Web Forms have been a very popular feature among BatchBook users. Turns out, people love being able to let their web site visitors do their own contact data entry! 
Through the BatchBook forums and email support, we’ve received a lot of great recommendations for feature enhancements. Among those requests was the ability to style the web form in a way that will fit your web site’s look and feel a bit better. As Sean pointed out on the thread, that’s actually doable right now with a bit of html wizardry. So, let’s do it!
Step 1: Create your form & grab the raw HTML
For this example, I’m going to replace the embedded contact form on my own website with the raw web form code. The first thing we need is a web form to grab the raw code from. (more…)
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Tags: batchbook, css, html, lists, web forms
Editor’s note: This is a blog post that I don’t really want to have to publish, because that will make it true. Adam is one of the most fun, creative, enthusiastic people I have ever worked with and my heart is more than a little broken by his news. However, as you will read below, he’s doing what’s best for him right now. Love and luck to you and your family, Adam. We will never air-drum, karaoke, listen to The Darkness, use the emo emoticon or see a rust eagle cruising down the road without thinking of you — MRR.
After nearly two and a half years, this week was my last at BatchBlue. This is a decision that I couldn’t have imagined making just a few weeks ago. My awesome co-workers have been incredibly understanding and supportive…and I think a big reason is that the decision really has nothing to do with BatchBlue at all.
Next week, I’ll be joining a company called PatientsLikeMe. PatientsLikeMe is a unique company that provides online communities for patients with life-altering diseases. What started as a small community of patients suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) has evolved into a site that hosts over a dozen communities for diseases ranging from mood disorders to Parkinson’s Disease.
While my role is not specific to any particular communities, I recently found myself in need of a community that isn’t there yet. The opportunity to make this happen is what brings me to PatientsLikeMe. I’m going to be doing HTML and CSS, but I also have much greater and very specific goals I’ve set out to accomplish in my new position.
This change, of course, is going to be a shock to my system. BatchBlue is part of every aspect of my life—both work (doing what I love) and personal (having the flexibility to be with my family whenever I need to). With BatchBlue, along with the occasional weekend customer service and 2 AM bug fixes came the ability to hang out with the kids during the day and even spend 11 days in the hospital when my youngest was sick. Things like that I’ll never forget.
It’s not just the BatchBlue staff that I’ll miss collaborating with every day. One of the big reasons I joined BatchBlue was the allure of working on a product with actual users. I came from a research and development think tank, and too often we had little to no access to end users. That all changed with BatchBlue. I’ve built relationships with BatchBook users—folks like Scott and Stewart—that I know will last even though I’m moving on.
If there’s one thing I took away from last week’s WebInno event it’s that BatchBlue is onto something big. It can be easy to forget that when you’re in as deep as we all are. But it was exciting to see so many attendees have that “ah ha” moment when I showed them SuperTags—specifically, the Social Media SuperTag—and the idea behind The Small Business Web. While I’m extremely proud of the work I’ve done at BatchBlue, I’m also excited to see how another designer’s perspective can guide BatchBook into 2010.
As BatchBook continues on the leading edge of the social CRM landscape, rest assured that I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.
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Tags: batchblue, sad trombone, work/life
Last week, Stephanie and I presented the first BatchBook webinar specifically about integration with our partners from The Small Business Web. The webinar, The Small Business Webinar: Using BatchBook’s integration partners to achieve contact management bliss, was a hit and we received many requests for an archived version. We’re pleased to announce it has been added to our Screencasts page (and is also embedded below).
Screencast: The Small Business Webinar: Using BatchBook’s integration partners to achieve contact management bliss
The Flash Video runs 12:26 and is 68.8MB. (Download iPod compatible version, 20.2MB)
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Tags: freshbooks, gmail, google contacts, integration, mailchimp, shoeboxed, zendesk
Tomorrow (Thursday September 10 at 2:00 ET), we’ll take a break from our regularly scheduled webinar to bring you a special one. This webinar, called The Small Business Webinar: Using BatchBook’s Integration Partners to Achieve Contact Management Bliss, will focus on how you can enhance your BatchBook experience through our integration partners.
The webinar description:
Join Stephanie Sweeney and Adam Darowski of BatchBlue Software as they demonstrate how to use BatchBook’s integration partners to achieve contact management bliss! You’ll see how easy it is to send emails to your customers, keep track of outstanding client invoices, import business card and other contact data, even monitor support questions all from the comfort of your BatchBook account.
With our integration partners, we’ve made it easier to manage your contacts, your way.
Stephanie and I will cover BatchBook’s integration with Google Contacts, MailChimp, FreshBooks, Shoeboxed — and a sneak peek at the newest addition to our small business arsenal — Zendesk! We hope to see you there!
Register Now!
(it’s free)
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Tags: freshbooks, gmail, google contacts, mailchimp, shoeboxed, zendesk
While doing some testing, I was pretty happy to get that SMS notification right there. Why? Because it came from BatchBook (in a roundabout way).
A while back, a customer wrote in looking for SMS notifications for his BatchBook To-Dos. This is something we originally planned to do, but never really got to it. Finally, I figured there must be a service out there that would take an iCalendar feed and push it to SMS. Turns out, the winner was a service we rely on quite heavily around here — Google Calendar.
Step 1: Get your BatchBook To-Dos into Google Calendar
To get your BatchBook To-Dos into Google Calendar, you need to click the “subscribe” button under your To-Do List to grab the iCalendar feed. Here’s what it looks like:
After copying the feed, paste it into Google Calendar by choosing “Add by URL”. You’re now subscribed to your To-Dos!
Step 2: Set Up Notifications via Your Mobile Phone
You can then open the notifications page for the new calendar (see image). Once there, the first thing you want to do is select “Set up your mobile phone to receive notifications”. Here, you’ll enter your mobile phone number and Google will send you a confirmation code (via SMS) to enter into Google Calendar. Once that is done, you are all set to receive SMS notifications for any Google Calendar.
On that same page — in the “Event Reminders” section — you can choose how you want to be notified (in this case, “SMS”) and how soon before each event (1 day, 1 hour, etc.).
And there you have it. You’ll now get your BatchBook To-Dos delivered via SMS!
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Tags: Google Calendar, iCalendar, notifications, SMS, To-Do List
