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Integrate SmarterTrack with Zapier
Idea shared by Massimo Arrigoni - 8/29/2014 at 3:14 PM
Under Consideration
It was already discussed here: http://forums.smartertools.com/threads/one-word-zapier.41100/
 
SmarterTrack lacks an integration with popular CRM systems, which puts it at a huge disadvantage compared to other help desk systems. Integration with Zapier or alike would at least partially alleviate the problem.

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Ditto that! It's been six months - would you please revisit this again? Just like Massimo says above - the luck of the CRM integration turns people away from SmarterTrack and Zapier integration would address lot's of these in one single go. Thanks!
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I agree... I Honestly don't know what they added in the latest version of smarter track.. its starting to feel like a sage product..
New version, but no useful features. This would enable so much. If I was the PM, I would put this at the TOP of the new features list.
Jeremy
 
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Vote it up then
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Happy 2015. We need this!!
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So Ive done some more research on this. It is possible to integrate smarter tracks XML Web Services with Zapier BUT BUT BUT you have to use the scripting options in Zapier to basically take the XML then parse it out. It would take about 40 hours of my time to do it. Before I do that I need to know from SmarterTools the following.
 
1. They are not going to provide a json version of the web services APIs in the next 2 years.
2. They are not already doing this.
3. No "legal" issues with me being the developer and manager of the Zapier App for smarterTrack
 
Honestly, SmarterTools should be the manager of the Zapier App for SmarterTrack  but since they have yet to do it, it begs other questions that I wont get into now. Based on the knowledge I have acquired from Zapier, this could have been done a year ago. At the end of the day whats cheaper development, Zapier XML App or json Web Services.
 
If someone from ST can response to my points above with an acceptable answer I would consider creating the zapier app for SmarterTrack. 
 
 
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The fact that they haven't done this yet tells me that they really don't get it: custom integrations with an API are yesterday's approach: expensive, time consuming, not flexible. It's the past my friends. It's not the present (and definitely not the future).
 
Businesses needed a completely different approach. The answer was tools like Zapier - and that's just one of many - that allow for integration between apps without ANY involvement of the development team. There is a reason why these tools are growing like crazy.
 
Those that don't get that Web apps need to be able to seamlessly talk to each other WITHOUT any custom integration are going to be left behind.
 
It's unfortunate because SmarterTrack is actually a good tool. I was the one to push the adoption of SmarterTrack at the company that I work for many years ago. It looks like they've lost track of what's going on in the world of Web apps. They risk being left behind, if they don't change course.
 
In the meantime, my company is looking to drop SmarterTrack and switch to a much more integrated competitor.
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Yea, the more I think about it, maybe its time to move one. If its going to cost me 40 hours to build the integration, Whats the migration cost to move to another product that already does it. If other product already support zapier, then they are more in tune with the times.
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Definitely feeling this way with SmarterTrack too after dealing with constant issues since launching it at our company. I've been going down the path of regret with the slow responses to issues, basics not working, antiquated approaches to various parts of the system (Search system in particular) and the lack of proper integrations with products like Zapier.  I was the one that recommended ST for our company as well.
 
 Then I look at what's coming in v11.x and I'm not seeing anything mentioned about old issues that people have been reporting for years. Nothing really new that makes me want to stick with it another year of it.  
 
Constant disconnect issues, custom fields not working as they should, permission system that isn't universal throughout, poor performing search system, no user management system, call log system that feels like an afterthought, no detail level reporting, no integration with CRM systems.  
 
List goes on and the list of positives is starting to be outweighed by the negatives for our company.
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Then what product would be the alternative?
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I've been doing a lot of research at work with regards to Web API's and the proper way to design one to be consumed by other developers. While yes, smarter track could just change the serialization from xml soap to json, but this does not bring the web apis that already exist inline with modern evolvable web apis. Because all the web apis would still use POST only.
 
Modern Web APIs should use GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, etc, so I understand what the smarter tools staff was saying when they said its not that simple. But if they are going to put in the time to evolve the web services, stop calling them web services, they are web APIs. new namespace etc. no breaking changes for users who might be using servers v1, or services v2... /api/
 
Secondly...
I noticed MSFT Azure has a product called API Management, available for companies that want to expose their API to other developers. The Key point here is that the Azure API Management will transform or translate and old school web service into a modern web api. I am NOT suggesting SmarterTools do this, But If a user out there wants to spend the time to build an API inside of this feature in Azure, it sounds like it could be a decent work around. Till Smarter Tools gets the Web API out in a future version of SmarterTrack.
 
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This is a polite request from someone at smarter tools to let us know if this is part of your plans for 2016. This AM I received a sales email that stated that ST was going to release two major version of all 3 products before 7/1/2016.
It talks about performance updates and an updated WEB UI, but does that finally include a web api that is reset and json based?
Thanks
 
 
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Bump!
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Integration with Agile CRM would be excellent. We'd very much like to be able to push data from SmarterTrack into our Agile CRM account.
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
Hello everyone,
 
Thank you for your participation on this thread. Yesterday, we met to discuss the feature list for future versions of SmarterTrack. Integration with third-party services is on our radar, and it's something we'd like to explore for future versions. We will post updates here as they become available. 
 
Thank you! 
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FWIW, at this point in the game, we can already integrate with Zapier. I believe that when zapier added mutli actions, it really opened up the door to do more and the flexibility to make it work well.  There are very small things that SmarterTools Dev team could do to make the integration build out better but I don't think they need to build a SmarterTrack App in Zapier. They clearly don't see the value in having their app in the zapier app library or they would have done it years ago.

Here is the rough how to to send events to zapier and then to slack or SMS or what ever you want.

Start with a Catch Hook in zapier, you get a url. 
Add Events that call the catch hook URL, Build your url parameters as your liking.
Tip Do not limit the web calls, change form 15 mins to 0.
Then do what ever you want with it in zapier.

We are currently using this method to post Ticket notifications to Slack Channels so that agents are aware when tickets come in, and boss man can see when replies are going out. 


Other Tips you might want to do in your Zaps. 
1. use zapiers Shorten URL on the  #adminhyperlink#
2. remove the [TICKETID] from the subject, otherwise it would be in the slack message twice.
3. Remove the "Re: " from the subject

Here are some other resources
we have 1 zap web hook and we have two smarter track events: One  for tickets New message and one for replies to tickets. 
Here is what My web call url looks like ( I removed account specific values)
This is the same URL but the events web call are slightly different

Slack_TicketReply_SUPPORT
https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/000000/aaaaaa/?actiontype=#agent# Replied To &ticketnumber=#ticketnumber#&customeremail=#customeremail#&subject=#subject#&agent=#agent#&urlLink=#adminhyperlink#

Slack_TicketNewMessage_SUPPORT
https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/00000/aaaaa/?actiontype=New Message&ticketnumber=#ticketnumber#&customeremail=#customeremail#&subject=#subject#&agent=#agent#&urlLink=#adminhyperlink#


The one thing smarter track could do is make it so that the web calls could post a json object with all variables. This would allow for us to use more of the details from ticket. in theory posting the entire message in a url could have illegal characters and would bomb out. Then we would not have to build URL parameters. This would also allow for better integration with data systems where data is critical. posting SmarterTrack Messages to Slack is not very data critical, other types of integrations with relational databases would most likely start to see inconsistencies. 

The its in the budget smartertrack could spend some time building this type of integration out and test their web calls. I have seen a few defects like when an agent replied some times its says [Internal System] is the agent that replied..

If anyone wants more info on this I can create a youtube video on how this is done.
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I would vote for this as well. Cloud hooks are whats happening now a days.

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