The Setup:

For the purposes of this post, I’ve created a generic ’sales’ address and an address for a fake employee - Johnny.  Johnny is so good, I want my big-dollar product leads going straight to him for quick conversion.  Every sales organization is structured differently, but we’re working under the assumption that our sales reps are product and territory based.  Our high-dollar product lines are the XY9500 and the YZ9900.  Johnny handles sales for MD, DC, VA, TN, NC, SC and GA.

The Approach:

GMail has a very advanced set of search operators built-in that happen to work with filters when included in the ‘Has The Words:’ text box during filter creation.  We’re going to create a set of filters in the ’sales’ inbox that will forward matching emails to the appropriate sales rep, label the message as ‘forwarded’ and then archive it.  Labeling and archiving the email keeps the inbox clean so that the generic address ‘manager’ only has to review and react to those messages that our logic doesn’t recognize.

The Execution:

Here is an email from a potential customer that found us on the web.  They’re interested in setting up a contract to purchase 100 of our XY9500 products.

Dear Sales Team:

My name is Phil and I’m the purchaser for Acme Associates based in Washington, DC.  We are in the market for 100 of your XY9500 products and would like to speak with a sales associate to obtain some additional information.

The best way to get in touch with me is via email or at 123-123-1234.

Thank you,

Phil

Acme Associates

Washington, DC 12345

For the state determination we’re relying on the fact that people use a full signature with the address.  You could also include area/zip code in an ‘or’ condition.  You can create another filter for just products that goes to an individual to distribute accordingly or to a distribution list of all the reps that handle that product.  Google Apps allows you to easily create distribution lists.

Within the ’sales’ email account enter the ’settings’ and create a new filter.  We’re going to leave everything but the ‘Has the words:’ field blank.  If you’re using a web form to capture the data you may be able to use the ’subject’ field but I think it’s a little more robust and easier to maintain if it’s all in one field.  One of the more important aspects of the operators to understand is that parenthesis “( )” equate to ‘AND’ and brackets “{ }” equate to ‘OR’.

The filter rule we’re going to use is: “({XY9500 YZ9900} {MD DC VA TN NC SC GA})”  This means that the email has to contain both a product of XY9500 or YZ9900 and a state of MD, DC, VA, TN, NC, SC or GA.  If it passes our filter, we’ll send it to Johnny, mark it as ‘forwarded’ and archive the email.  You could expand the list of states to include area codes since most people include at least one phone number in their signature.

Step 1

Step 2

Once you come up with a filter you want to use, test it by emailing yourself a few emails and entering the filter in the search field.  You know your customers best and if the email is caught (either included or excluded) as you expected then you should be good to go.  Here are a couple screenshots of the search - one note, the search feature will highlight pieces of the email that fit your criteria.

Search results from Sales inbox

Email with highlighted search results

The Debrief:

While this is in no way an exhaustive list of the advanced search operators, I think it is a good introduction and should get you started.  From a maintenance perspective, it would be best to create one filter per employee (sales person, PR agent, etc) so that in the unlikely event that they leave, you only need to adjust the forwarding email in one label to the interim employee.

If your website uses a contact form that potential customers fill out you have a little more opportunity for drilling into the data.  If you know how the data will be formatted when it hits your inbox that allows you to create more advanced filters and get things to exactly the right employee.  Maybe, your contact form has a ‘budget’ field with preset amounts and anything over a certain dollar figure gets sent to an urgent-response team.  There are so many applications for the search operators that spending some time to familiarize yourself with them will pay off in the long run.

One thing to experiment with is the ‘exclusion’ operator.  If you include the “-” symbol before one of your clauses it excludes items that meet that statement.  For example, if your filter criteria was “({XY9500 YZ9900} -{MD DC VA TN NC SC GA})” and you used the email above, your search results would return 0 results because it contains ‘DC’.

Don’t forget to have the office manager login and check those inboxes and forward those leads to the appropriate person.

If you have some other ideas that you use to make things easier, let me know in the comments.

Chrome got rid of the ‘fat’ around the browser giving me the tools/options I use the most and increasing my viewing area.  Another great feature is the fact that each tab runs independently so if one crashes it doesn’t destroy your entire browser session.  Just that one tab!  One thing I do wish they had though, ALT+F+C/X to close a tab.  However, that’s a discussion for another day.

