Vincent's Reviews: October 2017

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Announcing Shared Folders: Turning Automation into a Team Sport

A note from Mike Knoop, Zapier CPO and co-founder: Hi there—I'm Mike. I'm not a regular around the blog, but I get the privilege to pop in whenever we have big news to announce. Today's one of those days.

Our customers guide what we build. With help from our partners we make hundreds of improvements to Zapier every year. And as we climbed past 900 integrations and 1 million customers, we heard one consistent theme: people want to share Zaps with teammates.

Today's announcement delivers on that request. I'll let Chris, the lead on our teams product, take it from here.

At Zapier, we believe in the power of people. Computers should automate the boring stuff while humans focus on human work. Things like creating, strategizing, conversing, and collaborating.

That last one's important: collaborating. We get more done when we do things together. And up until now, it wasn't easy for teams to use Zapier.

Today we're unveiling shared folders to help teams automate anything, together. Shared folders let teammates access a shared set of Zaps and collaborate to build more powerful workflows.

With your individual Zapier account, you can create automated workflows called Zaps that connect two or more apps. But until now, you couldn't share those clever workflows with your co-workers.

Shared folders make it possible. Anyone with access to a shared folder can tweak and improve the Zaps inside or copy them for their own use. We even added an option to share accounts for other tools—like Dropbox, Pipedrive, and Typeform—so you don't need to create separate logins for everyone.

Automation is exponential. Every moment you spend automating something leads to time saved in the future. This adds another multiplier to the equation: shared folders is our leap into making all your web apps collaborative.

Want to learn more about how your team can get a leg-up with Zapier?

Start Your Team on Zapier

In this post, I'll break down some of the new collaborative features, how your team can use them with the apps you rely on every day, and how a handful of fast-moving teams are already using Zapier to get more done, together.

What's Inside

Team accounts, shared folders, and a breakdown of features
Using shared folders with your team's tools
How real teams automate together with shared folders

Shared Folders: The Best Way to Automate Together

Thousands of people have already joined teams on Zapier. Today, we're opening up access to brand new features.

Team-wide access to workflows

With shared folders, Zaps aren't limited to the person who built them first. If you build a workflow you want to share with the team, move it into a shared folder.

Anything in a shared folder is, well, shared with teammates. They can view, copy, or update any of the Zaps you share. It's the first time you'll be able to truly collaborate on a workflow in Zapier.

With shared folders you can:

Let anyone update a Zap, so you aren't stuck in a holding pattern while someone's in a meeting or on vacation.
Allow people to copy Zaps you build and use them like templates for their own workflows.
Show off your Zapier know-how, share your latest masterpiece, and inspire your teammates to automate more.

Don't worry: You pick what's shared, and what's not. You'll still have a private space for private Zaps. Shared folders make it easier to hand off your favorite workflows.

Share connections, not logins

Connect an account once and the whole team can use it in their custom workflows. That means if you have one company login for something like Facebook Lead Ads, Typeform, or Webmerge, you only need to add it to Zapier once.

Invite everyone, only pay for what you automate

Zapier grows with you. Our paid plans are based on how much time you actually save—not the number of people who join your team. Every team account includes usage-based pricing so you only pay for what you automate.

Don't get hung up on whether or not to invite a coworker to Zapier. It won't cost you anything until they're truly saving time with automation.

And loads of other features

This is just a cross-section of the collaboration features that Zapier for Teams brings to the table. Teams also offer unlimited Zaps, a single invoice for everyone, and enterprise-ready security. You can even bring existing Zaps with you from a personal account when you create a team.

Want the nitty-gritty details? Head over to our release notes.

See a Full Breakdown

Using Shared Folders with Your Team's Tools

Just like your team, your apps are better together. Here are some creative ways we're seeing teams use Zapier to free up time.

Run Successful Ads with Facebook Lead Ads and Offline Conversions

Marketing teams are always searching for more effective ways to reach their audience. In Facebook Lead Ads and Offline Conversions, Facebook provides intelligent ways to find, build, and track those audiences as they interact with your brand.

Of course, your team needs a way to move that data around. With Zapier, your teammates can send any lead that comes in via Facebook to a CRM, sales platform, or email marketing tool. Pop the workflow you build into a shared folder so anyone can update it for your next big campaign.

Grow a team of relationship-building experts in HubSpot

There's an art to organizing your company's sales and marketing pipeline. And HubSpot is, well, the hub for all of it. They help teams tackle marketing and sales while also tracking your relationships with every lead, customer, and company.

When your team uses HubSpot with Zapier, you can make sure that every contact and conversation is tracked automatically. Passing leads from the marketing team to your sales staff? Use a Zap to manage that exchange for you. By automating the steps, there's less room for crossed signals or missed opportunities.

Create beautiful surveys together with Typeform

Forms should be simple. On that front, Typeform delivers. Plus, they mix in a bunch of powerful tools like different field types, analytics, and design options that make it a flexible part of any team's workflow.

Setting up a few Zaps in a shared folder will help you get all your Typeform data to one place. You can save attachments from a response to your team's cloud sharing service, back-up data to a spreadsheet so you can analyze it later, or instantly spin up Trello cards for new entries. Anytime you create a new typeform, just copy the Zap, tweak it, and ask away.

Collaborate to build beautiful documents with WebMerge

WebMerge's mission is to simplify paperwork for time-strapped teams. When you combine it with Zapier, anyone can automatically build documents by connecting WebMerge to a simple form.

Whenever someone on your team needs to set up a new WebMerge document from a survey, just copy the Zap and swap out the template specifics. No need to reinvent the process across different departments.

Turn your team into MeisterTask pros

If you discover a new productivity tactic, you shouldn't keep it to yourself. Let your entire team in on the secret so you can all get more done.

Task management tool MeisterTask already offers grin-worthy ways to work together on any kind of project. Combine it with Zapier and your teammates can set up recurring tasks, send tasks to their personal calendars, or email ideas into a shared MeisterTask account.

Speed up your customer service with Zendesk

Here's the truth: speedy service makes for happy customers. Zendesk's adaptable, people-first software removes a lot of the friction from customer support.

Add a few Zaps to the mix to make your team even more agile. You can tag specific tickets as issues for your tech team or start conversations with customers who buy select products. Now you can share these Zaps to easily update or copy them the next time there's a new project or sale.

Get the whole team's work in one place with Dropbox Business

If you're using Dropbox Business, you already know how powerful a shared team workspace can be. Zapier's shared folders are a perfect collaborative partner: Your team can build workflows that back up everything from email attachments to team projects. You can even create custom notification for new files in your team's chat app.

Now it's easy to get everything in one place, automatically. Share templates with your team so they can craft their own Dropbox-based workflows.

Build a more efficient sales team with Pipedrive

When they're spending hours every week on data entry, it's hard for your sales team to focus on making deals. Pipedrive takes the burden out of managing the process and provides tools for tracking success.

But what about those incoming leads? Pipe them in with Zapier. Create a shared folder where your sales team can pull in submissions from ads and forms. That way, anyone can update or recreate a campaign. You can even automatically pass tasks into another department's project management tool.

