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New Features:
Google Apps integration including both single-sign-on and account auto-creation is the monster feature today. Now if you’re a Google Apps user you must be asking:
“Can Google Apps really automatically create the Solve360 accounts for my users?“
“Can my staff actually sign into Google Apps and instantly have access to their Solve360 Account without needing another username and password?“
The answers are “Yes” and another resounding “Yes”!
So if you learn anything today, learn about this feature. If you haven’t yet discovered Google Apps, don’t worry, we’ll walk you through it with a featured tutorial up at http://norada.com/answers later this week.
Since Solve360’s Google Contact Sync feature was first released, it has been a two-way street. It still is, but now it can also be a one-way street or a the-other-way street. From now on, you have the control! Many Solve customers want their Solve360 contacts to match their Google Contacts at all times. We made that possible when we first release this feature last year. But some clients realized that there was no right place for their Aunt Gwendoline in their Solve360 account; while others didn’t like Mr. Pensky’s (from the Pensky account) contact information to get mixed in with family and friends. It just didn’t feel right! Solve360 now allows you to avoid these two unwanted situations, so your work life stays at work, and personal life stays at home.
Constant Contact and Solve get serious about the ‘360 part Many of you have been pushing lists of contacts from Solve to Constant Contact to manage your larger email campaigns. It’s essentially a one-click affair to drop the data into Constant Contact, unfortunately you couldn’t keep track of the results from within Solve360—until now. Campaign information from Constant Contact is now displayed on the Solve360 contact page where it is convenient to see. So before you call Mr. Pensky, you can quickly check if he has been reacting positively to your email campaigns!
We’ve added a small but important feature to the search options so now, when searching by a specific field in your Contacts, Project Blogs or Companies, you can include or exclude records with empty fields. So you can easily make a list of contacts that have a special date in your system, because maybe you want to send them a reminder, or you can now make a list of the contacts missing that information. Searching in these two scenarios will be a breeze in this release.
A tasklist milestone was previously visible to everyone on your team in the “next actions” and “calendar” views of the Activities Dashboard. Now you can specify who should see the milestones in these views i.e. which team members the milestone relates to.
We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to integrate Solve with this year’s crowd favorite for email marketing, MailChimp. Unfortunately this doesn’t include the 360 part that Constant Contact sports because MailChimp can’t yet provide it. But since we know many clients use this service we’ve made it very simple to push your contacts between the systems.
Some improvements:
The update also includes over 30 minor refinements. Chances are if you recently made a suggestion, or reported a minor bug, it was addressed today.
This version also updates the code related to general browser user interface functions. We’re looking forward to a bit more optimizations (speed), resolution to a few “quirks” (unexpected behaviors) and set the stage for developing new features. Although we’ve done extensive testing for this release, there’s a small chance that a couple slipped by—if this is the case we’ll be on them without delay.
Some screenshots of the various areas follow…
—Mike, AKA the new guy ;)
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this update is awesome.
hello Mike the new guy!
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Great work! You solved some big issues today. I appreciate it.
Kevin
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A great effort with all these updates.
Thanks!
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Awesome job guys, you have a great product and continue to make it better! Thanks!
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Thanks for the warm welcome everyone 
- Mike
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Where can I find more information on the “Google Apps integration” portion.
I currently do not see “Solve360 by Norada” under the “more” drop-down in our Google Apps domain.
Please let me know how to check this integration.
Thanks,
Lizelle
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Hi Lizelle,
We’ll be adding the exact steps up at http://norada.com/answers later this week.
Essentially to link the systems you would open Solve360’s Google Marketplace page, click on the “Add it now” button in the top right, and follow the steps as prompted.
After this is complete the next time you login to your Google Apps account you should notice (as the Google Apps domain admin) that Solve360 is installed and the link under the More dropdown (Google’s universal navigation).
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Mike, for a new guy you’ve got a lot to say for yourself. Fortunately it’s all good, and I’m glad the rest of the Norada team have not just got you making coffee. Or perhaps you do that too? Good job all.
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Hi Steve,
Thanks. I followed your steps, and when I finally walked through all the steps, under “more” in Gmail interface, when I clicked on “Solve360 by Norada” it then took me to the regular Solve360 login page, but, it asked me for our Admin Login credentials.
So, now, when I roll over “more”, click on “Solve360 by Norada”, it automatically launches our Admin account.
Obviously I do not want every user to launch the Admin account, but instead their own individual account, from Gmail (Google Apps).
Am I missing a step? For now I have deactivated the app in my Google Apps, until I can figure out how to get that link to launch the exact users Solve360 account vs. the Admin account.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks,
Lizealle
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Steve,
In addition, I also had Kevin and another user within our accucode.com domain test this new feature. And when they clicked on the “Solve360 by Norada” option under the “more” link in their Gmail account, they launched an entirely *new* Solve360 account, with no data, completely blank.
So, there seems to be some issue for our Google Apps users to link over to the correct Solve360 accounts. It almost seems as if I just tied our Google Apps domain to an entirely new Solve360 account.
Can you please provide some insight on our observations regarding these integration issues.
We’re really excited about this new integration! Please just let me know if I’m doing something wrong on my end.
Thanks,
Lizelle
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Hi Lizelle,
Part 1 Your Google Domain Administrator account is now linked to your Solve360 Administrator account. When each user tries to click on the link under more their own Google Apps Account will be linked to their standard Solve360 Account, and if they don’t have one a Solve360 account will be created for them.
Part 2 Your to fast for me We addressed this issue at the same time you were probably trying it. We found a case that for existing Solve clients the users coming from Google Apps were provisioned with a new account in the org instead of linking to their existing one.
