There is currently a number of new micro-blogging tools that are focusing on the enterprise market – they gloat about having the coolest clients (IPhone, Blackberry, etc.) Unbelievable but true – many individuals in the corporate world might not have these gadgets. Of course, “everyone” supports the browser but lately I’ve been thinking about the importance of linking ESME into other parts of the typical worker’s environment. Many people spend most of the day either working of SAP-related systems or on Microsoft Office products. In a previous blog, we discussed the WebDynpro client for ESME which might interesting for people who work with the SAP GUI or portal.
I thought what about those individuals who work with Excel, Word, etc. Should they be left out of the micro-blogging world? With that thought in mind, I sat down down and wrote a VBA macro that creates messages on ESME. This macro is based on ESME’s REST API.
It In my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to do a full-blown client but there are number of existing micro-blogging tools where users can post entries on what they are doing (”finished presentation”, “working hard on sales analysis”, etc). I thought this functionality was a nice feature but I hated the idea of having to switch applications to just post a quick message. Therefore, I thought a macro that just pops up in your Office tool of choice which allows you enter a quick message for ESME would be nice. The macro I created is very primitive and could be definitely enhanced to make it prettier and even more useful.
To authenticate themselves, ESME users must replace “insert_your_token“ with their own authorization token. Tags are currently hard-coded as well.
Sub ESME_sendMessage()
‘HTTP variable
Dim myHTTP As MSXML2.XMLHTTP
‘HTTP object
Set myHTTP = CreateObject(”msxml2.xmlhttp”)
‘open the connection
myHTTP.Open “post”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/login?token=[insert_your_token]“, False
’send
myHTTP.Send
‘ Send Message
Dim message
message = InputBox(”Enter Message”)
myHTTP.Open “post”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/send_msg?message=” + message + “&tags=Test,excel&via=excel”, False
’send
myHTTP.Send
‘Logout
myHTTP.Open “get”, _
“http://api.esme.us/esme/api/logout“, False
’send
myHTTP.Send
End Sub
This blog is associated with the topic of Shadow IT , because ESME has the ability to empower not only those users who are aware of the newest / hottest social media technologies but also individuals who are more accustomed to Microsoft Office than Twitter. Such individuals develop complicated macros themselves to meet their requirements. They don’t need (or want) to go through normal IT channels. These people don’t know PHP, Ruby on Rails or Java. They’re not developers. What they do have, however, is a better understanding of their individual business needs than any developer will ever have. Therefore, let these users decide how they are going to use ESME.
Corporate IT just has to install ESME and then publish the link to such users. The ability of accessing ESME via VBA gives this group of users the capability to decide themselves how they will use the tool.
