I'm wondering if any other Tess organizations have done any fancy, fun integrations with Microsoft Outlook. Specifically with syncing contacts between the two.
I would like to get all of our employees actively using Tessitura as their main source for contact info for our patrons but it isn't always the fastest option. For example, if our Executive Director wants to send an email to 10 people that already live in her Outlook contacts it would be much faster for her to simply type them in the To: line of the mail rather than looking for them individually in Tess or building a list and executing an output set.
The problem we have (which may seem fairly obvious) is that our contact emails are being stored in multiple places. We may have someone reply to our Exec Dir's email requesting to update their email address. So it is updated in that specific user's Outlook contacts and no one else's Outlooks contacts. It's very possible that it also does not get updated in Tess.
I've been requested to investigate if there is a way to sync Outlook and Tess (on a nightly basis perhaps?) so that everyone always has the most up-to-date email addresses no matter which method they are choosing.
Looking forward to hearing how everyone has solved this conundrum! :)
Unknown said: I'm wondering if any other Tess organizations have done any fancy, fun integrations with Microsoft Outlook. Specifically with syncing contacts between the two.
We wanted to do this, too, and were not able to come up with any sort of fully automated solution. However, along the way we found that it's really easy to copy and paste e-mails from SSRS reports directly into an Outlook 2010 "To" field, or, even better, straight into a new Contact Group.
Now our e.g. Board and Actor contact data that used to live in spreadsheets or numerous personal contact lists are (hopefully all) kept in Tessitura, and e-mails and/or Contact Groups are addressed from custom reports. We encourage frequent refreshes (or recreations) of the CG's to keep data fresh, and since it's not completely automated I'm sure some stale data survives out there from time to time, but overall this strategy is going well for us so far.
I can provide more info offline, if desired.
Somewhat tangentially related - we're on Google Apps now, however - I've started to put links in reports to add an "Event" to your Google Calendar (this is possible by creating a URL out of some variables within the report - see here: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/3033039 ). Currently we use this to add solicitation tasks into people's work calendars.
I've also started to make all the emails in our SSRS reports "clickable" - which will open an email with that address in the "To:" field. Similar to Chris' suggestion - I suppose you could make an SSRS report for groups, that pulls from a list, and puts all the addresses together (comma delimited?) so when you click (SSRS Action) it utilizes a mailto link and sends to everyone in that group?
Wondering if the same can be done for Outlook (if it has some sort of URL handler). No idea if this works for contacts directly, though.
So, not exactly syncing to Outlook, but at least somewhat outside of "the box"... :)
Beth
Unknown said: I suppose you could make an SSRS report for groups, that pulls from a list, and puts all the addresses together (comma delimited?) so when you click (SSRS Action) it utilizes a mailto link and sends to everyone in that group?
I suppose you could make an SSRS report for groups, that pulls from a list, and puts all the addresses together (comma delimited?) so when you click (SSRS Action) it utilizes a mailto link and sends to everyone in that group?
Both will work, e.g. a list of ";" delimited e-mail addresses can be pasted directly into the "To" field in Outlook, while a new Group Contact list can be populated by copying two columns of data (Name & E-mail) straight from an SSRS report into the "Name:" field in the new GC. Very cool the first time you do it. :-)
You could look into the Exchange API (assuming you are using Exchange 2007+) if you use Outlook and want to keep it within the application.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee693007(v=exchg.80).aspx
You could have a SQL query/SP that contains the group of people want, then use the Exchange methods to create and destroy contact in the persons/shared mailbox. [simplified view on what could happen].
Few pre-requisites - Outlook, Exchange 2007 or above, the password for the user account needs storing somewhere to the program can access it to create/destroy the contacts (might prove an issue for PCI-DSS)
Personally, I wouldn't feed the changed records in Exchange back into Tessitura as you've no real way of knowing which record is newer/correct. It is possible, but you'd be creating a monster.
Unknown said: You could look into the Exchange API (assuming you are using Exchange 2007+) if you use Outlook and want to keep it within the application. [...] the password for the user account needs storing somewhere to the program can access it to create/destroy the contacts (might prove an issue for PCI-DSS) [...] Personally, I wouldn't feed the changed records in Exchange back into Tessitura as you've no real way of knowing which record is newer/correct. It is possible, but you'd be creating a monster.
You could look into the Exchange API (assuming you are using Exchange 2007+) if you use Outlook and want to keep it within the application. [...] the password for the user account needs storing somewhere to the program can access it to create/destroy the contacts (might prove an issue for PCI-DSS) [...] Personally, I wouldn't feed the changed records in Exchange back into Tessitura as you've no real way of knowing which record is newer/correct. It is possible, but you'd be creating a monster.
Very interesting that this is possible, though the issues you point out are indeed significant.