I would like to be able to make apps for clients via Heroku, but I would love it if they could sign up for the billing themselves so I wouldn't have to keep charging them monthly. Creating a team or a collaboration allows me to change the dyno type to whatever I want, charging them an arbitrary amount of money. I was wondering if there's any way to set things up where the person I'm developing for pays the bill, but has full control over what that bill will be, while I can still work on the app. A collaborator setup is almost what I want—you're not allowed to provision payed addons—but for some reason they still allow you to change the dyno type.
Also, I'm not 100% sure if this is the best exchange to be posting this on, please feel free to point me in the right direction.
My company (which does Tutoring services) recently transitioned to Square for their Appointments and POS and I am trying to automate certain tasks. I wanted to know if there was a way to create "Open Tickets" for transactions through the Connect API.
I went through the documentation and couldn't find anything that refers to "tickets". I checked the seller community but wasn't satisfied with the answer from Square since they seemed to not understand what "Tickets" meant. I have provided more details at the end of this post in case someone wasn't sure about "Tickets" here as well.
I believe currently Tickets are only available through the Square POS app (Android/iOS) and not on the Web Dashboard. I would like to be pointed in the right direction in terms of what I might need to look at in order to get access to automatic ticket creation.
For more details, please read on.
In order to clarify what I mean by "tickets", here is Square's page regarding "Open Tickets". They are basically a way to create and save transaction info ahead of time so customers can be charged quicker. The way we use "Open Tickets" is we create tickets for Tutoring sessions every day in the morning and when a customer shows up, all they have to do is look up their ticket and pay. We do this since we expect a lot of traffic every day and we want to streamline the process as much as possible.
Therefore, our admin staff ends up creating 80-100 tickets manually every day! I wanted to know if there was a way to automate this. I already have a running Google Sheets with all appointments data that would be needed in order to create a ticket. I just need to find a way to communicate with ticket creation.
I apologize if this is a long post. I tried to be concise but thorough. Please let me know if there is any detail that I missed. I appreciate any help!
Unfortunately, Open Tickets isn’t currently available for Square’s API. Square's API is only able to track completed transactions at this time.
We are constantly improving the product based on feedback like this, so I’ll be sure to share your thoughts with the API team.
There are plenty of companies out there offering texting to your landline without affecting voice service (ie zipwhip, heywire), but does anybody know what they're using? Twilio almost offers this, but it's currently in beta and only for toll free numbers. TextUs.biz has an explanation of how they do it in their faq, which explains that they have some sort of agreement with their SMS gateway provider that lets them get texts to a particular number routed to them, but afer a lot of googling I still can't find any resources on how to make it work.
(Disclaimer: I'm the VP of Engineering # HeyWire) The TextUs FAQ is spot on. SMS routing and voice routing are completely separate. OTT text carriers like us have agreements with SMS aggregators and have to abide by industry rules and guidelines. The agreements and rules may vary depending on whether you're doing short code, non-toll-free long code, and toll-free long code. International and MMS are also other dimensions as well.
In general, our application stacks connect to SMS gateways, which connect to SMSCs at our aggregator partners. Beyond that, the details of how everything works isn't technically complicated. Some the real special sauce comes in the details of all the agreements and partnerships required to get things up and running. Unfortunately, those types of details fall under the umbrella of "trade secrets". Partly due to providers not wanting to reveal too much to competitors and partly due to the agreements themselves, which prohibit disclosure of details.
Are you asking because you're trying to build something or just to try to find out some general information?
EDIT: And I just realized I wasn't logged into my account when I posted this. Oh well.
Our Magento store uses the Website Payments Pro payment gateway through PayPal. For the most part this works pretty well. Occasionally (about once a day), we get failed transaction emails and the errors are very generic (i.e. "Internal Error" or "There was an error processing your order. Please contact us or try again later."). I've been working with our PayPal rep, but he has not yet been able to figure out why. This doesn't happen with every transaction, and typically if the customer re-submits the order it will work the second time. This has been very frustrating for me as the developer, my employers, and the customers who see the same generic error message in a popup dialog box.
My questions are as follows:
Is this normal for a site that gets about 300+ orders/day?
Are we at the mercy of bugs in the PayPal system?
