Communicating and interacting with people on an ongoing basis is integral to building good relationships. Since BatchBook is all about relationships, we try to make it as easy as possible for you to keep tabs on the people you need to be in touch with.
One of my favorite functions in BatchBook is our Saved Searches, which I‘ve written about before. These handy gems make it easy for you to access your more commonly used queries. Combined with our built in ability to find the folks who you haven’t communicated with in a particular time period and you’ve got a great way to quickly find out who you may be neglecting.
Where this gets really cool is when you use natural language input in the date field and searching for items relative to today’s date rather than continually adjusting to keep the results current. Searches based on items like communicated with, not communicated with, created and last updated all accept things like ’7 days ago’ or ’30 days ago’ so you can be sure that you’ll always get updated information.
When creating these searches, it’s important to remember that the operator is being replaced with an actual date when the search is run so while it may seem like you need to change the wording of the search, BatchBook will take care of all the details behind the scenes for you.
For example,when using relative date searches like ’30 days ago’, a search for ‘Record communicated with less than 30 days ago’ is really asking
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Tags: dates, saved searches, search
Some big improvements to Search to announce. We recently moved to new search servers and they’re providing much faster searches. In addition to this upgrade, we’ve also added two new features:
- Record Not Communicated With: Now you can do specific time based searches to see whom you have not been in contact with. Very handy for keeping in touch with folks. This field accepts natural language input like ’7 days ago’ which is nice for creating reports as the date does not have to be static.
- “Is Empty”: This is probably our #1 feature request of all time. People have always wanted an ability to see what records have no email address, what records do not yet have their supertag info filled out. Now you have it! In the advanced search dropdown you will now see:
Just select the ‘is empty’ filter with no value and BatchBook will bring back any records with blank info for that field. A really nice way to make sure the data you need is on the contacts important to you.
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Tags: batchbook, search
I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrew shared 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.
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Tags: awesome bar, delicious, firefox, Our Users are So Smart, search
