Need Help

[RaideNz7]

We need some thing that can receive and notification via email then go to one of two sites take certain information and put it into our site wile using 3 different logins.

 

Also we are looking for a C++, java, JavaScript, SQL more the better  programer full time preferably from Atlantic Canada

[programmer]

54 minutes ago, RaideNz7 said:

We need some thing that can receive and notification via email then go to one of two sites take certain information and put it into our site wile using 3 different logins.

 

Also we are looking for a C++, java, JavaScript, SQL more the better  programer full time preferably from Atlantic Canada

So you need a to automate pulling information from sites and entering it into your own upon receipt of a notification email?

• What email service are you using?
• What kind of information are you pulling from the sites (are you scraping content, copying logs, or just a invoking a REST call and copying the result?)
• How are planning to put the information into your site (HTML form, web service, ftp, etc?)

[RaideNz7]

Yes Bell, private information for insurance and form I think it would be best for it to enter it into our sites forms aka full out boxes or drop down boxes

[programmer]

Try to either bullet or put punctuation between your responses, it makes them easier to understand 

 

• You will need use a program to take Bell's email data and take action whenever an email is recieved.
  • Assuming you're using Bell Canada, this page looks like it has the relevant information: http://support.bell.ca/internet/email/how-to-use-bell-mail?step=5#displayStep
  • And assuming the above link is to the right mail provider, you need to buy/build a IMAP or POP compatible email solution.
    • Do you plan to do this on a single computer, on a server, or on the cloud?
    • Do you have a programmer to work on this? If so, what technologies is he/she familiar with (so I can link a relevant example), if not do you know what programming stack this will use?

 

• For part 2, it depends on how you are going to get the data. Do you have a web service you can call or do you need to log in get the data? Do you have permission from the data source to get that data?
• What are you planning to use the data for? Insurance data is rife with personal information which if mishandled can land you in legal trouble (I am not a lawyer, always consult someone who is.) 

 

• For Part 3, do you have any of this site up and running? There are multiple possible architectures you could use to import the data from a web service to a scanning a storage folder with result files. Another option is having somebody manually get the data and enter it into your site.

[fringie]

I can't really comment on the languages you posted but.. The easiest way is to use a language that has native support for this kind of thing i.e. C#. You can create an instance of an Outlook Mailbox and use .NET functionality to do this and you can make a browser instance (IE11 or Edge). There is support for multiple forms of authentication too so I doubt there would be an issue there. If the load is high is high you can make the app asynchronous and add a queue system. I think you'd need an Outlook (you can do a 5 minute proof of concept test for this though) email account for this to work as it's .NET/Office 365. You can get a single licence of like the E1 or E3 Office 365 (business) licenses then connect your domain to it to be able to make your email account into your own Outlook account i.e. Joe.Bloggs@customcompany.com.

 

You can probably also use Microsoft Flow to do this too as it's used for automating tasks like this. It just depends if the functionality for what you want exists yet because it's still fairly new. Flow can also connect to custom API's so you can create the functionality you want that's missing.

 

So basically, there's options in the Microsoft suite of things. There are definitely other options out there but I was just saying options I know of the top of my head.

 

 

(sorry for the rambling, too lazy to format it nicely)

[programmer]

 

19 minutes ago, fringie said:

I can't really comment on the languages you posted but.. The easiest way is to use a language that has native support for this kind of thing i.e. C#. You can create an instance of an Outlook Mailbox and use .NET functionality to do this and you can make a browser instance (IE11 or Edge). There is support for multiple forms of authentication too so I doubt there would be an issue there.

Not that Microsoft doesn't make some nice things, but many of their ancillary offerings are garbage (some primary tools like sharepoint and access too) and getting them to play nicely with other technologies is a pain. I would suggest against going a Microsoft solution unless a company is already vendor locked on their stack, and I would advise against using Outlook as a mail processor unless the solution is only meant as a stop gap and is intended to be replaced in the near future with something more flexible and robust.

