Force Monkey

Configure - Price - Quote (CPQ) Solutions

2011-12-03T20:44:00.001-05:00

The Sales Cloud application by Salesforce.com provides allof the basic elements for small and medium-sized businesses to generate pricebooks and build sales quotes. But whatabout enterprise-sized organizations or even smaller companies with verycomplex product configurations? Forthese businesses, the standard price book, product and quote tools inSalesforce.com may not be sufficient. These companies must generally turn to a Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ)solution.

What’s In a CPQ Tool?

CPQ solutions vary by vendor, but generally include thefollowing features:

Product Catalog: In aCPQ tool, Products and/or service offerings are loaded into a product catalog,which stores product information in a structured and consistent way: productname or service name, description, SKU, pricing information and pricing history. Some CPQ solutions also allow productmanagers to upload data sheets, pictures and or video clips. Product catalogs can become very complextools, allowing organizations to define a nested catalog hierarchy,relationships between products, product code translations for backend billingsystems, access / visibility rights, and more. As a Salesforce.com Administrator, you’ll want to carefully review howthe CPQ product catalog integrates with Salesforce.com Products and Pricebooks. Both are critical areas if you want to takefull advantage of Salesforce Opportunity and Quote management features. Thebest solutions advise users on related products, provide price comparisonservices, and integrate directly with enterprise resource planning (ERP)systems.

Product Configurator: You want your sales team selling, not getting mired down in the complexarray of currently available product bundles and promotional offers. Product configurators are tools that theSales team use to customize bundles of product offerings accurately andquickly. The best CPQ solutions featureconfigurators that hide the complexity of your service bundle and productofferings. Rules management features allowproduct managers to define product relationships and bundling rules, whichensure deals are built and priced correctly.

Needs Analysis / Guided Selling: Advanced CPQ solutions feature tools that guide the ustomer, partner or sales user tosee related products / offerings, see automatic discounts or promotions theymay be eligible for. It allows them tocompare similar product offerings side by side, or alerts them to currentpromotions.

Quotes / Proposals Generator: When you start descending into your CPQvendor selection process, you’ll find that most CPQ vendors have a stand alonesolution – which allows for all product configuration, pricing, proposals,approvals and quote management to be done in their platform – a full SFAsolution. Optionally, they may alsoprovide some integration with the CRM platform of your choosing. Rich quoting tools will feature extensions,like selectable cover letters, product details, a “first bill” snapshot (forsubscription models), terms & conditions, electronic signature integration(DocuSign, eSign, TurboSignature). Theymay also include workflow rules to automate the approval process, if needed.

When Do You Need CPQ?

If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, chancesare you need a CPQ solution:

- Our current configurations and price rules are scatteredacross multiple documents – and finding them is slowing your sales team down

- Our Sales team submit orders with invalid configurationsor incompatible products; correcting these is costly

- Orders are submitted with incorrect pricing for theselected configuration

- Our Sales team frequently submit orders using expired /discontinued promos or products

- The process of rolling out a new promotion is extremely complex,time-consuming and prone-to-error

- Our product configurations / bundles are so complex, wecan’t allow customers to order products over the web

CPQ Vendors(Salesforce.com Certified)

Looking to learn more about CPQ solutions? The following vendors have CPQ solutions thatintegrate to some level with Salesforce.com:

- Apptus

- BigMachines

- Cameleon Software

- FPX

- Sterling Commerce

- WEBCOMinc

Other CPQ Vendors

- CRMantra

- SmartCatalog

How To Prepare for Salesforce.com Certifications

2011-07-09T12:33:00.000-04:00

I'm helping a new group of Salesforce.com Admins prepare for their upcoming ADM201 Certifications (which they'll be taking at Dreamforce 2011). While preparing to help THEM prepare, I created this quick list of 14 tips, tricks and advice -- I hope you find it useful!

1.) Exam Format: This is a timed, multiple choice exam. There are 60 questions you must answer within a 90-minute window. Some questions have one answer, some have multiple correct answers (and you must select all of them correctly). The advantage of a multiple choice format is that all of the information is in front of you. The disadvantage is that additional information is also given to you, designed to confuse you. Some people excel at this format and never have to study. I’m not one of those people. I need to study hard, write down the information, and review / recall it often.

2.) Exam Environment: Salesforce certification exams are taken on a computer and monitored by a proxy. The exam software will present you with one question at a time. You must answer it or skip it, and then move on to the next question. At the end, the software gives you a chance to review each question and verify or change your answer. The exam is pass/fail: you need to score a 67% or higher to pass (hey, for most exams we took in college, that’s an F, so how hard can it be, right?). Exam results are calculated immediately: you will know if you passed or failed before leaving the exam area.

3.) Scope of the Exam matches the Scope of Salesforce.com: The exam covers the full breadth of functionality in Salesforce.com. This might be challenging for admins who are only focused on one aspect of Salesforce.com for their companies (i.e., a new admin who is only using the Sales App for sales force automation features). Salesforce Administration training and certification covers the full gambit of Salesforce Apps: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support. You will need to learn (or refresh) on all of the applications in Salesforce, as well as features that might not be often touched (user / profile / role configurations, security configurations, etc. I wasn’t prepared for questions about configuring international monetary settings or changing the default languages, because in the company I worked at didn't use these features (and I hadn't attended the training, I just opted for the test). I passed, but I wouldn't be surprised if I just barely squeaked out a 68% (Salesforce doesn't share the test results, so I'll never know how well or poorly I did on that first exam). Since then, I have been much more careful in my exam preparation. My advice here is to make sure you’re focusing on the full functionality of Salesforce.com, not just the functionality that you're making use of at your current company.

4.) Preparing for the Exam: Don’t wait to the last minute. This is not the type of exam you can cram for the day before (unless you’re one of those people mentioned above, who can breeze through multiple choice formats with no problem). Start preparing weeks before you schedule the test. Dedicate small increments of study time every day. Use the last few nights prior to the exam to review all of the information you have collected / prepared.

5.) Get a Study Partner: If you can, find yourself a study partner. Study buddies and study groups were great in college, they're great when prepping for the Salesforce.com Certification exams. Don't have anyone you can partner up with at work? Get involved and connect with folks in your local user group, you’re almost certain to find someone preparing to take the exam, preparing to recertify, or eager to be talked into it! Plan study sessions, take turns reviewing chapters and writing down your own multiple choice test questions for each other. Create mock exams for each other and test each other.

6.) Certification Training: Salesforce offers 5-day, instructor lead classes which help participates prepare for the Salesforce Certification exams. There are courses for Admin (ADM201), Advanced Admin (ADM301), Force.com Developer (DEV401), Force.com Advanced Developer (DEV501), and Consultant (CON201). Courses range from $3,000 (for Salesforce.com Administrator Certification) to $4,000 (for Advanced Admin, and all other certifications). The courses generally include a voucher to take the exam. You can register and learn more about these training programs at www.salesforce.com/training. Confession: I've never taken one of these (I'm too cheap, and I don't personally do well with instructor-led class formats). Still, I hear great things from the folks in my Admin and Developer network who have taken them.

7.) Get the Latest Study Guide from Salesforce.com: At the bottom of the Salesforce Training and Certification page there are descriptions and links to the study guides for each of the current certification offerings. The study guides include sample questions in the format you'll see during the certification exam. These are very helpful, make use of them. Here is a link to the current (Spring’11) Administrator Study Guide.

8.) Some Great Trips from Bloggers: Hayata Takeshita (@crmverse) offers some great advice on his blog: Salesforce.com Certification Exam Notes. Hayata writes, “One obvious piece of advice was to read the questions and answers carefully, especially those with NOT, CANNOT, and EXCEPT in them. I was provided with two pieces of paper and it helped to answer the questions as TRUE and then transpose them to fit the question format.” Hayata also suggests a practical study aid: flash cards. He built his flash cards using the Notepad app on his iPhone. “Since the exam was mostly about memorization, flashcards were a great tool. There’s something about writing stuff down that helps improve the learning ability of people.” You should also check out Hayata's vlog: Home Study for the ADM201 Certification Exam. It's a short, 8 minute video with some great tips and advice.

9.) Another Great Blog Resource: ForceCertified.com is a fantastic resource. The site was designed by John Coppedge (@johncoppedge), who created the site while preparing for his own Salesforce Administrator Certification exam. John went on to obtain his developer and consultant certifications, and updated the site to reflect the preparations he did for those exams, as well. The site also includes a link to a simulated, timed practice exam. The questions in the ProProfs practice exam are similar (if not slightly harder) than those in the actual certification exam. Take this exam and check your score at the end. As mentioned previously, you need to score 67% or better on the Salesforce exam.

10.) Write it down: Both John and Hayata used similar means to prepare for the exam: they read the materials carefully and then wrote the information down. Hayata created flash cards on his iPhone Note app, John created a website. If your study practice includes writing stuff down, you will likely retain it better. If you have a tablet device or smart phone, I recommend checking out www.studyblue.com – free online flashcards that you can study wherever you go!

11.) Harmony of Mind requires Harmony of Body: Get plenty of rest and eat healthy meals the day before. Have a great breakfast the day of the exam. Be positive – you’ve worked hard preparing for this, you can do it!

12.) During the Exam: Think actively and logically. Read the questions carefully, don’t rush. This is a timed exam, so answer all questions that know the answers to first, skip the ones you don't. Then you can do the mental math ( “Hey, that’s 80%, I should be ok.”) before going back to answer all the questions you weren't certain on. Do a final review of all questions and answers, if you have time.

13.) After the Exam: On no, you didn’t pass! Don’t worry, rumor says that upwards of 40% of people fail their first attempt at the exam. Don’t despair, you’re still in good company (you’re part of the bold few who have actually made the effort to get certified!). You are wiser about the questions and format, and better prepared for the NEXT time you take the exam. It will cost you $100 to re-test, and I recommend doing that sooner (within 1-2 weeks) than later. Recall (and write down!) as many questions that stumped you as possible. Then study and prep for the next test.

14.) After the Exam: Congratulations, you passed! But you can’t stop here. You need to recertify with each seasonal release of Salesforce.com (approximately 3x per year). These are necessary because the Force.com platform is constantly evolving. If you’re not going to continuously maintain your certification (which requires an ongoing financial investment), there’s not much point in taking the first certification. Shell Black offers some great tips and advice for managing your Salesforce.com Release Exams in his blog: Release Exams.

Good luck -- and be sure to let us know how you did!

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Where Have All the Good Admins Gone?

2011-07-07T21:29:00.002-04:00

I’ve been watching an interesting trend lately: Salesforce.com Admins are leaving their current companies and joining some of the top CRM consulting companies instead. In the past couple weeks, a half-dozen of the top “Force.com Enthusiasts” that I follow on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have signed on with companies like Appirio, Mavens Consulting, Accenture and Acumen Solutions. Some recent examples (most on this list flocking to Appirio):

Alex Sutherland (@apexsutherland)
Brandy Colmer (@forcedotmom)
Matthew Lamb (@SFDCMatt)
Meryl Flynn (@MerylRothman)
Jennifer Phillips (@crmjen)
Joshua Hoskins (@jhoskins)
Kelly Walsh (@thekellywalsh)
Nick Hamm (@hammnick)
Ward Geis (@old_nick)

These aren’t just Salesforce.com Admins either … they’re some of the Top Guns in the Force.com community. Many of them are inaugural members of the Salesforce MVP program, all of them are strong Customer Evangelists for the Force.com Platform.

What’s happening here?

This past month, at Cloudforce Boston, I had a chance to chat with several Salesforce Admins who are on that list. Of the individuals I spoke to, each cited a similar motivation: they’re very passionate about Salesforce.com. They know what great things it is capable of doing and they’ve seen some incredible use-cases and ways other companies are using it. Some expressed a little frustration at their own companies, who were not taking the recommendations and advice of these Force.com Gurus: “I just came to the realization that no matter what I tried to do, I just wasn’t going to win them over. I don’t want to fight that hard to make my company brilliant! I want to work with companies who recognize the benefits of Salesforce – who really want to use it – and then help them get the most out of it.”

I have to confess, I occasionally experience these same frustrations. To me, it’s so clear how a well-developed and widely deployed CRM solution can completely transform a company. I’ve seen that transformation at other (smaller) companies where I’ve deployed Salesforce (and sometimes, competing CRM solutions). Partial CRM deployments are great, full CRM deployments (covering all customer-facing teams) are better, but extending the platform deep into the back office is simply #Awesome.

In a small company, I was able to roll out CRM features across the entire company quite easily: I’d just turn features on. Users were eager to see what else the platform to do, and it was easy to roll-out custom apps and services that met their needs. In a large enterprise company, I do far less development / deployment and far more preaching. I need to constantly evangelize cloud-computing in general, basic principles of CRM, and the value of extending our CRM tool beyond Sales. It’s exhausting and I can sympathize with some of those admins who favored the consulting career path.

Another Salesforce.com Top Gun that I correspond with (whenever our cloud paths cross) has been advising her company to avoid splitting their Salesforce.com org into two instances. In some cases, it might make sense, but in their model, she knows that it doesn’t. She’s the lead Salesforce.com Admin, and is being told “do not question this decision (to split the orgs), do not ask any questions.”

When your company no longer allows you to give them appropriate counsel and advice – no longer allows you to even ask questions – it might be time to seek out blue skies and green pastures.

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Liking the New Twitter Feature – Tell Me Who Liked What I Wrote

2011-06-11T15:27:00.000-04:00

This past month (5/23/2011), Twitter introduced a new feature: email notifications whenever someone “Favorites” or retweets one of your posts (as long as you “follow” that Twitter user). It’s only been three weeks since the feature was rolled out, but I’m finding it to be a dang useful feature!

Why It’s Useful

My tweets are hodge-podge of information, but generally relate to CRM, Salesforce.com, cloud-computing, agile methodologies, privacy and security. These are my hot buttons, the areas of technology I am most interested in. These are the topics I tweet and blog about. More than likely, the folks who follow me share some of these same interests (otherwise, why follow?).

I get a lot of useful information from the folks I follow on Twitter. I especially like the way Paper.Li delivers all this content to my mailbox, in a newspaper format, twice daily.

Like many Twitter users, I like to reciprocate. I hope that the information I am tweeting is useful to those who follow me. Until this Twitter feature came along, my tweets have been largely a “one way” communication. Occasionally, users would retweet a particular message, and I’d see evidence of that in a my twitter stream. But now, getting an email link with of everything that has been favorited or retweeted gives more direct feedback. It lets me see who liked something I wrote. Those positive feedback loops are important in social tribes. Being able to see how often something you posted was “liked”, marked as a “favorite” or “+1” gives the author a sense of appreciation: someone found this information useful, I should do more like that.

Enabling and Disabling the Feature

When the feature was rolled out, it was set to enable for all users. You can change those settings easily: when logged into twitter, click the drop-down icon next to your name, settings, Notifications tab, and uncheck the appropriate activity checkboxes.

What do you think of the new feature? Like it or hate it? Do you think it might change the way you or others tweet?

