We are developing our hotel management system (PMS) for our hotel. There are a number of questions:
An example is the site booking.com. He has his own calendar for managing the hotel's load and prices. This calendar has the possibility of sending to the PMS system through the XML calendar. In the choice of admin panel booking.com as a hotel manager there is a PMS selection functionality which to send the calendar synchronization with booking.com. There are about 300 of them.
And on the other hand in the PMS of the external platform there is a choice of sales channels, such sites as booking.com and others. And when I send the calendar synchronization with booking.com to the PMS system there is a choice also inside the PMS system online travel agency Booking.com.
Total questions:
How can I become an aggregator as a booking.com site so that we can be selected in PMS systems as an aggregator channel.
How can I unload my calendar in two third-party mode. Through XML, what are the other options? How does this work?
I am not sure if I understand you clearly but if you want to be able to sync with booking.com
you have to register as affiliate partner with booking.com
then you can request for developer page access
once you get the access for developer page, you can get an API Key and you can see the full XML API documentation.
Then you can start developing 2 way request and responses according to their document.
For starters, I will recommend Agoda or HomeAway.com
Related
I'm in the process of creating a Facebook Messenger chatbot using Chatfuel.
It is designed to collect all the information about a certain musical band together in one place. It allows users to play the bands music via links to spotify, and to buy them through amazon, using an affiliate link. See a biography, link off to merchandise, watch youtube videos etc....
I've just watched a video on the review process and it tells me.... (Udemy course)
No marketing or promotional messages.
No advertising, sale or product announcements.
No Brand advertising, branded content.
No Newsletters or announcements
No Upselling or cross selling of products or services
No Referral program or incentive promotions
Yet on the Facebook Messenger page it tells me
Raise Awareness
Get your business, product or service in front of more people.
Acquire Customers
Generate more leads and turn your conversations into conversions.
Enable Transactions
Incorporate account linking and purchase flows to enable more transactions.
Robbie Williams and Aerosmith have both just released chatbots, which effective promote and sell their album, tour and merchendise by sending the user to various web pages, they don't actually do it in the chatbot.
My problem is that I cannot actually find this information on the Facebook site. I've looked through all the documentation and review policies and there is nothing about these restrictions.
I am wondering if this video is referring to unsolicited messages (broadcasting) sent by the chatbot rather than user button clicking?
Can anyone point me in the right direction to find the relevant docs? I feel I may be wasting my time developing this and need some official confirmation.
Thanks.
You should have a look at official policy page, "Comparison of Messaging Types" paragraph is a good summary. Basically there are two tipes of messaging that your bot can make:
Standard Messaging (inside 24 hours window from last user interaction with bot)
Subscription Messaging and Customer Matching (allows messaging outside 24 hours window)
Standard messaging allows all use cases including promotional material. I think that Udemy video might be outdated, hence this quote:
The restriction on promotional content has been removed for standard messaging.
I can see their calendars on the web when I sign on, can I retrieve this from API? I hope to be able to build an intelligent meeting assistant.
As seen in the Calendar Resource API docs right now:
The Google Data Calendar Resource API is now deprecated and is scheduled for sunset in January 2017. Apps should instead use the Directory API's Calendar Resource object.
As for the suggested Directory API, I think you could specifically use the resources.calendars.get which is described in the docs as (with parameters):
Retrieves a calendar resource.
Parameters:
calendarResourceId - The unique ID of the calendar resource to retrieve.
customer - The unique ID for the customer's Google account. As an account administrator, you can also use the my_customer alias to represent your account's customer ID.
-- where I think you can specify the user to get that specific calendar from.
All,
I was wondering if there is any way that you know of to automatically populate a Calendar in Office 365/Outlook based on what other users enter to their calendar.
The HR manager wants to have a calendar that shows when employees are out of office all in one place. Having a shared out of office calendar people can "invite" makes sense, however he believes people will forget to do this and it wouldn't be effective!
I've so far found no obvious way of doing this.
Thanks in advance.
The closest built-in feature to a global or master calendar is not a single calendar, but the ability to overlay multiple calendars in Outlook's Calendar module. External calendars would of course have to be shared/delegated to you first, but you would at least have a central point to view appointments from multiple people using this method.
However, if you prefer a single Calendar but need appointments from other Calendars in it, then you're definitely looking at synchronization - but you can't synchronize multiple calendars in Outlook natively. For that you'll need to look at a custom solution (such as an add-in) or third-party tools:
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sharing/more-tools-and-utilities-for-sharing-data/
You could develop an app or a service that uses Outlook Calendar REST API.
Your service would poll the employees calendars, compare their status with a local database and create new events on your shared calendar using again the Outlook API.
