I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrewshared with us (via the BatchBook Forums) how he’s using FireFox 3′s “Awesome Bar” to quickly search for contacts in BatchBook.
Now that I have all my data in BatchBook, I wanted a quick way to pull up a contact. Thanks to Firefox and the Delicious.com extension, I have it!
(If you don’t know, Delicious.com is a great bookmarking application. It handles all my bookmarks. And there’s a handy Firefox extension.)
Be sure you have the Delicious extension installed. Then you can right click in the BB contact search box (upper right of any BB screen). Select “Add a keyword for this search in Delicious.” Then you can fill out the bookmark details and enter a keyword that will invoke the search.
The lawn needs mowing and the Red Sox are on a winning streak, so that can only mean one thing… it’s spring! We have a bunch of cool things under development (if I do say so myself), but before we start adding more to BatchBook, we felt it was time to do a little spring cleaning. The community over at the BatchBlue Forums has helped us so much along the way that we consider it an additional team member. For that reason, we’re giving the forum users a sneak peek at the updates we’re making.
If you’re a forum user, we’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re not a forum user yet, we’d love to welcome you to the community. As forum user Kenny recently said:
One of the key benefits BB is becoming for me is an excellent source of tips on new or emerging web sites / services that I hadn’t been aware of previously, via users on this forum.
This is great! Thanks all for participating on this board
We’ve been busy these past few weeks hooking up on the backend with many of our favorite web services for small businesses. One of our favorites is FreshBooks, the professional invoicing and time tracking tool.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, then a screencast must be worth at least a thousand and six. Here’s Adam’s latest screencast explaining how the integration works. HINT: It’s way cool.
We’ve been long-time customers of FreshBooks and really love both the product and the company. We hope this integration will make it easier for you to manage all of your contacts and view their invoices from one place. Here’s a post on the FreshBooks blog talking about the integration as well.
BatchBox email forwarding is one of my favorite feature of BatchBook. Every BatchBook user gets their own BatchBox address. You can use that address to forward (or BCC) email messages into BatchBook. We’ll handle the trouble of creating a communication, attaching it to the proper contacts, and retaining attachments.
On any contact page in BatchBook, email addresses (of course) are hyperlinked so that clicking on them opens a new message in your email application. Forum user Dean made the awesome suggestion that we automatically BCC those messages to the BatchBox address. He got an Our Users are So Smart post for that.
Some of our savvy forum users are Gmail users. So, they used a Firefox add-on to make all email links open in Gmail. Only problem is Gmail was dropping the “+” sign that’s in every BatchBox email address. That’s no fun. We were kind of stumped, though.
If you take a look at our website, you can pretty much tell what BatchBook is—a social CRM and contact management web application for small businesses and freelancers. There are many things BatchBook is not. But BatchBook is also very flexible (thanks to features like SuperTags and affiliations), which opens the possibility of people turning it into something we never imagined.
New forum user dcis-steve is one of those people. He went from “newbie user” to “BatchBook for Project Management” pioneer in two days. We had a good discussion on the BatchBook Forums about what he was up to. Here is his summary of how turned BatchBook into a project management application.
