Some observations while I integrated Wufoo and Solve360

Finally I have time to write about something related to my work at RecycleMatch. First of all let me tell you a little bit about the company, then I'll go into what I've been working on the latest month.

RecycleMatch tries to divert large waste streams from landfill and connect them to companies that can use it to create value. Through an online marketplace and web 2.0 marketing, RecycleMatch is able to connect companies in an effective and cost-efficient manner in order to create value throughout the business ecosystem.

Over to my assignment, integrating Wufoo forms and Solve360. Let me start off by telling you shortly about these two Internet-based systems. Wufoo provides companies and persons the abilities to create complex html forms to post on a website for collecting information from their users. Solve360 is a easy-to-use, good looking hosted customer relationship management (CRM) system. They have a neath way of organizing the information you collect, into contacts and project blogs. For a company like RecycleMatch the organization makes it easier to handle the waste streams, and learn from historical data.

Now over to the more technical stuff. These two systems both have an application programming interface (API). Wufoo are also able to send notifications through webhooks, and have a URL form posting mechanism that I've used in the integration. This mean that we have the ability to fill out some fields in a form through a URL, and send all the information posted in the form to a script that can transform the data.  Solve360 has a generous API that allows you to do all the stuff you'd want to do.

This opened up for some PHP coding. The solution might not be the most sexy code I've written, but it works great and saves RecycleMatch for huge amount of manual work. To get me started, the example code found here worked great. I wanted to send the data from a web site form to Solve360, set some category tags and create some activities that are regular for every posting in a form.

I started off trying out the example and made that work with Solve360. I just edited the user and token and I was good to go. The next step was to get Wufoo to post to the php-script. I did this by going to the form in the Wufoo admin pages, hit notifications and setup a webhook. All you need to do is supply your URL to the php script made out of the example and add a handshake for security (optional). Every time a new complete posting is made to the form, the data will be sent to our php script.

Using simple if-else sentences and the Solve360Services I was able to convert all the data coming from Wufoo to Solve360 data and insert it. I search and see if people or companies are already registered in Solve360. If not I will create new, else I'll update the record. Using the examples and API reference from Norada I was able to put in all the data I need with some neath functionality like follow up activities and automatic e-mails. The discussion forum on Norada's site also helped me a lot.

The two Internet tools and their APIs have proven to work efficient and helps RecycleMatch automate many of the manual tasks we did before. Being able to combine complex and maintainable forms from Wufoo with Solve360, our CRM have opened new doors for the operations of our company. It is a simple and cheap solution which creates enormous value for our company.