I have a website and I would like to implement a paid subscription service. Its a simple service with only 2 types of plans. For now, ill just use Paypal. But im a little lost before start, mainly with the data model.
My main question for now is, what information do I need to keep for each subscription? Do I need to implement a shopping cart for this (dont think so)? Im not asking for a detailed explanation, just a few lights or resources to find a way to start. Thanks.
Depends on what technology you're using. Basic payments work a bit like this
-> You send them to paypal with a plan (you define the plan on paypal)
they know which amount to charge
you can pass custom parameters which they will pass back
Customer fills in application
<- paypal tells you that your predefined plan got purchased
in this same request, they send a lot of info about the payment including a GUID and your params
-> you ask paypal "hey, some one just told me this plan GUID got purchased, can you confirm"
<- paypal service returns 'yes'
-> you take the customer's ID from the params that you attached when you sent them to the paypal service and update them to "paid" in the database, or whatever
That's it in a nutshell...
Look at any subscription card mailer from any magazine and you can get an idea of what kind of data you will have to record. Start and end date for the subscription would be a good thing to keep, and what kind of plan the user is subscribed to. Once you have the end date, you just need to run a query to get the records of the users that have access. Something like
Select * from users where subscription_end_date is >= today
I'm sure there will be a lot of other columns that will go into your final product, but that will be up to you to decide what data you want to keep. What are the different states that a subscription can be in? Can someone be subscribed to both services at the same time?
PayPal does a decent job if you want to charge the same amount every month. However, if you anticipate your users making changes to their subscription plans (upgrades/downgrades) or needing to provide credits to their account for customer support purposes, PayPal would require that you cancel the subscription...and then have the customer re-subscribe.
[Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly.com]
Recurly handles the upgrades and downgrades, and provides automated customer emails to be sent out to your customers (on your behalf) for every event confirmation, and invoice that occurs. You also have a full account management dashboard and reporting so that you don't need to build this yourself.
Best of all, if you ever decide to leave PayPal, and move your business to a standalone payment gateway, Recurly stores all of your credit cards in a PCI compliant vault so you don't need to ask you customers to come back and re-subscribe. (PayPal will not return your customer credit card information). You simply configure your new gateway in Recurly, and payments will be processed without any interruption to your business.
Here is a blog post we wrote on the topic:
http://blog.recurly.com/2010/08/top-ten-reasons-to-use-recurly-vs-paypal-for-recurring-billing/
-Best of luck.
-Dan
Not sure whether this question makes sense on SO, but I'm working on a website that would provide a list of new cars of interest to the user, a bit like autotrader.com. Do you guys know how this type of websites operate? On autotrader.com I was thinking that maybe the dealers have to upload and update their inventory themselves. Does anyone know whether it is the case? Also I felt that when you go to a dealer in the US, they can search for a specific car through all the dealerships.
Bottom line: The inventory seems to be accessible by third parties - who knows more?
AutoTrader gets its data by
Dealer manually adding the vehicles
Dealers third party services pushing the data to AutoTrader nightly (FTP or Emailed) from services like.
website providers / inventory management tools such as AutoJini.com, VinSolutions (now owned by ATC)
Lot management companies such as Dealer Specialties, KBB CDMData (these companies come to the dealers lot and take the pictures and then send the data out to website providers, classifieds sites etc.
feed processing company like Digital Motor Works.
or AutoTrader is pulling the data from the Dealer Management System like (Reynolds & Reynolds, ADP, Arkona, etc) pull method is mostly used for new cars.
Inventory is normally not accessible by other third parties... however one can always get the data for most dealers in the US via API from Oddle or Vast and Edmunds.
I should also add that you can get a custom crawl of all the data on ATC & cars.com from 80legs.com. This kind of service is used by companies that do pricing analytic for dealers.
You can also try contacting the website providers or the lot management companies and get the data feed from them.
There are an ISO 3779 (Europe) and FMVSS 115 (US & Canada) standards for all the cars on the market.
Each and everycar is identified by a VIN (Vehicule Identification Number).
I think that is what you are looking for.
You can get the official well-updated VIN data here
If you want to find it another way, google as usual will be your friend.
You can pull dealers inventory (active and historical) using Marketcheck Cars API
You can use Marketcheck Dealer ID or the source website domain for the dealer you are looking to pull the inventory.
Pull active inventory by dealer ID -
http://api.marketcheck.com/v1/search?api_key={your_api_key}&dealer_id={dealer_id}
Pull active inventory by dealer source website -
http://api.marketcheck.com/v1/search?api_key={your_api_key}&source=www.sanleandrohonda.com
More cases documented at the official API documentation
You can sign up at the developer portal hosted here and obtain the API key to start evaluating the API.