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Simple Productivity Booster: Disabling the Outlook Email Desktop Alert

2011-06-10T00:20:00.000-04:00

This past week, Ed Gallagher, our Division VP, brought in a Productivity Expert from the David Allen Company. David Allen is the author of “Ready for Work”, “Making It All Work”, and “Getting Things Done”. Ed had recently attended one of his seminars, and then hired one of the author’s professional consultants for some 1:1 coaching. Ed was so inspired by the program and the benefits he got out of it, that he decided to have all of his Directors, Managers and Supervisors attend the same training.

I have to confess – as finely tuned and productive as I think I am, I learned a thing or two. One of my “instant gratification” favorites from the training was: disabling the Microsoft Outlook email pop-up … read on!

Our trainer was Chris McIntyre (great speaker, great trainer!) and he promised to teach us things about Outlook that we didn’t know. Impossible, I thought!

Microsoft Outlook is my favorite email tool (sacrilege from a Force.com Evangelist, eh?), mostly because it’s the tool used by every company I’ve yet to work at. I use all the features of Outlook and I mean all: email, calendar, contacts, groups, tasks, notes, journals, views, rules and alerts, forms, macros, VB scripts … everything. It’s my nature. I become extremely vested in the productivity apps that I use every day and have to understand every little nuance about them. But there’s a difference between knowing every little feature that a product offers, and understanding when and how to use those features.

One of the tips that Chris recommended early in the session: disable the email pop-up alert (which is enabled by default) triggered when a new email enters your inbox. Chris explained, “It’s a productivity killer, especially if you get a lot of email. And I’ve been looking at the way you all work the past few days … you guys get A LOT of email.”

He’s right. On a daily basis, there are probably 100+ emails that move through my inbox. “Think about it,” Chris continued. “There you are, working on that really important report for your boss. You’re in the zone, writing up the document and – tap, tap, tap. It’s like someone tapping on your shoulder or tugging at your shirt sleeve: the email alert. And it stays there for a while, saying, ‘Hey, look at me … it won’t take long. Just look. LOOK! I’m titled REALLY IMPORANT.’”

And every email that comes in to the inbox does the same thing. Tap, tap, tap.

Of course, I knew how to disable the feature already – I just always thought keeping it on was the proper thing. Afterall, these are emails! They are COMMUNICATIONS! THEY ARE IMPORTANT!!!

But they’re not, really. They are distractions. They steer my attention away from my primary focus. They may indeed by important, but they can wait. Because whatever I’m working on right now is MORE important. If someone wants to get a hold of me urgently, they can call.

So I disabled the email pop-ups (In Outlook 2007, right click on the Outlook icon in your Systray, and uncheck “Show New Mail Desktop Alert”; same process for Outlook 2010, but the displayed menu options are labeled differently).

Today was my first full run without the pop-up alerts. Wow … what a difference it made. While writing up a detailed enhancement request, I was amazed at how much better it felt to get through that whole hour, without a single email interrupt. It was like working in the office on a quite Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, we allow ourselves to be distracted by every little thing; we forget the importance and ease by which we can tune out the world, and how much our brains really need that.

More tricks on the way, as I review my class notes and embrace some of the other lessons learned.

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My Favorite Daily News Source: Twitter (via Paper.li)

2011-05-01T12:45:00.000-04:00

If you are an avid tweeter, then I highly recommend you create your own Paper.li subscription. It’s free, and it’s a remarkable tool for delivering focused content, directly to your email inbox, in a daily electronic newspaper format.

Whenever I’m online, either at home or at work, I’ll invariably have Hootsuite up. It scrolls a constant stream of tweeters and search topics that are of interest to me: Cloud Computing, Salesforce, Comcast, Robotics, Project Management, Process Improvement. Hootsuite allows me to stay connected with peers and my “social community”, and find new connections with people who share my interests. But even though I’m somewhat selective in who I follow on Twitter, it’s still an extremely high-volume of content. It’s very difficult to keep up with that stream.

Enter Paper.li

Paper.li summarizes all of the content (links, articles, photos, videos) that were shared by the people you follow, and summarizes them into a daily newspaper format. Confession: it felt somewhat pompous to create a newspaper around my own name. I had to get past that, and remind myself that the daily newspaper content isn’t mine – it is stuff that was shared by all the people I follow on Twitter. It’s all packaged up in a newspaper format, delivered to my email inbox daily. The format is much easier to read than scrolling through a twitter stream at the end of the day. This daily feed has become one of my favorite ways to take in news and information.

Paper.li allows you to set the frequency of your newspaper feeds, including a Daily Edition (default), Morning & Evening editions, and a Weekly edition. You can even control the preferred delivery hour. Don’t you wish you had that flexibility with your regular newspaper?.

Paper.li inserts some advertisements throughout the newsletter. The ads are not overbearing or distracting; I’m able to ignore them as easily as I ignore advertisements in a traditional newspaper or magazine.

The result is a daily newspaper that has a refreshing mix of personal interest content mixed in with industry and work-related content. I truly love it!

Creating your own daily Paper.li newspaper is easy:

1.) Navigate your web browser to http://paper.li
2.) Click “Create A Paper” in the top right hand corner of the page
3.) Follow the prompts to create a paper based on:

… your Twitter account: the newspaper will consist of articles shared in the past 24-hours by yourself and the people you follow on Twitter.

… a hash tag (i.e., #salesforce): the newspaper will contain articles shared in the past 24-hours by all Twitter users, who associated that hash tag with the article

… a Twitter @list: select any Twitter list, your own or that of another Twitter user, and get a daily newsfeed of articles shared by those users

Note: If you have taken an approach of simply following EVERYONE who follows you on Twitter, you may want to prune your Following List. The newsfeed is much more relevant if it includes articles promoted by people who specifically share your interests.

Check it out, and let me know if it makes a difference on how you read and manage your Twitter following practices.

From Chatter Apathy to Chatter Fan in 30 Days

2011-01-28T23:09:00.003-05:00

Meet Joe Onisick, a self-proclaimed “IT professional specializing in data center technologies with a focus on virtualization and private cloud architecture.” (I haven’t had the heart to tell Joe that there is no such thing as a private cloud – that it’s a myth, like unicorns and leprechauns – but perhaps we’ll broach that twitter conversation on a later date :-)

I jumped into a conversation with Joe when he spoke disparagingly of Chatter:

So here we have a well-educated, intelligent fellow, who finds real value in “public social media”. From reading his Twitter stream, I see that Joe expertly wields Twitter to find other business professionals, networks with them to get answers and solve problems. So how is it that he couldn’t see a similar benefit with Chatter?

Could it be that the Chatter deployment at his company did not have appropriate C-level executive sponsorship? Securing your C-level executive sponsor is critical in any organization-wide application. Someone “at the top” has to recognize that this corporate social media stuff has value, convince their peers that it will be helpful to the company, and provide the oversight to ensure that it is rolled out properly.

Perhaps there had been no training for the user community at Joe’s company. Let’s be honest – a good number of our friends, relatives and work colleagues simply don’t understand the power and impact of social media – or even what it’s good for. A corporate executive, whom I get to work with from time to time, refers to Facebook as “Wastebook”. He perceives it as a tool for idle minds and wants no part of it in the workplace. An organization cannot simply turn on a tool like Chatter and hope that employees will “get it”. Training, monitoring, and re-training must be part of your Chatter roll-out strategy.

Perhaps the deployment did not have appropriate attention by community moderators. Social media is only useful when there is wide participation. In public social media tools, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, there is an enormous community of active participants. But when you close the tool to a smaller community, it very often requires a moderator to monitor the micro-blogging stream, create and steer conversations to the appropriate discussion groups, and nurture the community until it is able to thrive on its own. Many corporate social media experiments fail, simply because there is no one there to lead the conversation and get everyone out of their SocMed shells.

I made a note to check back with Joe one month later. I wanted to see if there had been any change to his position on corporate social media. There had been:

From Chatter Apathy to Chatter Fan in 30 Days. Go get him, Robin Daniels, there’s a successful user story in there somewhere!

Salesforce.com Acquires Dimdim - Why Is That Good?

2011-01-08T12:57:00.002-05:00

This past week, Salesforce.com acquired Dimdim, a browser-based web conferencing service provider. Dimdim is a very useful app and I’ve used it to conduct webinars, User Group meetings, and training sessions for remote employees. As web conferencing goes, Dimdim included all of the basic functionality: ability to schedule a web conference, track meeting registrations, automatically send email reminders to meeting registrants … even the ability to record the web conference for later playback.

After the event, the web conferencing organizer would receive an email link, which he could immediately share with anyone – so they could view the recorded session and play it back at their leisure. Organizers also recedived an embedded HTML link, which they could paste into their blog or website, making the content of the meeting available to a general audience. Beyond web conferencing, Dimdim had other useful features, like whiteboard collaboration, the ability to share and store documents, phone conferencing, and webcam sharing.

I used Dimdim for a good number of Salesforce.com consulting projects that I was doing for Non-Profit Organizations. These organizations were attracted to Dimdim because it was the only free web conferencing solution available. The free version only supported 20 attendees, but that was perfect for their needs. The Pro version, which allowed a greater number of participants and more functionality, was only $25 / month. Very compelling, compared to other web conference vendors, which were in the $40 - $60 price range.

It’s clear that Saleforce.com is acquiring Dimdim for its technology, not its customer base. When giving me the heads-up about the acquisition, my Salesforce.com Account Executive was careful to mention that Salesforce currently has “no plans to go into the web conferencing market.” Shortly after that, I got an email on my free Dimdim user account confirming the same: my Dimdim account will remain active until March 15th, and after that I won’t be able to use it.

That doesn’t mean Dimdim will go away completely. Afterall, Dimdim is based on open source code, and an open source version of the code will be posted to SourceForge.net. However, neither Salesforce.com nor Dimdim will be contributing to the open source project going forward. Source: Brown, Rodney (2011, January 7). Mass High Tech: Dimdim sells to Salesforce.com for $31M.

Why is this good for Dimdim? In the press release, Dimdim CEO DD Ganguly summed it up simply enough, “From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time collaboration in the cloud, with no software. Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible.”

Why is this good for Salesforce.com? Good development talent is hard to acquire, and in just 3 years, Dimdim has done some very interesting, innovative stuff in the web conferencing space. Salesforce plans to retain the Dimdim engineering team, most of which are located in India. Although the standalone web conferencing service is terminating, the engineering team will focus on integrating “Dimdim’s technology with Chatter as quickly as possible.” Source: Henschen, Doug (2011, January 7). InformationWeek: Salesforce.com Acquistion Feeds Chatter .

Why is this good for Salesforce.com Users? Plan on seeing some new features in the Salesforce.com Collaboration Cloud service very soon: instant messaging (and being able to log those communications to a contact / lead / case), screen sharing (how handy will that be for your customer service team?), whiteboard collaboration sessions that can be recorded and stored in Content or Chatter Groups, training webinars (also recorded and stored for replay), and more. Great stuff coming!

Why is this good for Dimdim Users? Well, truth be told, it ain’t. There’s not one good thing about this for Dimdim users, and I’m sorry to see my Dimdim web conferencing user account go away. Individuals who used Dimdim for web-conferencing will look toward other web-conferencing solutions (Yugma/Skype, for no-low cost; GoToMeeting, WebEx, Live Meeting, iLinc or others for subscription services)

What about you? What are you looking forward to with the latest acquisition by Salesforce.com?

Converting 10-Lines of Apex code to a 1-line Validation Rule Formula

2011-01-01T22:44:00.006-05:00

Code clean-up is what I'm doing these days ... lots of code clean-up. One of our Salesforce.com orgs (we have sixteen of them) currently has 72% test coverage in production. I'm not sure how the previous administrators were able to install code below the 75% threshold, but they managed. I'm tasked with getting that code cleaned up, so I can deploy a new release.

While looking for areas to improve code coverage, I stumbled upon this trigger:


trigger checkAccountPhoneNumberBiBu on Account (before insert, before update) {
   for (Account account : Trigger.new) {
      if (account.Phone==null) continue;
      Pattern p = Pattern.compile('[-() ]');
      String sPhone = p.matcher(account.Phone).replaceAll('');
      // check length without punctuation
      if (sPhone.length() != 10) account.Phone.addError(' Phone number must have 3 digit area code and 7 digit number');
      p = Pattern.compile('\\d');
      sPhone = p.matcher(sPhone).replaceAll('');
      if (sPhone.length() > 0) account.Phone.addError('Phone number must be formatted as (999)999-9999');
   }
}

This trigger looks at the value entered in the "Phone" field before an Account record is inserted or updated; if the phone field is not in the (999)999-9999 format, it errors out and notifies the user to enter the phone # in the proper format.

In addition to this Apex code, the developer also had to write a testmethod to ensure coverage of the trigger. His code was only getting 67% test coverage (which is what brought the trigger to my attention in the first place).

As I started looking at what I needed to add to the testmethod to ensure 100% coverage, I realized it would be easier to just get rid of the trigger altogether, and replace it with a Validation Rule. That 10 lines of Apex code was reduced to a 1-line formula in a validation rule:

NOT(REGEX(Phone, "\\D*?(\\d\\D*?){10}"))

Here's the validation rule in the UI:

Simpler is always better. Any time you can minimize your code (or get rid of it altogether), you make your org simpler, smaller and eaiser to maintain. I'm a fan of that.

Another benefit of implementing this as a validation rule is that I'm able to control where the error message is displayed. Previously, the trigger method displayed the error message at the top of the detail record page layout. With validation rules, you can display error messages either at the top of the screen or at exact field where the error was made; I generally prefer the latter.

Want to see this and other useful validation rules? Check out the Useful Validation Formulas guide by Salesforce.com.

Why the hate for Salesforce.com CRM?

2010-12-19T14:24:00.000-05:00

I love Salesforce.com, that’s no secret. Fellow employees meeting me for the first time often ask if I’m a Salesforce.com employee. That’s because I tend to evangelize it’s use in every aspect of our business, and am vested in ways of extending its functionality throughout our organization – even beyond CRM. I’ve made it my job to know everything I possibly can about the Force.com platform and how it might benefit our business. I know I’m not the only one like me; I had an opportunity to meet plenty of Customer Evangelists at Dreamforce this past year, and of course there are the folks I regularly interact with on Twitter, the community forums, and now the Dreamforce Chatter app. But I always wonder if there are product evangelists who love competing CRM products as much as I love Salesforce.com.

Meet Leon Tribe (@Leontribe on Twitter), a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant based out of Sydney, Austrailia. He has a blog, Leon’s CRM Musings, which he has been writing since 2008 (at about the same frequency and volume that I’ve been writing my Force Monkey blog). It’s a good blog, and worth reading. It is a Dynamics CRM blog, “focusing on a functional perspective and from the perspective of making codeless changes”. While reading his blog, I was amused at how frequently (and damningly) he talks about Salesforce.com (less so in 2010, but much more so in ’08-’09). Why is that, I wonder? I never talk damningly (or frequently) about Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Where does all the hate come from?

I came to be aware of Leon after browsing the latest #Salesforce Daily Paper.li newsletter.

