Use SmartSuite? You NEED to Know How to Use the Ply Extension...

When I talk to folks who are switching over to SmartSuite, they usually mention design or the look and feel as one of the main reasons why. I mean, look at this thing, right? You've got white space, you've got clear fonts, you've got nice concise interface in those curvy corners. I mean, this is basically a work management software dripping in sex appeal or something. That's like the lamest explanation ever. But regardless of how beautiful SmartSuite is, it could be a little bit more beautiful if we we could customize the way SmartSuite looks to fit our own workflows. Just because the sponsor of today's video, SmartSuite, has such a pretty interface does not mean we cannot make it better. Early on, SmartSuite made a strategic partnership with Ply, which allows you to add buttons, icons, features, elements into the SmartSuite interface nearly seamlessly to allow you to create custom buttons or interface options that are not baked into SmartSuite itself. In fact, if we go back to that sexy screenshot I showed you earlier, you notice this thing here, this add to Google Calendar thing that is not part of SmartSuite. In fact, that is ply that I've baked inside the SmartSuite interface. If I adjust the font and color settings, it can actually blend in almost seamlessly. In fact, let's do it. There we go. Would you even notice that being different? I don't think so. It blends right in there. But this is a magic button. Ply is an early stage startup that allows you to add those kinds of icons and elements into the tools you already use. And from these button clicks or triggers that you define, you can have a sequence of automated actions, totals, pop ups and even artificial intelligence help you out to do the next steps in your workflow. PLY is a tool that is created for both internal and external use, with a slight skew towards internal. And here's the best part, guys, it is currently free. It's free. So everything I'm showing you today, you can use a free SmartSuite account and a free PLY account and you can do all of the things I'm showing you in this video without having to spend a dollar. And once you see the time saving value of some of these buttons and workflows that I'll demonstrate in this video, I think you're going to want to sign up. So thank you SmartSuite. Thank you for making this strategic partnership. Having played around with it for a while, it is kind of ridiculous that this is a free extension for you to use. So if you'd like to take advantage of this before the offer expires and they go out of beta, check out the link in the description below to Both get your SmartSuite account and your PLY account set up and integrated, which is what you'll kind of need to do to go through the rest of this tutorial. So before we go into how you get all of this stuff set up with both Ply and SmartSuite, let's go into SmartSuite and let me demonstrate two of the Ply features that I've already set up. Just so you know why it's worth following along. The first PLY feature I have set up is inside my IT help desk solution in SmartSuite. If you are not familiar with the idea of using SmartSuite as a help desk video on that up above. But for now, what we're going to focus on is just this magic little button I've added to the top, which is Request Missing Info. This is PLY doing its magic. So what does this button actually do? Well, inside this IT Help desk, we have this button added into every single record here. And every time we click it, we have PLY look at the contents of the given record, in this case the user request and the description provided by the client who needs support. And from that information, PLY will generate a drafted email for how we can fill in the missing information automatically. All right, so let's go. In this particular record, a customer is asking for help, filling in a registration form. And in order to move forward with that request for help, I need a little bit more information in where to move forward. Normally what you do is manually go into your email or ticketing system, ask a bunch of questions, or maybe you'd go into the communication center of SmartSuite and manually send an email to the client. But rather than doing that extra work manually, I'm going to use PLY to help jumpstart my process. I've created this button called Request Missing Info that every time I click it, I see an interface, a pop up modal like this pop up. It's asking me, hey, human being, is there anything specific you need to know to make sure we can move forward with this request? In this case, I know I need to be aware of which registration URL is being used. So. So I'm going to type out that question and then I'm going to click Done. When I click Done, PLY is going to move on to the next step of the automated sequence I designed, which has it go to OpenAI? I know, I know. You can't go anywhere without hearing about ChatGPT these days, but OpenAI is going to take both the information from the SmartSuite Record and the question I wrote in and use that information to draft a message to the client. Here's the result. Hi there, we're sorry to hear you're having trouble. Can you please provide the URL to the registration form you've been trying to use? I can copy this message now and pull that into either the communication center or my ticketing system in order to move forward with the request without me manually having to type a bunch of information. If I use my secondary mouse button to edit the feature, AKA the sequence created by ply, you can see exactly how this happens using the Display button, contextual record interface, OpenAI, and then again another interface here. Too afraid of AI taking over the world to enjoy that example? Don't worry, I've got a second one that we're going to go through in greater detail to get you started. Let's head over to Time off requests, the other area and one that I showed earlier in this video. It's also one that I talked about in this video up here about managing time off requests inside of SmartSuite inside this interface. As it stands, we have a lot of information around when team members need to take time off, and currently I have added a more inconspicuous button from PLY to help me do some