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PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Good news for PowerSocial and PowerSMS subscribers! PowerObjects has two different custom workflow activities that have recently been developed to enhance your CRM installations free of charge as a bonus for subscribing to one or both of those solutions! They are part of the solution available to download called PowerBitly. In order to work all you need is a valid Bitly token stored in the configuration of either PowerSocial or PowerSMS.

Finding the GUID of a record can often prove to be a difficult task. With the PowerBitly plugin the workflows do the work for you, grabbing the GUID of your records for you and then using it to run the workflow. This will be true for all records, unless you are running the workflow against an activity record. In this case the workflow will be ran against the activity and the getGUID call will return the GUID of the record that the activity is set regarding.

The other custom activity, Bitly, effectively returns a Bitly-encoded URL from a URL that is entered as an input parameter. There are a couple different ways this can be done:

  • the URL can be entered when the workflow is set up, derived from data in the workflow
  • be created from a combination of the two, which we will show in our example in this blog

These activities will work great with many of our other PowerPack solutions. We will show its use in PowerSMS in our example, but keep in mind it can be used in PowerWebForm, PowerEmail, PowerMailChimp, PowerWebTraffic and most other PowerPacks as well.

Scroll to the end of this post to download and save the zip file. Then, just like when you imported a PowerObjects add-on solution, you'll navigate to Settings > Solutions > select 'import' > browse to where you just saved the zip and double click to select the solution.

Now that the tool is in the system, the next step is to create a workflow process to use the Bitly solution.

Create a new process: Go to Settings > Processes > select New. Depending on specifically what you are trying to do, fill out the Create Process form.

In this hypothetical example, we're going to pretend that we are running a marketing campaign aimed at getting more existing customers to use PowerPacks by asking them to text CRM to 867-5309 for a chance to win a free 3 month subscription to the solution of their choice.

1. Create the new process and set the Entity to SMS:

PowerSocial Subscribers

2. Then set the workflow to only respond to the messages that include our indicator (CRM):

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

3. Now, grab the long URL from the web address we want to use Bitly on for the SMS text back to the customer.

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

4. Go back to your process and select the Set Properties button.

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

5. And paste this into the Target URL Value.

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

6. Now add a step to create an SMS message to send back with the Bitly to the raffle page.

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

7. Finally, set the properties of this SMS message, adding the shortened URL in the SMS Message field as shown below

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

8. Select Activate to get the workflow active. Please note that you will also need to adjust the 'Change the record status' field to now be Pending Sent

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

Finally, tying this all back to the first custom workflow activity mentioned, getGUID, you would repeat the same steps to add the getGUID step to the process much like we did with the Bitly. Keep in mind that because an SMS record is an activity, this will get the GUID for the record that the incoming SMS message is set be "regarding."

For more on how SMS "regarding" is set, see the PowerSMS Import and User Guides. If no regarding is set, the tool will return the GUID of the SMS record itself. This custom workflow activity has no parameters or inputs as were required with Bitly.

PowerSMS, PowerSocial Subscribers: Free getGUID and Bitly Custom Workflow Activities for Download!

We hope you enjoy these bonus features to your PowerSMS or PowerSocial solutions as a little holiday gift to our friends everywhere in CRM!

Do not hesitate to reach out to powerpackpro@powerobjects.com with any questions about any of our add-on solutions!

Download PowerBitly 1-0-3-2013

 

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

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