Introduction

Oracle CRM OnDemand has a great feature that allows you to set up a workflow process that will detect an Event and associate a series of Actions for that event.
We're going to take one of those actions, send an email, and publish a message out to our Twitter account.

There may be several reasons why you want to do this:

a) you want an alert when someone changes some data that you are interested in
b) the alert has not been set up by your dev or IT folks - and you don't do code
c) you want your friends (well sales team and work colleagues) to know about the changes as well
d) you use Twitter today ...

Of course, you have to be careful about the data that you are publishing.
It is still Enterprise data - subject to the same data privacy laws that is exercised today on your CRM data.

Step 1: Set up your workflow to create an email

This is straight forward - if you have never done it before it will take about 5 minutes.
We will create a workflow that gets triggered whenever one of our contacts changes job title - either they got promoted or changed jobs - and someone else has updated the job title ...

part i) Set up a workflow to generate an event whenever someone changes a JobTitle.

From the Main CRM On Demand screen - Select 'Admin' then 'Administer Workflow Rules'
Create the new Workflow with the following settings

Workflow Name: JobTitleEventFeed
Record Type: Contact
Active : (set as active)
Trigger Event: When modified record is saved
Workflow Rule Condition: (PRE('<JobTitle>') <> [<JobTitle>])

Quite simply - whenever a modified record is saved, and the Job Title has changed - then fire off the action.


part ii) Set up an Action to be triggered whene the workflow conditions are met

Once you have created the workflow - you need to create an action (any number of actions). We will use the 'Send Email action'.
Create a new action. Set the following properties.

Action Name: Send to Blogger
To: Valid Email Address
Set the email address as to a unique mail-to-blogger address e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com.
Subject: %%%[<ContactFullName>]%%% has changed Job title
Message body : %%%[<ContactFullName>]%%% of %%%[<AccountName>]%%% has changed jobs from %%%PRE('<JobTitle>')%%% to %%%[<JobTitle>]%%%

(If you had not figured out by now - %%%[<ContactFullName>]%%% is a way of saying 'reaplce this string with the ContactFullName value.)

Make sure the Action and the Workflows are Active


Step 2 - set up your blogger account
We are going to create a blogger account where we can send the email.

a) create a blogger account - e.g. http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com
b) set up your 'mail-to-blogger' address (go to Settings -> Email) - e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com. You will use the 'mail-to-blogger' address defined in Step 1.
c) Make a note of the RSS feed URL. In this example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml. You will use this in Step 3


Step 3 - set up your twitterfeed account
d) go to twitterfeed.com and associate the feed URL to your twitterfeed account. In ths example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml




All you need now is a good Twitter client (I use Twirl an AIR desktop gadget - which means it works on Windows, Linux and Mac).

So - go ahead - change a contact's title ... - it will get published to your Twitter account... (twitterfeed has a lag of up to 30 minutes)

There may be a more efficient way of doing this - I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has a better way ...