Microsoft released a blog entry recently, in order to clear all this up:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and 2011 Update Rollup Release Dates, Build Numbers, and Collateral
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crminthefield/archive/2012/02/10/microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-and-2011-update-rollup-release-dates-build-numbers-and-collateral.aspx

One of the difficulties we face is project tracking. Making sure that:

• every developer is working on the most pressing items,
• our QA department knows what to focus their testing efforts on, for each build,
• our sales people know when new builds, with new features are coming out.

We’ve tried many tools for keeping track of our projects, including:

• Complicated spreadsheets, with a grid showing each developer, and all projects, saved in a common directory,
• using Yammer.com and asking developers to yammer about what they’re working on,
• Daily meetings, making sure everyone’s focused,
• Online tools like Basecamp.com,
• Using our Wiki to say what developers are up to, and should be doing,
• Whiteboards at each office, with individual developer priorities,

And, none of it worked very well. Developers don’t like meetings, don’t like yammering, don’t like anything that gets in the way of what they should be focused on.

Last fall, we started using Trello.com, a new FREE online product from Fog Creek Software – the same people that build the terrific Fogbugz bug tracking system we use here at InGenius. We’re all thrilled with the results!

Trello is a deceptively simple application. It presents you with a page called a “board”, and the board contains multiple lists.

Each list can have a title, and multiple entries, known as cards. You can drag cards from list to list, and you can re-order lists by dragging them as well.

Cards are the basic unit within Trello. Cards generally move up and down in a list, and from list to list, within a board.

Each card has a title, and when you click on it, it flips over to reveal a description, and a set of notes. People can add comments to a card, assign labels, assign a card to a particular worker, or vote on a card.

At InGenius, we use a similar setup to Fog Creek’s development board – we have a main board for all the development in our company, and have lists for:

• Known Issues,
• Ideas,
• Next Up,
• In Progress,
• Implemented,
• a list for each release.

Items generally move across, from left to right as they progress from ideas, to being implemented, to getting moved to a release.

Using Trello has been a godsend for both the developers and senior staff at InGenius. We can now easily see, in a single view, everything that’s in progress in the company, and can easily move cards around to indicate their priority.

Developers can easily make notes about their progress, which we review in a once-a-week meeting to make sure everyone’s on track. Each card contains a description of the bug or feature. Developers can easily add notes about their progress, and can move a card to the “Implemented” list when they’re done.

And, our QA staff can easily look at the lists for each release, to see which new features have been implemented, so they know where to focus their testing efforts.

Trello has become the focus of our developer meetings, allowing us to keep the meeting to 15-20 minutes and make sure everyone is on the right track.

We’ve learned a few tricks as we’ve used Trello.com:

• Don’t overload Trello with too many items. In our case, we keep the “high level” items in Trello, and leave most of the detail work in FogBugz. The items we track in Trello are generally the things that we’ll highlight in each product release, and major, customer-affecting issues. The balance between Trello and your bug tracking tool is hard to determine.
• make sure that card titles are succinct and descriptive
• Make sure that developers update the cards regularly
• Use labels to show which cards are bugs, and which features have been tested, or need documentation updates,
• Assign cards to developers by dragging developer icons over to a card,
• Use Trello in developer meetings as a focal point, and to show the team how the tool should be used,
• Encourage higher management and sales to use Trello too.
• Have a look at Trello’s development board for ideas and tips – and it’s fun to watch features move across, and out into a release!

Of course, Trello is not yet perfect, but new features are being implemented every week.

Our wish list includes:

• Ability to move lists from board to board,
• Better functionality in the iPhone and iPad applications,
• Better management of company members, and management of which company members are allowed access to a board (this is already much improved)
• Tighter integration with FogBugz

But, we wanted to do more – we wanted to set up a system where we could call customers who have downloaded our software, and help them with the installation and configuration of the application. As with most telephony applications, it can be complicated to set up because of the many different types of phone systems out there.

So, we came up with a plan:

1. User obtains a trial key from any of our download pages,
2. The registration system sends an email to the user, with their trial key,
3. The registration system also sends an email to a special email address at Salesforce.com, containing the registration info,
4. Some custom Apex code at Salesforce.com parses the email, and creates a lead, and a task showing what the user downloaded.