[RaideNz7]

• We are currently using bell Canada's email threw pop on outlook express. And it's on a server.
• Programer oooo programers qq our slack programers of like 20 years moved and switched company's and the new programers quit after 3 weeks or so 2 days ago.
• Aka the second reason we need help. When we put out resumes we got 1 or 2 applications.
• I am the only Non contract Tech support for the company atm. We have the old programer helping once in a wile and a contracted networker
• What email program would you suggest.

[fringie]

Just now, programmer said:

 

Not that Microsoft doesn't make some nice things, but many of their ancillary offerings are garbage (some primary tools like sharepoint and access too) and getting them to play nicely with other technologies is a pain. I would suggest against going a Microsoft solution unless a company is already vendor locked on their stack, and I would advise against using Outlook as a mail processor unless the solution is intended to be replaced n the near future with something more flexible and robust.

They've made huge strides in recent years, the whole O365 landscape is completely changing at the moment to bring it into the future (as it was very in the past before) and it shows, Office 365 adoption is going through the roof.

 

SharePoint is 100% not garbage (Online is amazing in what it can do), if the implementation is bad then yes - it doesn't get used but if you have the correct implementation for the business needs it becomes a key part of businesses process usually. I'll admit Access seems pretty rubbish especially when they have Dynamics CRM (that being said I've not used Access myself). Can you elaborate on your compatibility point (examples might help)? That being said them throwing in Access for basically free isn't exactly a bad thing.

 

I should mention a lot of issues are around the implementation level and Microsoft themselves are getting more involved there and with the customers themselves so there should be an improvement in quality. 

 

What do you dislike about Outlook? Outlook works flawlessly unless you have some dodgy plugins/issues on the computer it's using. Outlook is robust but I'm not sure how it can be flexible, can you elaborate? If you want something that's not exactly robust you should be calling out OneDrive (it's still good but that's an example of a service that has some problems).

 

There are issues but 9 times out of 10 it's not Microsoft's fault (usually it's the implementation is bad). I think this is a big reason why Microsoft themselves are getting involved, also there's a lot of money in it so that probably a motivator too. 

 

It sounds like the pains you have experienced are very different from what I have seen. I am interested to know the context behind your opinions if you don't mind sharing.

 

[fringie]

2 hours ago, RaideNz7 said:

• We are currently using bell Canada's email threw pop on outlook express. And it's on a server.
• Programer oooo programers qq our slack programers of like 20 years moved and switched company's and the new programers quit after 3 weeks or so 2 days ago.
• Aka the second reason we need help. When we put out resumes we got 1 or 2 applications.
• I am the only Non contract Tech support for the company atm. We have the old programer helping once in a wile and a contracted networker
• What email program would you suggest.

I have no idea what "bell Canada's email threw pop on outlook express" is as I'm from the UK but hearing Outlook and server means you have an on-premise configuration of Outlook which means you create a console application in c# to do this. Edit I just looked up Outlook Express, oh wow that's very old. I think it'd work but it's so old it's hard to say. If you want to upgrade to Outlook Online it's very easy to setup and hassle free so I recommend giving it a try if you guys are looking to upgrade. You get all the new features which is nice.

 

In regards to your employee situation use an agency as well. It's very important you have permanent staff as they understand the solutions.

 

Where is the source of the "certain information", the email? What type of site is it (i.e. asp.net)?

 

 

[RaideNz7]

I'll repost the second half of the message to job forms ty for the advice

[RaideNz7]

• Ahh where's the job form.. ok you ment a different site. I would prefer if you say to fix somthing at least tell me where or how to fix it. Example would be the best site for programers job listings. 
• The second half of the post was a dual question as a job request and a request to find where to get a good programer

[RaideNz7]

We are using office 2012 or 2016 outlook depends

[programmer]

8 hours ago, fringie said:

They've made huge strides in recent years, the whole O365 landscape is completely changing at the moment to bring it into the future (as it was very in the past before) and it shows, Office 365 adoption is going through the roof.

 

SharePoint is 100% not garbage (Online is amazing in what it can do), if the implementation is bad then yes - it doesn't get used but if you have the correct implementation for the business needs it becomes a key part of businesses process usually. I'll admit Access seems pretty rubbish especially when they have Dynamics CRM (that being said I've not used Access myself). Can you elaborate on your compatibility point (examples might help)? That being said them throwing in Access for basically free isn't exactly a bad thing.

