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My ultimate guide to getting started with Gmail

29 May 2013

So, you have your shiney new Google accounts set up. Now what? Here is some tips and tricks to get you started.

Gmail

Settings

There are a few settings that I always set in Gmail:

  • Language
  • Phone Numbers
  • Browser connection: Always use HTTPS
  • Conversation View: On
  • Desktop Notifications: On
  • Keyboard shortcuts: On
  • My picture
  • People Widget: Show
  • Create contacts for auto-complete
  • Personal level indicators
  • Snippets
  • Set your signature. Plus always check “Insert this signature before quoted text in replies and remove the “–” line that precedes it.”

Search

Searching in Gmail is very powerful. Yes, you can do similar searching as you did in Outlook (click on the drop down arrow at the right of the search bar), but you can do all of that so much quicker just by typing into the search bar.

See this video showing all the main features of gmail search and the full syntax of what can be searched.

Also, turn on the Quick Links Lab to enable saving of your favourite searches and add them to the left hand panel.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Whilst you are using the keyboard do to do searching, learn another few tricks to improve your productivity using keyboard shortcuts  in Gmail. Have a look at this video showing keyboard shortcuts, including a tip on setting up custom keyboard shortcuts. The full list of shortcuts is visible by shift+? and see the help document for more information.

Compose

The new compose window has been causing a few people a bit of concern, as it is quite different than the previous compose window. I don’t mind it (except on mac when browser windows just disappear on you). Once again there is a video showing the new compose and a handy cheat sheet on how to use the formatting features and keyboard shortcuts.

Labels and Filters

Labels are the most powerful feature of Gmail – forget folders, labels allow you to have one email in two “folders”! This quick video provides and introduction to labels and the help page on labels is useful too. But adding labels to emails manually is a bit tedious, so why not let Gmail do the work for you. This is the power of filters. The help page for filters is pretty basic. This Mashable article is a pretty good overview of a few of the Gmail filtering features (though why they make that comment about folders, I just don’t know), and this Lifehacker article shows 10 examples of filters that they recommend.  Oh, and you want a video? – well here is a cute little video showing filters.

I use an @ symbol before my important label names to make them appear at the top of my labels list – eg my @ToDo label. When you have set up all your labels, go to the Labels settings page to show which labels appear in your left hand panel. Stars are also handy and can help you highlight important messages within labels.

The wonderful thing about labels and filters that they work exactly the same way in your Gmail app in your iDevice or Android phone (note, I am not referring to the standard mail apps that come on your phone – download the Gmail app).

Sending on Behalf and Forwarding

So, you are now convinced that Gmail is waaay better than that clunky old Outlook 2003 you have been using for years… so take it to the next level and use it for ALL your email addresses – yes, I know you have that hidden hotmail address and probably one that came with your ISP. I have lost count of how many emails I have, but they are all available for use from my Gmail.

This can be a bit tricky to set up but once it is set up it is great. When composing an email you can choose which email address to send it from, and you can either forward email from another email account to Gmail, or let Gmail get email from your POP email (eg your ISP email is usually POP enabled).

One trick for success. After you have done the verification steps for forwarding, go back into that account and check that the forwarding is enabled – it seems to disable after you verify that you want it to be forwarded.

Security

Now that everything is set up, you would not want to loose it. So go to your Google Accounts settings and set up 2 Factor Authentication, including setting up the Google Authenticator on your phone, and while you are there set up the Inactive Account Manager.

Bonus – CRM

If you want lightweight customer relationship management features in Gmail, then try a few of the add-ons listed in this video. The list of add-ons that are mentioned in that video are:

Plus I would add:

  • Rapportive and
  • maybe Boomerang Calendar, however I could not get it to work with non-US timezones.
  • and ToutApp (which is an interesting app, but I’m not sure I have a need for it).

Now just remember, that this is not a full CRM system, and these add-ins to Gmail are not available on your mobile device. So, I would still recommend paying for a proper CRM system.

