The Salesforce.com IdeaExchange

SalesForce.com IdeaExchange – it’s one of the best kept secrets that New SalesForce.com (SFDC) Users and Administrators should learn about and take advantage of. Do you know about it? Do you use it?

The IdeaExchange is a forum where SFDC users and administrators can submit product enhancements, or “ideas”. In addition to submitting these ideas, SFDC Users can also promote ideas they like, and demote ideas they don’t like. These votes are tracked with a score value as users vote them up or down. Through this voting, the most popular ideas bubble up to the top.

What a great tool for SFDC Product Managers to get user input and feedback on the product! In fact, SFDC product managers frequently review and comment on ideas posted in the IdeaExchange, fostering an open dialog between SFDC Customers and the SFDC Product Development Teams.

You don’t need a Salesforce.com account to browse the IdeaExchange, but only SFDC customers with an active user account can post, comment, promote and/or demote ideas in the forum.

At the top of the Blog, I reference IdeaExchange as one of the best kept SFDC secrets. I don’t know if your experience is different, but I kinda stumbled on the IdeaExchange by accident. One day, while logged in to my administrator account, I was clicking on various links and images to see where they would take me. Eventually, I clicked on the AppExchange logo, and from there I clicked onto the SuccessForce.com link. There are a lot of really GREAT resources on the SuccessForce website, but the one that caught my immediate attention was IdeaExchange.

It was the images in the IdeaExchange that caught my eye most. When posting an Idea, Users have the option of also uploading an image to emphasize or illustrate their idea. A picture is worth a thousand words (and it draws peoples attention). Add a picture to your feature request / product enhancement – maybe with a little Photoshop editing to show how you want the feature to work – and BAM! You’re able to communicate your idea that much more effectively.

When browsing the IdeaExchange, you can select tab filters to view “recently submitted” ideas or “most popular” ideas. On each idea, you can also view the comments, feedback and opinions that other users have weighed in with. In your forum profile, you can see a historical record of ideas that you have commented on or promoted. You can even look at the profiles and “idea stats” of other users in the IdeaExchange community – to see which ideas they’ve submitted, how those well those ideas have been promoted, etc. You can see the “Top Idea Users”, both those casting the most votes and those creating the most popular ideas.

It wasn't until DreamForce 2007 that I saw the real potency of IdeaExchange. DreamForce is the annual user convention in San Diego, and this past fall it attracted over 7000 SFDC users. During his keynote presentation, Marc Benioff announced some of the new features in the upcoming Winter’08 release. His presentation included screenshots of how these ideas had originated on the IdeaExchange. These were ideas that had "bubbled up" on the IdeaExchange, and very likely a many customers at the convention had even voted up some of these ideas. As the features were announced, the user group applause and excitement was electric!

The Take Away for Customers? We hear what you're asking for, and we deliver.

If you haven’t used the IdeaExchange, set some time aside to take a tour of it. Run some keyword searches on SFDC features that you use, and see the ideas SFDC users are talking about related to those features. Don't stop there ... get involved! Register your IdeaExchange community profile, and chime in with your own comments. Promote ideas that interest you. If there is a feature that you want or need, but you can’t find it with the forum search – post your idea to the user community. Salesforce.com really listens to its community base, and if the Idea reaches critical mass, you’re very likely to see it announced in an upcoming release.

Helping Victims of the Natural Disasters in Myanmar and China

The Salesforce.com Foundation will match your individual monetary donations, up to $5,000 and to a total of $250,000, toward the Asia Relief Fund. The Asia Relief Fund was established to "help support the relief efforts in Asia, for the recent cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China." You can find out more at the Salesforce.com Foundation website: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/

I learned about this program only after taking a pause on the Salesforce.com (SFDC) login screen. If you're like me, you normally blow past that SFDC login screen without reading any of it's contents. Most often, it's advertising hubba-baloo for Salesforce training classes or month old news about fraudulent, maliciuos phishing emails targeting Salesforce.com users.

But some big, bright font, and the "Power of Us" SFDC logo caught my eye. Even though I had speedily entered my username and password, and already logged in, I hit the "back page" button on my browser to take a closer look. The blurb on the login screen asked SFDC users to "Join the Salesforce.com Foundation Matching Grant Campaign".

Clicking through to the Asia Relief Fund page, I found information and links to The Asia Foundation and the Give2Asia organization. There were also links for getting ongoing updates about the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Burma, and how relief organizations are using these funds. I made a modest donation -- the equivalent of filling my tank with gas at the pump (which these days, is becoming increasinly less modest). It was quick, easy, and of course tax-deductible.

If you've been thinking about the recent natural disasters in Asia, and the tragedy experienced by its victims, please consider this opportunity to lend aid. I think it's a great program.