SIDEBAR: If you don’t already know about Paper.li, you should check into it: http://paper.li/introduction.html. Paper.li is a news aggregator, similar to Flipboard. When you sign up for the service, you specify a Twitter hashtag (like #Salesforce). Thereafter, you will receive daily news updates from Twitter mentions that include the #Salesforce hashtag and a news article. I’ve subscribed to Paper.li feeds on: #Salesforce, #Privacy, #Security, #Lego and #Robotics.

Anyway, back to Leon … I discovered him and his blog after he started adding the #Salesforce and #df10 hashtags to Microsoft Dynamics CRM related news articles, like these:

These tweets cause the related Dynamics CRM news articles to populate the #Salesforce Daily newsfeed. That reminded me of the silly marketing tactics employed by competing CRM vendors at Dreamforce: the SugarCRM carolers and the Microsoft Dynamics “I Didn’t Get Forced” Sequay Brute Squad. At his Day 2 keynote, Marc Benioff said, “Not everyone wants us to have this fun. There are forces out there that are trying to stop us. They don’t want us dancing to Stevie Wonder. They don’t want us dancing to will.i.am, and singing to his “I Want to Own It” song.”

It's true. And while I spend very little thought on their CRM world, they seem to spend a lot of attention on ours.

But I’m still left to wonder – do the Dynamics CRM product evangelists have as much fun as we do? Is TechEd, the annual Microsoft User Conference, as much fun, energetic, and informative as Dreamforce (it should be: at $2100 for just the conference, it’s double the cost)? At TechEd, do Microsoft customers get to hang around the pub with Microsoft Developers, as I had a chance to do this past week at Dreamforce? Does TechEd have as much music, energy, and fun as the Dreamforce Global Gala? Is their community as connected, invested and friendly as ours is?

I have to believe it isn’t, because you can’t be having a lot of good, clean, wholesome fun if you’re spending so much of your time damning and lashing out at the competitor’s CRM product.

Salesforce Schools Oracle in Ad Sign Campaign

2010-12-11T01:18:00.003-05:00

This past week was the annual Salesforce.com User Conference, Dreamforce 2010. In advance of the user conference, CRM rival Oracle purchased advertising space across from the Moscone Center, where the convention was being held.

Picture courtesy of Woodsin Martin, SVP at Salesforce.com, who quips, "Not sure who does the ad copy at Oracle, but they might need a fact-checker."

Salesforce.com put their own ad up across from the Moscone Center soon afterwards, letting their customers know who they thought the REAL #1 was:

Yes, the Customer is #1, according to Salesforce. Oracle, you've just been schooled.

Dreamforce: Tips for First Year Attendees

2010-12-01T09:07:00.000-05:00

Dreamforce is just a few days away, and at the prompting of my good friend David Schach, I wanted to take a quick moment to help folks who are attending Dreamforce for the first time.

My first Dreamforce: I was lost. I mostly "followed the crowds" and hoped I was heading in the right direction. Here is a list of things I wish I had known that first time:

1.) Check-in early. My Salesforce AE recommended I check in the day before the conference ("go ahead, they're open now, go over and get your badge") and I'm so glad I did. There were a dozen people behind the counters, and only myself to be waited on. When I saw the huge lines the next AM, I was so thankful that I had checked in early.

2.) To the extent that your allowed to explore the Moscone on the day before, take advantage of it. The corridors aren't filled with thousands of people moving between break-out sessions, and you're likely to make a few friends.

3.) Arrive early and get a good seat. I like to be near the front, but not so far forward that I don't have a good view of the presentation screen. Never sit on the isle, always move to the middle. That doubles your chances of striking up interesting conversations with folks on either side of you.

4.) Don't be shy. This is a Users Conference, and you'll get the most benefit from it if you make eye contact, smile, and get to know your neighbor. Find out what they do, who they work for, how they use the platform, how many Dreamforce sessions they've attended. If they are a veteran, ask them for THEIR tips and suggestions.

5.) Bring lots of business cards. Just bring the whole, gosh darn box. You'll probably need it. When you get a business card from someone else, jot notes on the back or face of the card: where you met, what you talked about, etc. Get that information into your favorite CRM at the end of the conference! Send them an email follow-up after the event, referencing whatever notes you took about them at the conference. This is CRM 101, but rather than creating relationships with Customers, you're creating realtionships with the Salesforce User Community -- which has a TREMENDOUS value. It is well-worth nurturing.

6.) Have a plan (I really wish I had made one!). What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to meet? Which vendors do you want to see and get first-hand demo's from? This is the place to do it.

7.) If you know certain people are going to be at Dreamforce, and you really want to meet them -- make arrangements in advance! With Chatter, there's no excuse to not reach out and make those connections now! Ask if they can get together with you for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks.

8.) This is the hard one, especially for a social media junky like me. Put the mobile device down. I mean it! Remember why you are at Dreamforce: to see the latest cloud-computing advancements (which admittedly, has some pretty cool mobile apps), meet interesting people, and gain long-term, productive relationships. BE SOCIAL. When waiting outside a session, or while sitting and waiting for the session to start, don't have your thumbs madly twirling on your mobile device. At the end of the session, avoid rushing out to the hall, only to flip out your phone so you can scroll through your email or messages. Instead: Connect. Engage. Interact.

9.) Introduce people you meet to other people who are joining your group late. I was delighted when David Schach introduced me to Scott Hemmeter (ArrowPointe), several Dreamforces back. Helping people make connections to each other will reward you with good karma, all the rest of your life.

10.) Dreamforce is like Disney. You can't hope to see it all, not in one visit. Don't even try, and don't stress out about it. Just enjoy thoroughly every part of it that you CAN see.

11.) Cloud Expo. Walk it, don't walk around it. Explore every booth! At my first Dreamforce, I confess, I avoided the expo floor like it was a leper colony. Not so on subsequent Dreamforce events. You can learn so much about ways to benefit your company -- just by having a conversation, looking at the solutions vendors have found for various problems.

12.) Have fun. Leave the office behind, it's just 4 days. They'll survive. Rock out at the Global Gala, get an invite to a vendor party, or have drinks with some new friends you made that day. This is YOUR conference, and you won't back back for another 11-12 months. Make the most of it.

Here are some tips and recommendations from other Dreamforce Veterans:

Brad Gross (@imperialstout): Biggest mistake newbies make is trying to do everything. Relax.
Deep into a conversation with another attendee? Skip that next session. Its recorded for a reason.
Expo people starting to bug you - run to the campground and sit in the Customer Hero theatre for a time out.

Oh and my biggest hints:
- Bring a water bottle
- Bring a coffee mug
- Leave the laptop
- Smile and smile often
- Show patience with the other attendees. For some this is their Disney (<-- That was for you Jeff)

David Schach (@dschach): Bring breath-mints. The coffee is good, which means that we're all drinking it. So be kind to your neighbor and pop a TicTac.

Jeff Grosse (@crmfyi): "Don't worry about getting to a session during every time slot." Breakout sessions are fantastic, no doubt. Something to keep in mind though is that all but the roadmap sessions will be available for future viewing on video where you can listen, pause, take notes, and take it in at your leisure, either by yourself or as a team. The time you have at Dreamforce should have a balance of the must-have sessions and time spent in the Expo talking to vendors, in the Campground talking to cloud experts, and in general, talking to everyone else at Dreamforce. Those are things you can't reproduce at home and require your time and attention wile you're at Moscone.

Michael Gerholdt (@mikegerholdt): My word of advice- Plan your Cloud Expo experience. Last year, when I arrived I glanced over the vendors that were exhibiting and marked off the ones that I needed to see. Then when I had a change to go to the expo I visited them first and marked them off my list. Once I had the information I needed I could wander around and sign up for the fun freebie stuff. It's easy to get caught up in all of the free iPads and flip cams, but remember you should come back with valuable information for your company. [As a side note, my coworker at the time did the opposite, and was very disappointed that he didn't get to meet the vendors he needed to interact with.]

Got your own tips and recommendations for First Year Attendees? Mention them below!

Salesforce Updates - Sept 10, 2010

2010-09-13T11:03:00.001-04:00

#Dreamforce

Count Down: @RatherGeeky reminded me that there are only 83 days until Dreamforce 2010. Have you registered and booked your reservations? This will be the biggest Dreamforce yet, with more than 20,000 attendees! Register here…

Community Conference: One of the things I love most about Salesforce.com is the overwhelming strong support I get from the user community. There are thousands of active community users who are writing Salesforce blogs, creating or promoting new feature enhancements on the IdeaExchange, participating in local user groups, asking and answering questions on the Answers forum, and collaborating on the community forums. This year, at Dreamforce 2010, we’ll have a chance to all meet each other. Dreamforce 2010 will have a community meet and greet! Read more…

#Administrators

150 (or rather, 32) Steps to Salesforce Greatness: AvideonCRM published an article titled “150 Steps to Salesforce Greatness”. The article actually only lists the first 32 steps (which is fair: the consulting company needs to keep some trade secrets!). Trying to figure out where to start with your new Salesforce.com setup? Check out this article! It has some great starting tips. Read more…

Mass Emails with Salesforce.com: What is the best way to do mass emails with Salesforce.com? Check out this article by @TFrankfurt; in the article, he talks about the current limitations of mass emails through Salesforce, and shares some popular AppExchange Email solutions to help break past these barriers – very helpful blog! Read more…
200+ Free Salesforce Apps from Force.com Labs: Force.com Labs has been crazy busy the past few months, churning out new apps on the AppExchange – all free. The best thing about these apps (aside from being free) is that they are open source. Sometimes I’ll take these apps and use them just as ideas for other apps that my org needs; sometimes the apps give me ideas for optimizing code that for other apps that already exist within our org. Either way, if you’re not familiar with these apps, you should probably spend some time to get acquainted with them. Check them out here…

#Developer

Force.com Developer Meetup in Chicago: Salesforce.com is hosting a Developer Meetup at the Summit Executive Center in Chicago, IL this Wednesday (9/15) from 6:00 PM – 9:30 PM. There are two tracks planned: Intro to Force.com Workshop and a session on developing Chatter Apps. Quinton Wall and Reid Carlberg will be guest speakers at the event. If you are local to the Chicago area, and have wanted to learn more about developing applications on the Force.com platform, this meet-up will be a great intro! Read more…

Learning How to Code: “I want to learn Apex and Visualforce and all that other stuff, but I don’t know where to begin.” Apex is a structured programming language, very similar to Java. Visualforce is a structured mark-up language, very similar to HTML. If you don’t already know the basics of these topics, jumping in to Apex / Visualforce programming can be a challenge. Google can help! Check out these tutorials on learning HTML, CSS and Javascript from Google. (Thanks, @CRMFYI for the link!) Read more…

Use Visualforce to Add Inline Google Maps to Account / Contact Page Layouts: This is an oldie, but a goodie (that I rediscovered this past weekend). @phollo wrote a blog showing how to add Inline Google Maps to your Salesforce.com page layouts. It’s a great article, complete with sample code. Read more…

Cloud Computing for Java Developers Webinar (VMforce): Jeff Douglas wrote a great review of the recent Force.com webinar, “Cloud Computing for Java Developers”. I’m really looking forward to the REST API that will be piloted in the upcoming Winter’11 release! Read more…

How Do You Follow?

2010-09-12T22:27:00.000-04:00

One of the folks I follow on Twitter was worried about "false Twitter followers" -- those nefarious persons who follow you, get a follow back, and then unfollow you. It lead to Twitter conversation on the left pane.

On Twitter, I tend to follow and unfollow people quite a bit. For me, Twitter is like a giant "internet users conference". I wander around the conference floor, evesdropping on various conversations taking place.

When someone comments (or rather, tweets) on a topic I am particularly interested in, I'll click on their Twitter stream and check out their other recent tweets. If they are noteworthy or interesting, I'll follow that person.

Over time, the topics I am interested in may change and I may suddenly "unfollow" individuals who are tweeting on topics that no longer interest me. The act of "unfollowing" is not meant to be a slight or insult.

The "unfollow" is not necessarily permenant -- I'm just wandering over to a different section of the "internet user conference" floor to listen to other conversations.

I use Twitter as a tool for sourcing new information. The individuals I follow provide that information, in the form of quotes, updates, or links to interesting blogs or news articles, or even just entertaining comments throughout the day. They are sharing relevant content that interests me.

And if they unfollow me (or never follow me)? No big! I get value from the content they share, not from their act of following me back.

How do you follow and unfollow on Twitter?

Who Is More Excited About Upcoming Winter'11 Releases, Salesforce.com Users or Microsoft Users?

2010-08-29T23:13:00.001-04:00

Jeffrey Schwartz (Redmond Channel Partner, Editor-at-Large Redmond Magazine) wrote a recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Online, titled Dynamics CRM Facelift Brings Confidence to the Channel. I read the article, hoping to get some insight about the upcoming "Salesforce.com Challenger", but I think I'd be discouraged if I were a Microsoft partner. The whole article seemed to be an endorsement for Salesforce.com.

Here were some of my favorite quotes:

""I just went on a call for CRM and the VP of sales just keeps pushing Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce and he'll find a flaw in anything else no matter what you implement," says Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of New York-based Queue Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner.

Forrester Research Inc. analyst William Band says while Microsoft Dynamics CRM has gained appeal, outpacing Salesforce.com could be a high bar to clear.

"In order for Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM to become a billion-dollar business, the market has to grow more or somebody else has to lose a lot of market share," Band says. "I don't know that there's that much space in the marketplace for Microsoft CRM to get that big. I don't know where another billion would come from."

A further source of frustration for Goldstein is the $49 per month price tag for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, which he says is far less expensive than Salesforce.com, yet customers aren't swayed by that. Price and feature comparisons are not the issue, Goldstein says. "The problem we run into is so many VPs of sales and ex-sales people just have a history with Salesforce. They just ask for it by name and they just refuse to use anything else," he says.

So what's in this upcoming release for Microsoft CRM 2011? According to the article, here are the key features:

"Outlook Integration: Users can manage their CRM interactions from within Outlook. CRM data can be treated like any other Outlook data.

Ribbon: The Office Ribbon added to the new Outlook also will be added to the new Dynamics CRM client.

Role-Tailored Design: Users access relevant forms based on their role in the organization and are restricted from accessing data they're unauthorized to view.

Inline Data Visualizations: Users can create charts, drill down into them and share them.

Real-Time Dashboards: Customers can provide real-time dashboards to assess business performance.

Solutions Management: Developers and IT managers can package up all customizations and install them into the system and they can stay protected from others inadvertently overwriting them.

Field-Level Security and Record-Level Auditing: Important to any organization where privacy and/or compliance are required."

This isn't exactly material that will steel market share from Salesforce.com. These features have been standard with Salesforce.com for more than 5+ years. By comparisson, in it's upcoming Winter'11 release, Salesforce.com is deploying:

Chatter: Probably the most talked about Salesforce.com feature in the past few months, Chatter asks the question, "What are you working on?" It brings social media into the CRM tool, giving Salesforce.com a Twitter or Facebook like facelift. It seems to be making a real difference in user adoption among the companies that are deploying it in production.

