MyRealPage supports MLXJet email branding

We have just added support for MLXJet email branding. For those that haven't heard of MLXJet www.mlxjet.com, this is a company that offers a consistent email branding based on a template which you create with them. This template can then be applied to any email you send from anywhere: Outlook, Webmail, Outlook Express, even MLS Board systems, like mlxchange, Tempo, etc. In addition, MLXJet provides email tracking, "live links" to the realtor's website, and a cash referral program. 

Branding is very imporant to a real estate professional and consistent branding is a cornerstone of a successful brand. Things are great if you are in control of the emails you send, but what happens when emails are sent on your behalf, as in when a user signs up on your website and they get a confirmation and welcome emails...

And this is what MyRealPage has provided: the ability for our users to have the same consistent branding which they use when manually sending out emails, applied to automated emails that are generated by MyRealPage. Among such emails are:

• Automatic listing notifications to clients and leads regarding new properties, price changes, etc.
  
• Signup confirmation and welcome emails
  
• VOW (Virtual Office Website) communication emails, and others
  

We are excited to continue creating integration facilities for our users to allow them to connect and interact with useful 3rd party systems. This fits nicely into our strategy of making MyRealPage website and listing products "good web citizens"!

Read the full product release on MyRealPage Company Blog:

http://www.myrealpage.com/blog.html?blogEntryId=294881

and on MLXJet website:

http://www.mlxjet.com/my-real-page.php

Intense January 2009

We are still on January, supposedly trying to recoup from holidays, and yet MyRealPage Tech Team has already made four whopping product releases in only 2 weeks:

• MyRealPage and Outlook contact synchronization
  
• New Snippets Weblet
  
• RSS for content cross-publishing
  
• and Smart Image Resizing and Image Editor

In addition, four new HOWTOs have been published on MyRealPage Web Cookbook Blog.

It's ironic, but most of MyRealPage techies find the holiday season more productive as they find it "quieter"! This has been an intense start for a new year, and it's not over! 

We have another major product release that we are very excited about and which nicely ties into the "MyRealPage: a Good Web Citizen" strategy: stay tuned! The strategy is simple, really. In today's web it's impossible to be all things to all people. It is thus important that your company can fit into a larger web eco-system, and its products are able to integrate and co-operate with others that may do things your company doesn't or do them better. Outlook integration, deep RSS adoption, online image editing are all great examples; and we are not stopping there. Interestingly enough, there is a large effort right now on the web in exactly this direction (tubemogul, social site aggreators, like spokeo, media synchronization, like zumodrive, etc.). So we will also let other integrators integrate as we focus on our core product values; but we'll make sure that the process is easy and we provide adequate facilities for that.

This is going to be an exciting year for MyRealPage; we have ambitious plans and everyone is full of energy!

Four more HOWTOs published in MyRealPage Web Cookbook

Four more HOWTOs have been published in MyRealPage Web Cookbook. Most of these recent posts are related to blogging and online social media and their integration with MyRealPage websites. These instalments are in line with the promised list:

• RSS, Atom, Feeds: A Quick Primer
  
• FeedBurner: Supercharge your Blog!
  
• Publish your MyRealPage Blogs to Twitter
  
• Show your Twitter Feed on your Website with MyRealPage
  

Of course, the very best way to keep updated on new instalments is to use Google Reader and subscribe to the MyRealPage Web Cookbook. Once you have a Google account, it's very easy:

• Navigate to MyRealPage Web Cookbook Feed
  
• Click on "+Google" icon
  
• [Update] Or click on +Google icon at the top right corner of this page

Making RSS do Neat Tricks

In a modern website, it's often not enough to simply publish your content. As users become more and more sensitive to the need to promote their content, they will find that they want to promote various content across their own website: a home page is a perfect candidate!

It is a known fact, for example, that web visitors respond well to written testimonials; you may also want to catch their attention with a little "tidbit" of information, such as a quote, or even better; a property that isn't even listed by you, but is part of a Reciprocity program (which may give you the right to advertise it while complying with your MLS Board Reciprocity rules).

We called this process of cross-posting content: "featuring" (other terms out there include "Buzz", "Boost", etc). The basic premise is the same: to feature something, you need to have a list of items; a list of items is a perfect candidate for an RSS feed; an RSS feed is a perfect source for an RSS Reader. MyRealPage has always had a "News Weblet" as part of its Website System, so we decided to open up the RSS feeds to make all this content "featuring" possible. (If you are looking for a Quick Primer on RSS, Atom and Feeds as it may relate to this post, go to MyRealPage Web Cookbook article).

Many MyRealPage weblets have also been built on the uniform platform which we called "Lead-Ins" in the past. We found that many things that users want to list include any subset of the following attributes:

• Title
  
• Description
  
• Optional Image
  
• Optional Link

We built Testimonials, Awards, Links, Reports, and recently Snippets weblets based on this technology. Now any "Lead-In" based weblet (i.e. list-oriented weblet) will produce an RSS feed. Even better, when you have multiple such weblets on a page, all of them will contribute to the same feed (neat for links, for example, where you may want to break a long list into multiple sections, consisting of several Links weblets).

RSS feeds are now also extended to Listings. Your own listings, your Office Listings, and your public Predefined Searches. This means that you can "feature" listings from any of those sources. We comply with the Reciprocity rules for the MLS Boards we work with, so your featured listings will contain all the necessary disclaimers and logos, as required in your area.

Watch a demo video below showing how a couple of featured items can be built on a MyRealPage Website:

MyRealPage launches Outlook Contact Synchronization

MyRealPage has just launched a public beta testing for Outlook Contact Synchronization. We have built an integration with Funambol synchronization technology which covers many mobile devices, Thunderbird, and very importantly: Microsoft Outlook. 

MyRealPage users will be able to synchronize their contacts and leads from their Private Office, as well as their Webmail Address Book to their Outlooks. Being able to synchronize to Outlook is very important, as it provides a gateway to integrating with other contact and lead management tools and platforms, such as Top Producer, for example; as most major ones integrate with Outlook.

Read the official blog posting on this subject at MyRealPage Company Blog. 

You can also watch a video on how to use this new tool here:

This is a step to make MyRealPage products fit better into a larger technological eco-system in which many real estate agents, teams and brokers operate.