Join the Salesforce Professional Network on LinkedIn

Do you know about the Salesforce Professional Network on LinkedIn? I just found out about it a month ago, and have been meaning to blog about it for some time. A recent LinkedIn invite from a fellow SFDC NHUG Member Ken Quast reminded me to do so.

About LinkedIn

Hopefully you know all about LinkedIn, but for those of you who don't, here's a little info. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking group. Other examples of social networking groups include sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and more. Unlike those other web services, LinkedIn is focused on connecting academic and business colleagues together, even as they change jobs or careers.

Here's how it works: A LinkedIn user invites (or receives invitations) from professional or academic colleagues, and the tool maintains a list of these contacts (called connections, in LinkedIn). A contact network is gradually built up which consists of direct connections (persons you know or have worked with directly), 2nd degree connections (people who are connected to your connections), and third degree connections. These 2nd and 3rd degree connections can be used to get introduced to someone you wish to know through a mutual contact.

I use the tool to keep my resume updated, to keep my direct connections aware of various projects I'm working on, and to keep tabs on what past colleagues and college allumni are doing now in their professional careers. People change jobs quickly, and it's easy to lose track of them. LinkedIn makes it easier to stay in touch.

Becoming a user in LinkedIn is easy ... and free. Visit http://www.linkedin.com/ for more details.

LinkedIn Groups

So what are LinkedIn Groups? It's a group of LinkedIn Users who are members of an industry or professional group or even alumni organization. It's another way of expanding your personal LinkedIn Network, expand your list of business contacts, and stay in touch with group members.

Salesforce.com Professional Network

Salesforce.com has a LinkedIn Group with nearly 1,000 members! You can join the Salesforce Professional Network by visiting this web page.

The Salesforce.com Professional Network connects former and present salesforce.com users, administrators and employees, allowing them to expand their professional development, exchange ideas, network and continue to be a part of the Salesforce.com community.

As a group member, you'll have the option to make your profile available to other group members. You'll also have a Salesforce Professional Network badge on your LinkedIn profile.

Want Your Antivirus Software to Run Faster? Defrag!

If you’re like me, you don’t think about desktop maintenance for your home computer (like system backups, defragmenting the disk, etc.). One system maintenance activity I do regularly, however, is antivirus scans. To be honest, I only do those because the clever software vendor designed the application to automatically do a virus scan on a weekly basis when installed.

I noticed my antivirus scans taking longer and longer to run. Then I found this little gem on ZDNet: Antivirus Software and Disk Defragmentation. The white paper is written by a company that produces and sells Diskeeper – and application that handles file and free space fragmentation on your desktop. It describes how the company conducted research with 4 popular anti-virus scan applications, including Symantec Antivirus 2003, McAfee Pro 7.02, Trend Micro PC-cillin 10.03, and Panda Titanium Antivirus 2004.

The results? Run-time of the anti-virus scan improved 20% - 55% on systems that were defrag’d, lowering scan times by 17-58 minutes. Neat!

Miracle Elixer: chkdsk

I called our corporate IT Helpdesk, and reported the latest plague on my corporate-issued laptop.

"My monitor just turned all purple. I think the computer is still running fine, but I can't get to the Task Manager with CTRL-ALT-DEL. I hear the disk drive spinning every few seconds, so I don't think it's entirely locked up. Same problem happened last week, but then the display turned all white. And two weeks prior to that, it turned all cyan colored."

"Run a chkdsk for disk errors," says the bored IT professional.

"Huh? Sorry, I wasn't clear. I have a problem with my monitor wigging out, displaying a random color."

"Ok, well, run chkdsk and see if it fixes it."

I was seething, staring at the caller ID on my phone with laser beam eyes, hoping that on the other end, he was feeling the pain of those lasers boring into his skull.

"Okay?"

"Yeah, sure." Click.

It's the same thing, a running joke in the office. Report any problem to the IT helpdesk, and they'll ask you to run a chkdsk.

In my case, the problem was somewhat rare. I'd only seen it happen three times, but the behavior was the same. The entire display would turn a single color, and I was unable to get to my desktop, or navigate my way to shutting down cleanly. I had to power off the laptop, and reboot.

So I ran chkdsk. There was a disk error, did I want to clean it up? Sure. I'm still fuming, because I'm certain this is just an error in the file allocation table, and has nothing to do with the monitor problems I've been having.

That was three months ago, and I haven't seen the problem since. But that just makes me angry, because I know it has nothing to do with the chkdsk /F that I ran. I could have thrown a butterball turkey at the monitor, and the results would have been the same.

"Yep, thanks, throwing the butterball at the laptop while it was docked solved my problem -- no more colored screens. Thanks, IT dude!"

chkdsk

It's the Miracle Elixir of the IT Helpdesk.