Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The people at Quickbooks Online are listening


As I was sending yet another reminder to one of my clients about an invoice, it hit me. Why am I sending an email with a .pdf of an invoice?

Actually, it didn't hit me until I was walking later that morning. I should be able to send the "transaction" directly to my customer's payable ledger. It was a minor epiphany, since we regularly send transactions (paypal) all the time.

So, I sent an email to Quickbooks online support suggesting this feature and they responded within 15 minutes. My suggestion included the idea of a queuing mechanism on the customer side, essentially approving and receiving the transaction into their ledger. Completely removes data entry errors (and effort) and could improve my cash flow.

The Quickbooks rep was very excited to tell me that it was an "awesome suggestion" and they would put it in the feature queue. We shall see.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Facebook for Business

I am seeing many examples of people and businesses using Facebook to extend their brand. Facebook pages provides a simple and easy way to create a mini-site about your business/brand and attract new fans/prospects/customers.

Guy Kawasaki has a great post that summarizes some basic steps to get started. He pulled these from Jesse Stay's I'm on Facebook - Now What??

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Using Salesforce and Google Docs (part I)


I will be posting a series of articles on using the newly integrated Salesforce with Google Docs. ETS uses Salesforce for incident management. We have also been "light" users of Google Docs to create and share documents and spreadsheets internally.

Installation of Google Docs within Salesforce was a breeze. Just clicked on the "get started" link and was brought to the setup module for our Salesforce instance. There were five options to add Google Docs and we added all five. Clicking on "add" for each one prompted a license agreement and then it was complete.

One minor snafu was that in order to use the integrated package, you need a Google Docs Business account. This did exist for our domain (setup months ago), but all the existing Google Docs were under my personal account.

So, in order to get the functionality you need your domain and users configured on Google Docs for Business. This is a bit of a hassle since Google has no current linkage to our email users. For example, in order for the user jdoe@domain.com to get all the functionality running on GD/SF, you need to have jdoe@domain.com defined as a salesforce user AND a user on Google Docs with all email settings configured.

I *think* this means that jdoe@domain.com needs to be setup on GD to be the primary mail client. Which of course means that you would need to setup the POP3 settings in gmail so that email will flow. More to come on this...

Another hiccup occured when we tried to create a GD from the SF interface and was prompted for the GD login. Entered the credentials for the business account, but received a "server error" on the GD side. Still don't have this working..

So basically, nothing is working, but I am confident that we will work out the configuration to getting it going. Once we do, we'll put it here.

Monday, April 21, 2008

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