Outlook 2010 Integration: This release will have a number of key (and much needed) improvements related to Outlook 2010 integration, including: email added indicators, improved Outlook administrator settings, increasing # of characters supported in the Subject field, 64-bit OS Support, simpler synch features and scheduled sync functionality.

Reports, Dashboard Improvements: Salesforce already has very powerful reporting and analytic features built in. In the Winter'11 release, there are a number of improvements targeted toward this Salesforce.com feature: drag & drop report columns, drag & drop dashboard features, improved report sorting functions, ability to run Dashboard reports as "current user", ability to change the running user in real-time, improved chatter integration, and more.

Improved Search functions: ability to search Content (document libraries), improvements to the advanced search features.

Improvements to the Change Sets deployment features

Improvements to Sites (web site hosting inside Salesforce.com), including support for 30x redirection

These are just a few of the features that Salesforce.com is rolling out at the request of Salesforce.com Customers (via their IdeaExchange forums). On top of all this, we're going to see some nice new functionality related to VMforce, Chatter, calender scheduling, consoles, and more.

Salesforce.com weighs in with a heavier price tag, but it remains easier to implement, easier to customize, and contains more functionality "out of the box" than it's Redmond competitor. Salesforce.com remains my preferred CRM in the competitive marketplace.

Salesforce CRM Talent in High Demand

2010-08-17T11:11:00.004-04:00

The unemployment scenario may be grim, but Salesforce.com CRM Talent is in high demand.

Erik Palumbo is a corporate recruiter at ModelMetrics, Inc. They're looking for a Salesforce.com Technical Architect, and finding it to be a real challenge. He has posted to multiple LinkedIn user groups, tapped his traditional network for talent acquisition, and says he's finding "little interest".

I wouldn't categorize it as "little interest", but rather "supply and demand". Salesforce.com is hot right now. Admins, Developers, Technical Architects, Contractors, and Consultants are in short supply. David Taber commented similarly in his recent CIO article, "The CRM Talent Shortage: Here, Now".

I have also heard this repeated in the local Salesforce.com User Group meetings I facilitate and other CloudForce user conferences I attend. At Comcast, I've been helping our HR department find additional Salesforce.com talent, and it's been challenging for us, too. The number of personal calls and emails I've received from recruiters is up sharply in the past two months, averaging 3-5 per week. It's really surprising!

I gave Erik many of the same recommendations I gave my corporate HR department:

1.) For LinkedIn job postings, I recommend the Salesforce.com Professional LinkedIn Network. It is one of the oldest LinkedIn Groups, and is managed by Salesforce.com employees (Jeanine Thorpe, Erica Kuhl, Tom Wong, and Jamie Grenney). It's the forum were Salesforce.com posts their own job opportunities, as well.

2.) The Salesforce Community discussion boards have a Job Board for Admins and Job Board for Developers. You may find a pool of candidates there, who don't frequent or participate in LinkedIn groups.

3.) On one of Erik's job descriptions, I read that he didn't want to be contacted by 3rd party / recruiters. In Erik's case, that makes sense: he IS the corporate recruiter for his company. For most other companies, I would encourage they use recruiters. Don't be fooled by this crazy job market. Even though unemployment is high, skilled Salesforce.com CRM talent is in great demand. You may need to work harder at luring those candidates toward your company. A technical recruiter may be your best bet for filling an internal Salesforce.com Ninja position quickly: you need a hunter to help you find the right talent.

4.) Consider spending your budget dollars to TRAIN the right candidate, rather than RECRUIT the right candidate. Don't wait for Salesforce.com talent to fall from the Clouds! You may find it easier to find someone that has some of your core requirements, and put them through a rigorous Salesforce.com Boot Camp program. Find a talented business analyst / java developer / project manager, and introduce them to Salesforce.com. Put that firehose right down their throat and have them drink deep. For the near term, this may be the best chance for getting your internal Salesforce.com job postings filled quickly.

A final note to employers who already have Salesforce.com talent: hold on to them. I don't see this CRM talent shortage ending soon.

Good luck!

Salesforce Blogs, Books, Ideas, Videos and Developer Goodies

2010-08-04T12:46:00.003-04:00

Blogs

After writing my The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers article, I’ve received links to some other great-looking Salesforce.com Blogs. Check 'em out:

Arkus Blog, authored by @JustEdelstein
TECH GERM, authored by @abhinavguptas
Adventures in the Cloud, authored by @amber9904
Just Your Average Salesforce Admin, authored by @mattybme
Technology Share, authored by @aslambari

You can follow these five bloggers, and all the other SFDC Tech Bloggers on Twitter with one click. Click the “Follow this list” button here.

Books

Jeff Douglas and Wes Nolte have teamed up to write "The Salesforce Handbook: A Newcomer’s Guide to Building Applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform". They published a teaser excerpt on their blog: The Salesforce Handbook. The book is not due out until October (plenty of time to get your signed copy at Dreamforce 2010!). Visit their blog to join the email subscription list.

Salesforce IdeaExchange: Ideas I Liked / Promoted

Allow Single Test Method Execution from an Apex Class (120): Give Developers / QA Testers the ability to select the specific test methods that should be tested in an Apex test class. Handy for when you are trying to debug a single method! Vote it up here.

Cool Videos

I really liked this Flash App Demo by James Ward. The demo shows the power of the new Flash Builder tool, and integrating it with Salesforce.com. In the demo, James shows an app that allows him to take a picture of a person, associate it with a contact record in Salesforce, which then automatically uploads that picture into a custom image field on the Salesforce contact object. Very cool, check it out at the The Salesforce Channel.

Developer Stuff

In the Salesforce blogosphere, there is lots of interesting stuff happening on the developer front.

Managed Package Woes: Abhinav Gupta of Tech Germ describes a common problem that developers first encounter when migrating their Force.com web-service apps from a developer org to a managed package. During this migration, and external Java, Flex, PHP or .NET client code that made web-service calls to the Salesforce WSDL Web Services break, because the custom sObjects and fields get unique prefixes during the packaging. He presents two solutions, read more ...

Java Namespace Exception Errors: Abhinav follows that great article with a 2nd one, describing the cause, effect and solution for when Java namespace exception errors are thrown, when using WSC and Apache Axis WSDL2 Java together in a JVM or project. To avoid this problem, Abhina suggests compiling the WSDLs using WSC. Read more ...

Force.com Explorer (Beta): Salesforce Developers and Admins have a new tool for their arsenal: Force.com Explorer (Beta). This is an AIR app, built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, which allows you to “browse your database schema, custom objects, and fields, and build test SOSL queries. It can also generate a simple schema report.” Read more at Developer Force.

VisualForce Pages that Talk to You? Aslam Bari thought of a great new trick: enable your VisualForce Pages to Speak! He found two useful web service / plugins on the net: jTalk is a an API that converts text to speech on the fly, and DewPlayer is flash MP3 player. Combined, you can integrate these into your VisualForce pages and convert output data to speech. Read more at Technology Share. One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting, with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.

Posting AppExchange Apps Just Got Cheaper: One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.

Marc ... is that you?

2010-08-03T01:15:00.000-04:00

I used to have a little counter on the side of my blog, which tracked the number of unique vistors on my site. I'm sure you've seen these gadgets before -- almost every newbie website designer puts them on their first website, and every professional web developer cringes at the sight of them.

I replaced the visitor counter with a widget from Clustr Maps (I suspect this gadget makes professional web developers cringe, too). Clustr Maps gives both a visitor counter, and it also tags the location of visitors on a world map.. Every now and then I'll go take a peek at the world map, looking for answers: who are you? Where do you come from? What brought you here? Most importantly, how can I help?

Tonight, I discovered a new red blip in Hawaii. Hey, that's where Marc Benioff lives!

Several years ago, after my first Dreamforce event, I sent a personal note to the Salesforce.com CEO. I told him that I was blown away, that Dreamforce had changed my whole aura. Within an hour, Marc replied simply, "Mahalo." It's Hawaiin, I had to look it up.

I wasn't exagerating in that note. Dreamforce had changed something inside me. When I returned home, I started doing more volunteer and local community service work. I started approaching problems with a very different mindset. I started sharing more. I started blogging. My career path changed. Everything changed.

Dreamforce is now 4 months away. If you are a Salesforce.com Administrator or Developer, Dreamforce is the most valuable event you can attend. There is so much energy, learning opportunities, and networking opportunities at this annual conference. It gets bigger, better and more festive each year. Friendships that you make at Dreamforce will last long afterwards, and you will be able to tap them all year long. I was "between jobs", and missed last year's Dreamforce event ... I can't wait to go back this year!

Will you be there? Let's connect!

Register here: http://www.dreamforce.com/. Register today!

The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers

2010-08-02T13:09:00.007-04:00

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton

Updated: I found an error in my earlier posting: the value of the Alexa ranking was reversed. I mistakenly thought that a high Alexa ranking was favored over a lower ranking. I corrected the ordering based on the Alexa scores (sorry, Mike - now I'll have to buy YOU a beer at Dreamforce!).

Mark Fidelman (EVP Sales @ MindTouch) recently wrote an article for the Cloud Ave blog titled, "The Most Influential Technical Communication Bloggers". I recognized a few names, added several to my Google Reader feed, but most were unfamiliar to me. Blogs are a primary information source for me, and I read a lot of them each week. When I first started working with Salesforce, I grew up on a steady diet of Gokubi.com, CRM FYI, X2 On-Demand, and Perspectives on Salesforce. These were the giants on whose shoulders I stood.

I compiled a list of Salesforce.com Bloggers, and then because I was curious, ranked them in a similar manner as Fidelman's Most Influential Blogger article: a weighted formula across a range of metrics, including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technocrati Authority, and Twitter Followers. I also added a 6th category: # Blog Posts YTD. Each category was given an equal weight, scaled on a rank of 1-10. With 6 categories, a blog could have a ranking between 6-60 – the most influential bloggers scoring at the top side of that range.

I started with a simple Google search on “Salesforce Blogs”, recording the URL for each. I arbitrarily stopped after the first six pages returned by the search engine. If the authors of various blogs included links to other Salesforce blogs (and many did), I added those to my research list, as well. In the end, I found 47 different Salesforce.com blogs. To be included in the ranking, a blogger needed to focus their posts on Salesforce.com, with at least 6 Salesforce-related blogs posted YTD.

For blogs that were co-authored, I used the Twitter account associated with the “Retweet” button on that blog. For instance, the Cloud Blog is co-authored by various Salesforce.com executives: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, and Steve Gilmor. The “retweet” button on this blog uses the Twitter alias @salesforce, so that is what I used to evaluate the Klout influence and Twitter following of that blog.

Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers
Here are the Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Bloggers (NOTE: There were ties for 4th, 9th and 10th place):

Here is the detail break-out for all of the blogs that made the ranking qualifications:

Rank	Author	# Posts YTD	Alexa	Google Page Rank	Technocrati Authority	Klout Score	Twitter Followers
1	Jon Mountjoy, Quinton Wall, Reid Carlberg, Umit Yalcinalp, Dana Le	177	200,867	5	126	25	1436
2	Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, Steve Gilmor	45	312	0	0	49	9025
3	Steve Anderson	16	1,527,075	6	1	25	474
4	Jeff Douglas	69	650,409	4	0	19	417
4	Appirio Tech Blog	16	304,254	5	0	10	1181
5	Scott Hemmeter	6	1,275,872	6	1	25	1436
6	Jeff Grosse	11	2,962,398	4	0	28	1532
7	JP Seabury	6	2,918,131	3	1	18	1066
8	MK Partners	97	1,020,411	3	1	10	169
9	David Schach	7	8,045,399	4	0	43	934
9	Jason Venable	27	2,213,081	3	0	19	167
10	Mike Gerholdt	18	27,426,342	3	0	22	627
10	Alessandro	19	2,978,238	3	0	13	202
11	Mike Leach	23	4,393,577	0	0	14	585
11	Jared Miller	10	0	2	0	7	251
12	Wes Nolte	12	408,999	0	0	8	211
13	Mark Christie	31	911,745	2	0	0	34
14	Joel Dietz	16	12,357,441	0	0	15	142
15	John Rotenstein	10	3,855,810	6	0	0	45
16	ForceTree	10	2,059,232	2	0	0	0
17	ForceDotCom	12	10,359,827	2	0	0	0
18	Sid	6	9,440,652	0	0	0	0

Honorable Mentions
There were 30 other blogs, but many were filtered from the rankings process due to the infrequency of their posts (the arbitrary cut-off was 6 posts YTD, averaging 1 per month). Of these blogs, Honorable Mentions go to:

Michael Smith, Simon Fell, Liz Kao, Jesse Lorenz, John Coppedge, Alex Sutherland, Joe Ferraro, Michael Smith, Dave Manelski, Interactive Ties, Shamrock CRM, and Sam Arjmandi.

If I missed your blog (or a Salesforce-related blog that you read regularly), please let me know!

I am Force Monkey, hear me Chatter!

2010-07-22T00:53:00.004-04:00

The Force Monkey blog has a new look tonight. While I was playing with the new Blogger Template Designer, I updated the background, the font templates, and changed the blog sub-title. The old "Never understimate the power of the Force!" sub-title is gone, replaced with the new "I am Force Monkey, hear me Chatter!" All credits go to Gary Breavington (@gbreavin on Twitter), and here's the background story ...

Earlier today, I received an email from a fellow Salesforce.com User Group member,

"Hi JP, I was just on a partner webinar with Salesforce and they are reiterating the branding rules in their [Salesforce Partner Terms & Conditions Agreement]. One of the rules is no "force" in a company or product name. I don't know if this is applicable if you are not a partner, but wanted to mention it to the key Force Monkey!"

I understand the position entirely. As Salesforce.com rebrands it's identity around the Force.com name, it has to be protective of it. Customers might presume that any other company that uses "Force" in their own product or company is endorsed or more directly affiliated with Salesforce.com. At the same time, I'm a rebel at heart!

Here's the twitter conversation that spontaneously led to the sub-title change on this blog:

So there you go, the source and inspiration for the new blog sub-title. Thanks, @gbreavin, @IdaApps and @DarthGarry for the mid-day laugh. Ha!

I should explain where Force Monkey comes from, I get asked about it often. The origin actually predates Salesforce's rebranding on the Force.com name.

About 4-5 years back, I worked as a Technical Support Engineer for a small, start-up company. We had just brought in a consulting firm to help us select a CRM vendor, and settled on Salesforce.com. The consulting partner gave a price tag for helping us with the initial deployment and data migration, which weighed in somewhere near half my annual salary -- and was a four month project. We were actually at risk of not going forward with the CRM deployment, because the company wasn't prepared to make that investment.

I told my boss, "The consultants have been great in helping us narrow down a CRM vendor, but I think I can manage the roll-out faster. Let me take a crack at it."

He did. I was surprised at the speed and efficiency with which we could customize the tool. I rolled out the company's first Salesforce.com deployment in just four weeks. After the initial turn-up, I scheduled a two week window for doing rapid changes / updates to the package, based on user needs and requests.

