Walkthrough Tutorial: Consuming XML Web Services in Excel 2013

I just uploaded a screencast video demonstrating a few methods to consume XML web services.

In the tutorial, I demonstrate how to use a simple currency exchange web service in  three different ways:

i) through a stand-alone requester agent

ii) through a web browser

iii) through Excel 2013 and its new WebService and FilterXML functions.

Here's the video. Let me know what you think...

How-To: Setup Free Voicemail on your Canadian Carrier Smartphone

For some time now, I’ve been meaning to explore options for free voicemail – especially in the Canadian context where customers may be charged $7.00 to $15.00 per month for various voicemail or call management options. Since my own contract with my carrier was coming to an end, I did some serious research and evaluated various options for getting “free” voicemail.

The caveat about “free” voicemail is that some of us might already have a good voice and data plan that we want to utilize for a voicemail system without having to pay anything extra for it. It just makes common sense – voicemail shouldn’t be treated as a paid add-on – in the current competitive market landscape, it doesn’t constitute a value-added service.

During my research, I came across two options that would fit the bill:

1. FreePhoneLine.ca which offers a free Canadian phone number and other complementary services such as voicemail and long distance.
2. Youmail.com which offers visual voicemail applications for various mobile platforms and uses it’s hosted communication platform for storage and delivery of voicemail.

I signed up for and tested both of these services and decided to adopt the latter due to the following reasons:

i) Youmail allows account administration through a website and a mobile interface (convenient);

ii) It provides a variety of options to configure alerts and notifications for voicemails and missed calls (SMS/Email/Push);

iii) It provides the option to deliver call receipts to people who leave you a message (could be a useful feature for some use-cases);

iv) I like the crowd-sourced community model being used for collaborating on new applications and sharing tips as well as voicemail greetings ; and

vi) I wasn’t bothered by Youmail’s sales team unlike FreeLine.ca who kept trying to upsell other products and services.


Hence, this How-To tutorial will discuss setting up visual voicemail through Youmail. If you’re interested in exploring what you can do with the alternative FreePhoneLine.ca solution, there’s a good blog post tutorial available here.



What You Will Need:


1.  A reasonably good data plan for the following purposes:


         a) to receive push notifications for the visual voicemail application (you can configure the type of notifications you wish to receive).

          b) to retrieve voicemails as electronic sound files (mp3) through the visual voicemail application or through your online account.

          c) to setup or modify your voicemail administrative options such as greetings.
              This can be done through the visual voicemail application or through your online account.

2.  A voice plan that will allow you to access one or potentially two phone numbers that may be long-distance for you (within Canada). One of the numbers is needed to forward to your calls to the voicemail system, while the other is required to retrieve the voicemail and setup your administrative options (greetings etc.). With respect to the latter, as mentioned in points 1b & 1c above, you can retrieve voicemail and setup your voicemail options through the app on your phone or through your online account, and in this case, you will not need to worry about the second long-distance number to retrieve voicemail.

Note: If you have a long-distance plan or an unlimited calling to/from specific phone numbers through plans such as the Rogers My5 / My10, you should include these number(s) in that list.

3.  Access to Call Forwarding feature through your carrier. To my knowledge, this is already included in many voice plans.


Procedure:



1.  Sign-up for a Youmail Account:

You can sign-up for an account through the Youmail website, or alternatively, you can download the Youmail app
(see links in step 6 below) on your phone and use it to register for an account.

2.  Verify your Phone Number and Youmail Account:

• The verification workflow involves providing your phone number and receiving an activation code via a text message on your mobile device. This activation code needs to be entered on the website to proceed with the sign-up process. In case you don’t receive the activation code (happened in my case), you can use the dial-in number provided on the website to confirm your phone number. This will allow you to proceed with the sign-up process.

• At the end of the sign-up process, you will receive a PIN that needs to be used to authenticate your login to the website and use the mobile app. This PIN can be changed later through the website or the mobile app.

3.  Skip the Call Forwarding Step for Now:


Once your account is setup, you may be asked to configure call forwarding on your mobile phone. I found the instructions provided by Youmail for this purpose to be inaccurate or dated. This is why I would advise that you skip this step for now. We’ll come back to this later (see step 5) .



