FlashPanel Wins the 4th Annual API Mashup Contest

Yesterday BetterCloud’s cloud management tool, FlashPanel, was declared the winner of the 4^th annual API Mashup Contest. This award is not only a huge honor for the entire BetterCloud team, but is a testament to the hard work our developers put in day in and day out to bring such a robust product to market.

The contest, which selects its winners based on the number of APIs (application programming interfaces) used and how well those APIs are integrated into the product, is the premier competition in this space and includes venerable sponsors, media partners and jury members from Google, The Next Web, ProgrammableWeb, SEOMoz and Twilio.

How Did We Win?

To take home first place, FlashPanel skillfully incorporates 9 Google APIs, including:

• Provisioning API – Users, Groups, Organizational Units
• User Profile API – User contact information
• Shared Contacts API – Shared Contacts Management
• Group Settings API – Google Groups Management
• Email Settings API – Email Signatures, Forwarding, POP/IMAP, etc.
• Calendar API – Schedule Reminders
• Docs List API / Drive API – Document Ownership including sharing permissions
• Spreadsheets API – Import and Export tools via Google Spreadsheets
• Reporting API – Last login date, Email quotas

Using these critical Google Apps APIs allows us to deliver the most sophisticated cloud management tool for Google Apps administrators, enabling them to better manage and secure their domains and even automating many common tasks and processes along the way.

According to jury member Rob Spectre, a developer evangelist at Twilio, FlashPanel is “absolutely the missing toolset for Google Apps administrators.”

And we plan to build on top of several more APIs in the coming months. To read more about the contest, check out ProgrammableWeb’s blog post and API Mashup’s press release here.

What’s Next?

We may have just won an award, but we’re never content to let our product stand still. Since releasing FlashPanel Version 1.8 just this month, we’ve added several feature enhancements bringing you even more functionality.

Conditional Formatting for Email Signatures

As promised, the first winning feature from our FlashPanel Feature Contest has been added to FlashPanel. Users who are missing information in certain categories of their user profiles will have text in their signatures moved up, effectively deleting any blank lines.

Bulk User Photo Upload

Our recently added bulk user upload and update feature now includes the ability to add user profile photos in bulk. This will save domain admins time and effort.

We’re excited to bring more functionality to the millions of FlashPanel users around the world, but we’re always looking to improve our product. Please use our support forum or complete this form to share feedback and feature suggestions.