Double Bonus – the + Sign

This trick is my favourite gmail trick of all time. Need an extra email address? Not sure if those people are going to pass your email address on? Use your regular email address but with a + and a few letters after the name (eg for me it would be jodie.miners+anything@jodiem.com.au. This way you could create a unique email address for everywhere you add your email address. For double bonus points you can then filter on messages that come TO: that specific address to deal with them as they arrive in your inbox.

Email addresses with the + sign are not able to be used in some places, but it is better than nothing.

If you have a Google Apps account, you can set up aliases for your main email also. Eg if you are David@yourname.com you could set up dave@yourname.com or dave.jones@yourname.com. See the help page on how to add nicknames.

Finally

You may want to set up Gmail for offline use, use Google Hangouts in Gmail, start using Google+, set up your Google public profile, set up Google Authorship on your blog posts.  And that should be enough for now.

Oops, notice I didn’t mention themes? No themes for me – I want the clean lines of Gmail only, plus I want it to be the same look and feel as the Gmail apps on my mobile devices.

Salesforce Chatter Notifications

16 May 2013

Chatter is a great tool, and if you use Salesforce, you should be using it, and using it every day – many times a day. Chatter is great for “working out loud” and keeping others in your team up to date with what you are doing.

There is a lot of help out there about how to use chatter, including the Chatter Best Practices page on the Salesforce website and this excellent series of 9 chatter training videos created by Engineers Australia for their Chatter implementation. They may be a bit specific to just engineers and just the stand-alone chatter app, but they are very well done.

One thing I could not find enough information on is Notifications, so here is my explanation of notifications. (Well, it started out as being only about notifications, but it may now include a bit more information also).

Chatter, like most social networks, can be Push or Pull - eg you can “pull” the information towards you by going to look at your chatter feeds, or have chatter “push” the information out to you, via notifications.

Read more about Chatter, Chat and Messages in Salesforce

The state of CRM Systems for Not For Profits

14 February 2013

I like working with Not For Profit organisations, especially since they usually have old technology and outdated systems so there is so much that I can help your NFP with, that can revolutionise the way you work. The basis of most NFP data requirements is based around a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system.

Each NFP is different, but there are some common features that most NFPs need to have when looking at a CRM system: Read more…

Q and A: User Friendly Document Collaboration

18 December 2012

Question

I received a question from Richard:

What’s a user friendly online project management tool that we can use to share documents, and record discussions and comments.

Read more…

Q and A: Sharing Committee Documents

4 December 2012

Question

What is the best solution for sharing the documents that the committee needs to access? We have Google Apps and our WordPress website, but we think Dropbox might be best.

Read more…

Ask me a Tech Question

1 December 2012

I get asked a lot of tech questions from friends and colleagues, and I usually reply by email and the info just sits in my email sent items and their inbox. So it’s time to set that knowledge free! So from now on, if I get asked a Question that may be helpful to other people, I’m going to share it on my website.

Read more…

No Hosting Websites

30 November 2012

There are a few new ways to get a website up on the internet without having to pay for additional hosting.

Now, these solutions are for those that want to create and maintain their own site from scratch, they are not based on a Content Management System like WordPress, so they may not be for everyone.

Read more…

Q and A: Training Resources for NFP Users on Salesforce

28 November 2012

Question

I work for a Not For Profit and we use Salesforce. I need some training, but we have a limited budget – any ideas?

Read more…

Q and A: Building a simple Website

22 November 2012

Question

I get asked this often, probably because I do blog about it so much.

What is the simplest way to get a basic website set up.

Read more…

Q and A: Resources for learning Web Development basics

21 November 2012

Question

A friend asked me to recommend where to start with learning some basics about Web Development.

Answer

My answer is to start with a foundation in basic HTML and CSS and then go onto some of the coding languages like Javsascript, PHP or others later.

Read more…

Q and A: A Sign-up box for WordPress and Mailchimp

21 November 2012

Question

An attendee from WordCamp Gold Coast who watched my talk wanted some advice on how best to do the Sign-up for a Mailchimp mailing list from A WordPress website.

