Batchbook Blog

Your Social CRM in Gmail: BatchBook integrates with Rapportive via Raplets

sransom

If you use Google to handle your email, you may have heard of the awesome social plugin from the folks at Rapportive. This plugin allows you to view the social connections of anyone who emails you right in the context of the email. Check it out:

This information comes up on the right of my screen whenever Rahul sends me an email. You can also hover over any email address and have the relevant info show up. Really powerful stuff and as lovers of all things contact data-related, we at BatchBlue have been big fans since they launched.

So of course we were excited when the folks behind Rapportive got in touch and asked if we wanted to participate in their new developer platform called Raplets. We immediately said yes and got to work.

What Raplets let you do is add onto the information supplied by Rapportive. In our case we can provide contact information, to-do (tasks) and comments. After setting up the BatchBook Raplet, you will see the following in addition to the Rapportive information:

With the BatchBook Raplet installed, from within Gmail, you can get a view of a person’s BatchBook information including basic contact information, any attached To-Dos and view/add comments without ever leaving your email. This is really powerful stuff and as you use it we think you will agree that it totally will rock your email world.

Additionally, if the contact does not yet exist in BatchBook you will see:

Click the “BatchBook It!” button and it creates the contact in your BatchBook account and even save the Twitter handle as well. A quick and easy way to get new contacts into BatchBook – we’ve already found this to be a huge time-saver and tremendously useful as we go about our busy days.

To install:

1. Go to Rapportive and install the plugin. You’ll need to use Google for you mail via Gmail or Google apps and also you must be using Firefox or Chrome as your browser.

2. Go to the newly-launched Raplet directory and select BatchBook. The install process will ask you for your BatchBook account name which is the first part of your BatchBook url. For example if your url is mycompany.batchbook.com then you would enter “mycompany” as the account name.

Then just make sure you are logged into your BatchBook account and start enjoying the awesomeness that is Rapportive + BatchBook.

We love that these guys are taking email to another level and are super excited they’ve invited us along for the ride.

  • http://rapportive.com Martin Kleppmann

    Thanks Sean — we love what you guys are doing at BatchBook, and it’s a natural fit to bring BatchBook into Gmail! I think lots of people are going to find this very useful.

  • Pingback: BatchBook CRM teams with Rapportive to Offer Awesome GMail Features « IQI — Interesting Questions and Ideas

  • http://saconsultants.org Rajesh Kumar

    I have been using Rapportive in Gmail and looking for ward to this integration! Great and a million thanks.

  • Jim Cotton

    Not working…timed out

  • http://beatylawfirm.com Gene Beaty

    OK nice idea so I install on chrome, attempt to go to directory, no dice, log in won’t work -error

    Looks like the program is not ready for common folk to use BB should not give it to us with instructions that don’t work

  • http://batchblue.com Sean Ransom

    Can you guys give us an idea of where the problems are? Just trying to get rapportive installed or actually installing the BatchBook raplet?

    There is a lot of press on this today so maybe a traffic issue. If it is a problem installing rapportive itself we can get folks in touch with them to help out.

    Let us now and we can did deeper…

    Sean Ransom

  • Michael Wright

    Great linkage. I had tried Rapportive before and found it’s usefulness limited. Now with the tie-in to BatchBook, it’s it bit more CRM-like. I love it.

  • http://waterwordsthatwork.com Eric

    Alright, so this is awesome! Thanks to both companies for this slick integration. I’m sure I will use it constantly from now on!

    Here’s a feature request: Let’s say somebody sends me an email, and this little Raplet tells me they are already in my database, but have a LinkedIn profile I was previously unaware of.

    Wouldn’t it be slick if I could hit a button and capture just their LinkedIn information in Batchbook — adding to the existing account.

    Or does it work that way now and I just haven’t quite figured it out yet?

  • Jamie Rich

    Love, love, love this. Hugely beneficial.

  • http://www.libart.com ErkanG

    Great stuff!
    For sometime I have been digging Rapportive a lot, now it makes much more sense. I felt quite lucky to be on board with Batchbook. Please keep up this edge! Thanks.

  • Daniel

    Sean,

    Really excited about this integration but ours is broken. If I view an email that I know has a batchbook record all I get is a message from Reporative that says “Thanks, we’re searching!”. Don’t see anything having to do with BatchBook. Thought about removing and readding the Raplet but can’t find a way to remove it.

    Would this have anything to do with the server side tweak that you had to make on our account to get OpenID working with Google Apps?

    Thanks.

  • http://www.scibiz.com Charlie d’Estries

    Hi guys… bringing us new things like Rapportive just makes my heart grow fonder. Thanks Batchblue for continuing to impress :)

  • http://batchblue.com Sean Ransom

    Daniel,

    Is it possible you are not logged into your account at batchblue? Nothing will show up if that is the case. Another thing is you may need to edit the settings in the raplet and make sure it is pointing just at your account name. IE for https://batchblue.batchblue.com you would enter batchblue.

    So double check those and then clear your cookies andtry again. If you are still having issues let us know.

    -sean

  • http://soulemobile.com Brian

    Please, integrate the to do list (and possibly events) into the rapport sidebar.