Create flexible applications and manage your inbox with Zoho

With all the tools they offer, your entire enterprise could run on Zoho. They boast apps for sales, marketing, finance, email, and more. Better yet, Zoho has Zapier integrations for 12 of their products, which means it's easy to automate your process.

Here are a couple examples. With Zoho Creator, you can build a custom app that collects email addresses and use a Zap to add them to a newsletter list. Or, let your team send messages from Zoho Mail straight into Trello so work stays organized. If you keep your Zoho Zaps in a shared folder anyone can copy your process.

Streamline your team's scheduling with Calendly

We'd all like to spend less time in meetings. More than that, though, we'd like to spend less time on the back-and-forth of scheduling them. That's where Calendly comes in: their simple scheduling software shows open slots that attendees can book based on your availability.

It works well for teams, too—especially when Zapier's in the mix. You can automatically create new video calls when someone on your team schedules a Calendly event, or tie meetings to specific leads in your marketing software. Drop a few of these Zaps in a shared folder, and your whole team can adjust the workflows based on what they need.

How Real Teams Automate Together with Shared Folders

A collage of photos from the teams who use Zapier

Teams at Indiegogo, Customer IO, and InVision use Zapier for Teams to automate their work and be more productive.

We've had early adopters test drive shared folders to make sure they were polished for you on launch day. Another plus? They already figured out some impressive ways to automate work as a team.

Learn how companies like Indiegogo, Streak, InVision, and Lucidcharts use Zapier for Teams to get more done, together.

Read the Case Studies

Get Your Team Automating Today

Ready to help your team automate together? Upgrade to a team account on Zapier today, and you'll be able to use shared folders to collaborate on workflows with co-workers.

Start Your Team Today

source https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-for-teams/

How Real Teams Automate Together with Zapier for Teams

Read These Zapier for Teams Case Studies

How the Hotjar Team Creates Databases Automatically with Zapier + HubSpot
How Lucidcharts Auto-Populates Zendesk and Salesforce with Valuable Data
Why the Team at Indiegogo Trusts Typeform + Zapier for Contact Management
Building the Mode Analytics Machine: How this Team Automates Lead Collection
Automated Analysis: How Customer IO Minimized Data Entry with Zapier
How a San Francisco Non-profit Sends More Students to College with Airtable and Zapier
How Streak Uses Zapier to Enrich Support Requests with Extra Info
Efficient Design: How the InVision Team Uses Zapier to Save 10 Hours of Work a Week
Build a Better Connection: How Intercom's Product Education Team Collaborates with Support

How the Hotjar Team Creates Databases Automatically with Zapier + HubSpot

A photo of the Hotjar team posing for a photo outside

"Being able to bring other team leaders into Zapier has been a big benefit. For non-technical teams, it makes a lot of ideas for efficiency possible."
- Nick Heim, Director of Marketing, Hotjar

Read this post →

How Lucidcharts Auto-Populates Zendesk and Salesforce with Valuable Data

"Instead of spending hours and hours engineering a Salesforce sync to pull reports manually, we're able to automate this and spend more time on highly strategic initiatives."
- Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, Lucidchart

Read this post →

Why the Team at Indiegogo Trusts Typeform + Zapier for Contact Management

A photo of the Indiegogo team and their dogs

"Zapier has been crucial in helping us scale processes as we grow."
- Garrett Grohman, Director of Inside Sales, Indiegogo

Read this post →

Building the Mode Analytics Machine: How this Team Automates Lead Collection

"Zapier saves us time by reducing the amount of importing and exporting we have to do."
- Alexa Guerra, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Mode Analytics

Read this post →

Automated Analysis: How Customer IO Minimized Data Entry with Zapier

A photo of the Customer io team working together

"By using this model, we can almost always use one Zap per channel to handle all the inbound traffic coming from each point solution."
- Bill Miksich, Director of Demand Generation, Customer.io

Read this post →

How a San Francisco Non-profit Sends More Students to College with Airtable and Zapier

"Zapier makes our team more productive by automating information flow in processes that involve more than one person."
- Courtney Lee, Evaluation, Operations, and Research Associate, ScholarMatch

Read this post →

How Streak Uses Zapier to Enrich Support Requests with Extra Info

The Streak team posing for a silly team photo

"We work on a variety of processes collaboratively and Zapier is part of our daily flow here at Streak."
- Andrew Stewart, Growth and Customer Support, Streak

Read this post →

Efficient Design: How the InVision Team Uses Zapier to Save 10 Hours of Work a Week

Lindsey Redinger of InVision working at her desk

"Zapier probably saves me about 10 hours a week when it comes to running our design operations."
- Lindsey Redinger, Manager of User Research & Ops, InVision

Read this post →

Build a Better Connection: How Intercom's Product Education Team Collaborates with Support

The Intercom team paying close attention at a company-wide presentation.

"Zapier has helped our Product Education team keep in sync with each other and our Customer Support team."
- Zara Burke, Product Education, Intercom

Read this post →

Try Zapier for Teams Today

Ready to start automating smarter? Create your team on Zapier today.

Start a Team Now

source https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-for-teams-case-studies/

Steal This Workflow: How a San Francisco Nonprofit Sends More Students to College with Airtable and Zapier

The employees at ScholarMatch—a non-profit that helps low-income and first-generation students apply to, pay for, and succeed in college—know that sending students to college is a team sport. The ScholarMatch team's and their additional volunteers' hard work sent 698 students to college in 2016. 97% of those students are on track to graduate.

ScholarMatch volunteers.

Passing Along Feedback to Team Members

It's essential that the ScholarMatch team collaborates to provide the best experience for students. After all, students are at the center of everything they do. To keep themselves in touch with what students need and how ScholarMatch is meeting their expectations, they send out an online feedback form using Gravity Forms. When a student submits their feedback, ScholarMatch sends it to an online database tool called Airtable, where they can sort and view the feedback easily.

"Forwarding student feedback to our team is a way for us to conduct quality control, celebrate student achievement, and remain connected to our students as we scale." - Courtney Lee, ScholarMatch

Thanks to an automated workflow, which we call a Zap, the feedback is automatically sent to Airtable as soon as it's received.

This Zap is a key part of ScholarMatch's workflow because without it, the team couldn't respond to student feedback as quickly. With Zapier, the feedback is automatically and immediately funneled to Airtable, where all members of the ScholarMatch team can read and act on it.

"We gather and share student feedback across our team as a way to gather a temperature check of our program and the services," Courtney Lee, Evaluation, Operations, and Research Associate at ScholarMatch says.

"Forwarding student feedback to our team is a way for us to conduct quality control, celebrate student achievement, and remain connected to our students as we scale our services and serve more students every year," Lee says.

You can replicate ScholarMatch's workflow of collecting feedback and sharing it easily with your whole team using Gravity Forms, Airtable, and Zapier for Teams. First, create your Gravity Forms + Airtable Zap, then move it to a Shared Folder within your Zapier account. There, your whole team will be able to view and edit the Zap. Plus, they can set up more Zaps to send additional info to the same Airtable base without you unsafely sharing your Airtable login details.

Move your Airtable Zap to a Shared Folder.

