I am happy to announce that about a month ago, 5Buckets was approved for public listing on Salesforce.com’s Appexchange!!!

The Appexchange is a marketplace for Salesforce.com users and administrators to browse and buy application add-ons for their Salesforce.com  account. We are listed in two different categories and were highlighted on the main page for a few days as a new application. The listing has generated a considerable amount of interest and many leads have been coming in.

Check it out.

It’s a question we get frequently: How do I get this Salesforce.com report emailed to my boss. Or my direct-mail printer. Or to myself.

That’s where we have developed a feature in 5Buckets. You create a Bucket in 5Buckets that points to the SFDC report, and then Schedule it to be emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s as simple as that! The report lands in the boss’ or direct-mail printer’s or your Inbox as a CSV file. Open it up in Excel (or Calc if you are an Open Office user) and enjoy!

Last week we released a new feature in 5Buckets. It integrates four different applications - RegOnline, RingLead, Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. RegOnline is a event registration application. You can use RegOnline to let your customers and prospects register for your conferences or road-shows etc. Salesforce.com is of course a premier CRM application; RingLead is a product that goes along with Salesforce.com to de-duplicate Contacts or Leads before they are stored in Salesforce.com. ExactTarget is an email marketing tool.

Our customer approached us with the problem that the registrant data captured in RegOnline was silo-ed off in RegOnline. Instead they wanted to move that data to their CRM database - Salesforce.com. Additionally they wanted to use ExactTarget to send out confirmation and reminder emails. And to complicate things further, they wanted to use RingLead to de-dup information going in to Salesforce.com.

The solution is new functionality in 5Buckets under the “Triggers” feature. As soon as a registrant signs-up in RegOnline, RegOnline triggers an event in 5Buckets. 5Buckets then in turn makes an API call to RegOnline and retrieves the registration information. This information is then passed on to RingLead to add or update in Salesforce.com. Once that is complete, 5Buckets then invokes a ExactTarget API call to send a confirmation email to the registrant.

The beauty of this solution is two-fold: data is near-instantly captured in to customer’s CRM database allowing the sales team to know that their customer or prospect just signed up for an event. And secondly, data is now in a central database. Marketing can setup further communications with customer over time such as sending reminder emails or updates about events.

I was on LinkedIn earlier today and looking up the profile of a former colleague, wanting to get back in touch with him. LinkedIn had placed a Google-driven Ad next to the profile listing. Check this screenshot:

A couple of weeks ago I was at a client site doing ExactTarget API consulting. This client is standardizing on ExactTarget as their single source of all e-mail communications from three of their internal applications. They will use 5Buckets for the automation in certain cases, but also needed to develop their own integration with ExactTarget directly.

One of the developers posed me a question about “filters” in the ExactTarget web service. You can use
simplefilterpart() to specify what data point you want to filter on, and of course the value. For example, to filter on CustomerKey -

SimpleFilterPart sfp = new SimpleFilterPart();
sfp.Property = “CustomerKey”;
sfp.SimpleOperator = SimpleOperators.equals;
sfp.Value = new string[] { “TransactionalSendKey” };

Here you are first creating an instance of SimpleFilterPart. Then indicating that you want to filter using “CustomerKey”, indicating the operator and finally the value of the CustomerKey.

Now, if you have two filter criteria, you create two instances of the SimpleFilterPart and join the two using ComplexFilterPart (see code example in the Webserivces API guide, pg. 36)

Going back to the question that came up at client site - they wanted to know how they would add a third filter criteria. Well, it’s simple enough. Create a third instance of SimpleFilterPart and set the property and values as appropriate. Then create another instance of a ComplexFilterPart and assign you first ComplexFilterPart to the LeftOperand and the third SimpleFilterPart to the RightOperand.

ComplexFilterPart ComplexFilter2 = new ComplexFilterPart();
ComplexFilter2.LeftOperand = ComplexFilter1;
ComplexFilter2.LogicalOperator = LogicalOperators.AND;
ComplexFilter2.RightOperand = ThirdSimpleFilterPart;

Last week we released the latest version of 5Buckets. This last release was centered around one major feature - integrating with Vontoo.

Vontoo is a permission based voice messaging product. Their tagline is “Say It. Send It. Track It.” Essentially you can create audio clips and have Vontoo make phone calls to your list of opt-in subscribers. Sounds a little intrusive? Initially I thought so too. Phone calls after all have a little urgency to them. So receiving marketing messages on your phone is definitely annoying.

However, there are many situations where I want to get a phone call - school delays, weather alerts come to mind first. But beyond those reminder of a webinar I signed up for or a company wide communication by the CEO also lend themselves to phone calls. Vontoo has a customer in the music industry. The band has recorded messages and phone calls go out to fans about upcoming concerts, ticket sales & CD releases. Hmm, I certainly won’t mind a recorded message from Bono or Paul McCartney. :)

5Buckets is now integrated with Vontoo. It is another “output device” much like ExactTarget is an output device for email communications. The “input device” - the placeholder for phone numbers & email addresses - can be Salesforce.com or your own SQL Server database. For example, you can create a report in Salesforce.com that lists customers that completed their one year anniversary with you. Every day, 5Buckets will pull from Salesforce.com the list of customers with anniversary today and send them a pre-recorded voice message from Vontoo thanking them for their business.

This simple scenario can be extended to include email communications. For example, 30 days before the anniversary date an email could be sent by 5Buckets reminding the same customers that their renewal is due. An email as a renewal reminder, and a personal phone call on their anniversary thanking the customer when they renew.