We think a document merge into Google Docs is interesting and potentially a great case.  Do you have a practical example of how that would be used in your situation?

Sure;

Example 1: Merge name and address into a form letter to contacts tagged as “client” inviting them to a company dinner

Example 2: Merge name and address to all contacts associated with a blog advising that the file has been closed.

Example 3: Send letter to contact associated with a particular blog and tagged as “client”. The letter will include the name and address of the client as well as the names and address of the contact

As a final result you’d be looking for a PDF or printed copy of the merged document?

I’d like to have it in a format where we can make edits before printing a the merged document as well as direct to print and pdf format.

I second this recommendation.  I’m looking for a basic document management solution and if Solve had a mail merge solution it would be amazing.

I’d love to load in our template and insert our Solve fields into the template and be able to generate a document based on the company or contact record data.  We would primarily use it for automating proposals and service contracts. 

Just a thought…

On a scale of 1-10, how likely is a mail merge solution to incorporated into solve 360?

It’s one of a few new Google Apps integrations we’re looking seriously at (another example is Gmail Contextual Gadgets to show the details of a client record from within Gmail).

I would also love to see this feature. Mailmerge into “real” letters is an absolute must for my business and I would prefer an integrated feature rather than perform a lookup and export a csv. If this is on the cards in the future for solve360 I would be very happy.

My big concern with this is that Google Docs is underdeveloped right now it’s about worthless for any real word-processing.  Letterheads don’t work right, formatting isn’t properly preserved, etc.

For large mailings, I think you can pretty easily export to CSV and do the merge through Word.

Another temporary work-around might be a “quick copy” button next to often used fields in a contact/project’s details to put stuff on the clipboard (address block, phone, email, full name).  For individual letters this would be very useful. 

Also: the contextual gadgets would be huge.  Please also consider direct email integration through a similar interface (selecting emails in Gmail to copy into S360).  Right now my use of the email integration is about nil because I don’t have time to manually forward or copy every email into my dropbox.

I agree with sloughwi’s ideas for a quick copy button and, especially, contextual email gadgets. What I would love to see in s360 is something similar to the gadget for ManyMoon whereby you can create a new project or task directly from the email that has prompted it. Sender and recipients are automatically added to it and it is even possible to create and/or attach a Google doc at that stage. It’s a huge timesaver and something similar in s360 would be great to improve the integration with Google Apps.

Has anyone tried Drawloop’s “Mail Merge for Google Docs” (http://bit.ly/d8Yckd)?

I’m wondering if it has fixes for sloughwi’s concerns:  Letterheads don’t work right, formatting isn’t properly preserved, etc.

gatorphan - Jul 20, 2010 02:29pm

Has anyone tried Drawloop’s “Mail Merge for Google Docs” (http://bit.ly/d8Yckd)?

I’m wondering if it has fixes for sloughwi’s concerns:  Letterheads don’t work right, formatting isn’t properly preserved, etc.

Just looked it over.  Very interesting and something I might start using, but it’s focused mostly on template mail merge rather than formatting.  That said, there is an easy way I discovered to do letterheads:

Save a blank letterhead to a PDF.  Save your Google Doc (or other text) to a PDF.  Then use the “add/remove background” in Acrobat to add the letterhead background to your text PDF’s first page.  Works great, but take an extra step which is annoying.

You know an easy and maybe elegant solution here would be to just use some code like here http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/ to create an FDF file using all of the contact fields.  An fdf typically points to a pdf that is loaded on the web.  It will load the data right into any corresponding fields that the pdf may have in it.

So it would be to enter in the web address of a pdf that has fields matching solve 360 and then Solve360 would generate the fdf on the fly which will then load the pdf completely merged. The alternative would be for someone with a hours of fooling to write create a php script that will look up all pdfs on a web directory and pull all fields from a specific contact.  Then you could just click on a link and it would generate the fdf linking contact information to the pdf.

SusanM - Jul 09, 2010 02:03am

I agree with sloughwi’s ideas for a quick copy button and, especially, contextual email gadgets. What I would love to see in s360 is something similar to the gadget for ManyMoon whereby you can create a new project or task directly from the email that has prompted it. Sender and recipients are automatically added to it and it is even possible to create and/or attach a Google doc at that stage. It’s a huge timesaver and something similar in s360 would be great to improve the integration with Google Apps.

I wholeheartedly second this idea!!  I am getting more consistent about adding the dropbox in my BCC when I reply to emails or forwarding them, but I’m not so good at remembering the exact project name to have it show up on the Project.  So, I’m not confident that all the related emails are showing up in the right spot.  The “View Related” will help, as long as I’ve related the Contact or Company, but I don’t see any way to take an email already in webmail and relate it to an existing project.  The drag and drop feature doesn’t seem to work for this.  Am I missing something?