"Zapier makes our team more productive by automating information flow in processes that involve more than one person," Lee says.

Customizing Workflows for Your Team Members

To react to the variety of feedback that the ScholarMatch team receives, they rely on other Airtable Zaps. For example, the ScholarMatch team has Zaps set up to notify students' advisors when they receive new feedback from students.

"Zaps allow us to build custom flags for our team to monitor situations as they arise," Lee says. "That way, we can follow up on student feedback as soon as we know about it and resolve the matter promptly."

The ScholarMatch team set up multiple Zaps to notify each advisor differently, based on what's the best way to reach them.

"Since Zaps can be customised easily, we can tailor notifications to the advisor's choice of delivery method, be it an email or a Slack message," Lee says.

You can customize your team's Zaps so they work best for each of your team members, too. First, share the Zap you'd like to replicate for your teammates by moving it to a Shared Folder. From there, your teammates can copy the Zap and edit it, so it's exactly the workflow they want.

When your Zaps are in a Shared Folder, your team members can copy them and make them their own.

With workflows like this that are easy to build, share, and customize, the ScholarMatch team spends less time sorting and transferring student feedback. Instead, team members dedicate their time to creatively improving their services, so they can better serve students and work with even more of them.

All images courtesy of ScholarMatch.

source https://zapier.com/blog/scholarmatch-online-feedback/

Steal This Workflow: Intercom Saves Their Teams Four Hours Every Week with Automation

Great customer support teams are backed by a robust and well-maintained knowledge base. Sometimes the upkeep of product documentation falls to the support team itself. In the best-case scenario, the knowledge base has a team dedicated to writing new documents and updating older ones.

Intercom, a customer messaging platform that provides everything from live chat to help centers, exists in that best-case scenario. Zara Burke manages Intercom's product documentation on the Product Education team. Collaboration is key to their work; the support team helps them identify articles in need of an update.

"We rely on [our customer support team] to let us know when they spot help content that's out of date or needs to be improved," Zara explains.

"Zapier has helped our Product Education team keep in sync with each other and our Customer Support team. "Zara Burke, Product Education, Intercom

Originally, to make those edits, a support rep would make the request in a Slack channel. Next, the request is reviewed and added to the product education team's Trello board. Then, Zara or another team member would work with the requester for clarification and details. It became too much work and Zara knew they had to find an efficient way to process these requests.

"It was a long process and as our product grew bigger and bigger, we knew it was one we needed to automate," Zara explains. To make their automation dreams come true, Zara turned to app automation tool Zapier. With Zapier, Zara built efficient workflows, but she found something else, too. With Zapier for Teams's Shared Folders, Zara and the Product Education team can collaborate with the support team—and any other team—within Zapier.

"Collaborating across teams is essential for helping us create better help content," she says. Now with Shared Folders, anyone with access to the team account can edit Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps—or build entirely new ones.

Automatically Turn Form Responses into Project Tasks

To simplify the change request process, the Product Education team created a form with Typeform. Any time a customer writes in about an out of date document or support stumbles across one, they fill out this form with the details. To save the Product Education team from manually copying and pasting the form's responses to Trello, Zara built a Zap.

When a support request comes through Typeform, Zapier automatically creates a new task in Trello. That task contains all the relevant information—the support rep's name, the URL for the document, type of change, and context—so the Product Education team can prioritize and correct it.

"I would estimate that setting up the Zap saves us about 4 hours every week, across both Product Education and Customer Support."Zara Burke, Product Education, Intercom

"Now our team automatically gets notified when a new update gets added to our Trello board, and all of the information we need is there," Zara says. "Setting up this Zap also allowed us to ask for more detail when someone submits an update. The extra detail is key for us improving our help articles based on our customers' feedback."

This workflow is the perfect pairing of form with project management tool. If you use a different project manager, like MeisterTask, you can swap apps as needed.

With Shared Folders, working with across department lines has never been easier.

"We collaborate with many teams across the company," Zara says. "[These Zaps] allow our Product Education team to keep in sync with other teams."

All images courtesy of Intercom.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automate-task-creation/

Steal This Workflow: InVision Saves 10 Hours Each Week with Automated Workflows

We've all heard "work smarter, not harder." Maybe you see it every day on a poster hanging in the break room or in an email signature. Cliche though it may be, small teams take this mantra to heart. With fewer resources at their disposal, they have to be more efficient and effective in how they work.

Lindsey Redinger leads user research and design operations at InVision. Her team is small and has an additional wrinkle: "InVision is fully remote, with our product team spanning 10 countries right now," Lindsey says. "You can imagine how much there is to keep up with!"

Lindsey's cozy home office.

To help them manage it all, Lindsey uses app automation tool Zapier. "With Zapier, we’ve been able to automate a lot of the more repetitive tasks," she explains. "It’s still a work-in-progress as our team grows and learns, but now so much of our operational tasks happen automagically."

"Zapier probably saves me about 10 hours a week when it comes to running our design operations."Lindsey Redinger, Manager of User Research & Ops, InVision

Lindsey takes her Zapier use beyond powerful automated workflows, too. She uses Shared Folders in Zapier for Teams, which gives anyone with access the ability to create, edit, and collaborate on Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps. "Having shared Zaps allows [everyone] to see some of the processes we have in place, and empowers anyone to make changes they see fit," she says.

Lindsey has seen her team's time spent on project management and information consolidation drop by 25%. With the amount of user research they conduct, that 25% means more customers interviewed and projects completed.

Manage User Research Meetings and Interviews Automatically

When you interview as many users as Lindsey and her team, you could spend multiple hours every day scheduling interviews, sending surveys, and reminding yourself of meetings. Or, you could work smarter and automate all of that.

"Zapier's like having a design process that nobody notices."Lindsey Redinger, Manager or User Research & Ops, InVision

That's what Lindsey does. "As part of a very small user research team, I use Zapier to help automate the scheduling process," she explains. "This includes maintaining a record of every user talked to, notifications on Slack when events are scheduled or canceled, and adding a Zoom link to the invite for me. I even have reminders set up so I never forget to follow up with a thank-you note on busy days!"

Key to Lindsey's workflows are scheduling app Calendly, spreadsheet and database platform Airtable, and team chat tool Slack.

When a customer selects a time to chat with the user research team in Calendly, Zapier springs into action, searching Airtable for a matching customer. If a matching customer isn't found, Zapier creates one in Airtable. This gives InVision a complete database of interviewed users and, with Calendly's built-in questions, pre-interview data.

Make Any Meeting a Video Meeting

The next step in Lindsey's interview process brings in video conferencing app Zoom. "I could easily get myself into a productivity black hole trying to remember to add Zoom links," Lindsey says. "It would often interrupt whatever I was working on, because I had to make sure my events were set up for the week!"

"More important than the time saved, Zapier makes me more reliable."Lindsey Redinger, Manager or User Research & Ops, InVision

Now, Zapier adds Zoom links to Lindsey's interviews automatically. When the invitee is created in Calendly, Zapier creates a corresponding Zoom meeting. To make sure Lindsey and the customer both have the link to the Zoom meeting, Zapier finds the event on Google Calendar and adds the link.