One of the Resident Engineers came in to the office that I shared with another colleague and asked, "What are you force monkies doing in here? This is crazy fast, I just asked for that feature this morning!"

The name stuck, and Force Monkey found it's way to my "unofficial" job title. I've since done several consulting engagements and freelance projects as Force Monkey and Force Monkey Labs, although I've never incorporated as such. Now that it's been expressly forbidden, I just might have to!

So Google Wants to do Broadband?

2010-07-18T14:58:00.006-04:00

Full Disclosure: I am currently employed by Comcast. As such, my employer would potentially be impacted by the Google Fiber for Communities project. Depending on where Google deploys their proposed Open Access Network, Comcast might lose 50K - 500K subscribers. That said, I'm also a believer in laissez-faire economics, Adam Smith's "invisible hand", and welcome the idea of free market competition. I enjoy the open rivalry between Comast, Dish and Verizon (in my local area). Competition fosters innovation, reduces consumer cost, and drives companies to optimal performance. Competition is good for consumers and it's good for companies, too. Adding Google to the list of Comcast competitors would be interesting, not worrisome. Still ... I've seen and participated in a number of failed Google experiments, including the Nexus One. My own frustration with the Nexus One is the true reason for this blog, not worries about competition between Google and Comcast. Oh, and lest I forget, the views and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

When you make $23 Billion a year as a company, you can try all kinds of whacky "experiments", see if they work, and if they don't, just pull the plug. Think Google.

Google broke into the mobile industry last year by offering the Nexus One smartphone. Although the device was made in a close partnership with HTC (a Taiwan-based hardware vendor), Google sold the device exclusively through its website.

The Nexus One was designed to showcase the Android software, which was also developed by Google. Unfortunately, Google soon found that making a great mobile phone isn't enough -- you also have to support it. Soon after the phone went on sale, buyers started to complain on Google's support forums: they weren't getting prompt assistance when they had problems with their phones. There were also angry at the $550 early termination fee.

This week, Google announced that they are shutting down the Nexus One project. The phone will no longer be sold through the company's e-commerce site. Google will provide "support" for current owners, and will allow some carriers to continue distributing / supporting the phones -- but Google is effectively getting out of the mobile phone business.

Being a mobile phone carrier is hard. Maintaining a call center staff to deal with all your inbound customer complaints, technical issues, and service needs is difficult. But you know what? So is building, maintaining and supporting a broadband network infrastructure.

What happens after Google builds their ultra-high speed broadband network? Will they hire marketing personnel, to foster new marketing campaigns that compete and win market share from local broadband competitors? Will they hire Sales personnel to find new customers, win them over from competitors, etc. Will Google hire operations personnel, to provision the systems, hire technicians and engineers to maintain the fiber plant? Will they staff a call center to respond to customer issues, open trouble tickets, and dispatch service technicians? Will they engage with local government agencies / obtain permits (read "pay local government fees") to expand their network into adjacent communities? Or will they bail on the experiment after a few months?

I hope all those communities clamouring for the Google Fiber for Communities project are paying attention to Google's entry and subseuqent pull-out from the mobile phone market. I hope they look at other Google experiments (and the current state of those experiments), like Google Answer, Google Buzz, Google Catalogs, Google Directory, GOOG-411, Google Scholar, Google Search Appliance for Enterprise, Google SOAP Search API, Goog SMS, Friend Connect, Knol, Orkut, Google Wave, Web Accelerator, Google WiFi, Google Video ... the list goes on.

Don't get me wrong -- I like Google. I use their Search engine product every day (it's the default home screen for my home computer, and would be for my Work computer, if IT didn't lock down the ability to change the browser home page). I also use other Google products (Gmail, Picasa, Blogger, Google Voice, YouTube) routinely. But I know these other products don't make Google much money. At any time, they may suffer the same fate as the Nexus One (or all those other Google experiments, cited above), or be moved to a premium / subscription model (in which case I would likely discontinue using them).

Google is a Search Engine company. They make their money by reading, indexing, and storing all the data they can harvest from the internet, and presenting it to consumers through their search engine and/or search advertising product. Their entire business model is centered around making information public.

Frankly, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of my data, even encrypted, flowing through Google's fiber network. Especially after it was discovered that Google Street View cars had been sniffing Wi-Fi data. Even in the aftermath, I don't believe Google thought the idea of sniffing WiFi packets (i.e., finding data, indexing it and storing it) was a bad thing.

Google wasn't a particularly good mobile phone retailer, I have doubts that they'll be any better at maintaining and supporting a fiber broadband network.

Will the Upcoming Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta Challenge Salesforce?

2010-07-16T23:44:00.004-04:00

On the Salesforce Evangelist Power LinkedIn Discussion Board, Cheral Stewart submitted a great follow-up post to the following article:

Will the Upcoming Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta Challenge Salesforce?

She writes, "Having been a salesforce.com Administrator for over 5 years with a detour to MS CRM 3.0 in the middle, I have a hard time believing MS will be able to challenge salesforce.com. The inherent difference that I see is Microsoft is still too concerned with maintaining control of the CRM through IT Departments and IT consultants. This slows innovation, internal busines change, and most strikingly, empowerment of the business Users.

"The reason so many business users/departments now pay for their salesforce.com licenses and the support staff is that they want to quickly respond to changing business climate. They do not want to go through 2-4 weeks of CABs, written requests, funding allocation and final review while waiting to have the dropdown choices in one field change.

"IT Departments that are focused on quickly managed innovation, not just control, do not find their business users purchasing SaaS programs like salesforce.com outside of IT. The innovative IT Department welcomes the SaaS programs and seeks full integration between all the information systems to materialize the competitive advantage CRM offers."

Spot on.

I used to be a Microsoft Dynamics CRM User myself, although that was way back in version 1.2 days, before the rebranding to "Microsoft Dynamics". Back then, the product was simply horrible.

Although I'm a Salesforce.com Evangelist (some call me "fanboy", but I'm too old for that moniker), I watch the evolution of Microsoft CRM closely. Why?

First, because I believe competition is good. It helps drive innovation. Salesforce.com has emerged as the clear front-runner on the multi-tenant, highly-reliable, highly available CRM platform. They've pushed beyond that with their Force.com development platform. As high as they are in the cloud, I want them always watching with one eye below, to see who's coming up to unseat them.

Secondly, I generally like Microsoft products. There, I said it. I've used OpenOffice, Google Docs, and Zoho Docs, but business needs always brought me back to Microsoft Office. The web-based apps just don't meet the breadth and depth of functionality in Office. When I need to make that professionally looking Word document (formatted just so, quickly and painlessly), or crunch serious numbers, formulas and data, or build a slide deck that wows and amazes, I load up Microsoft Office. I also use Outlook, Visio, Project and SharePoint heavily. They are critical tools in my daily work.

So truth be told ... I want Microsoft CRM to be successful. I believe they have the best chance to provide that clean, elegant, seamless integration between my CRM tool and all of my daily productivity tools.

There are signs that Microsoft "gets it", and wants to realize that vision, too. At Microsoft's Worldwide Partners conference this week, Business Division President Stephen Elop described a suite of interacting Microsoft programs, all accessible through the cloud. Marketing, Manufacturing, Sales, Procurement, Service, Accounting, Distribution, Human Resources, Collaboration, Service Delivery all in one tightly integrated cloud-based tool set? Sign me up!

I don't anticipate Microsoft realizing that vision any time soon, but they need two things to win me back to doing a serious evaluation of their CRM offering:

1.) The Microsoft version of Salesforce.com's "IdeaExchange". Microsoft is very much out of touch with the needs and interests of it's user community. The IdeaExchange has proven to be the ideal tool for crowd-sourcing new features and functionality, and influencing the Salesforce Roadmap. Every company should have one of these, and Microsoft needs it desperately.

2.) Tight integration with the other Microsoft produtivity products I use every day: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Visio and SharePoint. I want the functionality of these products in the cloud, fully accessible through and tightly integrated with my CRM. Without hiring an army of IT consultants, Only then will I be free of my desktop, and able to access all of my work needs from any computer in the world. The company that implements this seamlessly (or comes closest to that) will capture my CRM interest.

Can they do it? Not soon enough.

Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook Integration

2010-07-12T21:31:00.010-04:00

Image Credit: http://www.ihovik.com/sfdc/index.htm

Salesforce.com is my favorite CRM tool. Microsoft Office is my favorite productivity tool. Having a solid integration between the two applications is a no-brainer, but I've always been frustrated by current integration, particularly when it comes to synchronizing Salesforce / Outlook contacts, emails and calendar events.

This blog post takes a look at the current state of Salesforce / Outlook integration, gives Salesforce.com administrators some alternative options, and a glimpse of what's to come.

Salesforce.com / Outlook Integration Today

Today, Salesforce.com publishes a free Outlook plug-in called “Salesforce Connect for Microsoft Outlook”. akaCRM has written an excellent blog titled, "Outlook Integration with Salesforce.com". It's a great read, especially if you're looking to deploy this tool for your own Salesforce.com organization. The article describes the benefits of integrating Salesforce and Outlook, explains what data synchronization can be performed, and includes a high-level overview for installing the plug-in.

As a consultant, I've worked with many companies on different systems (Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba), various Microsoft OS (XP, Vista, Windows 7) and different versions of Microsoft Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010). While some users have a trouble-free experience, most admin teams I've worked with get hammered with support calls related to the plug-in. Problems include:

1.) The Outlook plug-in is "mysteriously" disabled at start-up. Users can't see the Salesforce icons/menu options in Outlook, and need to either enable the plug-in (in the best of cases) or remove/re-install the plug-in (in the worst of cases).

2.) After intsalling the plug-in, Outlook has a propensity of crashing, prompting the user to disable the plug-in whenever it does so

3.) Outlook slows to a crawl (possibly during data sync operations, though users complain that this occurs more frequently than their data sync operations are set for)

4.) No plug-in support for Windows 7 (64 bit)

Even when the Salesforce Connect for Microsoft Outlook plug-in works flawlessly, it's far too cumbersome for end-users. There are too many mouse clicks required to associate an outlook email with its corresponding contact / lead / opportunity / case / custom-object record in Salesforce. When first installing the plug-in, users frequently stumble (despite training and coaching), and end up loading the CRM with duplicate contacts / accounts / events. This frustrating user experience leads to low user adoption / CRM abandonment.

For Salesforce Administrators, it's no picnic either. Setup and configuration for the Salesforce Connect for Outlook plug-in is decentralized: each user downloads, installs and configures their Outlook plug-ins individually. Whlie it's possible to push the plug-in to all users, it's no simple task for most SFDC Administrators. Consequently, Admins spend hours responding to user questions, helping non-technical, SFDC users install the plug-in, sync their data, and then dealing with setup / plug-in technical issues. These technical support woes take Salesforce Adminstrators away form their core mission, which is to extend the functionality of Salesforce within the company and help the business realize greater value from their Salesforce.com investment.

Salesforce.com Has a Fix Coming Soon! (Insert Safe Harbor Statement)

The current Salesforce / Outlook integration stinks. There, I said it. And lest you think it's just me, comb the Salesforce.com Community Answers site and you'll find plenty of frustrated users reporting the same thing.

Fortunately, Salesforce.com is working on a fix! At last year's Dreamforce event, Blake Markham, Sr. Product Manager / Email Clients for Salesforce.com, gave a terrific demo on the upcoming Salesforce CRM for Outlook app. The product is still in beta, and while it doesn't have all features of the current Connect plug-in, the sync and seamless integration features demo’d were a vast improvement over the current solution. Email and calendar sync are seamless and automatic, lead/contact records can be created with a single click, and the new tool gives SFDC admins centralized control of the deployment and configuration for their users.

In the November 2009 demo, Blake indicated that the new Salesforce CRM for Outlook tool was being piloted with a few select customers, and that he hoped to have it generally available this summer (Safe Harbor statement). Unfortunately, the Summer'10 release has come and gone, and the new app was not included. The tool will most likely be deferred until the Winter’11 release. In the meanwhile, if you’re willing to be a “beta tester”, contact your Salesforce.com Account Manager, and see if they can help get you into the pilot.

I suspect the Salesforce.com Email Clients Development Team is understaffed. It must be! What else would contribute to both the delayed launch of the Salesforce CRM Outlook tool, the lack of support for Outlook 2010 and Windows 7 (64-bit), and the many unresolved bugs in the current Connect for Outlook plug-in?

Unfortunately, the current trademark war between Microsoft and Salesforce.com isn't likely to change that staffing problem soon. Salesforce Customers and Users are caught in the crossfire, and the only winners will be the lawyers on both sides.

3rd Party Vendors Put a Silver Lining on this Grey Cloud Integration

There are a several 3rd Party Vendors who can provide some immediate relief to your Salesforce / Outlook integration problems. Here are a few worth taking a closer look at:

Image Credit: Screenshot from a LinkPoint Vue Demo

App:

LinkPoint Vue – Outlook Integration for Salesforce
Publisher: LinkPoint360
Price: $29.95 (1 time license fee; discounts for Non-Profits / NGOs available)
Posted Date: 12/4/2009
SFDC Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited
Reviews: 1 review, rated 5 of 5 stars
Demo: click here

Description:
LinkPoint Vue is a mash-up between Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce.com. The tool is built directly into Microsoft Outlook and supports Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. The mash-up creates a viewing window in Outlook. As you look at email from your leads or contacts, the mash-up searches for the matching email address in Salesforce.com, and pulls up the appropriate Lead or Contact record, as well as related Opportunities, Cases, Events, Tasks -- even custom objects -- related to that email originator's account. Bean-counters will like the one-time cost model (no monthly / annual subscription fees!)

Features:
- Ability to create Salesforce.com Contact and/or Lead records via drag-and-drop.
- Users can view Salesforce data inside Outlook without having to alt-tab / search in Salesforce
- Click on an email record in Outlook, and view all all contact history / activity related to that Lead/Contact in SFDC.
- Create / Update / View a Salesforce Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, or Case record from within Outlook with a single mouse-click (much easier than the Connect plug-in!)
- Get maps / directions to a contacts address with a single mouse-click (nice Google/MapQuest mash-up integration here!)

What’s Missing:
- Outlook / Salesforce Calendar integration. Users want the ability to create their appointments in Outlook, and have them seamlessly updated as calendar events in Salesforce (or vice versa). Add this feature, and the tool gets 5 Force Monkey stars!
- Centralized Administration Tools to setup, configure, and/or maintain the tool.

App: SalesDesktop 3.0
Publisher: InvisibleCRM
Price: $18/user/month (discounts available for Non-Profits / NGOs)
Posted Date: 9/30/2006
SFDC Editions: Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Developer
Reviews: 5 reviews, rated 4.6 of 5 stars
Demo: click here

Description:
SalesDesktop 3.0 has been around for long while, steadily adding functionality and enhancements to the application for the past 3+ years. This application is an Outlook plug-in, allowing Sales Reps to seamlessly synchronize their Outlook and Salesforce data, including calendar and task synchronization.