Do you recommend using a MailChimp plugin, or using a separate online form. As I’ve not MailChimp before I need some advice from an expert.

Read more…

Fragmentation of Task Functionality in Confluence

4 October 2012

I am trying to work out the best strategy for my clients to use for doing lightweight task management in Confluence. I thought that since we have the new Task features and Workbox in 4.3 that this would be a no-brainer. We would not need Ad hoc Workflows, we can just use the new functionality.

Confluence has released what looks like a great new feature in Confluence 4.3 – the ability to have Tasks on the page, and a centralised notification box called the Workbox.

With a number of new Confluence features lately, I feel that the release of this new feature is a bit half-baked and it doesn’t actually do all the things you need it to do. (I think it’s because I love the product, I hold it up to such high standards, and expect things to work really well first up).

Read more…

Using Graphviz in Confluence – A Tutorial

28 September 2012

I have always liked to do flowcharts. Simple flowcharts are good flowcharts – a picture tells a thousand words. I also love Confluence, and love the hierarchical nature of the structure of Confluence – much like a flowchart. Now we combine the two and we have a great way to communicate information. Enter Graphviz and the Graphviz Confluence Plugin.

This is a Tutorial to get you started with using Graphviz in Confluence to produce flowcharts quickly and easily.

Read more…

A Salesforce Nightmare

6 August 2012

I recently picked up a new client to help them out with Salesforce. They are a very small business and just wanted a 2 user group edition to start doing CRM. If they had not already purchased Salesforce I would have suggested that they stay away from Salesforce. Unless you can afford the top end of Salesforce plus numerous plugins, Salesforce can be really very frustrating.

The client was struggling to understand how to use Salesforce, and I can understand that. Salesforce is very American and is very very set up to sell Widgets. If you don’t sell widgets you need to customise it heavily to the way you work, and if you don’t have the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce, you can’t customise it enough. But this company does sell Widgets so I thought there must be more to it as to why they were struggling.

Read more…

Making a Printable Calendar in Google Calendars

5 August 2012

For a while now, I’ve been wanting a printable view of my Google Calendar. I maintain a family calendar of all birthdays and there are some family members that want a printable calendar.

Google Calendar does not wrap all day events in the month view, so you have to hover to look at the full event details.

So, I finally spent some time today to work it out. It was time consuming and annoying so I hope someone benefits from this to make it less time consuming for them.

Read more…

Excel, Charts and SQL in Confluence

31 July 2012

One of the disadvantages of Confluence is how difficult it is to use Tables, especially when they get large. One of the options is to keep tabular data in Excel and display the contents in Confluence. Or better still, get the data direct from a SQL Server to display in Confluence then show that data as a Chart.

Confluence 4 seems to be a bit better at handling tables, but Excel is still the king for displaying and working with Tabular data.

Some resources to help with showing Table data are: Read more…

Confluence is not a Word Document

31 July 2012

You’ve just installed a shiny new Confluence set-up for your organisation, now where do you start with writing content for it? Here are my thoughts on writing for Confluence and a few tips and links to help get you started.

My two main points for writing content for Confluence are:

  • Confluence is not a Word document, and
  • Confluence is not a file share.

Continue reading about Confluence not being a Word Document…

A4/Letter – the most annoying option in any software

21 June 2012

Why oh why is there ever any app that asks you whether you want to print this document or set up this document as A4 or Letter sized paper? Well, at least we should be thankful that there is even an option – how many apps do you use that are made in the USA and don’t even give you the option to change the paper size or change away from American spelling. (True story – an American colleague told me recently that she did not even know there was another paper size other than the “standard” and did not know it was called Letter). I can forgive regular users to not know there is a world outside the US of A, but I can’t forgive software developers.

Quick – do this test right now. Open Word to a brand new document, go to the Page Layout ribbon and choose Size – what is the default size that your blank documents are set to? If you don’t live in the USA and your documents are set to Letter, you have my permission to go and yell at your IT Department for not setting up your Word environment correctly – You probably still have American spelling in your documents and Inches in your Ruler and margins also!

