In a recent article, I outlined 5 common IT practices that waste your time. One such practice listed in that article: Repeating manual tasks. If you find yourself repeating the same task on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, you should ask yourself this question: Can this task be automated? Chances are, automation could save hours of time.

The question becomes…”How?”

If you’re an m-Power user, we recently released a new feature that will help you with automation: The Messaging and Scheduled Tasks enhancement. It lets developers build applications that perform tasks or send email and/or sms messages based on a predetermined schedule or event. While this is useful in all types of ways, here are a few tasks it could automate for you:

• Automatically correspond with customers: If a customer submits a support request on your site, the application could automatically send a confirmation email to the customer. Or, the application could automatically email customers who are behind on their payments.
• Automatically alert businesses to problems: Rather than constantly monitor your data for problems, an application can automatically send email/sms messages to the appropriate executive any time a time-sensitive business issue occurs (such as a customer account cancellation).
• Automatically run and distribute reports: Rather than handle reporting manually, this feature lets you automatically run and distribute reports on a predetermined schedule.

Now, those are just a few ways the Messaging and Scheduled Tasks enhancement can help you with automation, but the possibilities are endless. If you’d like to learn how to start using this feature, we’ve written up a tutorial and placed it in the techblog. You can find it here: Messaging and Scheduled Tasks.