Wondering if someone could give me some advice, I am building a CRM for a client, and one of their "like to haves" is that if they create a new contact they would like the contacts details be both stored in the database but also sync with there iphone/ipad address book.
The only way I can think of doing this is if iCloud offers an api, is this something that could be achieved, or are there any other solutions that maybe could help me.
The CRM is being built on PHP if that makes a difference.
Use Google Contacts API https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/ and set up Gmail as Exchange server on iOS device.
The iPhone supports calDAV (calendaring) and cardDAV (address book) protocols for shared calendaring and address book features.
PHP client implmentation as part of roundcube: http://www.crash-override.net/carddav.html
Open source calDAV and cardDAV implementation: http://www.davical.org/
Related
We have this Realand Fingerprint Recognition device here in our office and I have to connect it to a web based PHP attendance management system. But I don't have any idea if i can directly connect it. I'm currently looking for its documentation but it doesn't seems to have a PHP related guide on how can I get data from this biometrics device. There are some SDK here which are using demo websocket but it can't detect the device. Also, I'm not familiar with VB or C#. Any possible way that is flexible on most of biometric device that you can suggest? TIA.
It is possible with the Web API supported biometric attendance devices. Realand doest support the communication you are looking for. Please check the following answer which would address your question: Could not find Biometric system that could send data directly to web server
I am currently developing a little chatbot using IBM Watson assistant.
While I'm quite used to entities and intents etc... I really lack experience on how to link to bot to external services.
Long story short, my bot will ask for a phone number and an email address, but I can't get my head around on how to make the bot communicate with the outside world.
I have a Twilio account for, but I can't find any doc on how to send a message from the bot without going through Node-Red (and also in that case the docs are scarce).
For Emails, I thought I could use this, maybe calling a PHP file with Emailer?
Consider that the bot is integrated with Wordpress right now, using only the Watson assistant credentials.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help
My 5 pence advice:
run node-red in the cloud (see the bottom left section of page https://nodered.org/docs/getting-started/). E.g. I recommend the Node-Red Starter Boilerplate on IBM Bluemix (which is now called IBM Cloud) as you are already using the IBM Cloud service "IBM Watson Assistant".
Within node-red, you have specific nodes for the communication with IBM Watson assistant, email, Twilio.
Somehow you must integrate node-red (not Watson assistant) with Wordpress if that is what you want to use as conversation interface.
In IBM Watson assistant you can set context variables containing the phone number and email address that has been gathered during the conversation.
The node-red application has access to the data in those context variables (see the previous point) and can use that, for instance, to send an email to that specific address.
I have built an ecommerce website in CakePHP and MySQL which takes orders and stores them in db. I've been told that I need to create a web service for sending notification to desktop/via email which would alert us of any order given instantly and would also provide us with order details. Do i need to study up on web services, SOAP, GET POST etc. or can I do it with some easier method? What would be a secure and fast response way of receiving such a notification from the web application? Thanks in advance :)
A webservice would be useful the other way round. If a third-party entity wishes to access your website as a service without accessing HTML pages, yes in that case, creating a webservice on your end will be useful.
I recommend you for instance to see the RESTful webservice interface to stackoverflow/stackexchange itself to understand this concept: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs.
In your case, I can't see how webservices would be involved. If you just need to send emails from your website, it can be done directly with the PHP mail() function, or using a mailer like PHPMailer.
Desktop notifications are an entirely different matter, because you need a client software.
I haven't dug pretty far in that topic myself, but here are a few pointers:
A popular Desktop Notification software for MacOSX is Growl which has been unofficially ported to Windows: http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/
There is a PHP API to send messages to Growl clients: http://clickontyler.com/php-growl/.
Linkedin has a feature that allows users to enter their outlook credentials and imports their outlook contacts.
I am trying to emulate this functionality, in a php application.
So far, the only way I have discovered on how this might be done is through Exchange web Services. https://emailhost/EWS/Services.wsdl I am using the php-ews library to try and connect to ews.
I was hoping for some sort of information on a defacto way to retrieve contacts given a users credentials, but have been unable to find much information on this at all.
Are there any other ways that this could be accomplished other than EWS? Does anyone know how linkedin is doing this?
Given that this feature works for a random end user, I don't think LinkedIn connects to Exchange (through EWS or any other API), but to the Outlook instance on the users' machine.
Accessing Outlook objects on a local machine can be done in any programming language through old-fashioned OLE automation. This will also let LinkedIn retrieve contacts for accounts connected to other servers, like e.g. Lotus Notes. (Although I cannot confirm that LI actually does that).
I'm building custom CRM web based system and have integrated synchronization of contacts and reminders with Google apps and need do the same with Apple iCloud. Is there any way how to do it? I haven't find any official API for this purpose, CRM is written in PHP, but I'm able to use python for this purpose as well.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to interface with iCloud directly; it can only be done through an iOS or Mac OS app, and by calling the correct iCloud Objective-C APIs with UI/NSDocument classes. Since you are not using Cocoa, let alone Objective-C, you will most likely not be able to do this. I may be wrong of course, as I haven't conducted an in-depth search into this.
I would recommend that you sync using the google contacts api. Then, you can tell iPhone people to use that instead of iCloud.
I agree with the first and second answer since I too haven't found any solution to access a large portion of the iCloud data via PHP. It seems the best solution would be to make an mobile app to do most of the work. This may save a lot of time in fact.
However if you can get your users to install an app then make your own cloud. There is an open source software like: own Cloud link below that is very good at it.
https://owncloud.org/
You may want to take a look at this project: https://github.com/adammck/ruby-icloud . It accesses iCloud reminders using Ruby.