    THIS IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF CRM INTEGRATION, imho

    Thanks much,

  • sa

    I am so excited, I LOVE the idea of this! But help…

    I installed the plugin but the Batchblue raplet isn’t showing up under the rest of the Rapportive stuff. I cleared the cookies, added the raplet as described in the post, made sure I was logged in to Batchbook… what am I missing?

    (The main part of Rapportive seems to be working; it is pulling up information for most of the people I click on.)

  • http://www.sbmteam.com George Bounacos

    This integration alone is worth the price of a Batchbook account, and I think the whole web knows how much I love BatchBlue these days.

    This could be *really* useful. I just looked at a client, clicked the task area in the raplet and was reminded at 10 p.m., that yes, there is something due tomorrow.

    All I wanted to do was trash-talk about hockey. This let me slip in a comment that they should see their item together because it was top of mind.

    Nicely done!

  • http://www.pldturkiye.com Emre Güneş

    Honestly, such a nice move! Thanks guys.

  • http://batchblue.com Sean Ransom

    I am happy to see people are loving this. We are really excited about it and looking forward to getting even more functionality in there. Having BB in your mail is proving to be very powerful for us as well.

    For those having trouble please write to support@batchblue.com and we will help troubleshoot.

    Sean Ransom

  • Roby Freireich

    This seems like a great feature, but haven’t been able to get it to work yet.

    I installed Rapportive, logged on to Gmail on Firefox, and when I tried to login to Rapportive or Install Raplets, I received this message,

    “Currently this single sign-in feature is disabled for the domain”

    Can you help? Thanks!

    Roby.

  • Delia

    This is the most exciting BatchBook news ever! Thanks for the very pleasant surprise!! :)

  • Joel

    This is totally awesome! What a great idea!

  • http://www.rapportive.com Rahul Vohra

    Roby, it’s Rahul from Rapportive here.

    I’ve seen that problem before and I’ve just pinged my colleagues to see if we can find a solution.

  • http://rapportive.com Martin Kleppmann

    Roby, you need to enable “Federated Login” on your Google Apps account:

    http://www.skitch.com/martinkl/dyye9/allow-federated-login-on-google-apps-1
    http://www.skitch.com/martinkl/dyyjk/allow-federated-login-on-google-apps-2

    We’re looking at ways of making this more clear. Can you give it a try?

  • http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com Pawan Deshpande

    Rahul and Roby,

    FYI: I am facing the same problem as well.

    -Pawan

  • http://collinkromke.com Collin Kromke

    This could be a serious game-changer for me. WOWOWOWOW! Thanks guys.

  • http://www.rapportive.com Rahul Vohra

    Roby, Pawan,

    We’ve seen this problem before for people with Google Apps Premier domains. Unfortunately the error Google shows in this case is very unhelpful, but the solution is actually pretty easy.

    Do you have access to the administration pages for your Google Apps?

    If so, go to the Advanced Tools page. You should see several options under “Authentication”. If you click “Federated Login using OpenID” (see screenshot 1 below), you’ll go to a simple page with just one box to tick and nothing to fill in (see screenshot 2 below). If you
    tick that box and Save Changes, then login to Rapportive should work perfectly.

    Screenshots:
    1. http://skitch.com/martinkl/dyye9/allow-federated-login-on-google-apps-1
    2. http://skitch.com/martinkl/dyyjk/allow-federated-login-on-google-apps-2

    Does that help?

    Best,
    Rahul

  • Kim T.

    This is so awesome that I’m giddy.

  • http://www.taplister.com Kerry Finsand

    I followed the instructions above and do not see under advance tool- “Federated Login using OpenID”. I am not using premier, but rather the free addition. Does it not work on the free addition?

  • Andy Gambles

    I would love to see a “Log Email” button on the raplet so you could instantly just assign the email to the contacts communications in BatchBooks.

    • http://www.batchblue.com Michelle Riggen-Ransom

      Hey Andy, thanks for the comment and suggestion. This would indeed be handy, but unfortunately we can’t access that info through Rapportive at this time. We’ll keep it on the list, though. Those guys move pretty fast as well, so maybe this is something we’ll see in there at some soonish point!

  • http://www.diligentiagroup.com Brian Willingham

    Was loving BatchBook, but with the Rapportive functionality, this is absolutely indispensable. Thanks BatchBook and Rapportive.

  • http://citikitty.com rebecca

    I had the same problems as Sa. I installed the bb raplet in gmail but it did not show even though rapportive was showing.

    To correct this Batchbook recommended put just ‘companyname’ instead of https://companyname.batchblue.com/

    It worked!! Good luck!

  • Abhi

    Would be great to switch out comments for messages/email exchanges associated with the contact. Anyway to set that up? If not, could you share the code for the raplet, and we can hack it up?

  • joem

    so when can we add tasks in the raplet and truly make this integrated?

  • http://twitter.com/bjorn Bjorn Larsen

    Is this integration still active? Asking as it’s no longer listed on your integrations page.

    • bradshimp

      Hi Bjorn, this integration still works for Batchbook Classic, but we do not have an active integration with Rapportive on the New Batchbook.