Notify SF Users of Upgrades and New Releases

[Shari]

As a Salesforce user, I don't always go to the C&P forum to see what's new. It seems that recently a few upgrades have come out that are easy to miss. My suggestion is to send all your users a simple e-mail informing them of the upgrade so we can go to the AppExchange and download the new version. Please also make it clear that the API Library upgrade always needs to be installed first. Non-technical people may not understand that, including myself. I don't even understand what the API Library is, so I don't always think to download it.

Anyway, it would be helpful to get an e-mail in my Inbox saying that there's a new version to upload to Salesforce.

[CnP.Support]

Good day Shari,

Thank you for your suggestion and note. Notifying users of changes has not been as easy as we wish it was. Let me explain:

At Click & Pledge we take our email servers quite seriously since a small issue with reporting spam easily blocks our domain and name in many content filtering spam systems. While this may not be serious for most companies for us it means not delivery of the receipts to the organizations and donors. Unfortunately this issue has created a lot of problems for us. Here are examples:

• Many instances where AOL users have reported our receipts as SPAM resulting in delivery issues with AOL. Providing evidence and removal requests takes a long time and resources. I wish we could simply not email anyone with AOL domain but that unfortunately is not an option. One AOL user told me that he did not ask me to send him a receipt and just because he made a payment it does not mean we have the right to email him and then he hung up.
• Newsletter recipients who had subscribed to our newsletters through the administrative portal had reported our newsletters as SPAM resulting in issues with Barracuda appliances. Several of those that had reported us as SPAM were contacted so we find out why the newsletter has been reported as SPAM and the answer is always that they are no longer with the organization and don't wish to get the newsletter anymore. So instead of unsubscribing they chose to report it as SPAM.

The above list goes on and on and the result is always the same- much time has to be spent to remove the information from blacklists so receipts can be delivered in a timely manner.

Now for the newsletter:

On average every newsletter has a readership of less than 2%. Notifications, updates, alerts are never read by users and our clients. One challenge we think is simply that alerts are usually going to the accountants or financial personnel and they perhaps don't care about software notices. Over and over again we are contacted by users that don't get our notices.

Solution:

This forum is a great resource and one that addresses all the above concerns. Those that care to know may easily find out by subscribing to each product they care about. The forum is designed such that each product has its own news release section with a dedicated discussion area. You may subscribe to each section as shown below:



Our Salesforce product life cycle is ~6 weeks and by subscribing to the Salesforce Payment-as-a-Service News forum you will easily be notified if you subscribe to the forum as shown above.

As always we are open to suggestions and are always looking for ways that we can improve our processes. At times the most obvious solution may not be the one that works.

Let's now discuss the API Class Library:

Please visit the installation instructions: http://manual.clickandpledge.com/Sal...tallation.html

In the payment application 5 and above the payment form in the Virtual Terminal is native in Salesforce and no longer an iFrame. Moving forward the API Class Library is a prerequisite for all of our applications since it allows native development of payment forms inside Salesforce. The API Class Library is a unique product and a lot of companies are now using it to develop payment forms in their products.