Details:

So, here’s what we did, in more detail:

1) Create Email

We modified our registration system to send an email when a trial key is requested. The email looks like this:

Subject: [Trial Key]

Source:AUTOMATION
 Campaign:
 FirstName:Bob
 LastName:Smith
 Email:bob@bob.com
 Phone:555-1212
 Company:Bob's Baker
 Country:Canada
 Industry:
 Dealer:YES
 Product:IC
 Coupon:11111-22222-33333-44444-5555
 Platform_OS: Windows
 Platform_CRM:Salesforce.com
 Platform_TELEPHONY:Asterisk

2) Create Apex Class

We created an Apex Class to handle the incoming mail. The class parses the incoming email, then does the following:

1. Checks to see if there’s a contact with this email address,
2. Checks to see if there’s a lead with this email address,
3. If not found, then create a lead with the user’s info,
4. Create a task with the details of the product the user has downloaded. Creating a task is convenient because we can automatically handle the case where a user trials more than one product – they just get created as tasks on a lead/contact.

The Apex code looks like this:

Note that the variables ending in __c are custom variables in our Salesforce.com installation.

global class InGenius_Integration_Registration_Email implements Messaging.InboundEmailHandler {
 global Messaging.InboundEmailResult handleInboundEmail(
   Messaging.InboundEmail email,
   Messaging.InboundEnvelope envelope) {
    Messaging.InboundEmailResult result = new Messaging.InboundEmailresult();
    String EmailPlainText= '';
    string EmailSource;
    string EmailCampaign;
    string EmailFirstName;
    string EmailLastName;
    string EmailEmail;
    string EmailPhone;
    string EmailCompany;
    string EmailCountry;
    string EmailIndustry;
    string EmailDealer;
    string EmailProduct;
    string EmailCoupon;
    string EmailPlatform_OS;
    string EmailPlatform_CRM;
    string EmailPlatform_TELEPHONY;
    Boolean found = false;
    ID ContactId;
    Lead insertedLead;
    System.debug('Email Received from: ' + envelope.fromAddress + ' (' + email.subject + ')' );
    // Ignore emails with the incorrect subject
    if( email.subject != '[TRIAL KEY]' ) {
        System.debug('Email rejected: Wrong Subject(' + email.subject + ')' );
        return result;
    }
    try {
        EmailPlainText = email.plainTextBody;
        String[] emailbody=email.plainTextBody.split('\n',0);
        System.debug(emailbody);
        // THIS IS NOT a terrific way to parse the email, but it works...
        // If the email format changes, by even ONE character, this will fail.
        EmailSource =             emailbody[0].substring(7);
        EmailCampaign =           emailbody[1].substring(9);
        EmailFirstName =          emailbody[2].substring(10);
        EmailLastName =           emailbody[3].substring(9);
        EmailEmail =              emailbody[4].substring(6);
        EmailPhone =              emailbody[5].substring(6);
        EmailCompany =            emailbody[6].substring(8);
        EmailCountry =            emailbody[7].substring(8);
        EmailIndustry =           emailbody[8].substring(9);
        EmailDealer =             emailbody[9].substring(7);
        EmailProduct =            emailbody[10].substring(8);
        EmailCoupon =             emailbody[11].substring(7);
        EmailPlatform_OS =        emailbody[12].substring(12);
        EmailPlatform_CRM =       emailbody[13].substring(13);
        EmailPlatform_TELEPHONY = emailbody[14].substring(19);
        if( EmailDealer=='YES' )
            EmailDealer='Dealer';
        else
            EmailDealer='End User';
        System.debug(EmailSource);
        System.debug(EmailCampaign);
        System.debug(EmailFirstName);
        System.debug(EmailLastName);
        System.debug(EmailEmail);
        System.debug(EmailPhone);
        System.debug(EmailCompany);
        System.debug(EmailCountry);
        System.debug(EmailIndustry);
        System.debug(EmailDealer);
        System.debug(EmailProduct);
        System.debug(EmailCoupon);
        System.debug(EmailPlatform_OS);
        System.debug(EmailPlatform_CRM);
        System.debug(EmailPlatform_TELEPHONY);
    }
    catch( exception e4 ) {
        System.Debug('ProcessTrial Failure: Could Not parse email');
        return result;
    }
    // Try to lookup any contacts based on the email from address
    // If there is more than 1 contact with the same email address,
    // we just use the first match
    try {
        // Does a contact exist with this email?
        List<Contact> contactList = [Select Id, Name, Email From Contact Where Email = :EmailEmail Limit 1];
        if( !contactList.IsEmpty()) {
            ContactId = contactList[0].Id;
            System.Debug('Found Existing Contact:' + contactList[0].Name);
            found = true;
        }
        else {
            // Does a Lead exist with this email?
            List<Lead> leadList = [Select Id, Name, Email From Lead Where Email = :EmailEmail Limit 1];
            if( !leadList.IsEmpty()) {
                ContactId = leadList[0].Id;
                System.Debug('Found Existing Lead:' + leadList[0].Name);
                found = true;
            }
            else {
                // Create a Lead with this email
                Lead leadToInsert = new lead(
                    FirstName=EmailFirstName,
                    LastName=EmailLastName,
                    email=EmailEmail,
                    Company=EmailCompany,
                    Country=EmailCountry,
                    Industry=EmailDealer,
                    Status='Working - Key Issued',
                    Phone=EmailPhone,
                    LeadSource=EmailCampaign,
                    Product__c = EmailProduct,
                    TrialKey__c = EmailCoupon,
                    Phone_System__c=EmailPlatform_TELEPHONY,
                    Users_CRM__c=EmailPlatform_CRM);
                insert(leadToInsert);
                ContactId = leadToInsert.Id;
                System.Debug('Created Lead' + EmailFirstName + ' ' + EmailLastName + ' ' + EmailCompany + ' ' + ContactId);
                found = true;
            }
        }
    }
    catch (exception e2) {
        System.Debug('ProcessTrial Failure: Could Not Create Lead:' +  EmailFirstName + ' ' + EmailLastName + ' ' + e2);
    }
    if( found ) {
        try {
            // New Task object to be created
            Task[] newTask = new Task[0];
            // Add a new Task to the contact record we just found or created above.
            newTask.add(new Task(
                Description =  EmailPlainText,
                Priority = 'Normal',
                Status = 'Key Issued',
                Subject = EmailProduct,
                Product__c = EmailProduct,
                RegistrationCoupon__c = EmailCoupon,
                //IsReminderSet = true, // optional, set a reminder
                //ReminderDateTime = System.now()+2, // Set reminder for 2 days in the future.
                WhoId =  ContactID));
            insert newTask;
            System.debug('New Task: ' + newTask );
        }
        catch (exception e3) {
            System.debug('ProcessTrial Failure: Create New Task Failed: ' + e3 );
        }
    }
    else {
        System.Debug('ProcessTrial Failure: Could Not Create Lead:' +  EmailFirstName + ' ' + EmailLastName);
        return result;
    }
    result.success = true;
    return result;
 }

