Best Farewell Ever

On July 9 TechCrunch Europe is hosting The Europas, a tech innovation award show honouring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Zendesk is nominated in the category Best Enterprise B2B Startup.

You may not know this, but Zendesk is a European startup, more precisely a Danish startup, but have always had global operations, and right not we're in the process of relocating our headquarters to the US. Give us a good farewell by casting your vote on Zendesk!

Bug Tracking Meets Help Desk: Zendesk and Atlassian Tie the Knot (technically speaking)

Bug tracking is usually reserved for the engineers in the back room who hold all of the technology secrets. The customer service folks get to walk people through the solutions once the engineers figure them out. Until now, marrying the two was not a very harmonious proposition. Today, Zendesk is announcing integration with Atlassian, which builds Web-based collaboration tools for developers and has more than 15,000 customers worldwide. JIRA is one of their most popular tools, and it’s one of our favorite applications for bug tracking.

Now JIRA developers can integrate with Zendesk to offer a customer support interface that, as we like to say, is beautifully simple. Now any support organization can integrate their Zendesk with their engineering department's bug tracking application. This means that Zendesk tickets and JIRA issues become part of the same system, enabling engineers to report back to the help desk on progress resolving product issues. In turn, help desk support people can keep customers abreast of progress. And informed customers mean happier customers!

The integration requires installation of the Zendesk Updater plugin, which is available via Atlassian's Plugin Exchange. Please refer to our support forums for further documentation on the integration. Also observe that we have open soured the JIRA plugin, and you can access the source code from Zendesk's Github repository.

San Francisco Meet-up v3

We're back in San Francisco for another meet-up for Zendesk customers, partners, friends and fools. This year we're co-hosting with our friends from Get Satisfaction.

Looking forward to seeing you at The Brick House Cafe in SOMA on Wednesday July 1st from 6-8pm. As always please RSVP via the Facebook event page.

Dropbox Support for iPhone and Android Apps (PR)

We're pretty psyched to announce a new mobile Dropbox that you can embed in your iPhone and Android apps. Zendesk has had a web Dropbox for a while now. It enables you to easily embed a feedback or help mechanism in your web site without building your own html forms or integrating to our API. You can see an example of a Dropbox right here on this page, it's the little tab on your left. The mobile Dropbox does exactly the same for your iPhone and Android apps.

So are you an app developer for one of these platforms and do you want to make sure that your customers can always submit feedback or support requests directly to you from within your application, you can now embed a mobile Dropbox in your application. All customer requests are being piped directly to your Zendesk ensuring that your customers get the service transparency they expect and you as a developer gets professional-grade workflow to properly deal with customer service and support.

The talented people at jTribe and Headnix are already embedding the mobile Dropbox in their popular apps, and you can too by downloading the code libraries directly from Zendesk's GitHub repository. Both the Cocoa library for iPhone and Java library for Android are available and we've open sourced it so that you can extend and customize it to your needs exactly.

Full press release below the fold.

Boston Meet-up this Wednesday

As we're preparing for today's meet-ups in Hamburg and Copenhagen, we're thrilled to announce that we'll have our first meet-up at our new Boston HQ this Wednesday already. A lot of things are going on in Boston next week, and we also hope to see a lot of our friends from the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming by.

Look forward to seeing you on 107 South Street Wednesday 24 June from 6-8pm. Zendesk will host an open bar and nibbles. As always please RSVP via our Facebook event page.

Zen Tunes has Arrived to Facebook

Now you can chill out to soothing Zen tunes on Facebook too, as the virtual Zendesk Buddha Machine now is available as a Facebook app. Go visit and share it today for good help desk karma.

More CRM for your Help Desk

The last thing anyone wants to do is get in the way of a sale. Woe is the guy that costs his company some much needed revenue, especially in these times, because he lost some information or wasn’t aware of a customer support issue. As a help-desk company that also likes to make sales, we really understand the value of good customer service. (Side note: good story on value of good CRM data on InsideCRM.com).

That is why we are happy to announce our two-way integration with Tactile CRM, a great UK company that provides web-based contact and sales management system for small businesses and departments. With this integration our customers can display user information from Tactile CRM on ticket requesters directly in the Zendesk user interface, and ticket information from Zendesk on customers in Tactile CRM.

So, if you're running both Tactile CRM and Zendesk you will always know what customer information you have on your support requesters, and vice versa, the outstanding support tickets you have with customers. Voila, no more sales lost because of miscommunication or lost information.

From Zendesk simply go to the Account tab and configure the relevant Tactile CRM widget (going live Tuesday morning CET). From Tactile CRM simply enable the integration from the Admin area as described in this nifty little video from Tactile CRM embedded below.

Want to learn more? Meet both the Zendesk and Tactile CRM crew tomorrow at Zendesk's meetup in London at The Dover Castle, 6:30pm Tuesday, June 16th. We look forward to seeing you there.

Mobile Branding and Localization

With the feature upgrade last weekend, the mobile Zendesk UI experienced some improvements.

Your branded color-scheme and i18n settings are now mirrored in the mobile user interface. So if you have enabled the chinese end-user interface and have a red color scheme your mobile login page would look something like this example. The "remember me" login feature is now also fully supported in the mobile interface. So no more repeatable logins. Please note that the mobile UI is not iPhone optimized, but accessible from any mobile device with a web browser.

Stay tuned for next week where we have more news for our iPhone and Android developers out there.

Also, remember to check out the details for the latest feature release, that included a new ability to merge tickets, full CSV downloads (no more pagination), client capture and auto-subscriptions. Read more about it in our support forums. Have fun.

Support Billing with FreshBooks

There’s nothing like capping off good work with an incorrect invoice — no client likes getting a $4,000 bill for a $500 issue. Accurate and efficient billing is essential to any professional or organization who provides time and material-based services. The good news is that it’s easy to get this part right.

We're pleased to announce the FreshBooks Widget, which allows you to easily report time on FreshBooks projects from within Zendesk. FreshBooks provides the fastest way to track time and invoice clients and has helped more than 800,000 users since 2004. Now you can do incident-based billing without leaving Zendesk during your daily work.

The widget can be configured in just a few minutes as described in our support forums.

If you are not already using FreshBooks, use the coupon code "zendesk" to save $20 on a new subscription. You can also read more about the integration on FreshBooks' blog.

First Copenhagen Meetup and Last Farewell

On Thursday June 18 we hope to see all Danish customers, partners, friends and fools for our first actual Copenhagen meetup, which will also be a farewell to Copenhagen from the three founders Alexander Aghassipour, Morten Primdahl and Mikkel A. Svane, as we're joining our US crew in the new headquarters in Boston.

Please join us at Fischer from 5-7pm, where nibbles and, more importantly, the bar tab is on Zendesk. As always we kindly ask you to RSVP via the Facebook event page.

See you in Copenhagen!