Anyways, I’ve been using Chrome extensively the last few weeks and was disappointed when I discovered that there doesn’t appear to be any built-in XML/RSS rendering support.  I already use Google Reader so I’m not looking for an IE approach (feed in the browser - I don’t even use the browser), but something similar to Firefox would be nice if I happen to land on a page that is XML/RSS.  Not only does it not offer a way for me to subscribe to the document, it just displays raw text.  Here are some screenshots for comparison.

I’m disappointed but I’ll continue use Chrome.  It just makes it more difficult to subscribe to things than it was with Firefox.

RSS feed in Google Chrome

RSS feed in Firefox

RSS feed in IE7

ThemeForest Deposit Hack Shutdown

I must give them credit for at least modifying the pre-set amounts on the deposit page - now they’re in increments of $10 instead of $20.  Sadly, the lowest amount still starts at $20 and doesn’t really keep you from wasting, say, $8 on that $12 theme you want to purchase.  Keep in mind though, allegedly, if you email customer service they’ll extend your forfeit period beyond the stated one year.

I ran through the hack for a several different amounts but it appears everything is down.  Looks like a little validations before submitting to PayPal goes a long way.

In my comments I noted that I’d probably be back when I need another theme…I’m going to go ahead and retract that until this process is fixed.

LinkedIn.com

Last week LinkedIn quietly launched a new, cleaner profile layout that I much prefer.  The previous layout used a ‘tabbed’ approach that just didn’t do it for me.  I’m a Facebook user (never got into MySpace) and the clean profiles make it so much easier to navigate pages as you browse peoples profiles.  Hopefully, they tackle the ‘network updates’ layout next.  That thing is awful.

Along with the cleaner layout, they also enhanced the progress meter for profile completion and decided to group all the profile tools (send message, recommend, download, etc) in a single location - the top-right corner of the members profile.

Apparently, users complained that the ‘next suggested step’ in completing your profile was too hard (or not incredibly easy) which led to people not completing them.  The new profile meter displays all the actions users can take to baby-step their way towards a profile that is 100% complete.  LinkedIn claims that users with a profile that is 100% complete are more likely to land jobs.  I should have a citation for this but I can’t find the quote on the site anymore - it may only show up when your profile is not 100% complete.

The sad thing about this change is that no one seems to care.  At the time of this writing, not a single blog had referenced the post and not one person had left a comment.   So exactly how irrelevant is LinkedIn these days?  I’m a huge fan of the service!

Tabbed layout vs Clean layout [both via LinkedIn blog]

New LinkedIn Profile

Mint.com announced Friday that users of it’s free online money management suite can now create completely customized categories for tracking and reporting on spending habits.  Mint is a great tool (although admittingly, I haven’t set up all my accounts with the service) and they continue to roll out features that their users request making it more relevant to their needs.

Mint continues to make themselves more relevant to users everyday lives and ease the process of properly tracking their personal finances.  In the wake of the global economic disaster it becomes even more important to understand exactly where you stand financially and Mint aims to help.

Mint employs what I call a hybrid approach to expense tracking - users categorize and then tag expenses.  This gives users a very granular view of how money is spent.  My restaurant tabs could be either personal or business which may also be reimbursable.  It’s like the ‘folders’ of Microsoft Outlook meets the ‘labels’ of Google’s Gmail - the ultimate organization approach.  Now users can create their own categories if they don’t find a suitable one from the standard Mint list.

Categories can be created under any of the standard Mint ‘parent’ categories.  Here’s a shot of me making a custom category to for expenses related to this blog.  There isn’t really a good ‘parent’ for this so I placed it under ‘uncategorized’ for now.

The only problem I have with the customizable categories is that they had to be placed under existing ‘parent’ categories.  At least I couldn’t figure out how to create a new ‘parent’.  While this obviously isn’t a deal-breaker, it would still be nice for situations where there isn’t a suitable ‘parent’ already.  I’d like to see one where I could create my ‘NathanHJones.com’ category that is a little more appropriate than ‘uncategorized’.

All-in-all, I like the idea of customizable categories and thanks go out to the Mint.com team for constantly enhancing the application.

I guess for those few (maybe there is actually a lot) that have problems with drunk-mailing this could be a good fix but I’d much prefer Gmail spend the time to come up with ‘mailbox rules’ similar to Outlook.  Before people start screaming, yes, I know you can use Outlook with Gmail but I don’t want to have to use it.  With rules, I can easily setup a 1 minute delay on outbound emails.  This allows me to catch that last sentence or add that last recipient that may have slipped my mind as I clicked ’send’.

You can configure the settings on the ‘general’ tab after enabling the feature.  It’s a pretty quick configuration and let’s you tell Google when your preferred drinking times are and allows you to make it as easy or as difficult as you want.