Features:
- From within Outlook, create / update / view Salesforce.com Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunties) once, and the tool will automatically synchronize future inbound/outbound email activities.
- Synchronize Outlook / Salesforce.com data to your mobile device.
- One-click capture of lead / contact info
- Data synchronization occurs automatically, seamlessly, in the background
- All Salesforce CRM objects are viewable as folders in Outlook

What’s Missing:
- No support for Outlook 2007, 2010.
- Client-side App means you will inherit some of the same issues you have today with the Salesforce Connect plug-in: decentralized environment, users specify their own filtering rules, etc.

App: CureCRM Email
Publisher: CureCRM
Price: $4.95 / user / month (Limited Free version available, syncs outbound emails only)
Posted Date: 8/13/2009
SFDC Editions: Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Force.com, Developer
Reviews: 24 reviews, rated 4.9 of 5 stars
Demo: click here

Description:
What most impressed me about the CureCRM reviews were the many comments CureCRM customers gave regarding CureCRM technical support. These guys really stand behind their customers, going above and beyond to deliver outstanding product support!

As with other email integration tools, the application allows users to create Salesforce.com Contact and Lead records from within Outlook. Whenever those records are updated in Outlook they will be automatically updated in Salesforce. It also includes some nice social networking integration.

Features:
- From within Outlook, create / update / view Salesforce.com Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunties) once, and the tool will automatically synchronize future inbound/outbound email activities.
- Automatically synchronize Outlook / Salesforce.com email activity
- In Outlook, CRM email activity history are displayed in a Facebook-like “Conversation” window

What’s Missing:
- Messages are sync’d “on-demand”, rather than scheduled.
- Centralized Administration Tools to setup, configure, and/or maintain the tool.
- Outlook / Salesforce Calendar synchronization

App: Riva Integration Server
Publisher: Omni Technology Solutions
Price: $16.25 / user / month (Volume discounts available)
Posted Date: 2/23/2010
Outlook Editions: Windows 7, XP, Server 2003 or 2008 (on-premise)
Reviews: None
Demo: click here

Description:
Omni’s approach is unique from the other applications in that it is a Server-side integration, rather than a client-side Outlook plug-in. This implementation offers a much improved integration, and allows for seamless synchronization of all outlook records: contacts (flagged either as Salesforce Leads or Contacts), email activity, calendar events, tasks, notes, and more. The tool is delivered with Riva Single Sign-On, which means users don’t need to remember a separate Salesforce.com password. Instead, their ActiveDirectory/Exchange or eDirectory password will manage their Salesforce login – users simply need to login to their email. Because it’s a Server-side integration, it provides a centralized tool for administration: users don’t have to install any software or plug-ins, and there is nothing for them to configure.

Features:
- Server-side, transparent integration and data synchronization between Salesforce.com and Microsoft Exchange
- Install once at the server level; let administrators control and manage the app from the server for all users.
- Create / update Salesforce Contact and Lead records from within Outlook. Sales Reps flag which Outlook contacts should be synchronized, and if they are Leads or Contacts.
- Synchronize calendar events (appointments, phone calls, tasks,notes) and Address Books (Contacts, Leads, Accounts) transparently, at scheduled intervals.

What’s Missing:
- Nothing, although a server-side integration may put this product outside the expertise level of some Salesforce.com Administrators. Adding to this challenge, many IT / Email Server Administrators are reluctant to install software on the email server itself, so you may have to win over key stakeholders / decision makers.

What Causes Invalid Apex Classes?

2010-01-21T01:31:00.002-05:00

I’ve been training a new group of Salesforce.com Users on how to create change sets in a Sandbox, and deploy simple changes (in this case, Email Templates) to production. When we tried to deploy their change set, we encountered some problems caused by a different user group in the same org:

1.) Validation rules had been implemented by System Administrator users in the other group. The validation rules raised nearly a dozen DmlException errors, because they prevented existing Apex test methods to execute their insert / update operations.

2.) The deployment failed because the organization only had 72% test coverage. I hoped that much of this was caused by those same validation rules, but even after setting the offending validation rules to inactive, the org still had only 74% test coverage.

For this particular org, we have a very loose change management process. Business Owners, who deployed and implemented the instances with the help of a third party consultant, still have free reign in the instance. They don’t understand the impact their changes have on the Apex test methods or underlying applications.

I started reviewing the test classes associated with each DmlException error, and noticed a number of test classes had their “Is Valid” checkbox flag set to false.

I misinterpreted what the Apex Class list view was showing me: I saw the blank checkbox next to the word active and immediately thought “Why is this test class being evaluated, if it isn’t active.” I tweeted the question to the world, and my fellow Salesforce developers came to the rescue.

@dschach reminded me that Apex classes are always active:

So then I started poking around in the online help, I found the following notes about the “is Valid” designator:

"To aid backwards-compatibility, classes are stored with the specified version of the API that was used to compile them. Additionally, classes are stored with an isValid flag that is set to true as long as dependent metadata has not changed since the class was last compiled. If any changes are made to object names or fields that are used in the class, including superficial changes such as edits to an object or field description, or if changes are made to a class that calls this class, the isValid flag is set to false. When a trigger or Web service call invokes the class, the code is recompiled and the user is notified if there are any errors. If there are no errors, the isValid flag is reset to true."

I did a quick review of our Apex classes: 36 were set to Invalid. Ugh, that’s a lot of clean-up, and probably more than I can crank through in a single night.

@greenstork gave some helpful advice:

Alas, not so in our case – each of these 36 apex classes remained invalid, even after being viewed in production.

So what’s next?

1.) Short Term: I need to update the various test classes that flagged the DmlException errors, and modify them to support the recently added validation rules. Beyond that, I’ll need to look at other classes that are weak on test coverage, and move those to 100%. Then I can deploy my user's change sets.

2.) Long Term: The enterprise SFA application is much more complex than when the business owners first deployed and starting using it. Changes, like new validation rules or custom object / field edits can no longer be made in production. The business owners must adopt a more structured change management process, restricting their changes to Sandbox environments and allowing a QA/QC team to review the changes before deploying them to production. (Always a difficult political battle in any organization, but essential!)

3.) I need to update our Salesforce Audit report, with a periodic review of the “IsValid” field on Apex Classes. The purist in me says 36 invalid classes is too high; 0 is about right.

4.) I'm gonna need more coffee.

Sending Scheduled Reports to Individual Users in a Restricted Report Folder

2010-01-14T14:44:00.015-05:00

Scheduled Reports is a powerful feature of Salesforce.com. It allows you to schedule a specific report to run – and have the results emailed in HTML format – to a specific user or group of users. You can configure a report to run each morning at 7:00 AM, and have that report automatically emailed to all your direct reports. Very handy!

One of my users with delegated “report admin” privileges uses this to great advantage, but ran into a problem:

“I have a Salesforce.com Report Folder which is restricted to a certain users: it is only visible to Manager and Director Roles. One of the managers has requested a copy of a specific report from this folder be emailed to him at the start of each business day. Scheduled Reports supports this functionality, but not if the report is in a restricted access folder. When you set the folder access so that only certain roles can access it, Salesforce.com does not allow you to select “Users” when setting up the “Send Email To” option. The Report Builder option only allows Public Groups, Roles, and Users. What should I do? I don’t want to create a “Public Group” with just one person in it, and I don’t want to make this entire folder public – help!”

Here’s the workaround I gave her:

1.) After hours, when no one is likely to be accessing the system, change the restricted access report folder to public.

2.) Use the “Schedule Future Runs” feature to schedule the report. Because the report folder is now “public”, you can select a filter option that allows you to send it to a specific user. Save the scheduled report settings.

3.) Go back to the Report Folder access settings, and change the access privs back to the original restricted access.

Viola - the scheduled report will still be sent to the users within the selected mail-to list, and your report folder is still private.

If You Build It, They Will Come

2010-01-07T02:21:00.000-05:00

We have thousands of sales reps. How can I motivate them to give up their “tried and tested” sales tools (notes jotted on paper, contacts stored in their heads, excel worksheets stored on their hard drives, etc.), and start storing their leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc., in Salesforce?

Executive Adoption: The most essential aspect of any CRM implementation is executive-level sponsorship and adoption. Your C-level sponsor should have full access to Salesforce.com; as should their peers. If they don’t have it, get it for them. Your executive team will spend most of their time in the Dashboards, so spend a decent amount of time developing custom, C-level executive dashboards. Ask, “what would I want to see, if this were my company?” (because it is). Give your executive team Salesforce 101 training, covering the essentials of navigating within the tool, drilling into dashboard reports, and diving into the detail records below. Check in periodically (quarterly, bi-annually), and ask for feedback on what they would like to see added or removed from the Dashboard. Encourage them to monitor and engage your sales team on things they see happening through their Executive dashboard. When sales reps become aware that senior level management is in the tool, it will drive greater adoption and use.

What’s In It for Me? As a CRM Project Team, you need to make sure the system is LOADED with automation and other tools that directly benefit your sales team. If it’s simply another platform in which they insert data, it’s really not much improved over a basic spreadsheet. Instead, the tool must work for them. Consider AppExchange add-ons, like OneSource – which automatically populates contact data (titles, phone numbers, email addresses) and company data (company size, revenue, industry, etc.) when the Sale Rep enters some basic account information. Add personal dashboards that help the sales rep focus on their best prospects, key opportunities and sales pipeline. Design triggers that provide provide automated reminders for follow-up calls, etc. Integrate tools like DocuSign and DrawLoop, so that you can save your Sales Reps time with automated quote generation and electronic contract signatures. Integrate with back-end ERP systems, so that the Sales Reps can monitor post-sale activity. Use free tools like Ideas, Answers, Content, and Chatter to build a more collaborative work environment.

Make It Simple: Make your system simple for your sales teams to use. For your mobile warriors who live out of the cell phones, take advantage of Salesforce Mobile. Give them the ability to easily create or update leads, contacts, accounts, opportunity records from their handheld devices. Keep the input requirements minimal – don’t configure a dozen required fields on a new lead, when 2 or 3 will do.

Ride Alongs: Periodically ask if you can join members of your sales team as a “ride along”. Carefully watch and ask questions about their job, how they keep track of their day to day tasks, how they use Salesforce (or other tools). Always ask, “How can I make this system easier, so they have more time selling?”

Lead Assignment / Distribution: For inbound sales teams, adopt a system that distributes new leads based on each individual Sales Rep’s use of Salesforce. Example: Sally and Joe both have 10 leads currently assigned to them. Sally’s leads have a lot of recent activity (logged calls, email activity, trip reports / site visits), all logged within the system. In addition, she converted 3 leads to opportunities in the last 7 days. By comparison, none of Joe’s leads have been updated in the past 3 weeks, and he hasn’t converted any leads. Joe might have been contacting these customers, and making appropriate follow-up – he just hasn’t bothered to log it.
Don’t adopt a lead assignment method that evenly distributes leads to Joe and Sally. Reward the behavior you want your sales team to adopt by weighting your lead distribution system toward the CRM system users. Make sure it’s know to your Sales Reps how the lead distribution system works, and that it can be easily tracked on individual and team performance dashboards.

In addition to activity (recency metrics), consider a lead scoring system and how that might be used to influence lead distribution. In lead scoring, the “completeness” of a lead is used to calculate a value. For example, a lead that only has information in the customer name and phone # fields might have a score of “2”, while a lead that has information in the customer name, phone #, email, industry, company size, or other custom fields (budgeted amount, prospect urgency, etc.) might have a score of 7. The more fields they populate, the higher the lead score. A lead distribution system could use the cumulative score of recent closed/won or current funnel activity when determining how the lead should be routed.

Develop Dashboards for Sales Managers: Design your dashboards and reports in such a way that Sales Managers can see how well their team is performing against all the KPI they are measured on within the organization. Join their sales meetings, and listen to the topics they review – they design dashboards that show data along that same flow. Get the Sales Managers to drive their 1:1 and/or team meetings from these Dashboards. “Ok, team, let’s start with new leads this week. Joe, looks like you got a couple of leads listed as “hot”, but when I drive down into the detail record, I don’t see any recent call activity or notes to suggest why they are labeled that way – fill me in. <… listens …> That’s great. Let’s get that info updated into the lead please, before next week’s team meeting!”

If Sales Reps are keying their data into Salesforce, it’s important that Sales Managers use the tool for their status updates. The worse thing we can do as managers is to have our sales reps all this valuable information in the tool, but then when we call them into our meetings, ask them, “So, Sally … what did you do this week?” Sales managers need to be reviewing this information and be aware of what’s happening BEFORE they enter meetings with their team!

Tie Incentives / Compensation Plans to your CRM System: Your commission system must be based on information out of your CRM system. If the lead/opportunity is not in Salesforce, the Sales Rep doesn’t get commission. That’s a pretty simple, but it’s important to go beyond awarding sales just based on closed/won sales. Adopt incentive programs that enhance or accelerate commission based on the sale rep’s pipeline growth, timely lead nurturing / conversion, detailed account/contact/opportunity updates and activity / follow-up. Incent the behavior you want your Sales Team to adopt!

Remove their dependency on other systems (email clients, excel worksheets, etc.): Salesforce.com has a method for sending email from within the tool. Furthermore, when emails are sent through this method, the user can see if the recipient opened the email, how many times they opened the email, when they last opened the email, etc. Why would you ever send an email from Outlook? If the answer is, “that’s the system I’m familiar with”, then teach the new system! Show the benefit of being able to see when a customer reads an email, and act on that. Implement triggers that alert the Sales Rep, so they can do a follow-up call within the hour of the email being read. There are similar productivity tools for coordinating meetings, setting up reminder calls, automated email follow-ups, etc. Get the tool working for them, rather than make them work hard to get data into the tool.

CRM is a not a tool, it’s a strategy. Understand that you will be forever tweaking and optimizing your CRM system, so that it evolves as your business evolves. Make the process and the tool smarter, not harder.

And don’t hesitate to let me know if I can help!

How Do I Add My Own Custom Logo to the Salesforce.com Banner?

2010-01-01T17:57:00.010-05:00

How do I customize the top banner, so that it displays my company's org, rather than the standard Salesforce.com logo?

The logo that displays in the top left corner is defined by the application that you are currently running. Salesforce apps are selected using the drop-down in the top-right corner. In the image below, I'm running the "Ideas" app, which uses the Salesforce.com Service Cloud logo.

TRIVIA: The default logo is updated several times a year, with each seasonal Salesforce.com upgrade. Salesforce.com usually comes up with two or three different logo ideas, and offers Customers a chance to vote for their favorite logos on the Idea Exchange. The logo that wins the most votes is used for the next release.

If you want your own custom logo, then you'll need to build your own "custom app". That's not nearly as difficult as it might sound. In Salesforce.com, an App is simply a group of Tabs. The "Sales Cloud" app includes tabs like Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, etc. You can create a custom app that uses these same Tabs, but features your company logo. Here's how:

1.) Using image editing software, modify your company logo so that it is less than 300 pixels wide and 55 pixels in height. The image must be a GIF or JPEG format, and less than 20 KB in size. Save this image to the Documents tab. Be sure to mark the image as an "Externally Available Image" when you upload it to the Documents library (see below):

2.) Create your custom app. Select "Setup -> Create -> Apps -> New".

