Man, I’ve been a slow blogger recently. I’ve got some stuff to talk about, but apparently have been to distracted. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
Goldmine CRM Calendar RSS
A couple years ago I set up a simple online calendar for our service department to use so salespeople would be able to find out when their customers were getting service calls. Its there, but how many salespeople are going to check it regularly? While discussing this system with a rep, I suddenly had an idea: Make a calendar RSS feed!
Now what we were using doesn’t have RSS feeds. Besides, it predated our installation of Goldmine CRM. So I’ll generate a schedule in Goldmine, export a ‘iCal’ file, then use Google Calendar to display it and generate RSS.
Google experiment:
I took an existing ‘.ics’ calendar file from Goldmine, then FTP to a spot on the web. In Google, I added an ‘external’ calendar…and Google didn’t like it. Maybe its a problem with Google, maybe it is a problem with the way Goldmine generates the file. Experiment over.
Plan B: PHPiCalendar:
I’ve played with PHPiCalendar (PiC for short here) before, so I checked out its current version. Guess what: it does RSS! I made a new spot on the web for PiC and uploaded all the files. Unlike other PHP programs, it doesn’t use a database, so no tinkering with mySQL. I did have to figure out how and where to create a ‘temp’ file for it to use, which took some experimenting. Then I manually FTP’d my ‘.ics’ file and it worked.
Now Goldmine:
Goldmine is actually pretty cool when it comes to calendar functions. I selected what ‘users’ schedules to publish and what type of events, then put in the FTP information. It sends one iCal file with their combined schedule to the website. Then I set-up a ‘server agent’ to run the publishing of the file automatically a couple times a day.
What Goldmine doesn’t do, however, is add any info to the iCal file about the contact the appointments are linked to, so we have to manually add this to the comments section when an event is scheduled.
RSS feeds:
PiC offers daily, weekly, and monthly feeds. Or you can create a custom feed for a date range. Now the reps and other non-Goldmine users who use an RSS reader will be able to be up-to-date on our service schedule.
Overall I’m very pleased with the way things turned out. I’m testing for a week before rolling out to our folks.