As I found while I was testing, once you ‘pass the test’ once you can send as many emails as you want without being prompted to take the quiz again.  Apparently, you have to logout and then login again to re-prompt the ‘Mail Goggles’.  At least I had to logout, even when I tried sending messages to a different address.  Maybe it only asks you to verify once every set amount of time?!?

Verdict: Leave this one disabled.

Settings:

Gmail Adds Mail Goggles - Settings

Easy: 

Gmail Mail Goggles Easy Settings

Difficult: 

Gmail Mail Goggles Difficult Settings

Last Tuesday, Amazon announced that it plans to unveil the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server on the EC2 platform later this fall.  This announcement is a huge step and will allow customers to deploy ASP.NET applications using a host of database options as well as other Windows-based applications such as Windows Media transcoding.  This advancement in cloud computing will really ease the transition for potential enterprise clients which still tend to be very Windows heavy - ASP.NET portals still seem to be rather popular in my experience.

Last week, in an email to developers, they also announced that Oracle has certified EC2 as “the first cloud computing platform that has been authorized to run supported Oracle databases” which also increases the database options for enterprises and developers alike.  According to the announcement, customers will be able to run Oracle 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and the Oracle Enterprise Manager on AWS.  Oracle is really taking an interest in the project and has delivered a set of free images to help make deployment easier.

I don’t claim to know how many ‘enterprise’ clients Amazon Web Services has on its roster but I think this is really a step in the right direction.  I know enterprise security executives are still wary about throwing their proprietary data in the ‘cloud’ but who wouldn’t enjoy a little extra cushion for those PR heavy days when your site gets overloaded.  I can only imagine how busy the Bear Sterns intranet was the day their employees found out it was over.

This will also continue to lower the barrier of entry for web-based start-ups.  The language of choice these days tends to be PHP, but that isn’t normally a part of the university curriculum.  Now, students can continue to expand on those class projects and turn them into successful (hopefully…) start-ups.  Of course, that’s only for those few that aren’t programming before they hit high school.

I’m always in the market for great WordPress themes.  I’ve changed the theme for this blog a couple times and each time I find something I don’t care for.  I started looking for themes on ThemeForest and found a WordPress theme that I thought would work well for the site (I’ve since purchased it but I haven’t finished customizing it yet - expect a rollout in a week or two).   I also found a generic website template that I wanted to buy.

In order to purchase templates you have to deposit money into your ThemeForest account…you can’t pay for each transaction individually after you find your design.  No ’shopping cart’ functionality but they do allow you to bookmark themes you like.  I think that’s a mistake from a usability standpoint but if people want the theme bad enough, they’ll succomb to the poor process design.

So I start the process to deposit money and find that I can only give them money in multiples of $20.  Slightly confused/turned-off by yet another usability problem I contact customer service and ask if there is another way to make this happen.  I get a response a few hours later (great turn around by the way, seriously, I was impressed) tell me that their system can only handle the amounts displayed but that “although your money does expire after a year it can easily be renewed by emailing Support, so in actual fact you can keep the remaining credit in the account indefinatly.”

That’s great except for the fact that I may never use that money.  I ask if they offered refunds after a year but was shot down on that as well.  I mean it’s only $5 (my combined total was going to be $35) but why should I give you a free $5 because you have a poor design.

Frustrated, I set out to find a way around this but told myself I’d dedicate no more than 15 minutes to the effort.  I know PayPal can handle any amounts you throw at them so I figure I would explore bypassing their absurd “checks”.  Luckily, I know enough about web development and form submissions that I figure I would try a couple elementary hacks.  After locating the script on their server they submit to before sending to PayPal I locate the variable names and amount format and proceed to deposit exactly $35.  Here’s a shot of my deposit history for all you doubters…details on the hack are below the image.

Hack Details

1) Locate the themes you want to purchase and calculate your total

2) Translate your total into a 4-character non-currency format.  For example, my $35.00 deposit was translated to an amount of “3500”

3) Login to your ThemeForest.net account

4) Once logged in, enter the following URL in your browsers address bar and change XXXX to your amount determined in step 2: http://themeforest.net/accounts/confirm_deposit/?amount=XXXX.  For example, the URL for my $35.00 transaction was “http://themeforest.net/accounts/confirm_deposit/?amount=3500″

5) Once redirected to the PayPal website, confirm that your user id is referenced in the description and that the amount is right.  Your user id should be within the red rectangle on the image below

6) Once you complete the PayPal transaction you’ll be redirected back to your ThemeForest account where you can purchase your templates

NOTE: Use this hack at your own risk.  I don’t claim to be huge in the blogosphere but once the hack is public it’s possible ThemeForest will close the loop-hole.  I make no claims or warranties that the hack will work as described and can not be held liable for any losses you may incur.  Also, I did not ‘hack’ into their system to prepare this.  ’Hack’ in this context means ‘manual work around’ and all I did to determine how to accomplish this was review the HTML source sent to my browser by their server.

