of gotomeeting and using api to create/start/getMeeting etc but I have not found any api to send mail and invite people to attend a meeting. Is it possible to send invitation mail to people to join a meeting using api? If not then is there any other solution to send meeting invitation mail?
Is it possible to register a user before start of meeting? How can we find how many user has attended the meeting?
Thanks in advanced.
Yes its possible, the email invitation will be in two type
A normal email from server
An appoinment item.
If you want to send a normal email to participants. just fill the mail with join link with Created meetingid
You can create the join link for any particular meeting by concatenating the www.global.gotomeeting.com/join/ with meetingID which is look like www.global.gotomeeting.com/join/25456364 (number is sample meeting id).
send the above details as a mail. Sending mails from program depends on "which language you are developing" like C#/JAVA?
If you want to send the appoinment item, either you need to use EWS (Exchange webservices API) or you need to generate an ".ics" file from application with your meeting details filled in.
For your questions:
Is it possible to register a user before start of the meeting?
Yes, you can. the gotomeeting application itself having the options for invite a participant and adding a co-orrganizer.
How can we find how many user has attended the meeting?
You can find it using the api function call. below is the C# code for getting the attendees of a past meeting.
Namespace : using Citrix.GoToMeeting.Api;
MeetingsApi meeting = new MeetingsApi();
List<AttendeeByMeeting> attendees = new System.Collections.Generic.List<AttendeeByMeeting>();
attendees = meeting.getAttendeesByMeetings(accesToken, 23843894);
NOTE : API is used within the context of gotomeeting application, physically you cannot attend a meeting in any application except GotoMeeting desktop application and GotoMeeting webapplication (which is offered in their website).
GTM isn't going to send the email for you it, as it doesn't have access to any email account. You should be looking to use one of the wide variety of different email APIs around. E.g. if you're in a Windows/Exchange environment then look at using the Exchange Web Services. If you want a more generic solution look for an SMTP library for your platform.
Attendees for GTMs don't register at any point, only hosts need to have a registered account. Even when you join a meeting as an attendee the details (name + email) you put in can be anything. What are you trying to achieve by "pre-registration"?
I can't answer your last question about finding out how many users attended the meeting, I would guess probably not but I'm not really familiar with the API.
Following our company processes, our database has to send an email to a manager requesting for approval for some document record changes.
I was wondering if it was possible for the manager to reply to the server with an email containing "Yes" or "Approved" with the document# and have it update the document record accordingly. Right now, the manager has to send the QA dept the approval email, and they have to update the document record manually.
I have looked at SQL Mail, but it seems to be a bad way to go according to a lot of places.
We use Exchange 2010 and SQL Server 2008
Thanks!
Do you have IIS installed in your environment? If so, you can redirect the user from Mail (Outlook) to a service page to update the document approval flag.
If so, create a ASP or ASPX page that takes two query parameters. A document id and a approval notice.
Put two links in the email for the manager to click. You will have to send the email from SQL server with a HTML body. Enclosed are sample links for document 123.
Approve Change
Reject Change
Check out www3schools link below for details query string.
http://www.w3schools.com/asp/coll_querystring.asp
Check out the link below for details on working with databases.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/morebits/archive/2010/09/26/working-with-data-beginners-guide-to-database-in-asp-net-web-pages-part-1.aspx
As an added feature, you might want to record the Active Directory (Windows Login) of who approved or rejected the document. That way, someone can not approve the document themselves. A date/time might be also handy.
This is one of many solutions you can use.
I have a single authorize.net account, and I have 5 different e-commerce applications tied to that account. Some are posting from a public site and some are posting from managed access sites. I am using SIM and I have read about the Relay Response, but as far as I can tell I can only have one URL listed. That will not work for me as I need a different URL for each different point of entry into the e-commerce system.
My problem at the moment is that I need to update a datafield via a guid upon successful payment completion to confirm purchase of a digital item, but if I put in a relay response page it is getting sent to all my access points and throwing errors. Other parts of the e-commerce system need to send different emails upon completion etc, plus all the urls are different at the top level.
Is there some other way of accomplishing this task that I am overlooking?
Use Silent Post*. It's Authorize.Net's equivalent of Paypal's IPN. It will only post to one URL per account but it happens behind the scenes. This means you can send a custom flag along with each transaction identifying which site the purchase is for and then have it respond accordingly (e.g. send emails, update database, etc).
