Chatter from Salesforce serves as a very efficient internal communications tool for FDL because it offers a real-time feed that lets people in different geographical locations know at a glance what is happening on the site.

The one big limitation for us was that our authors and editors are constantly posting on various FDL WordPress sites and there is no app that automates posting notifications to Chatter, so we needed an RSS feed that posted updates in real time.

The Salesforce  Chatter RSS app only allows you to schedule a limited number of “calls” per day, so all the site’s posts appear in the Chatter feed at once — not much help for a news site where the front page editors need to know about an article as soon as it goes up.

WordPress has the ability to “push” real-time updates using PubSubHubbub, and sites like Blogtrottr will send you email alerts when a new post is published.  We thought if we could get  Blogtrottr sending email alerts to our Chatter feed whenever a new post was published, it might solve our problems.

The native Email2Chatter app had several limitations that made this difficult to do however.  I finally found a fork of the app on Github that was written by developer Matthew Botos which accepts emails from from multiple email addresses, a functionality needed to make Blogtrottr work.  I still had a problem with confirmation emails, so Matthew helped me find a work-around.  Many thanks to him for taking the time to do that.

I hope people find this helpful.  It has made the job of our editors and our staff much easier to have the RSS feed of our posts appearing in Chatter in real-time.  Now if someone could tell us how to compact the feed entries into 3-4 lines, our editors would be eternally grateful.

Instructions

1.  Make sure that the admin email you use for Salesforce is not also in use for any other user. This causes a lot of problems because app will search Salesforce when an email arrives and if the sender email is used by multiple users the app will wig out because it doesn’t know how to assign it.  So make sure you’re working with a “clean” email before you install.

2.  Install Matthew Botos’ fork of Force.com Labs Email2Chatter App . You can find it here:

3.  Deploy the app.

What happens next is a bit of a hack that Matthew helped me with.  What you’re going to need to do is bounce the confirmation email from Blogtrottr to an email that you can respond to, because the the app doesn’t give you the ability to do that in Salesforce.

4.  Create a new email service: Setup > Develop > Email Services > New Email Service >

with the following settings:

  • Apex Class:  ChatterEmailHandler
  • Accepts email from: Nowhere.com (important — we’ll come back to this)
  • ACTIVE :  Make sure to check the box to activate the service
  • Set all the “failure response settings” to Bounce Message
  • Enable error routing by checking the box
  • Route error emails: [your email address]

Click Save.

5. Create an email address to send RSS updates to in Salesforce.

Click “new email address”:

  • Email address:  Add an email prefix (I used chatteremailgit to distinguish the github app)
  • Check the active box
  • Context user:  Your Salesforce Id
  • Accept email from:  List the unique email address associated with your Salesforce ID AND busy bee@blogtrottr.com, because that’s where the emails from Blogtrottr will be coming from.

Click “save.”

The system will now generate a very loooong email address that appears at the bottom of the next screen, using the prefix you defined in the previous step and ending in salesforce.com.  Copy that email address.

6.  Go to Blogtrottr:

Enter the URL of the RSS feed you want to send to Chatter (I used firedoglake.com in the example above), and then  paste the long  email address from the previous step and  click “feed me.”  (If you want to create a Blogtrottr account you can login an set subject line prefixes and other options.)

Blogtrottr will immediately generate a confirmation email.  Because Salesforce is bouncing any email to the chattermailgit address that does not originate from nowhere.com, it will bounce the confirmation email to your email address.

7.  Find the confirmation email from Blogtrottr in your email account and accept it. Blogtrottr will now start sending the RSS feed to the email you created  in Salesforce.

8.  VERY IMPORTANT:  Go back to the email service screen (Salesforce > Develop > Email Services > [Chatteremailgit] or whatever you named yours > Edit

Remove “nowhere.com” from the “Accept emails from” field (leave it blank) so Salesforce will stop bouncing the blogtrottr emails:

9. You should start getting the RSS feed into your Chatter screen shortly.  It’ll look something like this:

Our front page editor hits the “like” button to signal to everyone that they have seen the post.  If they schedule it for the front page queue, they leave the post time as a comment in response.

10.  Troubleshooting

Blogtrottr is a really great service  and after trying many alternatives, it was the only reliable real-time RSS email generator I found.  It may take a couple of hours before the Blogtrottr RSS feed starts appearing in Chatter.  If it doesn’t, check to make sure:

  • You’ve used a unique email for your Salesforce ID that doesn’t appear attached to any other user in the system
  • You received your confirmation email from Blogtrottr and accepted it
  • Busybee@blogtrottr.com is set as your alternative email in the “email address service” screen of the Email2Salesforce app
  • You removed “nowhere.com” from the “accept emails from” field

If you checked all of those things and it still doesn’t work, contact the Blogtrottr folks.  They respond really quickly and they’ve been able to sort out feed problems for me before. (I swear I don’t have any interest in the company, their product is just really great and this whole system would not work without them.)