4.  Login to Your Youmail Account & Configure Options:


Use your phone number and PIN to login to your account. Browse the Settings tab to configure your account and mailbox options. The left hand menu consists of several sections that you can explore for various options. Under the My Information section, you can setup personal information details, change your PIN and setup a username for the community forum. Additionally, you should also take a look at the options in the My Alerts section to setup how you want SMS, Email and Push Notifications to be delivered.




5.  Enable Call Forwarding:


Now we’re ready to configure call forwarding. In the My Phones section under the Settings tab, you will find two access numbers. 

As noted earlier, these numbers may be long-distance for you. Assuming you’re okay with this, you will need to follow instructions from your carrier to forward calls to the Forwarding Access Number provided by Youmail.


In my case, the forwarding instructions provided by Youmail were inaccurate or dated. In fact, I received an email from Youmail with different yet still incorrect instructions. After some online digging (thanks Google!), I tested various suggestions and figured out the correct key sequence for call forwarding on the Rogers network.


You will need to enter the key sequence on your phone dialpad and press the Call button. Don’t miss the asterisks and hashes. While I’m listing various options here, in my case, I ended up using the BUSY/NO ANSWER Transfer option listed below.

• To activate NO ANSWER Transfer:

* 6 1 * Youmail-forwarding-access-number # CALL

• To cancel NO ANSWER Transfer:

# 6 1 # CALL

• To activate BUSY Transfer:

* 6 7 * Youmail-forwarding-access-number # CALL

• To cancel BUSY Transfer:

# 6 7 # CALL

• To activate BUSY/NO ANSWER Transfer:

* 0 0 4 * Youmail-forwarding-access-number # CALL

• To cancel BUSY/NO ANSWER Transfer:

# # 0 0 4 # CALL

Important Note: It is worth re-iterating that the call forwarding instructions provided above were tested on the Rogers network. You may need to follow different instructions specific to your carrier. Additionally, if you currently subscribe to a voicemail service from your carrier, you might need to disable it to configure call forwarding as described above.

6.  Install the Youmail Mobile Application:


Download and install the Youmail mobile application for your smartphone. Links are provided here for your convenience:

• Youmail Android App on Google Play
• Youmail iPhone App on the App Store
• Youmail on the Blackberry App World

Once the application is installed, you can use your phone number and PIN to login to the app. Once logged in, use the settings menu on your phone to explore the configuration options (pretty much the same options are available through the website interface).

7.  Test Your Basic Voicemail Setup:


We’re done with the basic setup and it’s time for a test. Call your number from a different phone and let it ring until it goes to voicemail (hopefully). Depending on how you’ve setup your push notifications and/or email alerts and/or SMS alerts, you should receive an indication or message on your phone for new voicemails on your Youmail voicemail box.




You may also want to test the system in other ways to make sure all missed calls go to your new voicemail - e.g. call your phone and ignore the call by pressing the end key or call your phone while it is turned off or in airplane mode.




Through the push notification, you will be directed to the Youmail App interface where you can browse and retrieve messages in your voicemail and also view any missed calls.

8.  Setup a Custom Voicemail Greeting:


With a working setup, you can now play around with various options. You probably want to customize or record your own voicemail greeting – this can be done by logging into your Youmail account and browsing to My Youmail => Greetings. You can select from various standard greetings or even peruse some funny ones uploaded by the Youmail community.


That’s it for now… 


I hope this How-To tutorial will be of some use.
Do you have any other tips or alternative suggestions for free voicemail setup?
If you try the setup in this How-To tutorial, let me know what you think in the comments section below.
You can also fire me a tweet with your feedback on this article.

Facebook Timeline for Brands: Overview & Five Suggestions

As the March 30^th deadline approaches for businesses to update their Facebook brand pages to the new Facebook Timeline, marketers are busy trying to figure out how to best utilize the new layout of their profile pages to advance their social media marketing campaigns. I’ve already helped two organizations in the conceptual redesign of their profile pages and I thought I’d write a blog post to list some of the take-aways from our brainstorming sessions. Hopefully these suggestions can alleviate some of the pain points for businesses that are distressed over this transition.

