Online security represents an important priority: for this reason, Pipedrive allows you to protect your data and those of your company through the so-called 2-factor authentication. 

Whether you are an admin user of the company's Pipedrive account or you are a user that would like to start using this CRM, it is important that you understand and know the security functions of this CRM.  

These functions allow you to apply some limitations to your Pipedrive account accesses, so you can guarantee that your personal data are stored safely and are available only to the right users.  

You can activate these rules by going to settings > Security center > Rules. 

2-Factors Authentication (2FA)

This option adds an additional security level in order to confirm that the user that wants to access Pipedrive is who he affirms he is. 

Let's see how to enable it in four simple steps: 

1. Go to settings
2. Password and Login
3. 2FA
4. Enable the function for your Pipedrive account

When you'll have enabled the process, you'll receive an email with a verification link that you'll use to access Pipedrive. You'll also receive some info regarding the place where the request is coming from. 

Attention: 2FA cannot work together with the function "access with Google" or with Single Sign-On of the Advanced plan, Professional Plan and Enterprise, we advise you to choose the option that best reflects your company's needs. 

We have seen one of the basic functions for the basic protection of your account: in Pipedrive you can also find more specific and advanced rules in order to limit users' access while maintaining your data safely stored. 

This was the third article from a series of five. If you haven't read the first two, click the links below.

Read the first article and the second one. 

Clarity, precision, and organization are three fundamental aspects necessary to make your work efficient. In this way, you can avoid wasting your time and dedicate yourself to more important aspects of your work. 

Every day we receive numerous emails, calls, messages not to mention all the appointments we forget to participate to or that we need to postpone due to the wrong day or time scheduled. 

Don't worry!  Pipedrive will help you in this job thanks to the function called "email and calendar sync". Let's explore them in detail below. 
 

Email sync

How many emails do we loose in our email list without even being able to retrieve them once read? A lot, am I right?

Pipedrive will think about it; you'll only have to select the contact you want to review and Pipedrive will give you an overall view of all your activities regarding the person.

How?

Pipedrive will calculate to which contacts and deals your emails and conversation belong to: taking into consideration the email address from which the message was sent, you'll have a clear vision regarding all your conversations. 

What is the most useful thing? Thanks to the email sync with your email provider (Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook...) you'll have a Pipedrive email database where you can see and manage all your received and sent emails without the need of opening a new tab. 

In order to activate this sync function you have to select settings and apps > email sync and click on the "connect your account" button. 

You'll have to provide your access info for the email account you want to synchronize on Pipedrive and you'll be ready to start sending your emails. 

It is not over yet! When you send an email, you often ask yourself if this email has been delivered correctly and whether it has been read. With a function in Pipedrive, you can trace all your email and you'll be able to see if the recipient opened the email and if he visualized one of the links available in your email.

Calendar sync 

As for emails,  the sync is also available for the calendar. 
You have to connect your Pipedrive account with your favorite calendar (Google, Outlook, Office, Exchange) in order to have all your appointments in place and under control and to be sure to have scheduled them at the right time on the right day, so you won't forget about your meetings anymore. 

In order to activate the calendar sync function, you have to go to setting and apps > calendar sync > add new account.
Insert the email address you want to sync into the calendar and set its password. 

When you sync your calendar to Pipedrive, you can choose different options and decide how the calendar you chose and Pipedrive will interact, e.g. which calendar you want to sync (if you have many).

Ready to have everything under control? 

Try Pipedrive and test it yourself. The first 30 days are free.

We almost arrived at the end of the series of these articles focused on Pipedrive: this is the fourth out of five.

If you haven't read the other articles and you are curious about discovering the numerous Pipedrive's benefits, click below and read the others!

1. Make your team operative in 8 steps with Pipedrive!
2. Planning fallacy and team organization: how to remain concentrated with Pipedrive
3. Protect your personal data with 2-factor authentication

Since we founded Thread Solutions, we sometimes have had discussions with our clients when working under Time and Material statements of work about the fact that we, at the end of the month, are used to add to the invoice all those billable hours employed in the realization of their project.