Follow the App Wizard prompts to give the App a name, add your logo, and select the tabs that you want to be visible when users run this app.

That's all there is to it!

TIPS AND TRICKS:

Use a logo with a transparent background, unlike my sample above. If you use a logo with a colored background, you'll spend a lot of time tweaking the color scheme of your tabs so that they don't clash with the banner. The cyan background in my sample doesn't blend very well with the default green of the home tab logo ... blech!

During the photo editing stage, trim your logo so that it is exactly 300 x 55 pixels -- even if that means adding a filler space around the edges. If your logo doens't match these dimmensions exactly, Salesforce will resize the image to fit, but not always. You may find that your logo is distorted on some screen transitions, or that it displays outside the banner borders.

Each App that you build can have it's own logo. The number of Apps that you can make (and/or upload from the AppExchange) depends on what type of licenses you have:

Personal Edition	n/a
Contact Manager	1
Group Edition	1
Professional Edition	5
Enterprise Edition	10
Unlimited Edition	Unlimited
Developer Edition	10

The custom app that you build (just so that you can display your own company logo) does count against the number of Apps you can download and run from the AppExchange -- so keep that in mind!

Pretty quick, pretty simple!

Dreamforce is Coming!

2009-11-10T19:48:00.002-05:00

I keep telling Paul Overy, my colleague and co-founder of Force Geeks, to start a blog. I think he'd be great at it. Here he is as a guest monkey, err, blogger. This is a reprint of a mailing Paul sent to the Salesforce.com New Hampshire User Group.

Dreamforce'09 is only 1 week away. Are you going?

Here are some things that you might find interesting:

- You can log in to the attendee portal to add sessions to your calendar. You can even have your updated calender emailed to you.

- A Dreamforce 2009 Tweet-up is scheduled for Tuesday night at 6pm. Originally planned by David Schach (@dschach), but Salesforce has agreed to host this event and give out free stuff. Hope to see you there!

- Another Tweet-up hosted by Model Metrics is scheduled for 8pm on Tuesday at Johnny Foley's Irish House. Stop by for a pint!

- Steve Anderson (@gokubi) wants you to join him next Wednesday in creating a collaborative document of the Dreamforce opening keynote using Google Wave. If you need an invitation to Google Wave, let me know and I'll send one.

- If you know of any parties, you can list them on the Dreamforce Party Planner, or you can just check out the spreadsheet to see what else is planned.

- If you still need a reason to get excited about Dreamforce, Salesforce is posting a count down of 8 reasons to get excited about Dreamforce.

That's all for now. Feel free to forward on links of your own.

Till next time,
Paul Overy
NHUG Co-Leader

Calculating Business Hours

2009-11-01T19:10:00.011-05:00

The Problem

My client has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in which they must respond to a certain type of service request within 2 business days. In Salesforce, they were trying to track what % of orders are serviced within the SLA period. To date, they had been calculating the SLA Due Date with a workflow rule. The workflow rule auto-assigned the SLA Due Date with a simple formula: today()+1. This was problematic for two reasons: (1) the formula didn’t factor in weekdays or company holidays, and (2) the process didn’t give consideration to “time of day”.

They understood the first point, but didn’t quite understand the significance of the second point. To illustrate, I described the following scenario: “Let’s consider the ideal case - an order comes in today at precisely 9:00 AM. By your formula, you have all of today and all of tomorrow to finish that order. If it takes you longer than tomorrow, you have exceeded your SLA. Now, let’s suppose an order comes in today at 4:50 PM. By your formula, you have only 10 minutes left from today and all of tomorrow to finish that order – anything after that and you have exceeded your SLA. Also, what happens if an order comes in anytime on a Saturday? By the time you get to work on Monday, you have already exceeded your SLA with the current formula.”

The light bulbs clicked on. We agreed they needed to start tracking the date/time of the order submission, and calculate the SLA Due Date by adding 16 business hours to that Order Submission date/time stamp.

Thought Process -- Getting to the End Solution

A reader recently asked me to share more details about how I get from Problem to Solution, so here we go:

I started by checking out the Workflow formulas; in general, if I can solve a problem with clicks and formulas, rather than code, I’ll take that option. In this case, I couldn’t come up with a simple solution. There are no functions that allow for determining the “Day of Week” in a date field, nor an easy way to exclude company holidays from the SLA Due Date calculation.

Whatever can’t be managed in a formula can almost certainly be managed in an Apex trigger. I visited the Salesforce Developer Community message boards, to see if anyone had done something similar. Before I write any code, I always visit the AppExchange and developer boards, looking for a short cut, inspiration or at least potential gotcha’s that other devs have run into. My quick search didn’t bear much fruit. Blanka and Rup3 had creative formulas that could be used in Workflow rules, but neither solved the problem of company holidays or calculating the value based on business hours. I spot checked a few other posts, but none provided they guidance I needed.

Next, I pondered how non-Salesforce Developers might have tackled this problem. I did a Google search on “calculate business hours” and came up with this interesting post (and code sample) on the Code Project boards. The sample was written by perle1, and was exactly the logic I needed. Well, almost. Whle it would be pretty simple to convert perle1's C++ logic into Apex, his code still hadn’t tackled the problem of holidays.

RTFM - Read the Foolish Manual. Yes, I probably should have done this sooner, perhaps at step 1, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for until I’d latched on to Perle1’s code. His sample focused my attention on company holidays. It was then that I recalled Company Profile configurations, which are a standard part of your organization setup in Salesforce.com. There had to be a way for my Apex triggers to use and offset with these configuration settings.

So I poked around the Apex Developers Guide, found the BusinessHours object and some nice sample code … and was pleasantly surprised. This was going to be a piece of cake! In fact, it looked like I’d be able to write this trigger in 4 lines of Apex code (compared with Perle1’s 90 lines of C++ code). Plus, I’d have the ability to handle holidays in the business hours calculation – without writing any extra code.

Here's the step-by-step:

1.) First, I entered in all of the company holidays (click Setup -> Company Profile -> Holidays). A nice Salesforce.com feature is that the holidays can be configured as "recurring", so you can set the holiday once, and then never have to worry about it. Recurring holidays are flexible, in that they can be set up to occur on a specific day of the year (i.e., Christmas is December 25th, every year), or on a date pattern (i.e., Labor Day occurs on the 1st Monday of each September).

2.) Next, I set up the business hours for the work group that was using this "Submitted Order" process. In Salesforce, click Setup -> Company Profile -> Business Hours. There was already a Business Hours record labeled "Default". I left that one there, and created a new Business Hours record labeled "BSC". I added in the service teams business hours, and included the company holidays. I set these hours as the new "default" for the org.

3.) Finally, here's the Apex Code that does all the work:

trigger calcBusinessHours on Submitted_Order__c (before insert, before update) {

// Assumes the BSC work hours are the default for the Org
BusinessHours stdBusinessHours = [select id from businesshours where isDefault = true];

for (Submitted_Order__c so : Trigger.new) {
if ((so.WB_Submitted__c != NULL) && (stdBusinessHours != NULL)) {
// BSC works 11.5 hours / day (8:00 AM - 7:30 PM, M-F). Our SLA is 2-days (23 business hours)
so.SLA_Due_Date__c = BusinessHours.addGmt (stdBusinessHours.id, so.WB_Submitted__c, 23 * 60 * 60 * 1000L);
}
}
}

Submitted_Order__c is the custom object that I want to determine the SLA Due Date from. This custom object has a date/time field labeled "WB_Submitted__c", and another date/time field labeled "SLA_Due_Date__c".

The "WB_Submitted__c" field has a date/time value when it is uploaded into Salesforce (by an external process). This is the date and time that the order was submitted to our support services group.

This function is triggered whenever a Submitted_Order__c record is inserted or updated in Salesforce. The trigger grabs the BSC work hours (which we configured as "default" in step 2), and then adds 23 business hours to that value to calculate the SLA_Due_Date__c field. NOTE: You'll want to change this if you're using 8-hour business days.

What if you needed to calculate the number of business hours between two date/time values, and record that into a number field? There's already a BusinessHours.diff method that does that work for you! NOTE: The answer is returned in milliseconds, so you need to do a little math to convert it to hours:

Hours_to_Close__c = BusinessHours.diff (stdBusinessHours.id, so.WB_Submitted__c, so.OA_Complete__c) / 1000 / 60 / 60;

How simple is that? Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy!

Training Tips for Your Administrator

2009-10-02T21:20:00.005-04:00

Our administrator has spent considerable time developing her skills in SF. I would like to provide her with some additional training but I believe after reviewing the course syllabus that the content provided by SF is too basic. Does anyone have any suggstions regarding training that might be helpful? We are located in the NYC area and are using the Professional edition. -- Connie Ducaine

Here are some ideas:

1.) Have your Administrator connect and get involved with the local Salesforce.com User Group. There are many User Groups around the world, you can find your local chapter here: http://www.salesforce.com/community/community/ On the right sidebar, in the section labeled Local User Groups click your region of interest, and register to join.

Salesforce.com User Groups are organized and run by volunteers within the Salesforce user community -- not by Salesforce. They're a great way to connect with other administrators, developers, partners, or even Salesforce employees. User group members share personal experiences, learn how others are using the platform, and have a unique opportunity to bring some of those ideas back into their own organization's instance of Salesforce.com.

2.) Even if you opt to not send your Administrator to training, consider sending them to get their certification. For more information, click here. While the training courses are designed to specifically help students with the certification exams, an experienced administrator will probably have no difficulty with the them. There are also plenty of online resources that will help students prepare for the exams. This is a great opportunity to show recognition for your hard-working employee!

3.) Have your Administrator get her own Salesforce.com Developer account. She can get one here: http://developer.force.com/

That site also provides a great deal of information on how to get started with some of the more advanced features of the tool. The Developer edition is a bit more "full-featured" than the Professional edition, so she can really spread her wings -- digging into more advanced features like writing triggers, designing Visualforce pages, and experimenting with AppExchange packages.

4.) Have your Administrator spend some time on in the Salesforce Community website. There is so much information here: Best Practices, Training & Recordings, Developer Blogs, etc. If she's really hot stuff, she might be interested in helping other users with their questions in the discussion forums.

5.) Want to really get her excited about learning more about the platform? Send your adminstrator to the annual Salesforce.com user conference: Dreamforce. This is a 3-day conference in San Francisco CA, designed for users, developers, and partners. The event is highly engaging, full of break-out sessions for users of all skill levels. I guarantee that when she leaves Dreamforce, her head will be swimming in ideas for how she can do more for your organization with the Force.com platform.

I think it's great that you're keeping her focused on advancement and improvement on her Salesforce skills. There are lots of resources out there, even if you're not interested in the actual training classes.

Salesforce.com Data Storage Space

2009-08-22T00:10:00.006-04:00

A Salesforce.com client contacted me, very concerned ... they were using 139% of their data storage space. Frankly, they were surprised that Salesforce.com hadn't yet disabled their ability to add new records to the system. Mostly, they wanted to understand how they got in that predicament -- they had only been using Salesforce.com for 10 months.

Here's what I relayed to them:

In a small org (less than 50 users), data storage space can run out quick!

Here's how storage space works in Salesforce.com:

With Professional and Enterprise User Licenses, you get 20MB/user (Unlimited User licenses get 120MB/user). This particular client had 29 User Licenses, meaning they were allocated 580 MB (0.58 GB) of data storage space. However, minimum storage space for any org is 1GB, so that was their actual data storage limit.

When you get right down to it, 1GB isn't a whole lot of space, not if you store a sizeable amount of records and want to be able to create trend reports / dashboards for 1-2 years. There is an Idea on the Salesforce.com IdeaExchange to increase this data storage space: click here. As we've seen time and again, Salesforce.com does a great job of implementing features / demands from it's customers -- so I'd encourage you to go vote this up. Then have every user in your org vote it up! Those votes really make a difference.

Additional storage space can always be purchased from Salesforce.com. They sell storage space in 50MB and 500MB blocks. It can be activated immediately, by contacting your account executive. Warning: prepare for sticker shock. It's been reported that the charge for this increased storage space is disproportionately high.

It would be nice if System Administrators received a periodic notification of what their data storage usage / capacity was -- perhaps as part of the monthly Admin Newsletter. However today, there isn't any automated email notification that a System Administrator can receive to warn them them when they have passed a certain threshold of data storage space. Instead, System Administrators must be vigilent, and periodically check their usage: Click Setup -> Data Management -> Storage Usage (see screen shot above).

The page layout shows what your Org's data storage limit is, along with how many MB and % of storage space is used. There are seperate break-outs for both data storage and file storage. Data storage is all the data stored in various standard and custom objects, and file storage space is for attachments, documents and media stored in Salesforce Content.

We observed that the majority of this client's data usage was from Tasks: 448,213 task records! We did some quick math, and observed that at 29 licensed users, they had assigned 15,455 tasks per user in the last 8 months (64 tasks per day!). The actual count was much higher, since many of these users were recent hiresm, but Phew! That's a lot of tasks!

As a rough estimiate, 2,500 Salesforce object records will take up 5MB of data storage space. The bulk of these were coming from their many Vertical Response mailings. There are techniques for configuring Vertical Response campaigns so that they don't spawn tasks, which their System Administrator was already familiar with, and indicated he would implement.

So now that we knew what the problem is, how did we resolve it?

Job #1 House-Cleaning: There are several free tools that allow you to do bulk export and deletion of records, like the Salesforce/Excel Connector tool and Salesforce Data Loader. Their SysAdmin grabbed the low-hanging fruit, backing up a sizeable chunk of their aged Tasks to a local file and then deleting those records from Salesforce.com. This brought them down to under 95% data storage. We're now doing a little data mining and discovery, looking at data stored in other objects and working with the client to determine what is relevant and what data is not really being utilized.

Job #2 Prevention: After we've cleaned house, we plan to take a look at what is spawning all these tasks. Aside from those created from Vertical Response, a good chunk of them were seemingly created from various time-based workflows. We need to look at this organizations business processes to determine if this is appropraite (64 assigned tasks per day per user?). Are these workflows critical? Are they appropriate? Do they align with documented business processes and objectives of the Organization? We may need to review and/or document the business processes, reduce tasks to a "reasonable" level, and update the triggers, workflows rules, and app configs (such as Vertical Response) appropriately.

Job #3 Monitoring - Stay Vigilent: As already mentioned, Salesforce.com does not provide an automated email to warn System Administrators when they are nearing storage capacity. We've already done quite a bit of work in this area, designing applications that do automated daily backups, tools that render that data available for viewing (for Orgs that need 24x7 access to their data, even during scheduled maintenance outages), automated attachment archiving, and automated data archiving (deleting records from Salesforce based on certain thresholds -- like Dead Leads > 12 months inactivity, Closed Cases > 2 years, etc.). We may look at designing a similar solution for this client, if it becomes necessary. For now, they can continue managing the backups and archives (deletes from Salesforce) manually.

The good news in all of this is that data storage issues, once identified, are easy to fix. Keep an eye on your storage consumption, and do some trend analysis on the amount of data you are loading to Salesforce.com, and how long your storage is likely to last. Then consider what archiving policies you might need to put in place, or consider purchasing additional space. Keep an attentive eye on it throughout the year.