"I’m human and I make mistakes, and I forget things sometimes when I’m distracted. Zapier remembers those things for me and hasn’t made a mistake yet."

Remind Yourself About Meetings

Checking your email inbox throughout the workday is like wading into quicksand: easy to get trapped, less easy to get out. So if you have meetings scheduled automatically, how are you going to keep track?

Lindsey's favorite Zap keeps her in the know about new meetings. "I have Slack alert me when new events [in Calendly] are scheduled so I’m not surprised by a calendar notification that I’m about to talk to a customer in 10 minutes," she explains.

With this Zap, you'll always be notified of newly scheduled meetings so nothing sneaks up on you.

Smart work beats hard work every time, especially when you have Zapier and Shared Folders at your disposal. "Zapier has affected [my] group’s productivity most by keeping us in sync," Lindsey says. "We’ve built a flexible system with Zapier that allows our design team to easily discover opportunities, prioritize feature developments, and advocate for enhancements to the product."

"Back in the day it might have taken me a day to “get around to” reviewing and sharing customer insights and feedback. That happens now every five to 15 minutes with a Zap, so it has reduced the turnaround time for exposing insights to designers and product managers by up to 99%."

All images courtesy of InVision.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automate-user-research/

Steal This Workflow: Streak Automatically Links Customer Data with Support Requests

Customer support comes with inherent challenges. Namely, support reps tend to work with customers on less-than-their-best day. Because of this, camaraderie and collaboration naturally evolve within the best teams. Teammates share helpful language, search tips, and find ways forward when issues arise.

Andrew Stewart works on growth and customer success at Streak. A Gmail-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Streak simplifies managing your customers. To simplify their internal processes, Andrew takes advantage of app automation tool Zapier. He even goes one step further and uses Zapier for Teams's Shared Folders.

With Shared Folders, team collaboration is a breeze. Andrew can share the folders with entire departments at once or invite specific team members. Each team member adds or edits Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps—as needed for their projects and tasks.

Manage Support and Sales Requests with Automated Workflows

With Zapier, the teams at Streak began automating manual tasks and building connections. "We use Zapier to create new leads, accounts, tickets, add data to new boxes, automatically create Streak contacts, and send contacts to drip marketing tools," Andrew explains.

One such Zap bridges the engineering and customer success teams. When the engineering team squashes bugs, they update the bug's Box in Streak. A Box houses all the information—emails, attachments, meeting notes—about a particular subject. In this case, the subject is a bug. When the engineering team fixes that bug, the Box's stages changes. This triggers Zapier to send an email through Gmail to notify the support team that all is well again.

Taking this Zap a step further, Streak added a filter to search for a specific stage in Streak. With Filter by Zapier in the mix, the email only sends if the status is "launched".

If you want automatic updates whenever a Box updates its stage—or when it updates to a specific stage—steal Streak's workflow with these Zaps:

Create Support Requests and Link Customer Data Instantly

Streak's customer success team runs their efforts through Streak itself. It allows them to link a customer's request to their Box, building a complete profile of the customer. Like most companies, one of the ways for their clients to reach Streak is through email. So how does Streak's customer success team take an email and transform it into a Streak Box? With a multi-step Zap.

When a new thread starts in Gmail, Zapier gets to work. First, Zapier creates a new Box in Streak and adds a contact to it, using the customer's email address from the Gmail message. Then, Zapier looks up the customer in Streak's user database, which they store in Google Sheets.

With this additional customer data, Zapier edits the customer's support request and links it to the customer's Box in Streak. In the instant the email hits Streak's inbox, the customer success team has a brand new support request, full of data and linked to the customer.

Since this is a multi-step Zap, we'll break it down into a few key components—and also give you the full workflow for customization.

Zapier for Teams makes sharing across department lines and within teams efficient and easy. "Zapier is part of our daily flow here at Streak," Andrew says. "We work on a variety of processes collaboratively."

Zapier for Teams has even helped streamline new employee training. "We [used to] run multiple independent accounts," Andrew explains. "The accounts tended to get blended, so some Zaps were in account1 and some were in account2. You had to look multiple places to find the Zap you wanted to edit." Now, though, Andrew says, he can just add the new employee to the team account.

"For many tools, we have an existing Zap that we can point to for the [new employee] to learn from. That saves time twice. First, for the employee who doesn't have to explain the Zap. Second for the learner so they can study at their own pace."

All images courtesy of Streak.

source https://zapier.com/blog/link-customer-data-support/

Steal This Workflow: Mode Analytics Instantly Sends Leads to Marketing Automation

If you took a random poll of your teammates and asked about their biggest roadblock, "not enough time in a day/week/month" would appear multiple times. If you're busy with repetitive or manual tasks, you may not be able to spend as much time on higher-value initiatives. So how do you find more time if you don't own a DeLorean with a flux capacitor. The answer isn't hitting 88 mph—it's efficient workflows.

Creating more time at Mode Analytics is Alexa Guerra, Senior Demand Generation Manager. Mode provides their customers—who include Lyft, Trello, Shopify, and plenty more—collaborative analytics to answer the questions behind the questions.

"While it may seem like a quick and easy thing to take a leads export and upload it to [marketing automation software] Marketo, it's the kind of task that is prone to human error," Alexa says. "And that can negatively impact your workflow."

With app automation tool Zapier, Alexa and the Mode team found an easy way to automate time-consuming tasks—but more importantly, they found a tool that grows with them. Using Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders, Mode builds efficient workflows together, from creating leads to team updates.

Create Leads in Marketo from Multiple Sources

Taking collaboration beyond the halls of the office and into the community, Mode created a jobs board for analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. Companies submit jobs and folks on the hunt can find them easily.

In order to submit a job to the board, a company fills out a Google Form, which notifies the team in Slack. Once the job is approved, it's added to content management software (CMS), Contentful. When the job is pushed live with Contentful, Zapier then syncs the submitter's email address in Marketo.

With this workflow, Mode doesn't have to ping each submitter about the status of their job listing. Instead, Marketo automatically sends an email when the job posting is live, completing the feedback loop with the hiring manager. Mode saves time on these tasks with a few Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps. We'll break down these multi-step Zaps into their components so you can steal their workflow and give time back to you and your team.

"Zapier saves us time by reducing the amount of importing and exporting we have to do."Alexa Guerra, Senior Demand Generation Manager, Mode Analytics

Mode also collects leads from G2 Crowd, a business and software review site. These leads are potential customers, curious about Mode and their product. On a business app's G2 Crowd page, there are a few different calls-to-action (CTA); in Mode's case, they have "request a demo", "free trial", and "ask Mode a question".

Zapier takes the responses to the G2 Crowd CTAs and funnels them into Marketo as new leads:

Send Team Updates in Slack

To embrace transparency, Mode opens up their communication, boosting visibility of go-to-market processes across the entire company.

"It helps bring more visibility into goings-on in the business—like new opportunities in Salesforce—which leads to more discussions and dialogue around improvements we can make," Alexa says. Mode uses Slack to share this information and start those discussions.

With a couple simple but powerful Zaps, Zapier sends Mode's new Salesforce leads and new Recurly transactions to a specific channel in Slack. And in an instant, the whole company can celebrate.