3) Configure Email Service

Once the Apex class is created, then you need to go to Develop -> Email Services and add a new Email Service to handle the incoming mail. This is where you’ll get the unique email address. Note also, that you may have to adjust the permissions, and adjust settings for which emails you accept mail from. By default this is quite locked down by Salesforce.com.

4) Last Step:

We hired Katy! Katy looks after calling customers when they’ve downloaded a trial version of our software, and make sure that the install goes smoothly. Thanks Katy!

Further Notes:

• We are planning to add additional code to update the contact once a user purchases our software.
• We are planning to improve the email parsing.
• We had quite a few issues getting the debugging to work reliably at Salesforce.com. It is not clear how to enable debugging, and how to extract debug logs.

InGenius Connector, and its cousin Mitel’s Unified Communicator Express can use TAPI in two ways.

1. InGenius Connector can appear as a TAPI telephony provider to CRM systems,
2. InGenius Connector can make use of TAPI to control your desktop phone (Connector as a TAPI consumer).

InGenius Connector as a TAPI provider for connecting to CRM systems

This is also called the TAPI Plug-in, and is an optional component of InGenius Connector and Unified Communicator Express. This feature is enabled for an existing installation of our product by simply entering a license key. When you’ve done this, InGenius Connector will now appear in the list of TAPI devices that are available on your computer, when you use a TAPI enabled CRM.

This mode is commonly used with CRMs such as Act, Maximizer, and Outlook and many custom CRM systems. From within your CRM, select the InGenius Connector from the list of TAPI devices on your computer, and your CRM will now be able to place calls using the telephone connected to InGenius Connector. You’ll also be able to see the caller ID for incoming calls, and the CRM will be able to pop the appropriate CRM contact automatically. Note that the functionality provided varies between CRM’s. Some CRM’s may not provide the screen-pop functionality, for instance.

