We have recently announced changes to our email validation services.

Accurately validating an email address is a notoriously difficult thing to do. The simplest approach is to ensure that the syntax of the email looks correct - for example, there is an @ sign and the domain ends in a known top level domain such as .com. However, this is a very simplistic approach and allows many invalid email addresses through.

A much more useful and accurate service would check to see if the email address is alive, available and accepting emails to be sent to it.

The data8 approach now has 4 possible levels to check an email address. Consider the email address info@data-8.co.uk. This is broken into a domain part: "data-8.co.uk", and a local part: "info".

• Firstly is it syntactically correct? Are all the characters valid and it looks like an email address?
• Secondly, does the domain part refer to an internet address correctly configured to send email?
• Thirdly, is the mail server alive and responding to requests?
• Fourthly, does the mail server allow you to send emails to the local part?

Unfortunately, it is not always as simple as this. If it was, the most obvious side affect would be that email spammers would be able to generate lists of all valid email address by using trial and error. In practise, if you try to validate lots of emails in this way - and there are many software packages that you can buy that do just this - then you will quickly find yourself blacklisted and unable to send any email to anyone. Not a good situation.

Also, many email servers employ various methods to make all of this difficult. Two common tricks that we can detect here when performing our most detailed validation are:

• Catch-All - a mail server configured with a catch-all rule means that any email sent to any email address is accepted. It is either just deleted, forwarded to another email address, or rejected and bounced (a soft bounce) a few minutes later. The data8 solution now detects these mail servers so that you can distinguish between a genuine good email address and an email address that is held on a mail server with a catch-all rule.
• Grey-listing - some mail servers are configured with grey-listing techniques. This means that the mail server initially rejects any approach to send an email and says please try again later. The idea here is that spammer would tend to give up at this point and move onto the next email address. The data8 solution detects grey-listing techniques and returns a different return code.

By using a data8 cloud based solution, you are not putting yourself at risk of becoming blocked and barred for looking like an email spammer. Data8's experience of validating millions of email addresses and our relationships with the major ISPs means that our service will continue to work without risk of black listing. You can also be assured that we are giving the highest possible validation rates with the lowest false positive rate.

The data8 email validation service can be used in batch to cleanse a list of email addresses, or in real-time to validate whether the email address is correct at time of capture. Contact us to arrange for a free trial or a free data quality audit of your email addresses.

If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM for creating quotes, you’ve probably been unlucky enough to have to use, or even worse, explain how to use, the “Print Quote for Customer” process from the quote screen.

Before I get too far, I’d just like to point out that it’s not the end result of this process I have a problem with – in fact, set up a decent mail merge template and you’ll get some decent quote documents out of it. It’s the process of getting there I take issue with.

There are plenty of pages on the web that describe the mail merge process, but it certainly seems to me entirely unintuitive. I have a quote on screen in CRM and want to see it in Word instead. Let’s count the steps the user needs to go through in order to get there:

1. Click "Print Quote for Customer"
2. Select to use an Organization mail merge template (you’re creating a quote – in my mind, you should always be using a company standard format rather than a personalised template)
3. Click the button to bring up the list of templates
4. Select the template to use
5. Click OK
6. Select to Open the file
7. Go to the Add-Ins ribbon
8. Click the CRM button
9. Click OK on the data preview screen
10. Go to the Mailings ribbon
11. Click Finish & Merge
12. Select to create a new document

Phew! That’s a lot of steps to go through, most of which are based around the technical steps of how the process is implemented and not the business processes the user is working with.

How about a smoother process that takes away the implementation details and allows the user to go straight from the quote screen to the finished document in Word without any popups along the way?

1. Click “Create Quote Document” (seriously, how many of these documents are printed rather than emailed?)
2. Select the template to use from the drop-down menu
3. Select to Open the file

How much time and frustration would that save your sales team, not to mention CRM trainers? An added bonus is to remove the spurious extra blank paragraph that normally appears in the finished document that was never there when you designed your template.

If you’re interested in this better process for your business, drop us a line on info@data-8.co.uk or 0151 355 4555 and we can send across the details you’ll need. It does require one unsupported customisation which unfortunately means it can only be used for on-premise installations.

We can also help streamline your sales process and increase the quality of your CRM data by adding postcode lookup, telephone number validation and email validation into your CRM system.

If you purchase some data from us that contains a telephone number column, you may find that it doesn't display correctly in Excel. For example, our phone number 0151 355 4555 may show as 1513554555 or even 1.51E+09. Not very helpful.

This is because Excel is treating the field as a number rather than text. The file will actually contain the correct number, e.g. "01513554555", but when Excel opens the file it decides to display it in the same way it displays other numeric fields.

If you encounter this problem, you can avoid it by using the following steps:

Rename the file

When the filename has a ".csv" extension, Excel will always convert telephone numbers to numeric values and display them in the formats shown above. The first thing to do then is to rename the file to give it a ".txt" extension instead.

Open the file

In Excel, click File > Open and select the .txt file. Click Open and the Text Import Wizard will open.

Choose Delimited file type

On the first screen of this wizard, select the Delimited data type option and click Next.

 Choose Comma Delimited

On the second screen of the wizard, select the Comma delimiter option. Ensure that all the other delimiter options are unticked, as is the "Treat consecutive delimiters as one" option. The "Text qualifier" option should be left as a double-quote.

 Treat the telephone number column as text

Select the telephone number column, then click the Text data type option. Repeat this for any additional telephone number columns you have. Click Finish and your file will be opened correctly.

I'm pleased to announce that our popular Postcode Lookup for Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution is now available on the Dynamics Marketplace.

Our solution is ideal for adding address capture functionality to your own Microsoft Dynamics CRM system, either on-premise or hosted, or for CRM integrators looking to add value for their clients.

Flexible pricing is available for both high- and low-volume users, and the solution features point-and-click configuration to customise the layout of addresses to match your CRM fields for any entity type.

As part of our ongoing growth at Data8, we have recently invested in a new telephone system. To get the most out of the new system, we integrated it with our Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to take advantage of the telephone number data stored there.

Because we have a consistent, accurate set of telephone numbers against accounts and contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we were able to add a number of added-value features to our telephone system including:

• caller ID name from telephone number
• intelligent routing of incoming calls to the account manager
• automatic call logging
• click-to-dial

These features allow everyone at Data8 to work more efficiently and serve our customers better. We could only add these services because of our position as a Microsoft Silver ISV partner to develop the required plugin code, and because we have accurate telephone number data in our CRM database.

If you want to add similar functionality to your own system, we can help by appending telephone numbers to records that are missing them, and standardising the format of the telephone numbers you already have to make them easier to search. If you're using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we can even integrate our data cleansing and validation services directly into the CRM system so you don't have to worry about exporting and re-importing your data after we have processed it. For more details about any of these services, please get in touch on 0151 355 4555.