Just smile and say "Hi." It can't hurt.

I've talked to a lot of people over the past couple of months. I've been working with my new business partner, Mike, on our new company, GetMinders, and part of my role is to meet people, make deals and fundraise when necessary. One reason I love this role is that I get to make new friends and have conversations with some of the most interesting folks!

As I've been working hard to meet people in the industry from VCs and advisors to business people and awesome developers, I've found that simply saying and meaning it, "Hello there, I'd love to meet up at some point over coffee to get to know you," seems to be the best way to get the ball rolling. There are great services like Hashable or LinkedIn for e-introductions and they can help a lot but a Tweet or email saying "How are yah?" really does go a long way.

We're all only human so this technique works better than you'd expect. Whether you're the richest man alive or someone just getting started in the biz, everyone enjoys socializing. Most of the time when someone doesn't respond to your virtual wave it's not because they don't want to (or they don't like you) but because they may not be able to. Time is not always on their side and responding to each and every request would be nearly impossible. But give it time and your "Hello", if sincere, may stand out from all of the other pitches and requests out there.

Want to customize Google Apps a bit more? Add links!

When we started looking at Google Apps for our domain there was one thing that stood out that always irked me.  There was very little space for domain wide customization.  Sure, Google is working on making it easier with a new user management tool, widgets, etc but something as simple as quick links to our other services were no where to be found.  After searching high and low, I came up with this solution and I hope it can help you out too.

The very first link we wanted in Google Apps was one to Postini, one of Google's own services for anti-spam.  It's no where to be found in the web interface and yet people need access to it every day.  This is where a bit of hacking came into play.  I popped over to the Apps Marketplace (Google's new playground for third party developers).  I paid the $100 to publish an app and began working on my non-app-app -- I'll explain that in a bit.

Go ahead and login to the marketplace and get over to your Vendor Profile so you can "Create a new listing".  Make sure "My product may be directly installed into Google Apps domain" is checked off.

Choose a category (it doesn't matter which one), fill in a name, a summary and a full overview (again, these don't matter either) and put something into the "Pricing Summary" box.  I typed, "It's free because it's mine" but you can enter anything you want.

Next it where the real process happens.  Copy the code below into the "Manifest" box:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ApplicationManifest xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/ApplicationManifest/2009">

  <!-- Support info to show in the marketplace & control panel -->

  <Support>

    <!-- URL for application configuration, accessed from the app settings page in the control panel -->

    <Link rel="manage" href="http://www.example.com/google/admin.php?domain=${DOMAIN_NAME}" />

    <!-- URL explaining how customers get support. -->

    <Link rel="support" href="http://www.example.com/google/support.php" />

    <!-- URL that is displayed to admins during the deletion process, to specify policies such as data retention, how to claim accounts, etc. -->

    <Link rel="deletion-policy" href="http://www.example.com/google/deletion-policy.php" /> 

  </Support>

  <!-- Name and description pulled from message bundles -->

  <Name>Links - LiveMeeting</Name>

  <Description>A simple application for testing the marketplace</Description>

  <!-- Show this link in Google's universal navigation for all users -->

  <Extension id="navLink" type="link">

    <Name> ✮ Some Cool App Here</Name>

    <Url>https://www.somerandomapp.com/someotherdir/</Url>

  </Extension>

  <!-- Declare our OpenID realm so our app is white listed -->

  <Extension id="realm" type="openIdRealm">

    <Url>http://www.example.com</Url>

  </Extension>

</ApplicationManifest>

There are only two areas you need to be concerned about for our purposes.  The first <Name> to </Name> section is what shows up in the Google Apps admin panel.  I recommend calling it something that you'll remember later.

The second area, <Extension id=navLink" type="link"> is where you fill out what you'd like to show up to your users in the Global Navigation bar in Google Apps.  Just fill in the values you want.

Finally, hit "Save and Preview".  You should be taken to the "Review your listing" page.  There's no need to publish it (The big GOOG will reject it anyway) but instead click on "Add it now" on the right hand side of the page and enter your Google Apps domain.

Follow the steps to add it to your domain, click through any approvals and make sure you you click to activate any licenses (sometimes it pops up with an error, just try again) until you see three green check marks in your admin panel.

And then you're all set.  It takes about 15 minutes for them to show up for your users but you should see links (as you see in the screen shot at the top of this post) that your users can now click.  You can add as many as you'd like (at least I haven't hit a limit) and they always show up in alphabetical order.

Let me know if this helps you out with your Google Apps roll outs and if you have any other cool tips or tricks to share, leave them here in the comments for others to try out.

Transparency = Good

I got an email this morning from a small company that we use and I have to say, I'm happy about it.

We use ZenDesk for a number of groups at work to track what and how we're doing when it comes to small projects and we find the tool immensly helpful.  It ties in with Active Directory for single sign on and it sends email alerts to all the parties involved to keep them updated on what's going on.

I'm obviously not thrilled with the hike in price (no one really would be) but I am thrilled that they were so transparent about this change.  The email was concise and the reasoning behind the price jump was made abundantly clear.  They even linked off to both their TOS (something Facebook might want to think about more often) and a quick FAQ.

Finally, they did two things that others need to learn to do.  They let me down gracefully and they shared their contact information right there in the email.  They weren't looking for user feedback as to whether or not the price should go up, they simply offered a way to slow down that jump while getting more customers to lock into the product.  It's both smart and friendly and that makes me a happy customer.

So for all of that, I say: Thank you ZenDesk.