"We also use Zapier to push celebration-worthy information about Closed Won deals from Salesforce and Recurly to Slack. Before Zapier, it was harder to communicate those wins."

Collaborating on workflows is an essential part of Mode's teamwork. They share responsibility for creating Zaps in their Shared Folders to improve the company's workflows.

"We're growing quickly and folks on the team wear many different hats," Alexa says. "It's important that individual Zaps not be owned by any one person, so that as a team we can continue improving processes and avoid occasional the bottlenecks of individual ownership."

"At Mode, we don't work alone—we need each other to achieve our goals."

All images courtesy of Mode Analytics.

source https://zapier.com/blog/send-leads-marketing-automation/

Steal This Workflow: Customer.io Automatically Standardizes Form Submissions for Reporting

When you work on a small team, odds are high that you have multiple responsibilities. Some of those tasks are probably shared, too, or jump department lines. Today might be a marketing project but tomorrow might have more of a sales or support slant to it. Maybe it's a project with an engineer to create a better tool or integrate a platform into your workflow.

But with a smaller team that shares responsibilities, you have to ensure that tasks and projects aren't being repeated accidentally. Customer.io, an app engagement platform that helps marketing and growth teams automate messages to their customers—from lifecycle emails to SMS—took this challenge head on and found their way forward: Collaboration.

"As a small team, it's imperative we work together, otherwise the multiple hats we wear can accidentally result in redundancy," says Bill Miksich, Director of Demand Generation. More than just a time killer, duplicate work mucks up CRMs and throws off analytics.

The Customer.io team at one of their company-wide retreats.

Looking to eliminate duplicate work and free the Customer.io team from manual tasks, Bill needed a way to manage the multiple apps used across the different departments and a way to continue fostering collaboration.

He turned to app automation tool Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders. Now, nearly every member at Customer.io builds their own Zaps—automated workflows that bridge two or more apps—and can share them with their teammates.

Customer.io relies on several different applications for their day-to-day sales, marketing, and people ops tasks: Slack, Livestorm, Clearbit, Close.io, FormKeep, and Customer.io, just to name a handful (or two). Bill faced a problem every company with multiple apps encounters: How do you standardize data in different formats?

With Zapier's homegrown tools, Formatter and Webhooks. Webhooks make sending data simple while Formatter can transform and split text, to name just a few of its abilities. Paired with Customer.io's business apps, Formatter and Webhooks provide each team with the flexibility they need to standardize information. "Every inbound channel has a set of tasks in their Zap to normalize, enrich, and ultimately route the data where we need it."

We'll dig in to three of Customer.io's departments—sales, marketing, and people ops—and explore the workflows they built to increase productivity.

Randomly Assign Leads to Sales Reps

Lead assignment can be tricky: You don't want to play favorites, every sales rep needs a steady flow of leads, and some folks just work faster than others. Customer.io's solution? Automated round-robin lead assignment.

When leads come through Close.io, Formatter by Zapier comes in. With Formatter's Utilities action, Zapier picks at random from a list of sales reps. Zapier updates the lead in Close.io with the new owner and in the last step, creates an event in Customer.io. Events in Customer.io store data and create a full picture for that lead.

The Formatter tool is one of Zapier's best weapons in the fight against manual work. With Formatter, Close.io, and Customer.io, lead assignment becomes fair and automatic.

Standardize Form Entries for Data Analysis with Formatter and Webhooks

Everyone has a particular online writing style, some in all lowercase, some with proper punctuation, and others in all caps with no punctuation It's annoying in emails and online comments, but when you try to analyze form responses from customers, random formatting can be more than just an eyesore.

To clean up customer entries from FormKeep, Bill created a Zap with three Formatter steps, all utilizing"Text" actions to clean up formatting. Since FormKeep has a single field for name, Bill uses the first two Formatter steps to split the single name field into first name and last names, separating the names by the space between them (watch this video to see exactly how to do this).

Once the name is split, Zapier runs a third Formatter step that transforms the input email address into all lowercase. Once this completes, the data flows into Zapier's Webhooks integration. Simply put, webhooks are a custom way to integrate your app by sending text to a unique URL and can be immensely powerful once you know how to use them. Customer.io uses webhooks to send their newly standardized form data to Segment, an analytics API and customer data platform, where it will be analyzed and used for reporting.

"By using this model, we can almost always use one Zap per channel to handle all the inbound traffic coming from each point solution."Bill Miksich, Director of Demand Generation, Customer.io

Zapier then finds or creates a lead in Close.io, and creates a task for the lead owner (which was assigned ahead of time by the round-robin sales Zap in the previous section).

We'll separate this Zap into a few of its key components so you can customize it for your workflow as needed:

Now, Customer.io's marketing reporting and analytics is clean and uniform. "If we didn't have [this Zap], we would have no way of standardizing or normalizing inbound data before it makes its way into our systems of record," says Bill.

Create Reminders and Send Notifications in Slack from New Emails

It's easy to find yourself inundated with emails, forgetting to follow-up in a timely manner. If you're on a hiring team, quintuple that statement. The people ops team at Customer.io created a simple fix not only for follow-up, but also for visibility: Use Zapier to send Slack messages and make reminders from new hiring emails.

When someone applies at Customer.io, their application comes into Gmail with a specific subject. Based on the subject line, the people ops team has Zapier send a specific team a message in Slack, and then create a 48 hour reminder to follow-up.

"Keeping the channel aware of new candidates kept us all accountable, and gave a space to talk about each application outside of our applicant tracking system in a tool we all were in every day," explains Customer.io's Head of People Ops, Rachel Baskerville. "When I needed to remind the hiring team to review applications, I could easily link to them in chat, where they could all respond in the same thread."

Shared responsibility plays a large role in Customer.io's use of Zapier for Teams. "Zapier makes it easy to trace the business and human logic back to a goal, so if there's ever a question about why something works a certain way, it's easy to point to the Zap and have them pick up what's going on," Bill says.

Remote teams take the best pictures.

More than just creating new workflows, the Customer.io team looks after each other's Zaps: "I think everyone should share ownership and understand how the sausage gets made," Bill says. At Customer.io, sharing is caring.

All images courtesy of Customer.io.

source https://zapier.com/blog/format-submissions-automatically/

Steal This Workflow: Hotjar Creates Databases Automatically for Accounting and Marketing

Whether or not a remote company thrives or flounders depends on a great many things, chief among them—communication. With employees scattered across states, countries, and continents instead of across an aisle, it's harder to know what your co-worker in another department is up to in their day-to-day. Heck, sometimes it's easy to lose track of your own teammates when they work in a different timezone.

Hotjar, a website analytics and feedback platform used by over 200,000 companies, is a remote company. Spread across four continents, Hotjar helps website owners understand their visitors and uncover opportunities for improvement. With this data, businesses can identify the how and why behind their visitors' behavior and redesign their site with a smarter flow, better language, and discover what their customers respond to. With an offering this complex, Hotjar relies on its employees to work together as efficiently as their product.

"We're located all over the world with no physical office," says Nick Heim, Director of Marketing at Hotjar. "It is absolutely necessary that we communicate in smart ways that promote personal productivity but also nurtures a team dynamic."