of the manual data entry that happens after a given request is approved. Every time I hit this plus Calendar icon, PLY is going to automatically again pull information contextually from the SmartSuite record and do things with it on my behalf. In this case, it is going to add the given time off request onto the company calendar. I'm going to go ahead and click the button so you can see it for yourselves. We see the magic happening here. Over in the corner we have a comment getting added into SmartSuite to let me know that it has indeed worked and if I flip over to my Google Calendar I'll see the event right there. Okay, so I have now gone super fast through two examples of finished PLY features and if you're like most people, you're thinking, oh that's neat, I have no idea how to set that up. So let's solve that with a few steps for the latter half of this video. Step one of creating something like you saw on the screen here or something for your own workflows is going to be kind of obvious. Making sure you have both a Smart suite and a ply account set up. You can sign up for SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video, by checking out the link in the description below. If you tell them we sent you, you'll even get an extra savings hint, hint. Similarly, you can sign up for PLY by heading to their website link below this video and getting into their beta program. Because again, this is a free tool right now, so it's really, really timely for you to make sure you get in to get the most out of your SmartSuite account. Now, once you have both SmartSuite and Ply set up, your second step in this journey is actually another install step. So super easy and you are going to need to install the PLY Chrome extension. That's how it does its magic. Again free. However, you do need to have access to the Chrome Web Store in order to install this extension. If that applies to you, go ahead and use the link below to jump to this area. If not, PLY will also prompt you during the onboarding flow to install this extension because you need this in order to do the magic. When you get all of that out of the way and head back to the Ply tab you probably have open somewhere you should see a page like this appear. This is their onboarding or home area inside of Ply. For now, I'm going to skip over all of these videos. You can watch them on your own time and just focus in on the new Feature button. Features in PLY are what they call sequences, or kind of a combination of steps and actions and interfaces that all work together to do the cool things I showed you earlier in this video. To really connect SmartSuite with the other things we have going on in our business, we need to build features for each of the areas we're trying to automate. Now, when you click on the new Feature button inside Apply, you have a few options available to you, but because we are primarily focused today on integrating it very well with SmartSuite, you're going to want to choose the first option in the first tab, which is going to be Add ons. This basically is what I showed you earlier of just having PLY seamlessly show up inside the tools you already use. Once you are here, I think you probably know what the next step is and that's typing in smartsuite in the dropdown of tools that are available. Once you find it in the dropdown, go ahead and click SmartSuite and it'll prompt you to connect your account. What it's going to ask you to do is connect your SmartSuite account to ply to give it permission to work together. This is a one time setup piece which takes a few minutes, but once done, you don't have to do again. Going inside here, we're going to click on Connect a new account and we're going to see this little pop up appear asking for some information around our SmartSuite account. The first thing we need is our API token. We can find that by going back into SmartSuite, which you probably have open in another tab, going over to your personal settings and locating the API key button. When you click on this here, it is going to jump you to the section of your home area where you have your API token. Now if you don't have a token such as right now I don't have one, just click Generate new key and it'll generate a string of text and numbers that you can then copy and paste into ply. So in this case I've got this code here, I'm going to copy it, go over to Ply, paste it in, and now I need to grab the workspace ID. Going back to SmartSuite, you can find your workspace ID up in the URL of your SmartSuite account. So in this case, my workspace ID is this string of stuff up here. S2P fog zero really rolls off the tongue. Only need that part of the URL to connect to Ply. Don't copy the whole URL, just that section between the two forward slashes and paste that over into your ply account. So here we go. We have my workspace ID and API token in. I'm going to click Connect. Once I click Connect, it's going to spin for a second. And this is just the connection forming between Ply and smartsuite. Once we have the connection set up, you'll see a modal like this appear. Where it's just asking us, okay, you're building some connections. Where do you want these connections to live inside of ply. Now this can be a little confusing if you're a new user, but just think about it like solutions in SmartSuite or folders on Google Drive. All it's asking you is where do you want to save it? If you are a new user like I am, at the time of recording this, you just click on the only option available. But if you have multiple people in your PLY account, eventually you might have multiple areas with different permissions. In those cases, pick the area where you want people to have access to it. From there though, we're going to click Save and then click Continue to move along in our new feature creation journey. Once we are at the next phase, we're going to see something like this appear where we have to choose what element we want to add into SmartSuite, because again, we chose an add on type. Now we need to choose where do we want to add it in. In this case, we only have one option, so our choice is very simple. Just go ahead and click on this and move on down the line. Once you give that a click, it's going to ask you. Okay. Okay, we're going to add