LinkedIn recently made a move to improve their messaging capabilities.  Sadly, they’re doing a very poor job of simply copying Facebook.

Facebook has been enhancing it’s messaging system for a while now and it’s actually pretty good.  I can message a friend, a friend list or an external email address.  I can add dozens of friends to a single message (I’ve added up to around 20) and the interface is clean and very easy to use.  The ‘new’ LinkedIn message center is simply a less functional copy of Facebook.

LinkedIn only allows up to 10 contacts on a message.  I can’t think of too many situations where I’d need more than a few people on a LinkedIn message but there are always exceptions and the fact that they’ve limited it is just silly.  They also don’t allow me (at least that I could figure out) to enter someones email address.  What if I want the message to go to an account that isn’t linked to my LinkedIn account, or to a co-worker that doesn’t have LinkedIn (yes, there are still those few).

One thing I did like about the LinkedIn message composer is the fact that it allows me to choose which linked email address the message is sent from.  Definitely something over Facebook…but then again Facebook doesn’t really need this.  I don’t want my work email address sent to people when replying to job opportunities.

Here’s a couple shots of the different messaging services for comparison:

I know devloping these kinds of services requires a lot of work and I appreciate that.  It’s better than what it used to be.  I just think if you’re going to blatantly copy another social networks messaging capabilities you need to do it justice.

I consider myself an early adopter.  I’m currently using Google Chrome (the newest web browser), I’ve been using web-based email for years (I own Outlook and it’s not even setup), I blog, I have a Twitter account, I’ve had Facebook since it was first launched at my school and I read almost all my news online (I’m a fan of Google Reader).  Those are the best examples I could come up with…it’s been a long week.  Bare with me.  But sometimes, it’s nice to have a copy in hand and get your eyes off the computer screen.  With my travel schedule (around 120-140 segments a year) sometimes it just isn’t efficient to turn on the PC and use Google Reader offline with Gears.

The biggest problem I have with my magazine subscriptions is managing the content for reference later.  One of the best features (in my humble opinion) of Google Reader is the ability to tag and ‘Star’ posts.  I currently have 222 starred posts organized under 252 tags…I read a lot.  But, I can’t really do that with an article in a magazine can I?!?  It would be a little inefficient to award an article a gold star (think back to elementary school people) but have to look through each page to find it.

Here are a couple things I do to keep this information at my fingertips:

Summary Emails 

I send summary emails to myself for each issue if there is something worth remembering.  For example, I just finished reading the October issue of Money.  I sent myself an email with the subject “Money Magazine - October 2008″ and included key words such as “retirement locations”, “Roth Advantages”, “Social Security Taxation Formula”, etc.

I have a general tag (SUBSCRIPTIONS) that I apply to each of these emails for easy location later and if an issue is particularly heavy on something I may assign it additional tags.  For example, Money tends to have issues packed with retirement information.  So, at times, I label a whole issue with the ‘RETIREMENT’ tag.

The tags are great but it’s inefficient to create a tag for every possible key word.  By entering meaningful words in the body of the email I can search for them later with GMails built in search functionality and figure out which issue(s) I need to pull for additional information.

Scanned Articles

Sometimes an article just jumps out at me as amazing or there’s just one article from an issue that I’m interested in saving for later.  In this case I’ll scan the article and send it to myself as an image.  Nothing too fancy here folks, my $150 All-in-One handles the workload nicely.  Attach the image, label it ’subscriptions’, add some key words and an appropriate subject and I’m sure to find it later.  For articles that fall into this category, I often star the conversation as well just to make it that much easier to find.

This allows me to trash the issue (there’s only so much space for storing subscriptions these days) but retain the information.  I don’t even know how many times I’ve pulled up previously read articles for quotes or references. 

The only real downside I’m facing right now is that I have to search twice.  With as much as I read, I can’t always remember where exactly I read something…I have to search.  In order to get the proper results I have to search Google Reader/sort through tags and search GMail.

It’s cumbersome at times, but I’ve found it to be a great way to manage print information so that it’s easy to find when you need it.  Hope this helps!