The entire Hotjar team spending time together at one of their company retreats.

"Being 100% remote, it's essential that we don't become siloed in the way that we work," Nick explains. "[App automation tool] Zapier helps us be faster and more efficient as teams." Whether it's pulling information from a CRM into billing software, building a database of invoices, or updating clients across multiple platforms, Hotjar uses Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders to reduce manual work and boost cross-team productivity.

Build a Form Response Database with HubSpot, Google Sheets, and Freshbooks

Chief among the workflows Nick and Hotjar needed automated was a path from their content management system (CMS), HubSpot, to their billing software, Freshbooks. The finance team at Hotjar was manually collecting information about users interested in annual plans and making sure data in HubSpot and Freshbooks matched.

"Rather than ask our engineering team to build an integration, which would have taken time and resources from other projects, we linked together a sequence of Zaps," Nick explains. Zaps are a bridge between two or more apps and, in Hotjar's case, connected their CMS and billing programs with Google Sheets.

"Being able to bring other team leaders into Zapier has been a big benefit. For non-technical teams, it makes a lot of ideas for efficiency possible."Nick Heim, Director of Marketing, Hotjar

Their first step in automating this workflow was to create a form on a HubSpot landing page. Any time a customer submits a response, Zapier sends those entries to a Google Sheet to create a separate database. Once in the Google Sheet, Zapier passes the entry on to Freshbooks, creating a new client.

"This integration took us one day of testing and saved our finance team a ton of manual time collecting this information."

Try out Hotjar's HubSpot to Google Sheets to Freshbooks workflow below—we even broke it up into pieces in case you need to customize your workflow:

"Zapier gives us autonomy to build efficient workflows that save the company time, without depending on dev resources."Nick Heim, Director of Marketing, Hotjar

"No one knows their workflows better than the team that works within them," Nick says. "Creating a Zapier account that houses multiple teams—all solving different problems—gives you a bird's eye view of different departments' processes, which helps break down walls that exist between teams."

A quick brainstorm session at Hotjar's company retreat.

Navigating remote work and what that means for teams coordinating efforts will always be a challenge. But with Zapier for Teams and Shared Folders under the hood, Hotjar found a way to keep efficiency and collaboration at the forefront of their processes.

"We're always trying to test new ways to improve creativity and collaboration. Zapier for Teams empowers [us] to not only identify gaps in team efficiencies but also create a system to improve them."

All images courtesy of Hotjar.

source https://zapier.com/blog/automatic-accounting-database/

Steal This Workflow: How Automation Decreased Lucidchart's QA Checks by 30%

Collaboration across teams ought to be business as usual. But if you've ever worked at a company that's undergone rapid growth, you know communication can break down almost as quickly as new employees are hired. Tasks get lost in the shuffle, teams lose track of projects, and productivity grinds down.

But collaboration doesn't have to take a hit; just look at flowchart maker and online diagram software Lucidchart. This year alone, the Lucidchart team has grown 49%—and there's still over two months before year's end. "As a company grows, cross-team collaboration [becomes] more and more important," Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, explains.

For Lucidchart, collaboration is more than just a way to work together—it's built into their product. From flowcharts to network diagrams to ERDs (entity relationship diagrams), Lucidchart makes it easy for their clients to collaborate with each other. With group chat and comments, viewable revision history, and more, Lucidchart knows teams that collaborate have a better chance of succeeding.

Taking that principle to heart, Lucidchart worked to maintain cross-team communication and keep different departments collaborating. To help them in that mission, they use Shared Folders in app automation tool Zapier. Shared Folders, a Zapier for Teams feature, gives multiple users access to a team's Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps. Using their new secret weapon, Lucidchart's quality assurance (QA) checks decreased by 30% and they optimized the flow of information between the marketing and sales teams.

With a Zapier team account, Micaela and Lucidchart built multiple Zaps and shared them across departments. Essential to Micaela's work on the marketing team are two specific Zaps: One syncs leads with the sales ops team and the other simplifies email QA.

Automatically Pull Data and Create Leads in Salesforce

Marketing and sales, the age old foes. Which team claims responsibility for increased sign-ups, revenue, conversions? Hard to say (it's marketing) but in truth, it's the combined efforts of both departments that creates an environment for a company to succeed. When these two departments align, leads become conversions and trials become sign-ups.

Part of Lucidchart's lead generation comes from their email service provider of choice, Marketo. But due to Lucidchart's specific business case, the out-of-the-box syncs provided by Marketo didn't provide the connections they needed. Micaela turned to Zapier for a solution.

"Zapier allows us to send leads from Marketo to Salesforce via webhooks with extreme reliability and ease," Micaela explains.

"Instead of spending hours and hours engineering a Salesforce sync to pull reports manually, we're able to automate this and spend more time on highly strategic initiatives."Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, Lucidchart

Key to this Zap is Webhooks by Zapier. Webhooks carry information from one source to another and are extremely powerful once you know how to use them.

Lucidchart uses webhooks to pull new lead data from Marketo: Name, email, phone number, etc.—all the data a sales team would need to follow-up—and creates a new lead in Salesforce, ready for the sales team to take over.

"What I love about this Zap in particular is that it's so flexible: We can add and remove information from the sync whenever we want without having to go through a sales op person," Micaela says. "We can also replay Zaps, so if we ever reach our Salesforce API limit, we can go through and easily sync the leads we may have missed."

Webhooks work with more applications than just Marketo so if you want to try creating leads the way Lucidchart does, give this a try:

Create Support Tickets with Webhooks Instantly

Lucidchart doesn't just create new leads from Marketo; they also build customer support tickets in support platform Zendesk. If Lucidchart receives a sales inquiry or a request for more information instead of a lead, the support team constructed a Zap to quickly create new tickets in Zendesk with webhooks.

Zapier builds the ticket with the name, email, and question or comments from Marketo. With this Zap, Lucidchart's support team doesn't have to rely on another employee monitoring Marketo for these specific requests. Instead, they just check their Zendesk queue and work as usual.

Notify Your Team of Errors In Slack

Since the flow of leads from Marketo to Salesforce is crucial to the sales and marketing teams, this Zap gets a lot of attention. Multiple people on the team are keen on getting notifications about new leads and their updates.

To make sure the entire team if something goes sideways, Micaela turned to Zapier's Shared Folders and team chat application, Slack. With a simple shared Zap, Micaela makes sure that any issues that might pop up are sent to the entire team (even if the person responsible for the Zap was on vacation).

If you have any business-critical Zaps that you like to keep an eye on, this Zap automates that process so a Slack notification will keep you informed.

Build a QA Database with Parserr and Google Sheets

The Lucidchart marketing team runs multiple email campaigns at any given moment and the data in those campaigns—what were the open and click-through rates?—shapes and guides future efforts.

Shared Folders are an excellent fit with any kind of campaign: The campaign owner can jump into your team's Shared Folder and create the Zaps they need to run and monitor the campaign. You can even create a template that each campaign owner copies at the start for ease-of-use.The marketing team had a simple goal: track campaign progress over time.