Google Docs only very recently gave us the option of saving a default for our paper sizes and margins – yet the margins are STILL IN INCHES!!!! WHY?

Apart from having the option to change the settings very ocassionally for when you are preparing a document for a US audience, why does the setting even exist?

Google knows I’m in Australia, why can’t it determine the settings for me automatically as Metric and A4.

Microsoft Word knows my location from the Regional Settings on my PC – why aren’t my default Word Templates created as A4? (They should be if the location was set before installing Word, but I think it should be dynamically based on that setting – if you want to create specific Templates with other paper sizes, you can do that).

And worse of all, please, please, please, do NOT set the default as Letter and not even have an option for me to change it in the settings to anything else as the Default. Or on the other hand, please don’t make me change it every time I need to print. If I was in the US I would think – “why is this setting here every time I want to print a document – I would never ever change the paper size”, if I’m in anywhere else in the world I think “why oh why do these stupid American software developers make me have to choose my paper size every time I want to print a document!”. No one wins.

So, in summary:

  • Always have the option for A4/Letter paper sizes, American and other Spelling and Imperial and Metric measurements.
  • Set the default based on my location – you know my location!
  • Allow me to override the defaults if I need to (maybe I’m visiting the US of A).
  • Honour those defaults everywhere.
  • Have the ability to modify the defaults for once off cases (eg printing the same document to A4 then Letter for global audiences).

What are your thoughts? does this annoy you too?

Salesforce and Email – a match made in hell

20 June 2012

The subject of this post may seem a bit harsh, but hopefully by the end of this longish post, you will see where I’m coming from. My call right now, is that there is NO email solution that works with Salesforce that is even remotely usable. I hope that I’m wrong. I really do. If you think I’m wrong please add to the discussion below.

When I’m talking about emails and Salesforce I am talking about the following scenarios. For the tl;dr version I’ve included my ratings for each of the scenarios:

  1. Receiving email from an existing client – PASS.
  2. Receiving email from a new client – FAIL.
  3. Receiving email from a new client about a specific case – Qualified PASS.
  4. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them – PASS.
  5. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case – FAIL.
  6. Emailing to a client – FAIL.
  7. Emailing to a client about a specific case – FAIL as above, with a MAJOR FAIL for dealing with attachments.
  8. Emailing to a third party about a specific case – FAIL.
I am focusing on Cases with this post, but there are a lot of things similar with Opportunities – the same issues you have about ensuring emails are recorded against the right Case happens with Opportunities and Leads also. How you set up these objects in Salesforce is dependant on your business processes.
The “ideal” email scenario with Salesforce is:
  • All contacts who ever email you are already contacts in Salesforce.
  • All email to those contacts are generated out of Salesforce.
  • Anyone who emails you about an existing case, will ALWAYS only ever reply to an email that has come from Salesforce.
  • Clients will reply to emails about specific cases with only content relevant to that case.
Of course that doesn’t happen in the real world – EVER.
And it definitely doesn’t happen if you are dealing with staff who work only out of their Outlook Inbox.

In this post, I am not talking about paid email syncing options that are available in the App Exchange (or this post will be very long). You can see that there are many many options, for huge dollar amounts. My thinking is that you pay enough for Salesforce, you should not have to pay more for basic functionality such as tracking emails for your client. There is one paid app that I will comment on, specifically in relation to Email to Cases. 

Receiving Email

Receiving email from an existing client

Emailing in to Salesforce to record that email against an existing contacts is pretty well handled. You can use Email to Salesforce, or the Salesforce for Outlook toolbar (which essentially does exactly the same thing). This matches the email address of the sender with an existing contact in Salesforce and then puts the content of the email in an Activity linked to the Contact record. I give this scenario a PASS.

Receiving email from a new client

I have no idea how you are meant to manage emails that you want to track for new contacts, apart from the obvious:

  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually attach the email to the contact through the Unresolved Email Task or the Unresolved Emails screen.

