For 
many businesses CRM is at the center of the way business gets done. The sales team uses it to keep track of leads and opportunities, marketing uses it to capture new leads or target a specific group within their own customer base, accounting uses it to track closed opportunities and the list goes on. Over the past year we have talked to many businesses looking to get the most from their CRM investment and make their employees more productive. While they are happy with their CRM overall, their employees could be far more productive with just a few improvements to the user experience, filling in the gaps in application functionality. Most of the requests fall into two categories: user interface or data integration. Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged WideLens
Complete your CRM user experience with Bungee Connect (a.k.a. Spackle the Cracks)
See the Results of Intern DevFest 2008
In late 2007, fifty Computer Science university students applied for 2008 internships at Bungee Labs. We flew nine of the most promising applicants from around the US to join Bungee Labs for our first “Intern DevFest”.
Over a 24 hour period the students had to extend WideLens – the Bungee Connect calendaring reference application – to develop new features and create a new derivative WideLens application…then present the results to the judging panel.
The nine students slogged hard all day (with frisbee breaks!) and most of the night and then presented their solutions to the judging team the next morning.
Check out the video highlights of the four winners.
Alex Barnett, VP Community
New Video – How to Import and Run WideLens, View and Export the WideLens Database
In this new WideLens video we introduce Josh, one of two devs who worked on the Bungee Connect reference calendaring application, who shows Ted a few more tips and tricks for Bungee developers interested in experimenting with the Bungee-powered app, covering:
-
How to import WideLens project into a new solution (and what’s actually happening in the background when importing the project)
-
How to run your instance of WideLens via simulate within the Bungee builder
-
Creating an account in your version of WideLens
-
Viewing your instance of the WideLens MySQL database via the SQL Console
-
How to export the WideLens database schema so you can use your own MySQL database
More videos to come. In the meantime, you can go to the WideLens developer page at the Bungee Connect wiki where you can find all the links to the various resources we’re putting together.
Alex Barnett, VP Community
Sync Google Calendar to Outlook
Seeing Google’s recent release of Google Calendar Sync, Alex Barnett has created a short screencast of how this is available as a browser-based utility through the WideLens reference application on Bungee Connect.
What are the key differences? First, Google Calendar Sync is a download-and-install application for your Windows desktop, whereas WideLens allows you to synchronize entirely in the browser. Depending on your use case, you may find one or the other scenario (or both) more practical. Second, WideLens allows you to view and manage your appointments for both Exchange and Google Calendars in a single consolidated view, with the ability to create, delete and manage new appointments on either system as well as within Salesforce.com and Facebook.
Finally, the WideLens codebase has been made available to Bungee developers under a very liberal open source license, allowing developers to make derivative works from the code base, so if you need to extend or pare down the base functionality, it’s readily available.
Bungee Labs Intern DevFest 2008
What an exciting day for us at Bungee Labs to welcome 9 potential interns who traveled from around the country last night to take part in Bungee Labs very first Intern DevFest.
We can’t wait to see what these very smart 9 CS students come up with using Bungee Connect and the WideLens reference app we’ve asked them to hack against.
Thanks to M.David (blogging this here) and Daniel Posch (one of last year’s summer Intern at Bungee Labs) who both agreed to join the contest’s judging panel.
Here are some pics from the 24 hour event.
New WideLens video: Overview for Bungee Developers
Over the weekend I got the chance to spend time with Herrick Muhlestein, one of Bungee Labs’ dev leads and a member of the team responsible for delivering Bungee Connect’s new calendaring reference application, WideLens.
In this video, Herrick provides an overview of the architecture of WideLens as well as some details on the app’s Class-Database relationships. The slides Herrick walks through are available here (.ppt)
This is the first of a series of videos we’ll be providing to Bungee developers with more detail on WideLens. If you have questions about WideLens, or want to discuss the video, head on over to the WideLens board at the BCDN forum (Bungee dev account required).
More WideLens Resources:
Alex Barnett, Bungee Labs
Webcast – Extending WideLens – Feb 21, 12pm MST
Please join us for a WebEx session where we will provide an technical overview of the Bungee Connect‘s new reference application, WideLens, and discuss how the WideLens reference app was extended to display a Salesforce.com custom event.
Topic: Bungee Connect Webcast – Extending WideLens (60 minutes)
- A Developer’s Introduction to WideLens Reference Application (Brad Hintze)
- Extending the WideLens Reference App with Salesforce.com Custom Events (Dave Nielsen)
- Questions and Answers (Brad Hintze)
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2008
Time: 12:00 pm, Mountain Standard Time (GMT -07:00, Denver )
——————————————————-
To join the online meeting, see details at the BCDN Forum (you must have a Bungee Connect developer account to enter the BCDN Forum) :
-
Look forward to seeing you there.
Alex Barnett
VP Community, Bungee Labs
Extending the WideLens Reference App
It’s been a big day for us, with news of:
- A new version of Bungee Connect going live last night
- A press release announcing our move from private to public beta (if want to sign up for a Bungee Connect developer account, sign up here)
- Dave Mitchell’s (Bungee Labs’ founder and CTO) blog post taking a stab at the definition of “Platform as a Service” (PaaS)
- Two new importable libraries for Bungee Connect–check out Amy Ballard’s posts from our Community team: the Amazon SimpleDB sample library and Google Calendar sample library
- A brand new reference application we’ve been working on for the last three months called WideLens, available now as an importable sample from within Bungee Connect
About WideLens
In this post, I want to focus on the new WideLens reference application from a Bungee developer’s standpoint – why we built it and how Bungee developers can modify and extend the Bungee reference application for their own purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Defining Platform-As-A-Service, or PaaS
There is an increasing level of discussion and activity around the topic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)–and more recently Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).On the SaaS side of things, there have been some notable successes in the areas of CRM-as-a-service, computing-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service. These are just a few examples of data, functionality and hardware as services over the network. These individual offerings represent the next logical evolution of software and computing in the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »
WideLens: A calendaring reference application for Bungee Connect
With the release of the latest version of Bungee Connect we are happy to announce the release of a new reference application for Bungee Connect. WideLens is a calendaring application built to demonstrate what can be built with Bungee Connect, such as:
Connectivity to multiple types of external data:
WideLens connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds. If you’re familiar with these services, you know this list isn’t just a mouthful to say, it represents a variety of protocols and authentication schemes. MS Exchange is accessed through WebDav, Google Calendar through gData, Salesforce.com via SOAP, Facebook through REST and MySQL connectivity is based on client libraries provided by MySQL (integrated directly inside Bungee Connect). Read the rest of this entry »