some cool icons into SmartSuite, but where do you want them? In my case, with this time off request scenario, I wanted it to be in my time off request solution. So I'm going to go in here and type time off and I'm going to choose the application for time off. Again, I'm just typing these in with Search and I'm matching them to the name of the app and the solution back in my SmartSuite account. If you want to have Ply show up in certain areas, just pick whichever areas are important to you. These are set up one at a time, which allows you to have a lot of customization, but just be aware of that from the get go. All right, so once I have the app and the solution selected, I'm going to go ahead and click Continue and then go to SmartSuite. I know this is probably a little bit weird, but ply is going to prompt us to go into SmartSuite. Because ply itself lives visually inside of SmartSuite, so it needs to know where you want it to go and how you want it to look in order for it to become part of your SmartSuite experience. Go in to the particular area you want to add this button icon thing in SmartSuite. In this case, my time off requests area, click OK and look for a pulsing button like the one you see up at the top of my screen here. In my case, I know I'm adding this button inside records. I don't see any pulsing icons here, but if I head inside a record that exists in this area, I do indeed see that magical button which allows me to kick off the setup journey. When you click on this button, you're going to see a few options appear. There's really two sections you need to pay attention to. First, the look and second, the function. The look is what determines how sexy or not sexy your icon appears. In this case, if I want to have a Little calendar icon and I want it to really stand out. I can go ahead and make it yellow and add it into my account. Close out of this for now and you can see now I have that yellow icon visible. Maybe you want something even bolder. You can Edit button design, go inside more design options and add a background color, make it look crazy and exciting and have words like this and save that. You can also do that if you really want to make your button hideous. But all of these options are within your control inside that very first menu of Edit Button Design. In my case, I'm going to go for a simple white icon that blends in with the rest of SmartSuite and I'm going to remove the background colors and other options here. I'm also going to exclude the text because I'm just going to use the tooltip to explain how to use this. All right, so we're going to click save and there we go. We've got our button added here. Now we have it looking cool, but we need it to function in a great way too. So to do that again, use your non dominant mouse button, click into this and then go to Edit feature. This is the stuff where the real meat of PLY lives. When you're in the tool, clicking Edit feature will kind of toaster pop up this big workflow editor here where you can outline the steps and activities that happen between now and the end of the feature. The very top of this feature is a display button. This is the exact thing we talked about before. So there's no changes we need to do here. Below that we have an automated step of getting the contextual record. This is something really unique about PLY and very different than tools like make and Zapier that you might be used to working in with ply. They are picking up information from everything else on the page that you are looking at. That's kind of all always baked into this first step. For 99% of use cases, you are not going to want to touch this step. And so let's just move on to the next one here. This little plus icon is where we can say what we want to have happen with all of the information. We made this button, why are we making it? What's the process we're trying to automate? Well, in this case I want to use this automation to have a Calendar event appear on our team Google Calendar. Here we can see I have the Google Calendar identified. It's called Example Calendar and I just want all of my time off requests. Whenever I click that Button in Ply smartsuite combo to create an event on the calendar. So that way my SmartSuite account data and my Google Calendar talk to each other without manual data entry. So I'm going to go over here to add a new step. I'm going to look up Google Calendar. There it is. Give it a click and move forward with setting up this connection to Ply. Remember, We've already connected SmartSuite, but anything else we want to also connect into this sequence, we're going to need to connect at least once. So here it's asking me, okay, what do you want Google Calendar to do? In this case, I'm going to choose quick add an event. Super easy way to create some events on my Google Calendar. Click that. Now, as you might have guessed, we need to set up the connection here. I'm going to click connect a new account. I'm going to choose my account. Over here I'm going to click Continue. Once it's finished connecting, you should see something like this appear once again, asking where you want this to save and then clicking Save. Now that you've got Google Calendar connected to your supply account, we just need to take some steps to finish setting up how exactly we want this event to work. So for that we're going to click Continue and it's going to prompt us to specify some details about what kind of event do we want to have. Do we want a 15 minute reminder? Do we want an all day event? What do we want to have happen here? The first thing we need to do is specify which calendar, if you have more than one, you want these events to be created on. In this case I'm going to choose my example calendar because that's where I want my event for you. It might be your personal calendar or your company calendar. Below that I'm going to choose what text I want to use to create an event. This is important because this is the stuff that Google will analyze when creating the specific event. When I click into this field, you'll notice that the interface looks a little bit different than it did on the last one. Up here it had a dropdown of calendars I had available. Down here it's showing me what data exists from previous steps. In other