1. The Cover Photo:

The Timeline based Facebook profile features a landscape oriented cover photo (suggested size is 851 x 315 pixels). For businesses, the cover photo provides an opportunity to express the tone and mood of their brand and their timeline profile page. While businesses can customize the cover photo to their liking, Facebook has prohibited specific promotional tactics such as calls to action for their customers (e.g. you can't ask followers to "like" or to click on certain tabs).

Brand managers should use the cover photo as a dynamic space to set first impressions for their products and services, and facilitate the right tone for an opening conversation with their future customer.

Example: I really like how Nissan has incorporated a really simple but powerful branding message “Our Most Innovative Year”. It gets people wanting to come back for the "reveal".

2. Milestones on the Timeline:

Since the Facebook Timeline changes the default profile page from a list of the most recent updates to a complete summary of an organization’s growth or its brand’s evolution, businesses should include events and achievements that symbolize various chapters in their development. This is especially important for what Facebook terms “Legacy Brands”, i.e. those brands that have decades of historical data that can be featured on the timeline.

In formulating the motif for a timeline, businesses should attempt to engage users through interactive rich media. The timeline should feature more than just status updates, and include photos, videos and location information where relevant.

If done right, the timeline should improve the stickiness for the profile page by allowing current and potential followers to scroll easily through the high points of a business – eventually creating more brand affinity.

Example: Check out Subway’s Timeline starting in the 1960s with the first use of the name ‘Subway’. 

3. Custom Tabs

Facebook’s older interface for business pages featured default landing pages that were invariably used for marketing campaigns and sales promotions. As a major change for many brands, the new Facebook Timeline will no longer allow directing visitors to custom landing tabs.

That being said, businesses can now select which of their tabs (icons) are displayed under the cover photo. These tabs provide the opportunity for businesses to feature the strongest aspects of their Facebook presence – whether it is stories or pictures from their customers, other content pages, or business-specific apps.

Brand managers should customize this space rather than accepting the default order of the tabs/icons along with the default fill images for these tabs. Positioning the tabs and using custom images should be considered to improve the look and feel of the timeline.

Example: Custom app images such as those created by Fanta offer a rich visual interface for the timeline.

4. Pinned Posts

To improve the visibility of selected content, brand page administrators can “pin” a post to the top of their Timeline. Pinned posts can remain at the top of a timeline for up to seven days. They can offer a useful means to broadcast critical information to followers as well as a mechanism to direct fans to contests and other promotions.

Example: Check out Starbucks’ pinned post publicizing its “Global Month of Service”.

5. Highlighted Posts

In addition to pinned posts described above, brands also have the opportunity to highlight important posts from their timeline. Clicking the star at the top right side of the post will increase the size of the post and make it span the width of the timeline, rather than just one column. This will garner more attention and make it very hard for followers to miss. Along with pinned posts, this feature allows brands to position their marketing and social campaigns front & center... literally :-)

Example: Oxfam USA uses a highlighted timeline post featuring a video that introduces the charity to its Facebook page visitors:

Hopefully this quick introduction to the Facebook Timeline for businesses will help you with your own transition to the new profile layout. While change is always painful, it is also inevitable, and there are benefits to be gained through new features and functions that weren’t available earlier. Some businesses have already started reporting improvements in their brand page engagement.

Have you already made the change-over? What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments section below, or fire me a tweet with your feedback on this article.

Using the Embed Tweets Feature in the New Twitter Interface

In the newly introduced (Thursday, Dec. 8th, 2011) online interface for Twitter, there an interesting feature that facilitates easier embedding of tweets into other online websites and blogs. The idea is pretty similar to embedding YouTube videos through HTML snippets that can be copied and pasted into a third-party website.

 I had to initially look around for the embed options... they're somewhat buried in the interface.


Here's a quick How-To Tutorial


1. “Open” a Tweet:

• Mouse-Over Tweet 
• You can click the Tweet text or click the “Open” link that appears when you mouse-over the tweet.

2. Get Tweet “Details”:

• After opening the tweet, click on “Details”

3. Get to Tweet “Embed” options:

• In the Detail view, click on “Embed this Tweet”

4. Select “Embed” options:

• Select embed option: HTML , Shortcode or Link
• Select alignment option for HTML or Shortcode embedding.
• Copy the HTML snippet or Shortcode or Link: Your choice should be based on what works on your blog or website platform. HTML Snippets will probably work on most sites. Tweet Shortcodes are currently only compatible with a few select web platforms such as Wordpress.

