A Tech Support Hero is Something to Be

Organic Technology Consultant Adria Richards of Aden Networks, model Zendesk customer and blogger on But You’re A Girl, has a daily web show called Ask Adria.

We've mentioned Adria before (see There are Women Out There that Wants to Wear Your Stuff) when she called us out and made us aware that our tee line was men-only.

This week Adria has received a copy of our new tee line, and has dedicated her Tuesday show to talk about her many years of experience with various help desk systems titled "Be a Tech Support Hero with Zendesk". Get some insight from a person in the know and watch the show. We've embedded it here (it's approx one hour), and love it. Not (only) because Adria is a big Zendesk fan, but also because Adria talks about these things in a way we all can relate to.

Adria, you got some big fans here too!

Amsterdam Meetup

Zendesk meetups have mostly taken place in the US and APAC region. But that's going to change as we're now announcing the first in a series of European meetups. This one is to take place in Amsterdam on Tuesday June 9 from 6-8pm at Café Restaurant Dauphine.

Yours truly is in town for SIIA OnDemand Europe 2009 and we wanted to take advantage of the trip to reach out to Zendesk customers, partners and friends in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is not our largest market, but we hope to see as many as possible of the ~100 Dutch companies and organizations that have taken Zendesk for a spin. As always please RSVP via the event's Facebook page. Everybody's welcome. See you in the bar!

Stay tuned for news on Hamburg, London and Copenhagen meetups.

Boston HQ Sneak Peek

On this quiet and uneventful Memorial Day we hereby offer a sneak peek at the new Boston Zendesk headquarters, where the sun always shines, and the buddha machines quietly hum in harmony as tickets are being resolved and new features being designed.

SSO with Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Jon Gales is a Django/Python developer and he has recently posted instructions on how to enable Zendesk remote authentication with Django.

Jon writes on his blog:

I had a pleasant time yesterday hooking Zendesk into an existing Django site. Their API has a hook for remote authentication which is a lot easier than their chart makes it look. Actually it was accomplished in only a couple lines of Python. [...] To the user it’s all transparent. Kudos to Zendesk on making it so easy.

Thanks to Jon for sharing and good luck and have fun to all Django developers out there. You can read more on the Zendesk Remote Authentication API in our developer section.

Zendesk Buddha Machine v2

Together for the first time. Zengirl and Zenbaby presenting the new Zendesk Buddha Machine version 2. With new tunes, pitch control, slimmer packaging and an even greener Zendesk green.

Share your Zenfessions to get your own ZBM2!

G'day Again

We're back in Australia for a couple of meetups. In Melbourne on May 27th and Sydney on June 1st. As always we look forward to seeing our friends, customers and partners in the neighborhood. And feel free to bring a friend--or a prospect.

In Melbourne we'll see you at The Bull & Bear from 5-8pm. In Sydney we'll be at The Australian Hotel also from 5-8pm.

As always please RSVP via the Facebook event pages. See you there!

Thank You, Wellington

Last month's meetup in Wellington was a lot of fun and splendid networking in this beautiful city. We want to thank our good friends, customers, partners and other aficionados for turning up, here amongst the guys from Xero, Madefromnewzealand.com, Silverstripe, Ponoko and everybody else. Great seeing you.

Next up: Sydney, Melbourne, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Boston and San Francisco. Again. Stay tuned for updates. Or go become a Zendesk Lover on Facebook for the latest.

ScreenSteps Brings Tutorials and Guides to Your Help Desk

Another day, another integration. Today we're very pleased to show you Blue Mango's ScreenSteps integration that brings instructions, tutorials and guides directly to your Zendesk help desk. The ScreenSteps widget allows your help desk agents to search for and grab content from your ScreenSteps Live account directly in your Zendesk help desk, and include links to relevant material from ScreenSteps in a ticket.

Blue Mango has put together this nice little video that demonstrates the widget integration:

You can get the full details on the widget on Blue Mango's blog.

According to Blue Mangos web site, "the ScreenSteps Support Suite allows companies and organizations to transform the way they approach customer support. It is built around a simple philosophy: each step of providing instruction to a customer should be easy. It should be easy to create customer tutorials and guides. It should be easy to publish them. It should be easy to deliver to the customer. And it should be easy for the customer to understand the information they are given. And that is what the ScreenSteps Support Suite does, it makes it easy to turn customer support into customer satisfaction."

Disclaimer: The ScreenSteps integration widget was created by Blue Mango and is not an official Zendesk widget and not supported by Zendesk support.

WorkflowMax Brings Integration to KashFlow, Xero, Quickbooks, More

WorkflowMax is a SaaS job- and project management solution that streamlines business tasks. From quoting, invoicing and project management, to time sheets, document sharing and profit analysis.

The service interfaces with most leading small business accounts and payroll packages such as KashFlow, Xero, Quickbooks, Saasu, MYOB and many many more.

Last week Auckland based WorkflowMax announced a widget integration for Zendesk that allows you to record time against trouble tickets. The integration supports data flow from Zendesk into Xero, MYOB, Quickbooks, Kashflow and Sassu applications for your time-tracking and billing requirements.

WorkflowMax has put together this fine little video demonstrating the integration:

Get the full details on how to embed the WorkflowMax widget in your Zendesk help desk at www.WorkflowMax.com.

Disclaimer: The WorkflowMax integration widget was created by WorkflowMax and is not an official Zendesk widget and not supported by Zendesk support.

Announcing Series A, New Boston HQ and 1,000 Customers (PR)

Big day today for the Zendesk team. We're announcing our Series A investment by Charles River Ventures, opening of our new Boston headquarters and that Zendesk now has 1,000 customers sharing the good help desk karma, here amongst Twitter, MSNBC, Condé Nast Publications, Scribd, Rackspace Cloud and John Lewis Plc.

On the last day of October last year, a taxi pulled up in front of Zendesk's offices in downtown Copenhagen and out jumped Devdutt Yellurkar from Charles River Ventures (CRV). He had stumbled upon us on the web, and had flown in to have a chat about a future together. The rest is, as you say, history, and today we're happy to announce that we have raised our Series A from CRV and that Devdutt has joined our board.

We're experiencing tremendous growth at Zendesk, and we have a lot of plans for our product. If we want to keep up with the customer demand and fulfill our own product ambitions, we need to make an evolutional leap. And to do that we need good counseling, a kick-ass network, über talented people, energy boosters, lebensraum and money in the bank. And with CRV we get all of that.

Zendesk's new corporate headquarters is situated in downtown Boston, on South Street in Boston's old Leather district. We have approx. 70% of our business in the US, and it makes sense to get closer to the action. We will remain a global operation and retain our operations in both Europe and APAC.

Last month we passed 1,000 customers. Meaning that one thousand active paying organizations all over the world are using Zendesk for supporting customers or employees right now. It doesn't seem to end and we want to reach out to some of the original first-movers and Zendesk customers such as MAXroam Cubic Telecom, WebExpenses, Laughing Squid, TETCO and Inquisite Inc. Thank you for being such excellent and loyal customers. We owe it all to you.

Full press release below the fold.