Do any of you have experience with similar problems? Or, on the contrary, do you have experience with a site that gets at least as much traffic and never has any errors with PayPal?
I'm at a loss for what to do. I want to believe that it is not an error in what we are sending to PayPal. But if every client using PP as their gateway experienced this much pain I would think someone with a loud enough voice would be pushing for improvements. I don't have any experience with other payment gateways, so perhaps PP is the lesser of all evils...
you certainly need to be prepared for issues like this and error messages for clients need to be clear and informative what to do if error happens.
yes you are and this can't be only paypal issue this can be n of issues with network latency user interaction etc.
there are n amount of sites experiencing this as the system is engineered with lot of break points and you can't assure that issues do not happen on 3rd party system or sites and you can have several precautions to avoid that by doubling the payment methods with several gateways etc.
The company where I work for (1800+ Employees) is looking to enhance the personal relationships between its employees, allow a better collaboration and communication between departments and make it easier for the HR department to identify skills, experience and interests among the personnel (ex: we have some colleagues with deep knowledge of SAP modules and products, but during concrete projects it results very difficult to identify them and integrate them). Therefore, they want to implement a social network for our intranet.
We are just looking for the basic features such as profiles, discussion boards and so on, so nothing fancy. I proposed Community Server but my boss said .Net and java are no-gos. He wants LAMP and is not interested in a web solution like Ning, because of privacy and security concerns. It does not matter if it is Open-Source or commercial software. But it should allow a complete layout customization and must also have access from the outside world.
So my question would be, is there something like Community Server running on a LAMP stack?
Thank you very much!
UPDATE: We already have a Facebook page and a group. But my boss wants some features not included in Facebook such as a tag cloud in each profile page displaying skills and relevant proyects; and a feature like the "neighborhoods" from Last.FM, where you can group people with similar skills and interests and there is also the confidentialy issue (discussions about projects, clients, etc). So, any ideas?
You should check out StatusNet. http://status.net/
It doesn't directly answer your question, but aren't you rather trying to reinvent the wheel?
Facebook has got Social Networking down and the likely hood is 95% of your 1800 employees already use it.
Why would you go to the effort of writing and supporting a product as well as asking your employees to update information about themselves in multiple places when you could just set up a Facebook Network.
The other point I would make is, why are you limiting yourself to one way of doing things right from the off. Perhaps a detailed analysis of which technologies best serve your purpose would be more appropriate.
I appreciate this doesn't answer you question, I just feel this is a good example of Corporations unwilling to embrace tools already out there, I suspect because they are scared of them.
I'm probably right in guess that you're company heavily monitors Facebook usage, which is why this also might be hard.
Try Open Atrium, a Drupal-based team server.
Some sort of facebook application would allow you to keep the data on a server that you manage, but still use facebook's existing features. Pretty certain that facebook uses PHP for its application framework.
I agree with MrEdmundo and would upvote him if I were registered. Dont fall victim to "It wasnt invented here" syndrome. I bet your boss is like "we need something like facebook".
If it makes you feel better... here is a little story:
I was trying to implement some sort of group chat so fellow employees could ask quick questions to eachother online without having to get up or if someone was on the phone, etc. However, the service I installed (some sort of jabber daemon, i forget which one) never really got used. The solution? Just install the facebook chat client because all the co-workers are already on facebook most the day anyways!
plus, the "screen name" is appropriate because it is our real names, not stuff like "Out Into Space", "theman", or "fly-mystikal-dj-69"
You might want to consider something like Drupal. It's technically a CMS, but it's extremely customizable, and there are a lot of modules available that provide social-networking-style features.
Use Office Messenger for communication. It's basically like MSN Messenger but run on the company's servers so they can monitor all traffic. To know who has expertise in what area, it can't be too hard to build your own simple CRUD application to record profiles of employees and have each profile tagged with key skills, that the employee has and build a search function to find the people with the skills you need at any given time.
You can create an application using the Facebook SDK (PHP, java or any other language) and moderate it so that only employees can use it. That way you can use the existing Facebook features and add the tag clouds and other stuff your boss wants.
I've not used it, but Dolphin might be worth downloading to try out.
elgg.org
LAMP easy to install and setup, looks like your requirements would all be easily satisfied by the official plugins that are available.
Another option: http://buddypress.org/