5. Paste the HTML snippet or shortcode to the blog or website:

• Here's how the HTML snippet from the example above renders on my blog:
  

just got access to the new twitter interface. need to find my regular controls but looks cool overall. — Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) December9, 2011

• I can improve the look-and-feel by including my desired style formatting... such as adding a blue border - ooooh! :-)

just got access to the new twitter interface. need to find my regular controls but looks cool overall. — Umar Ruhi (@Informatician) December9, 2011

That's it... easy peasy :-)

Some Twitter Tips to Get you Started

Over the past three months, I’ve started using Twitter a little more regularly than I used to. It’s grown on me and I’ve figured out the use-cases that fit my objectives as an academic. While upping the frequency of my tweets, I’ve also developed some familiarity with the conventions and terminology used on twitter.

In this post, I’m summarizing these conventions and terminology. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these tips useful.

What is Twitter?:

As a user, you will probably ascribe specific characteristics to Twitter based on what you use it for. Here are a couple of ways I think of Twitter:

• Twitter is a social networking platform that provides a microblogging service to its users. It allows users to post status updates called “Tweets” that are limited to 140 characters (including spaces and special characters).
  
  
• While many people would compare its functionality to that of a chat client, Twitter offers an open forum for many-to-many conversations.
  
  
• In addition to public messages, Twitter facilitates private communication among members (through direct messages)

·         For passive users, Twitter is a great monitoring tool to observe conversations among groups and posts regarding specific subjects.

Twitter Interface Basics:

Although Twitter can be used directly through its website interface (www.twitter.com), many people prefer using different clients to Twitter.com. My own favorite is TweetDeck (www.TweetDeck.com) which I use to monitor others tweets as well as to send my own updates.

• Your Twitter “Activity Stream” consists of you own tweets as well as tweets from others who you “Follow”. By following a user on twitter, you are adding that user’s tweets in chronological order to your timeline or activity stream. Following others is useful if you’re interested in the content and updates provided by them, and it’s also a recommended practice to foster reciprocity.
  
  
• It is also important to remember that tweets are public by default unless you restrict messages to specific recipients by including their usernames at the beginning of the tweets.

Essential Tweet Conventions:

Once you start tweeting beyond the basic / simple babble, you’ll start to realize the need for using direct reference to people, websites, and themes. These items constitute the three types of references you can include in your tweets:

• You can provide links to websites: While you can include the full URL of websites (http://...), you should get into the habit of shortening the URL. There are various URL shortening services available. My favorite is bit.ly (http://bit.ly).
  
  
• You can refer to other people of Twitter through a “Mention” by prepending the “@” symbol to their usernames. These mentions typically get reported to the person through an email or an alert within their activity stream.
  
  
• You can highlight specific keywords in your tweets by using the right “Hashtags”. A hashtag is a keyword with a “#” symbol prefixed to it. By utilizing relevant hashtags in your tweets, you can increase the searchability of your tweets by others. The key is to figure out hashtags that are used by others who talk about similar topics and utilize them within your own tweets if and where possible.

In addition to writing your own tweets, from time to time, you might feel the need to “Retweet” someone. By repeating a tweet from another user, you are amplifying their message and distributing it to your own followers. Again, this is a recommended practice to reinforce ties on your social network.  Remember that retweeting someone will make the original tweet appear in the activity stream of those who follow you on Twitter.

• You can retweet a message by clicking on the retweet symbol underneath that message. This is referred to as an automatic retweet.
  
  
• You can also retweet a person by copying the text of that tweet and prepending “RT @username” to identify that it’s a retweet from a specific username. This is referred to as a manual retweet.

Using Twitter as a Monitoring Tool:

• You can optimize your use of Twitter by creating “Lists” of different people you follow. For example, I have a list for my work-colleagues, and multiple lists that include professionals who talk about specific topics and subjects. This feature provides me with the capability to demarcate different social circles and communities of interest that I participate in. In the online Twitter interface, you can click use the drop-down menu underneath a person’s profile description to add them to a list (as shown below).
  