This takes a number of steps and will probably not be done by most staff after about the first week. This scenario is a definite FAIL – so you probably need to ensure there is another way to create contacts first, rather than when receiving emails for the first time.

Interestingly I noted that forwarding an email and using the Salesforce for Outlook results in different behaviour for Unresolved Emails – forwarded emails are shown in a special Unresolved Emails page, whereas Emails added from Outlook only show up as Tasks. 

Receiving Email related to Cases

Setting up Email to Case

There is a great post over at Button Click Admin that goes over all the steps to Set Up Email-to-Case, and there is a good video from Salesforce showing an overview of using Email-to-Case.

Also, when setting up Email to Case, one must have app is Email2Case Attachment Reassign which takes the attachments from the email and puts them in the Attachments related list on the case.

Receiving email from a new client about a specific case

After Email to Case is set up, the logging of emails into Salesforce to create new Cases works quite well – If the client emails directly to your support email address (or you can forward the email to your support email address). For a client that does not yet exist as a Contact in Salesforce, the case will be created similar to the one shown in the Email to Case Setup Video. and you will have to do the following:

  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually edit the created Case to attach the Contact to the Case.
I’m going to give this scenario a Qualified PASS because if all else fails, and the Contact is not created in Salesforce, the Case can still be managed and the contact details from the client are still recorded in the description field on the Case. But it is best to create the Contact in Salesforce as they may be an ongoing client.
I have created a No Code No Cost solution to create new Contacts from Cases like this using Object Converter

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them.

This is one of the perfect scenarios noted above. When emailing out of Salesforce to an existing client who has a Contact record created in Salesforce, the email gets a Thread ID added to it. When your client replies to that email, Email to Case sees the Thread ID and attaches the email to the Case and notifies the Case Owner that there is a new email. This scenario works effortlessly and is the way things should work in Salesforce – this gets a big PASS.

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case

But as we know, people aren’t perfect and often your clients will email you about an issue that is related to an existing case. This scenario is more annoying and here are the steps:
  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Open Salesforce and go to the record of the Contact that sent the email
  • Find the email in the Activities Related List
  • Open the Email Tasks record
  • Click Edit
  • In the Related To field enter the Case Number of the Case that this email is related to (Don’t know the Case Number? – no problem, simply open a new tab, search for the Case, copy the Case Number, come back to this tab, paste the Case Number in – easy!)
  • Save the Task
My response to this – AS IF! This scenario is a definite FAIL and there is no way that anyone except the most detailed person will do this. The end result is that Emails will either be only associated with the Contact, or not recorded in Salesforce at all. This then bypasses the whole reason for using Salesforce, which is to have “one thing in one place, once”.

Emailing Out of Salesforce

Emailing to a client

If the client is already a Contact record in Salesforce you could just BCC your email to Salesforce address as you send the email out from your email client. But that’s annoying to have to remember that each time. You can achieve a similar thing by clicking the “Send and Add” button in Salesforce for Outlook – a little easier.

The idea, however is to get people out of working from their Inboxes and work from within Salesforce as their primary tool, so you want them to generate the emails from the Contact record in Salesforce. There are a few advantages and disadvantages  with this way.

Advantages:

  • Multiple email addresses can be stored against each client record – just choose the right one to send to.
  • It looks just like regular email and has all the fields like Additional To and BCC.
  • You can do rich text formatting in the body of the email.
  • You can choose predefined Email Templates that have Merge fields in them to quickly create emails.
  • There is a spell checker built in.
  • You can attach files.
Looks and feels and smells exactly like email – right? Well just start using it for a week or so and you start to find the disadvantages are numerous:
  • Which is the right email address to send to?
  • No auto complete in the other email address fields.
  • No shortcuts or auto formatting that you are used (eg ctrl+shift+8 – Gmail or * space – Outlook to create a bulleted list; ctrl+k to insert a hyperlink).
  • No inline images in your email body (even Gmail can do this now).
  • Only one Email signature – you can’t swap email signatures as you can in Outlook.
I could go on. For hard-core email users who feel that they can’t get their job done effectively by using Salesforce this is an issue – they will just stop using Salesforce, and the emails won’t be tracked. And then there are Attachments, which is a whole other story – see below… So sending emails is a FAIL from me.

