Migrating from Clarify, SSO in Rails, Expert CSS Tips

Want to learn how to do really great CSS customization with Zendesk, how you migrate tickets from your Clarify system to Zendesk, or are you looking for SSO with Zendesk from your Rails app? Here's three really great articles from the previous week on these exact subjects.

Migrating from Clarify
Gary Shermann, VP of Services and Support for Dovetail Software, demonstrates the power of APIs in this article describing how to migrate tickets from Clarify to Zendesk. Clarify was one of the leading old-school help desk products, now buried somewhere deep in the Amdocs product stack. Even if you're not migrating from Clarify, this article is a good inspiration for using the APIs to populate your Zendesk.

SSO under Ruby on Rails
Zendesk's remote authentication feature is a slick, easy and powerful way of implementing SSO for Zendesk. It makes Zendesk a serf of your primary authentication mechanism, that be MS Active Directory or any homegrown system. If your primary authentication system is built in Rails, Tobias Crawley from Hand Built Software LLC, has just released this little gem for helping you enable Zendesk SSO from your Rails application.

CSS Expert tips
We've recently mentioned Onehub and their really slick Zendesk implementation, taking the CCS customization capabilities to its boundaries. Now you can get a few tips directly from the source in this article published recently on Onehub's blog. BTW Onehub empowers virtual teams with online tools for collaboration. Remember to check them out.

Thanks everybody for sharing your knowhow and experiences with Zendesk.

A Tweet is Worth a Thousand Words

Nobody likes to brag, but the feedback we're getting after the launch of the new editions and new site last month, is outright humbling. Here's a few tweets from the last couple of days that we think capture our zen-ambitions excellently. Thanks guys. Love you.

When Support Tickets Turn into Projects

With last month's release a new Basecamp Target saw the light of day. Basecamp integration is a highly requested feature amongst our customers but so far we haven't really identified what the common use-case is. The new Basecamp Target was bred by our own Basecamp usage, and we look very much forward to getting some customer feedback.

If you're unfamiliar with Zendesk Targets they're basically communication channels that you can trigger from ticket events. One of our more popular targets is the Clickatell SMS target that enables to send out SMS messages triggered by specific ticket events, e.g. an escalation or a re-prioritization. Another popular target is the Twitter target that enables you to send out status messages or an event stream to a Twitter account.

Of course Basecamp is the legendary web-based project-management tool, that has led the way for many enterprise 2.0 start-ups like ourselves. It's built by the Getting Real people at 37signals, has millions of users and is renowned for its ease-of-use and simplicity.

Here at Zendesk we use Basecamp to qualify, plan, assess and discuss the hundreds of feature requests we harvest from customers, stakeholders and of course ourselves. Some of these feature requests are spawned of support tickets. In stead of having a manual copy-and-paste workflow, we implemented a Basecamp Target that enabled us to create a message in a Basecamp project directly from a support ticket.

And that target is now available for all our customers. As with any other target you have full control over the conditions that triggers the target and what the target sends. It's enabled by an account admin in the Account tab: select Targets and then "add target". When configured and enabled it's available as an action on all triggers and automations. Have fun and let us know what you think.

Meet-up Hong Kong

We're back in the APAC region and are very much looking forward to see all of our good friends, customers and partners in Hong Kong for our first real Hong Kong meet-up. Belle, Bill, P.K., Don and the rest of you, join us at the East End Brewery, Quarry Bay on Saturday, October 10 from 5-7pm. The bar tab is on Zendesk.

Looking very much forward to seeing you all. As always please RSVP via Facebook.

Thank You, Mr. Smith

Come Join a Successful and Fast-growing Company in its Finest Hour

Zendesk offers a web application for customer care and support. The application is used by more than a thousand businesses and millions of users all over the world. We're currently a team of ~20 people spanning the world. We're setting up new headquarters in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and are looking for unique profiles to compliment our team:

- Online Marketing Manager - Filled
- Product Marketing Manager
- Product Manager
- Database Administrator - Filled
- UI/UX Designer
- Front-end Developer
- API Developer - Filled
- Back Office Developer - On Hold
- Application Engineer

Full job descriptions below the fold.

We offer competitive compensation, vacation, medical and dental coverage, life and disability insurance, stock options and 401k.

Please send a brief to-the-point application with your resume to jobs@zendesk.com. We will not respond to unsolicited recruiters. Remote workers will not be considered.