On the telephone side of things, the TAPI Plugin is commonly used with Mitel phone systems (using Unified Communicator Express or Unified Communicator Advanced, with the appropriate InGenius plugin), as well as users of Polycom phones, Aastra Phones, Asterisk PBX’s, and Broadsoft PBX’s – systems which are generally quite difficult to control via TAPI.

Using InGenius Connector with a TAPI-enabled phone system

The other way to use TAPI with InGenius Connector is to set up a phone profile within InGenius using the TAPI phone profile (which will be available within InGenius Connector in the first Quarter of 2012). In this case, the customer has a phone system that provides a TAPI interface, and want to use the features of InGenius Connector to control their phone system, or they want to use an InGenius Connector CRM integration with their phone system.

Users will have to install InGenius Connector, as well as the TAPI service provider which is provided by the telephone system manufacturer. In the case of Cisco, this is available for free, and can be downloaded by the Cisco Call Manager administrator.

We are currently developing TAPI support for Cisco phone systems, and will be certifying other phone systems soon.

Our customers generally use this option to connect their TAPI-enabled phone system to Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Sugar CRM.

First and foremost though, what is a call center?   The Salesforce call center is basically a softphone within Salesforce.  It typically appears in the upper left hand side of the Salesforce window, like this:

“No big deal,” you might say, “Softphones are old news, I already have Skype and Google Talk!”.

Ok, but the cool part about integrating a softphone into the Salesforce Call Center is all of the options for information tracking and capturing.

For example, you can quickly see what records are associated with a call.  Incoming calls will pop a screen that shows the caller ID, call history, and opportunities linked to the caller:

Phone numbers in Salesforce will become clickable so that you can click-to-call rather than manually dialing.  Whew, because that was getting pretty physically strenuous:

Salesforce keeps track of calls made, along with any of the information entered by salespeople.  So you can start tracking the number of calls you make or your team makes, the call duration, and call result, without manually creating new records:

That’s all pretty great for sales teams who are trying to share information and records with each other.  Each team member can immediately see the activity history, including calls, for all leads, opportunities and contacts.  If a team member is off sick or otherwise busy, her team mates can make sure nothing is missed.

“I’m sold! Now, how do I set up a call center in Salesforce? “

You need a CTI adapter.  A CTI is a Computer-Telephony Integration.  It the piece of the puzzle that allows Salesforce to interact with incoming and outgoing calls.  Not all CTIs have all the features mentioned above, and some CTI adapters have other features like power-dialing.

There are a few CTI adapters out there which can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange.  You’ll have to do some research to figure out what works for your phone system and offers the features you’re interested in.  This can be daunting if you aren’t familiar with telephony, but it doesn’t need to be.

To get started, check out this post on Basic Telephony Terms, and have a look at the phone systems you are using.  Then spend a bit of time on the Salesforce AppExchange looking at the CTI Adapters.  At InGenius, we’re very proud of all our positive reviews and we are always happy to answer questions about our products or your system.

Check back soon for more information on softphones vs. hardphones, business telephone systems, customizing Salesforce reports, and more!

The Basics

CRMs: Customer Relationship Management programs
These help document, monitor, and track a company’s interactions, primarily with its customers.  The most popular CRMs right now seem to be the web-based programs.  There are lots of great CRM programs out there, and we’ll get to those in a later post.

Telephony
A word for a phone system or a bunch of phones networked together.  If your office has a phone system with extensions, or if you need to do something like “press 9 for an outside line” then you something about telephony.

A few important terms and features:

VoIP:  Voice over Internet Protocol
This means speaking through the internet rather than through phone lines.  The most well known VoIP provider is probably Skype, which allows users to download it’s software for free, make calls between web-based Skype users for free, and make calls from web-based Skype users to landlines for reduced prices.

SIP: Session Initiation Protocol
This is a standard internet language for calling via voice and video.  I don’t really think it is important for the lay person to understand.  It might be important to know whether you are connected to a SIP based service provider.

IP: Internet Protocal
Internet language – or – how information is sent and received over the internet.  You may need to know something called your IP Address, which is a string of numbers separated by dots.  This is the location of your machine on the internet, just like your home address is the location of your house in the world.

T1
This is a kind of phone line.

Call waiting
The ability of the phone to signal that another call is trying to access your line while you are on a call.

Conference call
A call involving more than two parties.