"Frankly, Zapier is so easy to use, I encourage all of our new hires to explore it to see how they can save time—and everyone is happier when they save time."Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, Lucidchart

Lucidchart turned to email parsing software Parserr and Google Sheets. "By connecting our Parserr and Google Sheets accounts with Zapier, we're able to build really robust QA dashboards for things like email metrics—opens, clicks—as well as flow volume," Micaela says.

"This helps us identify breaks much quicker than we used to—and as a manager, gives me great peace of mind!"

This Parserr - Google Sheets Zap is a real timesaver, too. It's reduced the amount of QA checks Micaela and her team have to perform by 30%.

Automation certainly plays a role in making the teams at Lucidchart more efficient during periods of rapid growth and sharing Zaps helps foster a collaborative environment. But departments coming together for the same mission makes all the difference.

"Lucidchart is growing incredibly fast and making sure the company is all going in the same direction with the same aggressive goals is something our leadership has done a great job orchestrating," Micaela says. "As roles switch and the team grows, making sure our Zaps are up-to-date and working is [a responsibility] shared by more people and sharing Zaps allows us to do that."

All images courtesy of Lucidchart.

source https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-campaign-database/

Steal This Workflow: Indiegogo Automatically Manages Their Leads and Contacts

Once upon a time, before computers were invented—and even after, since they weighed a ton and cost a full-time salary—manual work ruled the day. Updating client files, adding new leads to mailing lists, and nurturing leads was all done by hand.

While we can now move files from one folder to another or copy and paste data from one system to another, instead of searching a filing cabinet or ringing someone up, there's still a ton of manual pointing, clicking, dragging, and dropping going on in almost every workplace.

Crowdfunding giant Indiegogo, like all other companies, dealt with this sort of repetitive work. Two things set them apart: collaboration as a core value and their neverending searching for efficiency.

CAPTIONHERE

Across the company, Garrett saw that different teams often wound up siloed from each other. "Finding [app automation tool] Zapier has helped remove a lot of those barriers by automating a lot of the tedious processes and allowing us to centralize data for everyone to see," he says.

With Zapier for Team's Shared Folders, breaking down barriers and bringing employees together is a breeze. Just add new users to the team account and they can edit and create Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps—alongside other teams.

"Zapier has been crucial in helping us scale processes as we grow. "Garrett Grohman, Director of Inside Sales, Indiegogo

"I deal with hundreds and hundreds of campaigns every day, and entering that data, even just one data point—and there's way more than one data point—used to be two people's full-time jobs," Garrett Grohman, Director of Inside Sales at Indiegogo, explains. "We got it down to one person's job when we started using Typeform to gather some of that information."

Create Users, Leads, and Opportunities in Intercom and Salesforce from Typeform Responses

After months of this new, better workflow, it was still taking the employee too much time and manual entry. "We asked ourselves, 'how can we simplify it?'" Garrett says. "That's when I found Zapier." This was a turning point for Garrett.

"Since [we found Zapier], that person has been able to change roles and do something that doesn't melt their brain," Garrett jokes. "And I've been able to run that entire program, plus a handful more, before lunch."

A lot of Garrett's (now automated) workflows at Indiegogo starts with Typeform. Some of the forms target leads that have quieted down. Others add new Indiegogo users to their email list. Connecting them all together? Zapier.

Garrett's specific task dictates which application he'll link to Typeform with a Zap.

Indiegogo uses customer messaging platform Intercom to send emails to their leads and users. All those users actually start with a typeform response, which Garrett uses to trigger Zapier to create new users in Intercom.

When it comes to nurturing leads, Garrett worked to answer a simple question: Why haven't we heard from this lead recently? To solve it, Garrett turned to Typeform, Salesforce, and Google Sheets.

"We send out a [Typeform] survey [through Intercom] and we're like, 'Hey, we haven't talked to you in a couple weeks. Answer these couple questions and let us know how you're doing.'"

"Zapier turns almost all of our five to six step workflows down to one to two steps."Garrett Grohman, Director of Inside Sales, Indiegogo

When a lead submits the typeform, Zapier updates the corresponding opportunity in Salesforce and then finds and updates that user's row in Google Sheets, adding their responses.

"Now, we can send everybody a few emails because we know when they have or have not responded to the typeform because they have or have not appeared in this Google Sheet yet," Garrett explains. "We can automatically update that little attribute of theirs through Zapier."

Add Users to Your Newsletter and Create Intercom Users from New Leads

With Intercom and Zapier paired together, Garrett's been able to automate every aspect of customer communication. Subscriber lists and users update without human interaction thanks to a few different Zaps.

One of the most powerful among those Zaps is also one of the simplest: Zapier creates new users in Intercom from new leads in Salesforce, making sure Indiegogo's email list is always up to date:

Another time-saving Zap subscribes new leads to Indiegogo's newsletter. When a user opts in to the newsletter, a new row is added to Google Sheets. Filter by Zapier checks a specific field to make sure the user has agreed to subscribe and then Zapier adds a user tag in Intercom, adding the user to the newsletter.

While most of Garrett's official responsibilities revolve around inside sales, he often finds himself working across teams to build better, more efficient workflows: "Collaboration is one of our four core values at Indiegogo," he explains. "It's bred into the culture."

"I get to work directly with the marketing team, our bizdev team, our enterprise team," Garrett says. "I'm making sure the wheels are still turning while they're working on perfecting [the business]."

CAPTIONHERE

Finding new, efficient ways forward wasn't always easy, especially when each team has a different pathway forward. "Our functions are so different that we often ended up working in silos," he explains. "Zapier has allowed us to be more open internally with our data and programs, and helped strengthen our cross-functional collaboration."

If it's an automated workflow at Indiegogo, there's a good chance Garrett worked with a team to make it everything they need.

"My mentality is if it's something that you have to click the same button more than three times in a day and you're consistently doing it, it's probably worth trying to trim off a couple clicks. Take five or 10 minutes and remove three or four steps and automate that."

All images courtesy of Indiegogo.

source https://zapier.com/blog/create-intercom-users-automatically/

Monday 30 October 2017

How to Make Any Printer a Smart Wi-Fi Printer

Printers are the worst. No, really: that's a direct quote from every discussion our editorial team has about printing. Printers jam, clog, slurp up multiple sheets of paper instead of one, randomly drop Wi-Fi connections, and require regular diets of ink that seem to nearly cost their weight in gold. Even The Wirecutter agrees: "All printers are disappointing."

Perhaps the biggest frustration with printers is setting them up so you can reliably print on any of your devices from anywhere in your home—or even outside of your home—especially if you don't have a wireless printer. While there are a number of ways you can share a printer from Windows or macOS on your network, they can be easy to mess up and are more limited than the better alternative: Google Cloud Print. Here's how to use Google Cloud Print to share a printer with your computers, phones, and tablets and print from anywhere in the world.

What Is Google Cloud Print?

Print from anywhere via Google Cloud Print (animation via Google)

Nope, it's not a great printer in the cloud that instantly delivers print copies of your documents to your door. Google Cloud Print serves a more pedestrian—and perhaps even more powerful—task: making any printer a smart wireless printer.