How does it work for the existing users now?
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Hi Steve,
Thank you so much for your quick feedback. So, here’s my issue, I’ll address Part 1 and 2 as you have it laid out.
Part 1 Your Google Domain Administrator account is now linked to your Solve360 Administrator account. When each user tries to click on the link under more their own Google Apps Account will be linked to their standard Solve360 Account, and if they don’t have one a Solve360 account will be created for them.
Response: We happen to have multiple users with Admin Rights, in our Google Apps domain. So, with that, I actually now, have my personal account tied to our company Solve360 Admin account, which is not my personal Solve360 account.
So, how do I change which Solve360 account I have tied to my Google account?
Part 2 Your to fast for me :) We addressed this issue at the same time you were probably trying it. We found a case that for existing Solve clients the users coming from Google Apps were provisioned with a new account in the org instead of linking to their existing one.
How does it work for the existing users now?
Response: Great job. Kevin tested this and it did indeed take him from Google to his exact Solve360 user account.
Just my account is incorrectly linked right now. My Google account still launches the Solve360 Admin user account, because my Google user happens to have Admin rights.
I hope this makes sense. : )
Thanks,
Lizelle
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So, how do I change which Solve360 account I have tied to my Google account?
The first time you established the connection (claimed the domain) you needed to login to the Solve admin account. That linked the current Google account to the Solve admin account. We’ve unlinked your Google account now—since the domain is now claimed, when you click on the link again from your own Google account it will link you to your own Solve account (having the same email address).
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Steve:
Yes, indeed, it now works properly! Thank you for working on this with me. I appreciate it, and this new feature is just cool!
Single sign on was a great idea to add, thanks.
-
Lizelle
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Steve,
SSO is a big hit. It makes it much easier to get people using Solve, and it is starting to feel like part of our Google Apps. Please keep pushing the integration forward in all areas “Google”.
I need to ask for a small tweak to the Google Contact Sync. It is close to being great, but we have a small problem. Yes, we only want our individual contacts to sync back to Google, and your recent change fixed this very nicely, but we also have a small list of contacts that are shared among all users. A couple of examples of contacts in this list include our Vendors, and even our own internal employees. With 50 employees, we do not know everyone’s phone extension, email, or cell phone.
Since we can only assign contacts to one user, I am thinking we could assign all of these “shared” contacts to our Workgroup. Now if your Google contact sync allowed us to select more than one user’s contacts to sync, (perhaps your new functionality with a check-box next to each name), we could sync our own contacts plus the Workgroup contacts, and we would now be syncing all the contacts a user might need.
I like this approach, because even though my scenario was narrow in scope, check-boxes allow for any combination of users to sync their contacts. 2 inside sales people, purchasing and controller, etc.
Hope this makes sense,
Kevin
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@ Kevin, you can choose to sync Google Contacts that only have a specific Tag. This would accomplish what you are after right?
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Hi Dave,
Unfortunately no. The way the new contact sync selection works is that you can chose to sync based on either “Tag” or “Assigned to User”. Not a combination of both. We have to use the “assigned to user” option, otherwise every user gets flooded with 1000’s of contacts that have nothing at all to do with them.
For your suggestion to work, we would need to be able to choose to sync a combination of a specific “Assigned to User” and a “tag”, then we could go through all of our shared contacts (vendors for example), and add a “vendor” tag to them. Then a sync would include user contacts and the contacts tagged with “Vendor”. This would work if the change was made to allow multiple sync criteria.
We don’t use tags for things like vendors today. We have a custom pull down field for identifying the type of contact. Vendor, customer, etc. I would prefer to keep it that way.
If instead, they allowed you to choose multiple users contacts to sync, you have an easy way to solve our problem. We would assign the vendors to the “workgroup user”, and the sync selection would allow us to choose “our” contacts and the contacts assigned to the “workgroup user”. Problem solved.
This also allows for shared contacts for any number of reasons. Maybe you have a few folks that are assigned similar roles in a company (purchasing, HR, etc.), or work on the same long-term project. They don’t need the security or secrecy of their own workgroup, but they really only use the same small list of contacts. They could sync their contacts plus the other team members contacts, and everyone would always have the contacts relevant to their job.
Thanks for the input,
Kevin
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Steve Ireland - Jun 16, 2010 06:31pm So, how do I change which Solve360 account I have tied to my Google account?
The first time you established the connection (claimed the domain) you needed to login to the Solve admin account. That linked the current Google account to the Solve admin account. We’ve unlinked your Google account now—since the domain is now claimed, when you click on the link again from your own Google account it will link you to your own Solve account (having the same email address).
I have the exact same case. We have a Solve360 admin account (that’s currently linked to my account) but several Google admins (which we’d like to keep). But I want my own Google account linked to my own Solve360 account, not the admin account.
So, could you unlink these? Would be good to have a facility for this in Solve, otherwise maybe you’ll be flooded with requests like these ;-).
Another question: if I’m logged on to Google and I go to secure.solve360.com, currently it doesn’t automatically log me in. Is this uspposed to work? I guess not, right?
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Hi Alef, Please ping our support team with your account details so they can confirm the change to the correct account—it’s a simple change here. We do plan on expanding the linking and privileges management as we expand our integration with Google Apps. We do need to be careful here though, if you created the account through Google Apps, did not reset the password, then revoked the access then you could not get back in; without contacting us for support 
Once the accounts are connected you can login automatically using the link under “More” (first image in the list - top left corner of Google). Just going to the login page won’t log you in automatically.
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