For this reason, today I will give you my point of view and I will try to show you the other side of the medal, hoping that you will agree with me on the importance of labeling all necessary hours as "billable" for the success of the project.

This problem is happening especially with small customers, or customers with small or not very skilled IT professionals. This seldom happens with the enterprise customers we also work with, because in my opinion, we share with these customers a similar manner of working and professionalism compared to smaller customers of ours, which have less experience in complex projects. 

Usually, we add a report to the invoice we send to our clients so that they have a clear understanding of what we have done for them. It is not easy to translate the tasks from the internal language of the team of Solutors to something that the customer is able to understand, and this is where the discussions mostly start from.
Let’s take for example the case of bugs and meetings that are also the majority of the tracked hours that the customer is more often arguing when reviewing our report.

What is billable time?

Before describing our situation, I want to clarify what billable time means.

Any time spent working on tasks that are directly related to the achievement of the goal inside the scope of work that the customer engaged us for, is considered billable time. 

The list of the following activities apply:

• doing actual work towards completing the project
• project planning
• developing project timelines
• conducting research for solutions to overcome difficulties
• attending meetings
• reading and responding to work emails or messages (via Slack, Whatsapp, Hangout, Teams, and whatever we agree to use to communicate)
• revising work submitted to the client, at the client’s request

When we get into discussions, the common scenario we face is that the client is willing to pay only for the hours we dedicated on performing actual work towards completing the job, and not for all those activities (that are also essential) needed to solve or revise something regarding the project. All these activities are necessary to do a good job, it is obvious that if we don’t spend the required time on these activities too, the job cannot be done.

It is crucial to make clients understand how important these hours are and why they should pay us for this commitment, but we sometimes struggle to state it clearly. 

In these last few days where our usual habits have been revolutionized, people (someone more, others to a lesser degree) have been forced to use the internet. 

In this way, video chats, conference calls, online lessons, and also Whatsapp video calls have become daily experiences and new channels to discover and use at best. The director of Iprase (the provincial corporation for the academic personnel education) knows it well: all of a sudden, he had to manage thousands of requests for remote learning.  

Until now, in fact, the majority of the lessons were done having a teacher physically present in the classroom, while only a few modules of the teaching offer were taught remotely. In a few days, it has been necessary to revise the installation of Iprase’s FAD (formazione a distanza, i.e. remote learning) and make some adjustments so that the platform was available to the users while solving some problems and difficulties rarely encountered so far inasmuch as the limited use of the tool. 

These activities, having urgency as the main characteristic, have not surely been realized in a simple way: neither from a technical level, nor from the management of the thousands of daily calls that arrived at the offices and nor from the decisional level of the people that needed to make a decision. 

In this way, we have tried to help Iprase to analyze and make sound decisions without permitting the urge to guide us: we tried to have a clear objective that went beyond this critical moment. We now aim at bringing remote learning (e-learning) in the daily lives of people and make it become an integral part of the educational offer from this moment on. 

Our foundersDavide Piazza and Nicola Grigoletti on the 30th of January will be in Geneva to present the case study on the mobile app used by Banca Etica. 

In particular, during this meetup, there will be the occasion to discover new principles that lie behind the API-led approach, analysing in a practical way the case study regarding Banca Etica's app.

During this meetup, Davide and Nicola will demonstrate how the API-led has helped Banca Etica in implementing the mobile app and how this has helped its team to accelerate the releasing times of this project and the later ones. 

Thanks to the Anypoint Platform functionalities and to the API-led approach the two teams involved in the project (mobile team and integration team) could proceed and work in parallel. Once that the API experience contracts were defined and exposed to the App, the implementation could occurred smoothly until the final test phase with the users in a short time frame.

Adopting the API-led approach at a level of system of records has permitted to manage the various dynamics of a parallel important and complex project inside the bank without any repercussions, permitting the migration of its core banking system from a provider to another one. 

