| | h1. {color:#009900}What Is This Page About?{color} |
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| | h3. This page describes a mashup application (situational application) which won the IBM Mashup Development Contest conducted during Mashup Camp 4 [http://www.mashupcamp.com ]; |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}Where Did The IBM Mashup Development Contest Happen?{color} |
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| | IBM Mashup Development Contest occured during MashupCamp 4, which took place at July 18-19, 2007 in Mountain View, CA. |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}Can I see a demo of the mashup?{color} |
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| | h3. Live Mashup Demo at IBM QEDWiki Website: [http://www.sitapps.net/qedcontest/show/pg/Submissions-Mrm0-ColdCallAssist-Complete] |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}What does this mashup do?{color} |
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| | | h3. Mashup Name | h2. {color:#000099}Cold Call Assist\!{color} | |
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| | h3. Mashup Business Objective: {color:#cc0000}Improve conversion ratio of closing sales and setting up appointments with Cold Call Assist\!{color}\\ |
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| | | h3. Authors | Mark Madsen \\ |
| | Renat Khasanshyn | |
| | | h3. Scenario | The Cold Call Assist\! makes cold-calling new prospects from Salesforce.com easier by gathering and displaying recent news about the company and their competitors, and provides a list of restaurants near the prospect's location along with a map for directions. This gives the salesperson relevant and current discussion points about the target business prior to the call, and makes it easy to suggest meeting for lunch or dinner in an area close to the prospect. | |
| | | h3. Mashup Usage \\ | Salesforce.com is used to maintain a list of prospects and customers, as shown here: !sf3.JPG! The contact list for the campaign is extracted from Salesforce.com using [Apatar Data Integration|http://www.apatar.com], automatically published in the form of an RSS feed [http://www.apatarforge.org/downloads/rss/salesforce_rss_1.rss on] [ApatarForge.Org|http://www.apatarforge.org] and displayed on an [IBM QEDWiki mashup web page|http://www.sitapps.net/qedcontest/show/pg/Submissions-Mrm0-ColdCallAssist-Complete] for the salesperson to review.When a prospect is selected from the list, the primary competitors are displayed below along with news about the company and a list of restaurants near the prospect's address.To prepare for the call, the salesperson can browse news related to the prospect or select a specific competitor and browse current news specific to that competitor.If the call leads to a meeting, the salesperson can suggest a restaurant from the list of nearby restaurants provided. The restaurant list is linked to the prospect's address, and any restaurant can be dragged and dropped onto the map to highlight its location. The weather forecast for the next several days is also provided to help choose a day when the weather would be best for the appointment or to do a golf outing. | |
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| | h3. |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}How Can I Create/Assemble The Same Mashup?{color} |
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| | h3. \# Create a new blank 3 row page |
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| | # Create and display a feed from ApatarForge for the Salesforce.com data |
| | # Add an url generator to call Dapper and obtain a list of competitors for the company selected |
| | # Add an url generator to call Dapper and obtain a list of restaurants for the zip code of the company selected |
| | # Add and display a feed for the competitors |
| | # Add and display a feed for the restaurants |
| | # Add two Google News widgets and link them to the company selected, and the competitor selected, and set them up in an accordion control |
| | # Add a Google Map widget and make the restaurants draggable |
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| | h3. Aggregators Used \| The Data Sources (Content Owners) for this mashup are: |
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| | * Salesforce.com |
| | * Google local search |
| | * Google finance |
| | * Google maps |
| | * AccuweatherThe Content Aggregators used in this mashup are: |
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| | * Apatar Data Mashups fromApatarForge.Org |
| | * Dapper Dapps \| |
| | | h3. Resources Used | * \*# RSS feed from Salesforce.com generated by Apatar | |
| | *# RSS feed for restaurants by zip code and company competitors generated by Dapper |
| | *# RSS feeds for news generated by Google News widgets in QEDwiki |
| | *# Map generated by Google Maps widget in QEDwiki |
| | *# Accuweather forecast data displayed via the QEDwiki weather widget . \| \| |
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| | h2. |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}What Are The Take-Aways I Could Use?{color} |
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| | h2. General Scenario Observation |
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| | The biggest problems were encountered with trying to process data from more than one source. Most of the tools we tried were best when a single source was handled. This led us to back away from combining data feeds, and to having separate feeds for different elements. The kinds of difficulties we encountered were not that different from the kinds faced when doing data integration inside the enterprise, although the web data integration tools and technologies are more limited.RSS may be convenient and popular, but it is a very limiting technology because of the inflexibility and inability to handle more data than a title and description. For business applications, a protocol like Atom is much better suited for passing data because it is extensible. Unfortunately we ran into challenges with every tool we used when attempting to consume data via Atom instead of RSS. |
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| | h2. Contest Technology Experience |
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| | The tools are all relatively new and we had difficulties with some of the rough edges with each of the products we were using. The biggest surprise was the inability of most tools to consume Atom feeds. We were less surprised by the quirks of the user interfaces, since they were all web-based and complex web-based UIs have always been challenging. |
| | We were happy with our ability to produce a web-based application that combined data and display elements, and with built-in interaction between components on the screen. Doing this type of work even a few years ago required much deeper skills in arcane areas. While ease-of-use is not up to par for end users, developers will definitely be more productive. We were able to build this mashup from start to finish with about 9 hours of work, including all of the data extraction (excluding time spent learning the tools). |
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| | h2. Best Practices Used |
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| | 1. Plan the data contents before doing anything else, and source most of the data before starting to build the UI. Backtracking when we couldn't obtain certain data required us to rebuild the entire UI several times. |
| | 2. Keep the data feeds simple and discrete. The data extraction/integration tools are not yet capable of addressing moderate to high complexity integration requirements. |
| | 3. Have fun, and never give up\! |
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| | h1. {color:#009900}Where Can I Learn More About Mashup Camp?{color} |
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| | h3. Official Website of Mashup Camp [http://www.mashupcamp.com] |
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| | h3. Blog post at Naked Open Source by Renat Khasanshyn: "[Mashup Camp 4 in Mountain View, CA: Web 2.0 is Going Mainstream|http://nakedopensource.com/2007/07/21/mashup-camp-4-in-mountain-view-ca/]" |