words, it's allowing me to map information, pull information from here and bring it in to step two. So let's do that. I'm going to go into get contextual record and here you can see it's showing me all of the data from the record that the button was clicked on. Okay. So here we have the person's name who's requesting time off. I'm going to click that by setting this up every time the button is clicked. Whoever the requester's name is is going to show up in place of Cole's name. It's going to be dynamic. Okay, so we've got Cole. I'm going to write, is going to be out of office. So I want to say how many days he's going to be out of office. I think I have a contextual record field for days. Let's type that in. Yep, there it is. PTO days. Click on that one Day starting on what day does it start? Contextual record. Do I have a field for what day he's leaving? That's end of absence. What about start of absence? There we go. Date of, start of absence. Give that a click. And I'm also going to specify that it's going to be all day. Once we have everything inputted, we can go ahead and click test down at the bottom and see what shows up over on our Google Calendar to make sure it's all working. In this case, I think we've got a little bit of an issue with date formatting. So I'm going to head back into Ply, add an additional step just to clean up that date formatting. Because currently it's got like T00. It's a little bit of a strange formatting. So I'm going to go into Ply, click the little plus icon here, scroll down until I see formulas, and locate the options for kind of reformatting our date fields. In this case, I'm going to choose format a date. Setting up this option, I'm going to choose the date input of the start of absence field right here. And I'm going to give it a clear formatting of in this case, just the date. I don't want the time at all included. Advanced. I'm just going to make sure this is all good. Good. Click test step, see what happens. Yep, it spits out just the date. That's what I want. So I'm going to go ahead, exit this out, go back to this step. Now I'm going to replace the raw date with the date that is now nicely formatted. So this one here. Click test step again to see how this one looks when it goes through. Heading over to my calendar, I do see that that T100 thing is now removed and we have just the date showing up here. I might want to add an extra space between these cells, but otherwise we should Be good to go. So I'm going to go ahead and click Test. Ply is going to do its thing and it's going to take me back into SmartSuite so I can pretend to click the button. Well, actually click the button for myself. So here I'm going to go ahead and click Test. Watch it do its magic over here in the corner, see this confirmation come through and if everything checks out, if I head over the calendar and I'm happy with what I see, I can go ahead and click Publish. If I want to edit it, I can go back to the builder. But for now I'm going to click Publish. Once this is created, I can now go into any record inside this app and solution in SmartSuite. Open up the record, see that handy button, click it once and know that the same sequence is going to happen again and again with no manual work on my part. If you are someone that previously had to do manual data entry because you had information in SmartSuite that you need to get into email or other things, this is such a game changer and a really time saving option. But don't miss out on the fact that these kinds of sequences that are built into your SmartSuite account don't have to be selfish ones. The features you create, those cool sequences like we just built here that you create inside of ply and have showing up inside of SmartSuite can be shared with other users. All you have to do is use the Share button here and share it with other users on your team who have PLY access. Or I should say on your team or off your team, you can share these sequences with those users. The way PLY handles access. So if I share this with someone else like whose account is connected to SmartSuite the way they do that is pretty interesting and there's a lot of different options you have, but for now, because that's kind of a whole other video, just know that this connection is available. And if you are someone that wants to take SmartSuite up a notch and start building not just all of your processes inside of SmartSuite, but using different buttons like this that you can add seamlessly to connect SmartSuite with other tools you already use, I feel like this is a must have combination, especially for the price of free. Yeah, even just this piece or the AI writing example I showed you earlier in this video, if this saves you 10, 15, 20 minutes, it will have been worth it. And I think it would be pretty hard not to save you that much time if you have these set up properly. Of course, the more powerful your SmartSuite setup, the more functionality you've built into SmartSuite. The more data you have collected here, the more you're going to be able to automate with PLY using that connection. So to get the most out of what the SmartSuite Ply connection can really offer, make sure you're keeping your information in organized solutions inside of SmartSuite and then just let the magic happen from there. This video is now super long and probably have to edit so much stuff out by the time you guys see this. Feel like I could keep going on and on, but for now just leave it to say if you want to try out SmartSuite for yourself, use it as that structured database hub for your business operations. This would be a great time to do so. These kinds of integrations are just at the early stages and it's going to be really exciting to see where they go next. Info on SmartSuite and signing up is in the description below and how we can help you on your migration journey. Plus, if you're already a SmartSuite user, please do use the link below to sign up for PLY so you can take advantage of the strategic partnership that they have created with SmartSuite. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. If you have any questions, please do let me know. Drop a comment, you know, share your thoughts, all that stuff until next time like and subscribe and enjoy the process.