*I am the author of this content
I am working on an app in iTunes connect for a client, under their iTunes connect account. I want to add myself as a user so that I can get email notifications of updates in app status. When I try to add myself as a user I get the following message:
The email address you entered already belongs to an iTunes Connect account. To continue, enter a different email address
I am using this email address on my own company's iTunes connect account, but not on my client's account. How can I add myself as a user?
#sarnold Turning your comment into an answer because it worked for me.
Two Separate Websites
Apparently for historical and organizational reasons, Apple operates their developer and app store business in a bifurcated manner.
developer.apple.com
The web site for all the technical resources, including documentation, WWDC videos and such.
itunesconnect.apple.com
This completely separate web site handles the business end:
Contracts, banking, payments.
Uploading your finished app.
Defining your In-App Purchase products.
Problem: Different Handling Of Accounts
The developer.apple.com site is slick in that a programmer can have a single Apple ID used to join multiple developer accounts. She may work for three different companies, and be assigned a role on each of those companies’ Developer accounts all on the same Apple ID. When she logs in to the Developer site, she is presented with a popup menu asking which of the three companies’ Developer accounts she wants to access during this work session. Nice.
The problem: in iTunesConnect, not so nice. In iTunesConnect, the "admin" person cannot assign existing Apple IDs as members with a role. Very strange. The admin is forced to create a new ID for each person being adding to the team. That means the person joining must have multiple email address. If an admin tries to add you to their iTunesConnect with an email address already used on some other company's iTunesAccount, an error message reports that email address / Apple ID is already in use. Obviously the programming team running the iTunesConnect site could use some help from the Developer site's team. ☹
Workaround: Email Address Trick
The workaround cited by sarnold involves a feature of email addresses. The spec for email servers has a feature where you can extend your email address. You can add a suffix to the first part of your email name by appending a "+" PLUS SIGN. From what I could figure out, the email software first looks for the extended name. If no such name is found, it drops the extension and looks again. If found, the shorter version of the email address is actually used.
So if the programmer Susan wants to use her email address susan#example.com for a second or third iTunesAccount, she tells her client's admin person at Acme Corporation to use something like this as her email address: susan+acme.com#example.com. Apple will still create a needless extra Apple ID for Susan, but at least Susan does not have to bother with creating and accessing extra email accounts. The emails sent by Apple will arrive at her susan#example.com address.
Susan double-checked this would work before talking to the admin person. She sent herself an email to susan+acme.com#example.com to make sure it arrived at the susan#example.com account.
Effectively, the email servers are not fooled by the extended email address, but iTunesConnect is fooled into creating an new Apple ID using an old email account.
Basically, you can't invite other iOS devs to review your efforts seems to be the result of this policy.
I had (and have) the exact same problem... what makes me kinda like FlavorScape's suggestion ;)
What I did is something similar to sarnold's comment: I used an alternative email address (_#gmail.com instead of _#googlemail.com) and this actually created a new AppleID with this email address.
It works fine, but it would be so much better to just connect my actual Developer account to my client's.
The way it's like at the moment, I can not even access the developer resources and (most importantly) the provisioning center with the new Apple ID, so my client has to do create new provisioning profiles and stuff, which is pretty frustrating and complicated.
Additionally, it is a pain to let him test the Apps on his own devices, because of the developer certificate is installed on my Mac, not his, and I am therefore the only one (or better, my Mac is the only computer) that can install new provisioning profiles on his devices.
Is there a better way to connect the accounts and solve these problems?
Cheers,
Nils
Apple now will allow the same email address to be invited to multiple itunes connect accounts and no longer allows new emails to be added with the +. Just a word of warning to others who were doing this the original post is now out of date with Apples new policy it seems.
#knl: The problem in the original question is specifically with iTunes Connect. If you want to be able to manage the Provisioning center -- to make profiles etc -- ask your client to add you to that account. Here are the steps:
Go to "Member Center"
Select the "People" tab
Click on invitations
Select "Invite person"
in the next screen they can select your role including "Member" (limited access) and "Admin" (full access)
From apple documentation:
You can only create test user accounts using an iTunes Connect
accounts with the Admin or Technical role assigned to it. Test users
do not have access to iTunes Connect, but will be able to test in-app
purchases in a development environment on a registered test device.
Link here