Confer-ence

New Funding, New Features, New Pricing!

The last few months have been an incredible time for Confer. Even in the midst of a continued economic crisis, we’ve been blessed with a myriad of new opportunities, relationships, and developments. We’ve matured our flagship product offering, trimmed fat from our operational costs, and begun development of our second product line.

Funding: We’re proud to announce that we’ve recently closed a considerable new round of seed funding from local North-East Ohio investors. This new capital will allow us to expand our team and provide even more power and flexibility in our flagship and other products.

Pricing: As part of our efforts, we’ve made significant changes to Confer’s pricing. Confer is now free for organizations with less than 20 users. Larger companies can benefit from reduced $3/$5 pricing plans, and enterprises can now install a Confer server in their hosting center to maximize security and scale.

Features: We’ve continued to maximize the scalability of the Confer product, allowing for organizations of 10,000+ users to very quickly create an alternate intranet for their business. Chat now includes activity indicators and last active info to provide insight into who is available, and who has been working when.

New Endeavor: We’ve also been working on our next product, 60mo (http://60mo.com), a powerful new approach to cash-flow, HR, and Finance management for small businesses and start-ups. We’ve received an incredible amount of feedback so far, and are looking forward to our projected beta launch in August of this year. As they say, hope isn’t a strategy, and the more accurate your plans, the better. Take our quick survey and help us shape the direction of our product here: http://bit.ly/a2m0rl

New features and fixes!

Our latest release includes several major additions including email notifications of Confer network activity, and on screen indicators of new updates.

Now your menu bar includes simple numeric indicators of posts you’ve not viewed, so if you’ve got three groups that you’re a member of, and each has a new post you haven’t seen, the groups menu item will have a (3) beside it, etc.

To setup email notifications, login to your profile settings, and you will see the Notification settings near the bottom of the page.  There you can choose to receive email updates from your network as often as you’d like;  as they happen, daily , or weekly. These are sent to your default email address provided in your user profile.

We’ve also massively refactored the code that drives directories of items, so now lists of users, tags, or groups should load much more quickly.

Finally, we’ve added the ability to view your other Confer networks (and associated indicators) from the “Networks” menu item on the main menu.

Keep the feedback coming.  We’ve still got a lot on the way, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates over the coming days.

C# API Wrapper for CheddarGetter

Intro

We decided to open up some of our source at Confer to help other .Net developers integrate with CheddarGetter, a plug-in subscription management and recurring billing system. This C# API wrapper is intended to handle the communication between your application and CheddarGetter.

Our C# API wrapper has implemented all of CheddarGetter’s APIs as of 03/15/2010.

Assumptions

CheddarGetter allows you to specify the unique ID of your Customers between your application and CheddarGetter. CheddarGetter accepts up to a 36 character string, so it can be just about anything, but we’re using a Guid that is hard-coded in the wrapper and the associated data classes. I toyed with making this generic but decided it’d be just as easy for you to change the data type and assumed most would be using Guid here since CheddarGetter’s own id’s are returned as Guids.

If you do need to change this Guid data type, you will have to make the changes on the getCustomerList method in CheddarGetter.cs and the Customer class in CheddarGetterDataClasses.cs.

Customization

Your product’s authentication will be called on virtually every call into the CheddarGetter API wrapper and will be accessed via a few app key settings in your web config. Below is an example of what is required:

<appSettings>
   <add key=”CheddarGetterUser” value=”YourCGUser” />
   <add key=”CheddarGetterPassword” value=”YourCGPassword” />
   <add key=”CheddarGetterProductCode” value=”YourCGProductCode” />
</appSettings>

The other area of customization is your CheddarGetter subscription plans and items. Everyone will have their own plans and items, so you will have to change the enumerations accordingly in CheddarGetterDataClasses.cs. The examples in the CheddarGetterDataClasses.cs are what Confer is currently using (Free, Trial, Good, Better, Best, Other) for plans and (USER, MB) for items. See below for the code examples:

public enum PlanCodeEnum
{
   Free = 1,
   Trial,
   Good,
   Better,
   Best,
   Other
}

public enum ProductItemCode
{
   USER = 1,
   MB
}

Structure

All of the classes in the CheddarGetter wrapper are static and can be called like so:

CustomerPost newCustomer = new CustomerPost();
newCustomer.Code = new Guid().ToString();
newCustomer.Company = “CompanyName”;
newCustomer.FirstName = “FirstName”;
newCustomer.LastName = “LastName”;
newCustomer.Email = “test@test.com”;
newCustomer.PlanCode = PlanCodeEnum.Trial;

Customer returnCustomer = CheddarGetter.CreateCustomer(newCustomer);

In the above example we are creating a new customer in CheddarGetter and will return a new Customer object with the new customer data.

The public static methods currently available in our API wrapper are:

AddCustomCharge - Adds a one time custom charge to the customer

AddItem - Adds an item quantity (increments by 1 if the quantity is not specified)

CancelSubscription - Cancels a customer’s subscription

CreateCustomer - Creates a new customer

GetCustomer - Gets a specific customer

GetCustomers - Gets a list of all customers

GetSubscriptionPlans - Gets a list of all subscription plans

RemoveItem - Removes an item quantity (decrements by 1 if the quantity is not specified)

SetItem - Sets an item quantity

UpdateCustomer - Updates the customer’s name, email, and company name

UpdateCustomerAndSubscription - Updates the customer’s name, email, company name, subscription plan, and credit card info

UpdateSubscription - Updates the customer’s subscription plan and credit card info

UpdateSubscriptionPartial - Updates the customer’s subscription plan and credit card name and zip (Used if the customer’s credit card is already stored and only need to updated partial information - i.e. changing a customer’s plan from one paid plan to another while retaining the same credit card information)

UpdateSubscriptionPlanOnly - Updates the customer’s subscription plan

Download Source

You can download our C# CheddarGetter API wrapper source here: 

http://libraries.getconfer.com/CheddarGetterCSharpAPIWrapper.zip

Need Help?

The source code itself is fully commented, but if you need more help you can refer to CheddarGetter’s online API documentation:

https://cheddargetter.com/developers

If you still need more help you can drop me a line at john at getconfer dot com. I will do my best to respond.

Enjoy!
-John