 

I should mention a lot of issues are around the implementation level and Microsoft themselves are getting more involved there and with the customers themselves so there should be an improvement in quality. 

 

What do you dislike about Outlook? Outlook works flawlessly unless you have some dodgy plugins/issues on the computer it's using. Outlook is robust but I'm not sure how it can be flexible, can you elaborate? If you want something that's not exactly robust you should be calling out OneDrive (it's still good but that's an example of a service that has some problems).

 

There are issues but 9 times out of 10 it's not Microsoft's fault (usually it's the implementation is bad). I think this is a big reason why Microsoft themselves are getting involved, also there's a lot of money in it so that probably a motivator too. 

 

It sounds like the pains you have experienced are very different from what I have seen. I am interested to know the context behind your opinions if you don't mind sharing.

 

I am only talking about solutions I've seen in the wild. My clients tend to have a very low bar of technical competency and when they cobble together solutions by wiring different versions of Microsoft products together all kinds of hell can break loose - one client was using Outlook as a document storage and batch engine queue for instance, another was processing tens of billions of dollars of through Excel Calculation Services each year (I still wonder how much their books were off due to rounding errors with Excel's 9 decimal points of precision )

 

The bigger problem to is that trying to research how they made the stuff work in the first place is like dealing with mainframes and flat files - lots of guesswork and cursing. I suppose if the clients actually had a team trained and competent in using Microsoft's stack, I wouldn't be involved in that part of the project.

 

6 hours ago, RaideNz7 said:

• Ahh where's the job form.. ok you ment a different site. I would prefer if you say to fix somthing at least tell me where or how to fix it. Example would be the best site for programers job listings. 
• The second half of the post was a dual question as a job request and a request to find where to get a good programer

I will be honest and say i have no idea where to look for full time programmers - maybe this is your time to step up and learn something new to help your company? Seriously - while you search for somebody, you might as well try your hand and see how far you can get: it will make it a lot easier to interview if you know what you need to do and your problem might just be simple enough you can achieve it.

 

Also, while you wait you could have somebody to literally do everything that the solution does manually - check the email, get the insurance information, put it in the site. Then you can look at how long each part takes and focus on automating the slowest parts first.

[RaideNz7]

• I'm on page 40 for c++ for dummies lol.
• I still could use some suggestions tho. And there's nothing built that u know of that can take a notified then go to one of 2 sites with logins and take the right info onto our site
• Also yes we have like 9 support workers entering that data atm.

[programmer]

C++ is going to be a much harder language to write something like this in - I'd advise either a C# Microsoft solution like fringie described, you could write something in Java, or you could do Javascript.

 

It sounds like the workflow could be broken into 2 pieces:

• trigger the process based on an email
• transferring the data between the sites.

I am guessing the second takes more time and money and would be the better automation target. A possible rough outline of what uou would need to do is:

• Create a simple form users can use to enter the data you get from the email
• When the form is submitted, you access the data from whichever site(s) you need
  • If the site has a web service that has the data you need, it will be significantly easier to use that. Web services are just exposed functions on a website. If you find them but have trouble consuming them ask for help on that.
  • If you have to navigate through the site instead, you basically have 2 options:
    • Use a tool like Selenium Webdriver to automate a web browser and have it go through the site copying the data you need (http://thiagomarzagao.com/2013/11/12/webscraping-with-selenium-part-1/)
    • Write a program to load the website inside it (iframe?), traverse its DOM, and parse out the data you want
      • This option is more challenging but should allow for faster processing.
• Once you have the data pulled, if your site has a web service then you could call it with the data you pulled. If not then either write a web service or use Selenium.

[RaideNz7]

• 1 and 2 is set up 
• C# and Selenium and iframe ill look into those thanks alot for the the tips.

Also what coding would you suggest for a app java?

[programmer]

I don't know what you mean? If you have decided on an approach and need help, then say which step you are working on, what you've learned and set up so far, and what you don't understand or can't get working right now. Be as descriptive as possible barring thing like security tokens or actual end websites urls/names.