In the following projects, the team of Thread Solutions published the anypoint platform and the best practices on Anypoint Exchange, which permitted to rapidly interface third-party systems for compliance projects and new business opportunities. 

Alberto Melati talks about his onboarding experience in Thread Solutions

When a new member becomes part of the team it is extremely important to have a great and solid onboarding plan. A structured learning strategy for newcomers helps them to become rapidly familiar with all technologies that we use in our business.

Our study-path covers a lot of technologies commonly used in modern IT, but the main focus of our onboarding plan is on APIs development and MuleSoft API-led connectivity. The first, and probably most important, building block of the plan is the “Mule Development Fundamentals Course” which serves to introduce a beginner to APIs development using MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. But, of course, attending a course is not enough: after having learned the fundamentals it’s time to address a real and challenging problem. Therefore, once the course was concluded, I started to develop an internal project, under the supervision of a senior developer: although it was approached as a “study project”, it was also a real project whose outcomes now helps us to improve our business (i.e. it was intended to follow all the lifecycle from development to production). The following is the onboarding integration project that I developed during my first period at Thread Solutions.
 

The challenge

We use avaza.com as management platform. Everything regarding any aspect of our business must be managed from Avaza. In particular any paid-leave request must be submitted and approved through Avaza. Currently the paid-leave scheduling for the team is a bit complicated because it is not possible for everyone to have a global vision of requests. Thus, for the convenience of the whole team, we want to see all scheduled absences from work on a (Google) calendar. Thus, we have to build an integration system which connects Avaza and Google Calendar through their APIs.

The solution

After the initial analysis of the problem, which was useful to learn the API-led fundamentals, I decided to implement the following solution. First of all we need two system-APIs (sAPI) to communicate with Avaza and Google Calendar. To build such sAPI is always a good practice because they provide an abstraction layer from external world. After that, we need a process-API (pAPI) which implements all business logic (in this particular case it will be an If This Then That, IFTTT, application).

The development of the two system-APIs is challenging on its own. Although this two APIs does not implement any logic, their development gives the possibility to become familiar with some modern technologies such as oAuth2 (which is used to authenticate on Google and Avaza APIs). Fortunately Mule has an extremely well-done structure that permit to handle this (common) scenario easily. 
On the other side the process-API implements all logics that we need in the project. It takes advantage of the two sAPI to retrieve data from Avaza and, after some validation logics, write them on Google Calendar. Also the development of this pAPI gives the possibility to learn some best practices of modern IT: when a paid-leave is requested, Avaza sends a webhook to our pAPI and thus we have to implement a reliability pattern. For this reason we used a database, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), to store all data received from Avaza. Subsequently the pAPI takes data from the DB and process them (or reprocess, in case of errors). Finally, since all APIs are hosted on CloudHub, the pAPI takes advantage of CloudHub notification system to manage alerts and bad request.
As part of the onboarding strategy, all presented structure was not planned at the beginning, but instead an incremental approach was used: I started with some simple task and then I added additional features step by step (additional logic, error handling and, at the end, a full reliability pattern).

This project, which is of course simple if compared with projects that we handle with our customers, gave me a nice and solid introduction to MuleSoft integration technologies and thus it serves as a good foundation for future, customer-related, projects.
It is remarkable that this integration system is now deployed to production environment and it is fully functional!
 

In conclusion

It is noteworthy that during development of this internal project, which is of course developed as a learning path for newcomers, we were also able to test some new MuleSoft’s cutting-edge products (such as Anypoint Visualizer and Monitoring) with benefits for the whole team. For example this is how Anypoint Visualizer automatically shows the actual implementation of the project:

The duplication at process layer is due to the fact that we used our service server to call APIs (i.e. actually there is only one pAPI).

Another example is Anypoint Monitoring which shows all metrics of APIs (in the figure below of our process-API):

After the battle for cloud services, Google and Amazon seem to have found a new battlefield, our homes. In the race “who will be your AI home assistant” it looks like Amazon started with a head start, but Google Home is catching up fast.

