Online Automation
Online automation is a busy place with lots of companies looking for a place in the market. Some popular ones are Zapier and IFTTT ( If This Than That). Of course even the big players compete with their offerings. I have used Zapier (free plan) and IFTTT before for my own work. The basic idea for these tools is to provide a non-coding platform to connect services with some sort of decision making in the middle. IFTTT tells it best by there premise – If this happens then this other thing should happen. Each solution offers an increasing list of integrations and various levels or complexity in their free and paid plans.
Enter Integromat
When I came across Integromat I thought it worth investigating. Even though the list of integrations was not as big as Zapier it is increasing all the time, but the Integromat pricing did look very enticing, with a usable free plan and various levels starting at US$9/month.
Check out this simple example of a roster system
A church I am involved with required a simple roster for a task at the weekly service. Eventually I would like to incorporate it into the church website and allow other departments to use it. But at this stage it is a list of dates and names in a Google Spreadsheet.
This was a good place to try Integromat – when someone is on the roster for the next service send them a reminder on the Wednesday before the service. The steps would be
1. Sort through the list of dates
2. If a date is within a few days of the current date
3. Send an email to the person on the roster as a reminder
Integromat Editor
The Integromat Scenario Editor is where I built this small system. The full developer interface has a range features to explore and to help streamline your progress - including things like ready-made Templates, reusable Connections, Data Structures.
The Scheduler is easy to setup the basic for this system.
Settings up Step 1 involved establishing the connect from Integromat to my Google Sheet and selection the required sheet and range of cells
In Step 2 the filtering took a bit of trial and error in how to handle the date field and do the required calculation. The ability to do test runs and the diagnostics were great to get if sorted.
Step 3 involved crafting the email to display the information required. At this stage i was just testing so the emails were directed to my email address. Soon this will be sent to the person on roster and the organiser of the roster.
I connected 2 emails tasks together but I need to explore using the router function here.
Testing And Development Cycle
I found the ability to test run the system great and the feedback on how the system ran very easy to follow and quick to identify the bugs. Even though I was still learning the interface it was pretty intuitive and the documentation and examples on their website useful for the complete picture.
Conclusion
So far the experience with Integromat has been very good. I will keep on looking into the features and how i can continue to use it in my business.