  If you use a client such as TweetDeck, you can display activity streams for your lists in different columns (I find this very useful for monitoring tweets).

• If you wish you use Twitter as a monitoring tool, you can save your searches and access them with greater ease at any time. Through the online Twitter interface, you can perform a keyword search using the search bar on the top of the screen, and click on the “Save this search” button.

This will make this search accessible to you through the “Searches” tab in your Twitter interface. Remember that the search results constitute an activity stream that will be updated as more relevant tweets keep getting posted.

• You can also mark tweets as “Favorites”. This is pretty similar to bookmarking important resources online. By creating your own list of favorites, you are really creating a catalog of tweets that you might want to come back to. The original tweeters receive a notification when you favorite one of their tweets.

Optimizing your Personal Interactions through Tweets:

You’ll probably get familiar with many customs and conventions of tweeting through your use of twitter, but here are a couple of tips to help you use the proper abbreviations and accepted vernacular.

• Use “via” to mention someone who pointed out something on Twitter. For example: “Here is a really great website http://shortURL via @username”
  
  
• Use “MT” to indicate a “modified retweet” when you are selectively quoting from a previous tweet. For example: “MT @informatician …”. While it is acceptable to use MT, it is good practice to ensure that you’re not changing the overall message.
  
  
•  Use a mention at the beginning of a tweet to direct that tweet to a specific person. For example: “@username hello how’s it going?” Referred to as conversational tweets, these messages will only be seen by accounts that follow BOTH your account AND the account you mentioned at beginning of tweet. Remember that if a mention is used elsewhere in your tweet, that tweet will be visible to all your followers.
  
  
• A variant of a conversational tweet is when you want to direct a tweet primarily to a specific person but also want your followers to see it. In such a case, you can prepend a period “.” before the mention. For example “. @username check this out: …”
  
  
• Use “cc” followed by a mention “@username” at the end of a tweet to get the attention of a specific person for whom that tweet may be relevant.
  
  
• While the above tips may be handy for interacting with others through Twitter, remember that you shouldn’t needlessly mention people in your tweets as this is considered a form of spam.

I think that’s about it in terms of a quick and light introduction to the use of Twitter. Like I said, you’ll probably figure out a lot more stuff on your own as you start using Twitter. These are just some tips that I hope you’ll find useful in getting started. Let me know what you think.

Happy Tweeting, and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@Informatician). I’ll certainly reciprocate.

Exploring Mashups - Part IV: A Social Networking Mashup Using Tarpipe

Continuing my series of blog posts on Mashups, here is the next installment... this time, I've decided to create a screencast providing an overview of Tarpipe and a tutorial demonstrating the creation of a fairly simple mashup that uses an email message to trigger a workflow that links Flickr and Twitter.

Let me know what you think...

*Update: I just re-did the screencast using Camtasia (Updated: March 2010)*

Exploring Mashups – Part III: A Geo-coded Mashup using Dapper, Yahoo Pipes & Google Maps

This is the third installment in my series of tutorials on building mashups using tools such as dapper for data mapping, and yahoo! pipes for data processing.

Playing with Mashups - Part II : Integrating Dapper with Popfly

Update: The Popfly site was discontinued in August 2009, and this article is only been keep for archival purposes.

This blog post follows from a previous one where I experimented and mulled over the functions provided by the content mapping and mashup functionality provided by Dapper. In my first trial run, I created a mashup for an online discussion forum in which I participate on a regular basis. The mashup was pretty simple – yet, it was the result of composing several dapps together in an iterative manner using a variety of information output formats. In this post, I am summarizing how I was able to take the final dapp that was created in part 1, and use it as an input to Microsoft’s Popfly mashup creator.

The data flow schematic and the popfly screenshot below reveal the configuration between the dapp and the popfly mashup. What’s happening here is that the dapp is used to output an RSS feed which is then captured by the RSS block in popfly. The specific items from the RSS feed are then rendered as a table.