Screen Pops
This is like caller ID for computers, except that instead of just the number showing up on your phone’s screen, the contact information for the incoming caller “pops” up onto your computer screen.  InGenius Connector Plugins can help your CRM “pop” screen identify additional information such as your history of calls with that phone number and notes made about that phone number, in addition to the number itself

Toast Pops
Ha!  No really, this is a thing.  Actually, it’s the same thing as above, except maybe the ‘pop’ isn’t the whole screen but rather a smaller window that appears from another application.  Like toast.  Coming out of a toaster.  Get it?

CLID or CID:  Caller ID
Why don’t we just call this  ‘Caller ID,’ which everyone understands?  I don’t know. Caller ID means that you can see who is ringing your phone before picking up.

Call Logs
These are records of inbound and outbound calls, or, all of the calls made from your phone.  InGenius Connector Plugins will help your CRM log calls and attach records or notes to those calls.  This is helpful for remembering each step of the sale or interaction and making sure that tasks do not fall through the cracks.

Cloud Based
When a program is based in the ‘cloud’ it means that there is nothing stored on your hard drive or local server.  People appreciate that they do not need to download or install anything onto their computers, and that their data can be accessed from anywhere.  Salesforce is known for being a cloud based CRM.

-  —  -

Things are evolving fast and different stuff is appearing all the time.  Are there any other terms that you think are important for beginners? Are there other important features that you use currently, or would like to see in the future?

It’s been a few months since we’ve updated the InGenius blog. That’s because we’ve been busy developing and perfecting some really great, easy to use telephony-CRM integrations.

What are telephony-CRM integrations you say? So glad you asked!  It’s a way to make hard and soft phones connect to  contact managers, (like Microsoft Outlook), and CRMs, (like Sugar and Salesforce).  Your contact managers and CRMs are programs and software pieces you already know and use everyday.  We just want to make it easier to put all these pieces together, saving you time and keeping you from losing track of important calls.

Our InGenius integrations are really smart applications.  Over the next few posts, I’m going to show you the smartest ways to use these smart applications.  If there is anything in particular you’d like to see, let me know.

What a great way to start 2012!

We’ll be at HIMMS from Tuesday to Thursday – but taking off Thursday afternoon to head over to Titusville for the launch of STS-133 at 4:50pm. You can get in contact with me at Rich@ingenius.com.

That said, our release this week will include:

• A brand spanking new colour scheme,
• Tweet Filtering! Our app can now filter out those obnoxious “Me Too” tweets, and even adapts dynamically to the amount of twitter traffic to filter more agressively if there are a lot of tweets flowing by. Among other things, we skip repeated retweets, short tweets, and any that contain any of our blacklisted words.
• View trending topics by region – you can now select a specific region to see trending topics. It’s kinda cool to see what topics are trending all over the world. Our app makes it easy to check this out!
• We’ve cleaned up the ads – moved them from embedded in the tweet stream to a dedicated ad location at the bottom of the screen (you can easily upgrade to get rid of ‘em eh)
• And lots more! (behind the scenes UI improvements, better refreshing, better show selection, etc)

Keep an eye out for the new Tweex this week at the Apple App Store!

In a white paper, Lori Bocklund, President, Strategic Contact Inc. remarks on the issues with contact centers in implementing new technology; “Problems we see include not looking at systems in place to start out with and potentially leveraging something that already exists, over-buying (licenses, functionality, capacity, etc.), not allocating the resources to use it effectively, never getting to the “Phase 2″ functionality, not making process changes to get the most out of technology, and failing to help the users see the benefits and make changes.”

With InGenius Connector for CRM systems we solve these problems by providing:

• Multi-platform support on both the CRM side and the VoIP or SIP service provider side to help businesses leverage what they already have in place
• Per seat purchase options to avoid over-buying
• Simple deployment options that include mass deployment or easy end user download so massive resources for deployment are not necessary
• An abundance of support materials including videos, documentation, presentation and webinars to inform users how to get the most out of the application
• Seamless integrations with the CRM application users are familiar with so benefits can be seen right away and changes required to use the software are intuitive (For example, click on a phone number to call)

With growing competition and increased consumer knowledge, businesses are investing in CRM software to better develop and nurture their customer relationships to improve their current and future bottom line. What businesses are missing however is that when introducing new software or technologies they are adding an additional tool on top of an already busy customer service representative or salesforce. This is where InGenius Connector for CRM systems comes into play. We take all these tools and merge them into a single access point so that customer service representatives need only access with one interface, CRM providers extend their functionality beyond their application, and VoIP providers integrate with business processes. InGenius Connector for CRM truly connects it all!