Anyway, I’d LOVE LOVE LOVE a manymoon like gadget within email.  That feature alone is one reason I’m doing some projects in Manymoon instead of Solve360.

This thread seems to have been dormant for a few months. I’ like to resurrect it.

We really would like to see a particular functionality that we kind-of expected to find in all CRM’s i.e. the ability to merge contact info with MS Office, Open Office, Google documents, Google mail etc…, so we can send for example a letter or an e-mail using the data stored in Solve360’s fields in the customers’ files and/or Blogs. Solve is great to use to track what has happened on particular jobs (project blogs), but we are finding its functionality is limited to being a sort of elaborate “Rolladex”

Google docs and Solve360, Google mail and Solve360? If we could have these working together seamlessly, that would truly be a marriage made in heaven - or in the cloud ;).

To allay the obvious reply to this, I do know we can send e-mail from Solve and also copy Solve into messages sent from Gmail by cc’ing to a dropbox. However I must say that in this day and age the linking to blogs and/or customer files is a bit clunky at best and when it doesn’t work it is a nightmare and causes big problems, through lost e-mails and even if we find subsequently them, can’t “re-link” e-mails back to their originally intended locations.

With regards to the above merging and linking: this is a problem that has long been looked at and has been solved by the likes of ACT, MS Contact Manager, Outlook and Goldmine a long time ago (15 years or so) There must be a way we can finally ‘solve’ this properly in Solve360 and put this ‘hole’ to bed?  All those in favour of a proper look at this say “aye”.

JB

Agreed.  This is a great feature.

There is also Office Live, by Microsoft, which is essentially their version of Google Docs.

I’m sure they must also have an API you can work with for those needing Microsoft integration.

Aye here too!  We know this would be very useful and is aligned with our mission of helping teams manage their interactions with their clients.

As everyone probably knows the world of Act!. Maximizer, et al have direct access to your computer and therefore have complete control over, and integration with your desktop office apps.  This makes developing features like mail merge drop-dead simple to implement.  Web apps have none of this, so here we look to our brethren ... Google Docs.

We’ve been dropping in some big and useful features in regularly.  While doing so this topic has been front of mind for the team here.  It’s getting attension but we don’t have anything specific to announce, just yet.

Engineering SpecialOps - Feb 14, 2011 06:37pm

This makes developing features like mail merge drop-dead simple to implement. 

But it’s been almost a year since the original request.  If it’s drop dead simple then really shouldn’t be a year… right?

Not trying to sound like a jerk, but that point seemed to require commenting on.

Perhaps you missed the point. 

This makes developing features like mail merge drop-dead simple [FOR DESKTOP APPLICATIONS] to implement.

I did.  Thanks for that clarification.

It’s great that you are working on this and “more power to your elbow” as they say here in the UK.

Here’s a potential innovation…

Would it be feasible for you guys to set-up a Solve360 Project Blog to which we ‘interested users’ could subscribe and so follow the updates as they happen and perhaps even help you test them?

JB

Buggrit - Feb 21, 2011 04:02am

It’s great that you are working on this and “more power to your elbow” as they say here in the UK.

Here’s a potential innovation…

Would it be feasible for you guys to set-up a Solve360 Project Blog to which we ‘interested users’ could subscribe and so follow the updates as they happen and perhaps even help you test them?

JB

Hey Buggrit!
We actually have an entire section of the forum dedicated to this called “New Feature Development and Testing”, perhaps you would be interested in subscribing to it: http://norada.com/forums/viewforum/7/

I would like to also state that this feature would be much appreciated.  We have looked at Freshbooks to generate Quotes/ Invoices, but have found that there is not quite enough customization allowed.

We need the ability to export contact information into a Google Doc (Spreadsheet).

@toddrathkamp keep an eye out for an announcement on this very soon

Thanks, looking forward to it.  Timeframe?  By the way, our company is in the software business, so I know you may or may not be able to commit.  Thanks in advance.

We don’t commit to times but we’ll be looking for testers as early as 10 days or so.  Drop your name with our team (contact info on the website) if you’re interested in that.

We are in the process of moving to Google Apps and evaluating CRM software that neatly integrates with it.  The mail merge functionality is a very important requirement.  I would love to be notified about testing/implementing into Solve360 & Google Apps.

Thanks.

Anything new to report here?

Yep, if you want to try out the next revision of the feature (which is expected next week) just reach out to our team (contact info on the website).