Dataflow Schematic - Dapper & Popfly Integration

click to enlarge

Popfly Screenshot - Dapper & Popfly Integration

click to enlarge

After reading the above, you’d probably wonder if this new configuration is really a “mashup” afterall in it’s strictest definition… and the simple answer to that is “probably not”… since the data in this case is being acquired from a single source, i.e. the dapp. However, the dapp itself was constructed in such a way that it fetches and formats data from multiple sources - so the original dapp itself was a mashup! That being said, the integration between dapper and popfly goes to show two important aspects of mashups: composability and reuse. The original dapp has now been composed with a different output stream, i.e. RSS and it has been configured with a new presentation format, i.e. table display in popfly. The end result is shown below:

• Dapper gathers feeds from the online forum and combines those feeds with last posters avatars into a data object;
• Popfly acquires the new data object and displays the data

Mashup - Dapper & Popfly Integration

*Embedded Content Removed - Popfly website is no longer available*

Playing with Mashups - Part I : Using Dapper for Content Mapping

This is the first blog post in what I plan to be a series of posts to share my experiences with various mashup building applications online.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been playing with the data mapping and mashup functionality provided by Dapper. Overall, my experience has been rather pleasant, and I would definitely suggest the service to someone who’s just getting started with mashups. It should be noted however, that on the outset, Dapper is more of a data mapping service than a mashup. The main features and functions of Dapper allow the end-user to extract pieces of information from websites and label and organize the information in a logical structure. The resulting information structure can then be output in various formats including XML, HTML, and RSS feeds, or it can be rendered in specific applications such as a Google Gadget or a Flash Widget. It’s pretty cool when you try all the available output options for the first time.

So to test out the basic functionality of Dapper, I set out on a simple task to query the Google Scholar search engine and fetch the list of my research publications. I thought this might result in something I would want to use in the future… and I was right. Other than the fact that Google Scholar still does not index many academic repositories and hence, the results are not comprehensive, I did get some results which I was able to formulate into a dapp. The resulting dapp was then rendered as a flash widget (shown below).

powered by Dapper

Here is a summary of the procedure to get to the results as displayed in the flash widget above.

1. Login to Dapper

2. In the section titled, Get any content from the Web, click on create a new Dapp

3. Enter the Google Scholar URL pointing to the search results you want to extract from.
In my case, I used: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=author:"Umar+Ruhi"&num=100&scoring=r
My name is specified in the author parameter. The num=100 parameter specifies the number of search results to show; and scoring=r specifies that I would like “r”(recent) articles to be listed first.
Under the form address bar, you can leave the format as Dapp XML.The output format can be customized later.

4. Once you see the google search results in Dapper’s virtual browser, you can select “Add to Basket”.

5. Ideally, at this point, it is recommended that you also give Dapper a couple of other similar pages (e.g. search results for other authors), so that Dapper can make some sense of the webpage structures. I didn’t really feel the need to do so in this case. If you want Dapper to just analyze the webpage structure of more pages, you can enter their URLs and “Add to Basket”. Once done, you can click on the Next Step button.

6. With the page(s) in the basket, you can start selecting areas of the page that you would like to save into your information structure for output. For example, I clicked on the titles of the search results which highlighted all the titles on the page. Sometimes, Dapper will select other non-related areas automatically, and you will need to manually de-select these by clicking the Clear link for the item(s) in the Preview selected content pane.

7. If you’re satisfied with the selection of information items, you can click on the Save Field button and provide a label for the field.

8. Steps 6 and 7 can be repeated to gather more information items from the webpage in the basket. With all the content fields identified, you can click on the Next Step button.

9. On the next screen, you will group the content fields and provide group name(s). These group names will be used to structure the resulting dapps. With all the groups specified, click on the Next Step button to proceed to the last screen.

10. On the last screen, you will be asked to save the dapp and provide a description. You will also have the option of making the dapp private, i.e. only you or someone who knows the exact address of the dapp or its output feeds will be able to access it. I use the private option for most of my dapps which I know have little utility for anyone else.
The input variables are meant to provide a mechanism for allowing an end-user to customize how the dapp is called. It is an optional feature, and you can click on the help link to learn more. Click Save when you’re done entering all the details of the dapp.

11. Now that the dapp is created, you will be presented with a variety of output options which you can play around with to see which option works best for you. As shown above, I selected the flash widget to present the results of my dapp.


That’s about it in terms of how the Google Scholar dapp was created. For everyone who’s interested in exploring Dapper, I also hope this mini-tutorial comes in handy for learning about other basic features of Dapper.