Emailing Out of Cases

For emailing out of Cases, or Opportunities or any other client related object, I’ve concentrated on Attachments. Specifically for Cases, there is an app called Email to Case Premium – this is a paid app so I will deal with the features and issues of this app in a future post.

Attachments

Attachments are where the real hell begins. So, you’ve spent all this money getting Salesforce up and running for your organisation, and you want to ensure you get the most out of it, therefore you insist that all documents related to Cases (or Opportunities, or Accounts or any other object) are attached to the Salesforce record that they relate to. (Why you would try to manually maintain matching folders on your share drive or in Box.net or similar is beyond me). Now, you want to email one of those documents to the Client or someone else – these are the steps to attach one document to an email from within Salesforce:
  • Before you email, go to the Case record, decide on the attachments you want to download.
  • Right click on the file name and download it to your local computer, or network drive (and use up your bandwidth for a second time, because you have already uploaded it once).
  • Now create the email and fill in all the details.
  • Click on Attach a file.
  • Click Choose File.
  • Browse to the File, remembering where you just saved it.
  • Click Attach to the email and wait for it to upload (using your bandwidth for the third time).
  • Click Done.
  • Now you can Send the email – Finally!
What an absolute joke! And querying this with Salesforce officially (this was a deal-breaker for a client of mine recently), they say that this is the way it is designed and the only way they can suggest you attach documents to emails, that are already attached to the record.
Yes, you could pay lots of $$ for Email to Case Premium, Loop or Conga – a few apps that will help attaching documents to emails, but that is not the point. How does Salesforce even consider this to be acceptable business practice? You know what’s going to happen, people will start saving documents onto the dreaded file share either instead of, or even worse, as well as the Salesforce record, then you have a nightmare of consistency – which one is the correct and latest version of the document. Wow! You will end up needing SharePoint just to manage the versions of the documents – and that is way overkill.
Dealing with Attachments is a MAJOR FAIL!

Emailing to Third Parties

This scenario really depends on your business, but a number of businesses would need to take documents from Clients, especially relating to a specific Opportunity or Case, and then forward them to another third party for processing or information.
Apart from dealing with the whole attachment issue there are a number of other issues:
  • You will need a place to record the Third Parties on the Case or Opportunity – your best bet is a custom child Object, because the standard functionality of Contact Roles is a bit limiting.
  • When you want to email to one third party you will need to copy the email address, create the email, then paste the email address in to the Additional To field.
  • What if you want to email two or more third parties – good luck with working out how to do that – possibly open a separate copy of the Case in a new tab, then do the email and switch back and forth between the two tabs and copy and paste the email.
  • If you want to use Text or HTML Email Templates there is a limitation that emails must be sent to a Contact or a User – so you may have to have your name in the To field, as well as the third party – this may look strange to them.

So – that is a lot of stuffing around just to send an email – so, for me, emails to third parties are a FAIL.

Summary

This is a long post and I have tried to be thorough in looking at ALL the options. There are some basic functions of emailing that get a PASS, but as soon as you take it even a little bit past the basics (I don’t think adding an attachment is anything but basic), we descend into the realm of FAIL.

I have yet to see any reasonable, even paid, solution for simply dealing with the attachment issue (without the other features of Loop or Conga). I’m sure it could be coded as a visualforce page, but I really don’t understand why someone hasn’t done it as a simple free app – so maybe I’m missing something that will mean it is difficult to build.

So, if you have any suggestions, other options or favourite apps to deal with emails, please add some detail in the comments below. In a future post, I will talk about the features and issues with one particular email App, Email to Case Premium.

Otherwise, right now, I don’t have a solution.

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