Socialcast Integration, Episode 2: The UI

June 24, 2010

In a previous post, I discussed how to publish activities from your Clarify/Dovetail CRM system into Socialcast. Cool stuff.

Continuing on this same line, I wanted to explore having access to Socialcast within your CRM application UI. Since this is where agents spend a good deal of their day, why not have a widget that shows their home stream, and allows them to share, update, and comment?

Socialcast widget

We can easily embed a Socialcast widget right onto the agent’s console within DovetailAgent. This would allow agents to see their home stream, post an update, or comment on someone else’s post.

We can use the Google Gmail gadget provided by Socialcast to do this. Normally this is used as a gadget within Gmail or iGoogle, but we can use it anywhere we want.

Once you’re logged into your Socialcast site, navigate to the Socialcast Applications page (https://yourdomain.socialcast.com/services), then click on the Google Gadget. This will tell you the exact URL of the Google gadget (http://yourdomain.socialcast.com/services/gmail/gadget). If you look inside the XML of that gadget, you’ll actually see a URL. It will be https://yourdomain.socialcast.com/services/gmail/widget (obviously, yourdomain.socialcast.com will be specific to your Socialcast account)

We can now use this URL to embed within our application.

We add a little bit of HTML to the console_left page in DovetailAgent:

<div class="groupHeader" onclick="toggleElement(‘socialcast’, ‘socialcast’);">
   <span>Socialcast</span>
   <span class="arrowCollapse" id="socialcast_plus_minus">5</span>
</div>
<div class="collapsable" id="socialcast">
    <iframe id="socialcast_widget" src="https://yourdomain.socialcast.com/services/gmail/widget" scrolling="no"></iframe>
    <hr/>
    <a href="http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts&sectionid=7&postid=12390#" id="socialcast_url" onclick="OpenUrlInConsole(‘https://yourdomain.socialcast.com’);">View full Socialcast site</a>
</div>

This adds a new area to the left side of the console, and includes an iframe whose source is set to the URL of the widget.

Here’s what it looks like:

Notice that we now have a Socialcast widget right on our console. From there, a user can:

• view their home stream
• search the stream
• share (post) a new update, link,  or other information
• comments on an item (after clicking on the item)

View Full Socialcast Site

I’ve also added a View full Socialcast site link, which will open the full Socialcast site in the main part of the app. Like so:

This makes it easy to reinforce the use of Socialcast within your organization.

If desired, it could just as easy open Socialcast in a new window by modifying the View full Socialcast site anchor element so that it opens in a new window:

<a href=”https://mydomain.socialcast.com” id="socialcast_url" target=_blank>View full Socialcast site</a>

Easy enough either way – whatever your preference is.

Staying in tune

Agents can now easily share and be closer to what’s happening within their group, and across the entire organization.

A global employee community

For a glimpse into how one organization is doing this, check out Philips. They recently launched their global employee community called Connect Us, which is powered by Socialcast.

Check out this video which introduces Connect Us:

 

Also check out this blog post which includes some data points about the Philips rollout, such as 1,928% growth in 6 weeks!

Awesome stuff.