What is an AI home assistant?

Forget typing into a keypad or pushing buttons on a phone to make calls, access apps or play music. Thanks to the latest voice activated technology you can now do all this and more, simply by talking into a device. We're not talking about Bluetooth speakers here. We're talking about speakers that live in your house, permanently plugged in and connected to the internet. In the case of Amazon's Echo line, you're speaking to Alexa; in the case of Google's Home line, you're speaking to Google Assistant.
 

The operating system of the future.

AI assistant companies are trying to expand their technology to as much devices as possible.

Why is that? Synchronisation is everything!

It’s important to have the same assistant on as much home devices as possible: smartphone, tv, fridge, car, radio,... . Let’s say for example that, at home, you dictated your shopping list, but you don’t have the same assistant on your smartphone. You won’t be able to access your list at the shop.

Creating an ecosystem where all day long users interact with their products and collecting all that user data is the key goal of these companies. Futurists would also dare say that the one who has the most used assistant has also the future of the OS in hands.
 

Google Home vs Alexa.

Currently there are three assistant technologies on the market: Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Siri. Amazon’s Alexa remains the most advanced with products like the Echo Dot being a particularly good value for those looking to dip their toes into the smart home space.

In the race “who will be your AI home assistant” it looks like Amazon started with a head start. However, Google is fast catching up and in 2018 we predict major advances from the search giant.

Google Home can understand context much better than Amazon Echo so, for example, if you don’t know the name of the Eminem song but you know that it features Rihanna, it should still find the track ‘Love the Way You Lie’. Similarly, if you ask a question about where was Adele born and then follow up with ‘tell me how many Grammys has she won?’ Google Home will know you are still talking about Adele.

As for Siri, it seems that Apple – once the pioneer of voice activated technology – has now dropped to the back of the pack.
 

Context is queen!

Of the three main voice technology platforms Google Home probably has the most developed ‘brain’ thanks to its integration with Google’s search engine. And that is where it’s get interesting.

For some time now context has become a big deal for the search engine. Content marketers needed to adapt their strategy. Google SEO optimisation has changed, just inserting keywords on your website doesn’t do it anymore.

The focus has shifted to context and relevance between search queries, different pages and different websites. All this to anticipate the growth of AI devices and voice search. You wouldn’t launch a voice search saying weather Val Gardena Saturday, you’d go “hey Google” or “Alexa” “what will the weather be like this weekend in Val Gardena?” Thus the arrival of long tail/ conversational phrase approach.
 

But not only at home.

After Ford and BMW, also Toyota is joining in. Later on this year their cars will have, as a standard feature, native support for Alexa. At first this option will be available on the Entune 3.0 app suite and Lexus Enform App Suite 2.0. As of next year others models will follow. Using Alexa drivers will receive news updates, talk to their media system, record shopping lists and so much more.

Amazon is also targeting big on enterprise. Even in the office Alexa could be used for booking meetings and conference rooms, calendaring/scheduling events, joining conference calls, retrieving data during meetings or presentations, executing “smart home” functions in the office like adjusting thermostats, turning on lights and more.

There’s enormous potential in the enterprise to build or integrate with productivity tools that actually help people or groups accomplish specific tasks.

So, what’s the score at this point?

Google, IBM, Microsoft and Apple, any cloud services or AI company, will need to respond sooner rather than later. Alexa has such a head start in the home, with a roughly 70 percent (or greater) market share worldwide. At this point Amazon has the advantage.

Today is the first day of Spring and great news comes along with the new season with regards to MuleSoft, one of our key partner Vendor. 

The biggest announcement is Salesforce acquiring MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in a cash and stock deal. The leading CRM cloud company is buying this leading platform for building Application Networks and API led architectures.

Thread Solutions is a MuleSoft's partner serving our beloved Italian country since the start and we were using the platform even before MuleSoft itself existed as a company. What does this acquisition mean for us as partners and developers? And what does it mean for our customers that embraced Mulesoft's Anypoint Platform as the backbone speed accelerator for their Digital Transformation initiatives?