Set your printer up with Cloud Print, and you can then print from any device or website from anywhere on earth. If you have a Wi-Fi printer that's Cloud Print enabled, your document will automatically print out, waiting for you to pick it up when you get home. Have a USB printer? Next time you connect it to your computer and open Chrome, all your queued Google Cloud Print documents will automatically print out. You can share it, too, for one of the easiest ways to let your whole family or office print documents.

And unlike standard network printing, you can set it up in 5 minutes or less—and never have to worry about it again.

How to Share Any Printer with Google Cloud Print

All you need to add a printer to Google Cloud Print is:

A USB or network printer that works with your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer
A Google account
Google Chrome installed on your computer

Turn on your printer and connect it to your computer if you haven't already. Then, open Chrome and enter the following in your address bar to open Chrome's hidden printer tool: chrome://devices. (That's the shortcut. The longer but more intuitive path is to open Chrome's Settings page, and select the Google Cloud Print option near the bottom of the page. That will open a settings page where you can add "classic printers" to Google Cloud Print.) Click Add printers.

Select printer to add to Google Cloud Print

Chrome will then show all of the printers that work with your computer, both USB and network printers. Select the ones you want to add to Cloud Print, and choose whether Chrome should automatically add any new printers you install to Cloud Print.

And that's it. Your printer is now a Cloud Print printer, ready to print documents from the web.

How to Share a Printer in Google Cloud Print

Feeling friendly? Like any document in Google Drive, you can share your Cloud Print printer, too, for a quick way to let friends and colleagues print documents.

To do so, visit your Google Cloud Print settings page at google.com/cloudprint#printers, select your printer, and click the Share button. You can add specific people via email, invite an entire Google Group (a great way to share a printer internally in a company), or copy a link to share the printer. With the latter, anyone who clicks on the link can use your printer.

Worried about an endless torrent of print jobs? You can set a limit on how many pages shared users can print per day—15 by default.

How to See Your Google Cloud Print Jobs

When you click Print on your computer, you'll typically see a printer icon in your taskbar or dock with a list of documents queued up to print.

Google Cloud Print includes the same tool. You can open your Cloud Print print jobs page at google.com/cloudprint#jobs and view a list of everything you or others you shared the printer with have printed. Pending print jobs will show as well—and if you've decided you don't want to print something, click its name then tap Delete to keep from wasting paper. You can't view the actual documents printed—but you can get details on who printed what, at least.

How to Print via Google Cloud Print

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the easiest way to print with Google Cloud Print is with Google Chrome. Open any website or web app, press Ctrl+P or CMD+P or click the print icon, and the default Google Chrome print dialog lets you print anything via Cloud Print. All you have to do is select the correct printer. Chrome will show your computer's default printer; click Change, then select your printer under the Google Cloud Print heading.

Print as normal—using the same printer settings to select page size, color, and more—and Chrome will print it out via Google Cloud Print. That works everywhere—on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and on Chromebooks.

Want to print out an image, PDF document, or other file that can be viewed in Google Chrome? Drag the document into Chrome and print it just as you would print anything online.

You can also use Google Cloud Print from other apps. If you're not using Google Chrome, Cloud Print still works in Google Docs and Gmail online. Click Print in the apps, and you'll see the Cloud Print dialog above. If a printer is offline, it'll show as grey—select it, though, and you can still print to it.

Or, if you're working from mobile, Google's Docs, Drive, Gmail, and other apps on iOS and Android also support Google Cloud Print. Tap Print and select the Cloud Print printer you want to use as normal.

Want to print to Google Cloud Print from any app on your computer or phone? Here are the tools to do that:

How to Print with Google Cloud Print from Windows

Google makes things easy on Windows, with an official Cloud Printer app that adds Google Cloud Print as another printer on your computer. Install the app, then print as normal from any app on your computer. In the standard print dialog, select Google Cloud Printer as your printer.

That'll open a new window in Google Chrome, with print options similar to the ones in Google Docs above. Select the printer you want to use to print it out with Cloud Print as normal.

How to Print with Google Cloud Print from macOS

To use Google Cloud Print to print from any Mac app, you'll need to purchase the $4.99 Cloud Printer app from the Mac App Store. Open it and login with your Google account, and you'll see each of your connected printers, their settings, and any documents in the queue. There's an Open file button to open anything and add it to your print queue, too.

Then, to print from any app, download its companion Virtual Printer and install it. You'll then have a Cloud Printer option in your normal Mac print dialog that you can use to print anything you want.

How to Print with Google Cloud Print from Android

Android, perhaps, has it the easiest. Many Android devices today come with Google Cloud Print built in. Print as normal from your app's menu, then choose Google Cloud Print and the printer you want to use.

If you can't find the option, download the Cloud Print app for free. You can then open documents in the app and print them—or use it from the print menu.

How to Print with Google Cloud Print from iPhone and iPad

On an iPhone or iPad, you have two great options to print anything with Google Cloud Print. The cheapest and simplest is the free CloudPrint app. Install it, then open the app and login with your Google account.

Then, whenever you want to print something from any app, tap the Share icon in the app, choose the CloudPrint icon (enable it in the More option if you don't see it), and select the printer you want to use. You can then view your print jobs and cancel them from the CloudPrint app menu.

Or, for more features, the Google-recommended PrintCentral Pro app lets you organize your files and print them via Cloud Print—and it also includes a printer extension like CloudPrint to print from any app.

How to Automatically Print from the Cloud with Zapier

Or, you could skip pressing the print button, and have your apps print stuff on their own automatically. That's possible using app automation tool Zapier, which has a built-in Google Cloud Print integration that can print your files, plain text, and HTML-formatted copy automatically.

Say you want to automatically print out Gmail emails with the Print label, or new files saved in a specific Dropbox folder, or Evernote notes in your Print notebook—or want to print anything else out that you need a paper copy of—without the mental overhead of remembering to click Print. Here's how it works:

Open Zapier and click the Make a Zap button
Select the app you want to print files from as the trigger app
Select Google Cloud Print as the action app, choose the Submit Print Job action, and connect Zapier to your Cloud Print account.
Add the file or text you want to print by clicking the + icon beside the Content box, as in the screenshot above. Select the content type below that, then pick the correct printer.
Test and turn on your Zap.

Now, whenever something new is added to the trigger app you selected, Zapier will automatically print that file or text out with your Google Cloud Print printer. It's the easiest way to print stuff. Here are some of the most popular ways to automate your print work:

Printing Productively

The funny thing is, most of us print less than we used to. It's easier than ever to keep all your communications and documents digital. Which makes it all the more frustrating when you really need to print something. You're not printing today because it'd be nice to have a paper copy—you've got to get this thing in print.

Google Cloud Print won't fix printers' worst issues, but it will smooth out the rough edges. Instead of having to endlessly tweak your network sharing settings, you can set the printer up once with Cloud Print, then print to it from any of your devices, anywhere on earth, even when your printer's turned off. Then when you get home or back to your office, turn on the printer and connect it to your printer, and Google Cloud Print will work its magic.

Image Credits: Banner background based on photo by Max Wheeler via Flickr; Cloud Print animation via Google Cloud Print site.

source https://zapier.com/blog/google-print-tutorial/