First of all, nothing changes for existing contracts, product development or deployment plans as reported in the FAQ page. MuleSoft will remain committed to its vision of building a platform for application networks and accelerate our customer's digital transformations, enabling them to unlock data across legacy systems, cloud apps and devices to make smarter, faster decisions and create highly differentiated, connected customer experiences. Our team of architects and professionals at Thread Solutions can assist you in understanding how this can be achieved, feel free to reach out to us.

What this acquisition brings to the market is twofold

The price of the acquisition, one year after MuleSoft's IPO, definitely establishes the value of the company: the value of the technology (Anypoint Platform), the vision (Application Networks), the approach (API led) and the methodology (C4E, Center for Enablement). "After 15 years working with integrations, I finally see that we live in an "Integration of Everything" world.", says Davide Piazza, co-founder of Thread Solutions. I started working when we were still discussing among IT architects about EAI (Enterprise Application Integation), ESB (Enterprise Service BUS) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and trying to make a compelling job out of it. Now we not only face an "IT world", but also a "consumer world" where omnichannel and user experience is driving huge expectations and putting much pressure on how IT can deliver assets faster. We, as users, expect not only to have a mobile first experience in everything we do, from shopping, to health, to office work, but we expect that emerging technologies like Augmented Reality and Voice assistants like Alexa or Google Home will be instantly available in our preferred apps. That's where we see tremendous impact of the API led approach bringing value not only to IT optimisation but in real user and customer experience."

Together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate the pace of adoption of the leading platforms for CRM and Application Networks to the broader market. In Italy we help companies to approach their customer 360° view. Based on the data they have in their CRM, with the right API led approach we are able to build reusable and discoverable assets that give IT that delivery speed many of them are struggling for, under the pressure of Business and Regulatory enforcement (like for example PSD2 and GDPR). We see the opportunity to accelerate our own growth in the market bringing to our customers not only expertise and technical skills using Anypoint Platform (thanks to our certified team of Muleys), or establishing a C4E, we really have space to add great value with our agile mindset, best practices know how and the ability to stay only where great challenges and expectations live.

Mule 4 and Anypoint Studio 7 go GA

But there's more! Today, after a long period of beta, Mule 4 and Anypoint Studio 7 become General Availability. We've been using the new release during the beta period and are very impressed by the major power, higher speed and greater simplicity that this new release brings to the platform. We're excited about this announcement of GA and we'll be covering more details in other posts. You can read the announcement post on the MuleSoft's blog.

Thread Solutions and Max Mara Fashion Group partnering up for the first Italian Mulesoft Meetup

Mulesoft Meetup Italia - 7 march, 2019 | 6:30 PM

March will be a very important month. For the first time, the MuleSoft community unites on Italian soil. As an official partner, there’s only one place we’ll be! 

This meetup will be a unique opportunity where all professionals and specialists of API-led connectivity can share experiences, discover new opportunities and pick up new ideas. During the talks, speakers will dive into arguments related to System Integration, API Management, API-Led Connectivity and examples of SalesForce integrations.

Main components and characteristics of the Mulesoft Anypoint Platform will be illustrated through some case studies. Team members will tell all about their experiences, the difficulties they faced and how they approached the important challenges to adopt new business models.

We at Thread Solutions, as official partners since 2012, will have the opportunity to tell how we have supported the mobile strategy initiation of a major holding company in the fashion and retail sector, famous all over the world for its brands: Max Mara Fashion Group.

The subject of our talk will be the issue of legacy modernisation, orchestration and system security. We’ll use the case study of the B2C application of “Diffusione Tessile” and focus on the potential given by the idea of reusing components in an API-led development context. All with a view to increasing ROI and business agility.

We wont reveal too much, but what we have in store for you, is a non usual gadget: a nice gift and small game chasing the challenges of integration and digital innovation. 

Enter the world of APIs during the networking between appetisers and a chatter.
So come and meet us.