Landing Your Next Developer Gig on the Force.com Platform

2009-07-01T23:21:00.012-04:00

Excerpt from an email I received this week:

"Hey JP, I notice you tweet about some Salesforce jobs occassionally. I'm looking to make a change. I've spent the last year doing a lot with Salesforce, including the Force.com API through ASP.NET / C#, custom objects, custom fields, workflow rules, email alerts, custom web-to-lead, and Salesforce.com Administration. I also do a lot with PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and ASP.NET. If you know of any opportunities, drop me a line at ..."

Actually, it was a series of tweets DM'd to me, but I just appended them all together. I get 2-3 emails, tweets, or phone calls like this every week.

I wrote this blog for all you aspiring Force.com developers out there, looking to make a change or get plugged in to the Force.com development scene. Disclaimer: My interests are slightly self-serving: now I can just link this blog post in reply to all those emails, rather than reply to them each individually! #TimeSaver

First, take a moment and listen to @garyvee. This is one of my favorite clips by Gary, from his presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo last September.

Important Take-Away:

"Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, 'What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?' Do that."

Working on the Force.com Platform is great, but please, Please, PLEASE don't do it unless it's something you absolutely love. Soon after you've started working with this tool, you're going to start pulling your hair out. You'll find yourself growling at governor limits, cursing Apex 75% test code coverage requirements, puzzling over the real differences between Apex and Java, and wondering why object IDs come in 15-char and 18-char flavors. Don't even get me started on the lack of VLOOKUP() functionality in workflow rules.

You'll hate it! Just like Gary hates answering the same question day after day after day ("Which white wine should I have with my fish?"). You're going to need every bit of passion and love for what you're doing to help you ride through these moments of frustration.

"You have to love what you do. Because let me tell you something ... doing what [we] do, sucks. Eighteen hours a day? [7 days a week?] ... It gets tough! But if you love it, you will win." - @garyvee

Developing in the Cloud, and on the Force.com platform in particular, is really fun and allows you to churn out some amazing stuff. But you will definitely be frustrated along the way, as you wrestle the learning curve. Love what you're doing, to get you through those frustrating moments. And then you'll be able to do it, ALL THE TIME.

Donate Your Talent to a Non-Profit
The philanthropy model at Salesforce.com is simply amazing. They have an organization, the Salesforce Foundation, which donates user licenses to qualified non-profit organizations all around the world. Developers have written custom applications specifically designed for these non-profits, to help them with volunteer management, donor management, membership / household tracking, and so much more.

With the help of Salesforce Foundation, these Non-Profits have the tools -- now they need you. to help with their deployments, customizations, and training.

If you're trying to break into the Force.com Development scene, consider donating some of your time to one of these Non-Profit organizations. They don't even have to be local! I'm located in New Hampshire, but I've been able to collaborate and design solutions for non-profit organizations in California, Texas and Colorado.

It's a great way to get some exposure working with the Force.com platorm, gain some references for future contracts, and do something wonderful for a worthy cause.

Later, after you become a wildly successful Force.com developer, I hope you'll come back to the Salesforce Foundation now and then. Donating just a small amount of your time (even just 1%) can make all the difference in the success of a non-profit organization!

Ready to get involved? Click here, or send an email to foundation@salesforce.com requesting more information.

Get On Twitter
If you don't know about Twitter, you have to get plugged in to it. Now! Twitter is a micro-blogging service, which I've talked about previously. It's very powerful, because it lets you tap in to a huge network of Salesforce.com Employees (Program Managers, Developers, Community Managers, etc.) as well as other Consultants, Salesforce Partners, ISVs, Customers, Power Users, Administrators and more.

I use TweetDeck to manage my Twitter communications. All the folks who tweet about Salesforce.com are in a TweetDeck group, so I can monitor their Twitter stream during the day more closely than all the other folks I'm following. Not a day passes that I don't learn something new from this talented group of people! Twitter is a fantastic learning tool. Use it to learn, use it to teach, but definitely use it.

I also have a TweetDeck Search filter set up for "SFDC", "Salesforce", and "Force.com". I use that filter to find new developers and Force.com evangelists to follow. It also gives me a chance to see the many Salesforce.com related job postings that companies and recruiters are posting on Twitter every day.

Get on Twitter, and open yourself to a whole new way of learning.

Plug In to the Developer Community
Salesforce.com has a tremendously strong developer community. Tap into it here: http://developer.force.com/

I've had a couple Salesforce.com Developers / Consultants contact me, and ask if I was able to pick up a contract for one of their clients. This happens when they are already fully loaded with projects, but don't want to turn their existing client away. The only way to be part of this network is to reach out and connect with the community.

Log on and participate in the message board forums. Learn from and/or help others. If you have a question or problem, put it in front of your peers in the community. For best results, include your code samples, as well as screenshots and images. Of course, it always helps to send out a Tweet, with a shortened URL link to your question on the Developer forums.

You'd be surprised at how helpful the community is. They'll help get your question answered and your project moving forward. Be sure to pay the community back, by looking at other questions that have been asked, for which you might have answers.

Connect on LinkedIn
There are a ton of LinkedIn User Groups out there, full of developers and technology experts on the Force.com platform. A lot of job opportunities get shared in those LinkedIn groups, as well. Update your LinkedIn profile, and get plugged in to these groups.

Get to Dreamforce
Dreamforce is the annual user conference and vendor expo, sponsored by Salesforce.com. It's 4+ days of powerful keynotes, roadmap discussions, break-out sessions, tech talk and more ... all centered around the Force.com Platform.

At Dreamforce you will meet other developers, make friends, and win clients. If developing on the Force.com platform is something you're at all interested in, this is a "must do" event. Get more details here: http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/

Bid on ODesk
Looking for some short-term contracts for your reference portfolio? Check out the Force.com Jobs Group at oDesk! "Whether you're a skilled developer looking for that next job, or a customer or partner wanting to find and hire developers to work on small integrations and freelance projects, this is the place to be."

Check it out: http://www.odesk.com/groups/salesforce

Contract Partners
In addition to oDesk, there is an entire industry designed around connecting Consultants and Freelance Developers with the Companies who need their services. If you're looking to pick up a few projects, to start building your customer reference portfolio, you may want to look into this more. A couple companies that I've heard mentioned regularly are:

- Hire On-Demand
- ForceBrain Salesforce Consultants

Check them out!

Develop Apps
Of course, you don't need to have existing clients. You can start working with the platform today. Developer accounts are free, and you can start building applications right away. Want a real challenge? Sign up for the Developer Challenge, and put your programming skills head to head with some of the best of the best!

Details here: http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/07/announcing-the-forcecom-cloud-developer-challenge.html

Welcome to the Cloud and Good Luck!

Force Monkey, Inc. (?)

2009-06-30T19:52:00.009-04:00

Over the past few months, I've been working with an increasing number of Salesforce.com developers and customers, helping them navigate complex CRM deployments on the Force.com platform. Despite the dismal economy, I'm busier than ever. In fact, I've been so consumed with an increasing number of projects, contracts and clients, that I've decided to incorporate my practice.

This isn't the first company I've founded. In my college, I started a small "business" with 6 close friends. It was a gaming company called LIONE Rampant, and we ran it quite successfully for seven years. As we grew older, finding girlfriends and wives, we decided we were getting too old for that "silly gaming stuff". We sold the company -- to some of our then-customers -- and went off to get "real jobs". These new owners, in turn, ran the company for seven years and sold it to some of their customers. It delights me to see that a business venture I created has "stood the test of time", and is still operating more than 20 years later, even if I'm not directly involved with the business. Not many companies can say that, gaming or otherwise.

I don't game any more (well, maybe a few FPS and MMO hours, here and there). Instead, I spend a lot of my time developing applications, helping companies get more from their technology investments, consulting on best practices for operational management, process improvement, and CRM deployments -- particularly on the Force.com platform. I've decided it's time to put more formality in my business practice.

I'm researching the the different legal structures, and trying to determine the best one for my practice: sole proprietorship, LLC, C-Corp or S-Corp. The business entity types are all familiar to me from long-ago days, when I was researching how I should incorporate LIONE Rampant. That company was founded as a C-Corporation, but I'm leaning toward an S-corporation for this current venture.

I reached out to my Twitter network, asking how they managed their own consulting / software development companies:

As always, they were helpful and eager to share.

Jeremy Ross (@jeremyross) operates his business as a C-corporation. That means his business is taxed at the corporate rate, and there is the risk of double taxation when paying out dividends to shareholders. Those can be minimized, but it seems like more overhead than I'm willing to adopt.

Scott Hemmeter (@arrowpointe) is the owner of ArrowPointe (http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/). He's published several Force.com applications, making them available through the Salesforce AppExchange. He also provides consulting services on the Force.com platform. From our past conversations, I feel his business model is closely aligned to what I'm looking to do. Scott started as an LLC, but changed to an S-corporation, because it has some tax advantages over the LLC.

Uncle Sam considers LLC Owners to be self-employed, which means they must pay a 15.5% "self-employment tax". The entire net income of the business is subject to this tax. In an S-corporation, only the income that is paid to the "employees" is subject to the employment tax. Other income, paid to the owners as a distribution, is not taxed. I don't mind paying my "fair share", but if I can find a way to reduce my taxes, well, that's just more money I'll use to help stimulate the economy!

With an S-corporation, there is a bit more overhead: I'll have to form and work with a "board of directors", for starters. There are more record keeping rules to keep up with. I'm familiar with those burdens, having maintained the books and organized 7-years of LIONE Rampant BOD meetings. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's really not.

I've a bit more research ahead of me, and I'll probably talk with a CPA before I formally file this week. I must confess, I'm excited about the prospects of my new venture.

Are you managing your own consulting practice? I'm curious about your operations, and the legel business entity that you've adopted. Please share your comments below.

What's On Your Summer Reading List?

2009-06-29T14:13:00.000-04:00

It's summer time, and I'll be spending a lot of time pool-side with the kids. Here's my summer reading list (many based on recommendations from you!):

Art of the Deal, The
Attitude 101, by John C. Maxwell
Cash Flow Quadrant
Covert Persuassion, by Kevin Hogan
Dog Eat Dog, and Vice Versa
Eat That Frog
Getting Things Done
How to Win Friends and Influence People, By Dale Carnegie
How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships
No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs
Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith
Selling to Big Companies, by Jill Konrath
Richest Man in Babylon, The
The Millionaire Next Door
The Way to Wealth
What To Say When You Talk To Yourself
When I Say No I Feel Guilty
Think and Grow Rich
The Way of the Superior Man
Dan Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter
CopyBlogger
The Psychology of Influence
How to Survive Office Politics
How to Climb the Corporate Ladder
How to CYA
Do It Now
Getting to Yes
Difficult Conversations
Never Eat Alone
Is That Your Hand in My Pocket

What are you reading?

It's really nothing personal, but I don't want to Stay-in-Touch

2009-06-09T22:46:00.005-04:00

Do you have users that create contacts in Salesforce.com, but don't need the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up messages?

Sales professionals and account teams may benefit from the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature, because it prompts them to periodically check-in with their contacts and keep the contact information up-to-date.

However, other users groups in your organization may need the ability to create Contacts, but have no interest in the feature. Support teams, for instance, who might deal with customers on a "one-and-done" basis may need to create a contact to associate with their Case, but not need to do periodic follow-ups with that contact after the case is fully resolved.

The "Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature is enabled by default across all profiles, but you can easily disable it in the User Profile (click to enlarge):

Is it a Lead, Account, Opportunity or Contact?

2009-06-07T20:16:00.005-04:00

Inspired by my recent Twitter conversation with New York Private Investigator, Michelle Pyan (aka @michelle_lpi)

I've worked with a few clients who, for various reasons, have a lot of trouble with Salesforce.com terminology. Often it's because Salesforce.com has roots in Salesforce Automation, and these users don't come from a traditional sales background.

That's the power of Salesforce. It's such a powerful platform, and it can be customized for any business, and just about any application.

Yet many new users stumble with the Salesforce terminology right out of the gate. They're eager to get started, to get their data added to Salesforce -- and get stuck asking, "Umm, is it a Lead, an Account, an Opportunity or a Contact?"

When explaining Salesforce.com to new users, I'll often use the fish model:

Lead = Something swimming in your favorite fishin' hole.
Contact = Fish.
Account = School of Fish.
Opportunity = Fishing rod.
Closed/Won Opportunity = Lunch.
Closed/Lost Opportunity = The one that got away.
Campaign = Planning and preparation for the big fishing trip.

Since the third grade, the fish is about the only thing I can draw that people will recognize it for being just that: a fish. As I describe these terms, I'll sketch them out on a whiteboard. The visual presentation delivers a lot of "Ah-ha!" moments, and users walk away with a clearer understanding of how to enter data into these standard Salesforce objects.

Do you encounter a similar struggle with your new Salesforce.com users? What tricks do you use to bring clarity on these terms?

Why Analytics Help

2009-06-03T12:17:00.009-04:00

Lately, I've been getting a lot of requests to help organizations with data analytics and reporting aspects of their CRM solutions. I'm very encouraged by this, because it means companies are using their CRM for more than just managing customer relationships better. They are also using these tools to understand and improve their own business processes better!

A methodical analytics process is important, because it forces you to (1) define goals for your organization, (2) monitor and track performance against these goals, and (3) drive continuous process improvement based on objective, measurable results.

Let me share some of the results from the “Great Dashboard Clean-Up Project”, which I’ve talked about in past blogs.

On this project, I've worked with a number of cross-functional areas -- but this post will focus on work done with Support team. Our Customer Support organization receives high accolades from customers with respect to our response and handling of cases. It's really nice to get this unsolicited feedback from Customers, but the division manager wanted to track the teams’ performance with more objective data.

Together, we defined some Key Response Areas (KRA) for his team:

Time to Respond: After a Customer contacts us (through email, phone or web), how quickly does the support organization respond to that Customer?

Time to Restore: If the call is related to an operational issue or problem with our product “in the field”, how quickly does Support restore that equipment to full operational service?

Time to Resolve: How long does it take for the Support team to fully resolve (close) a Customer case?

We set goals for each of these KRA. This was very easy, as the organization already had internal, implied Service Level Agreements (SLA) documented. We simply “fine-tuned” the definition of those metrics, and published them to Customers:

Time to Respond
o Email / Web – contact and/or reply to Customer within 24 Hours
o Phone – if unable to answer immediately, call back within 15 minutes

Time to Restore
o Sev-1 (Critical Priority) Cases – Restore service within 4 hours
o Sev-2 (Urgent Priority) Cases – Restore service within 6 hours
o Sev-3 (Standard Priority) Cases – Restore service within 24 hours

Time to Resolve
o Sev-1 / Sev-2 Cases: Close within 7 days
o Sev-3 Cases: Close within 14 days

Here’s where things got a little tricky. While we had customized our Salesforce.com CRM system heavily to support our business needs, there was no customization centered around many of these SLA metrics. For instance, we could easily count the number of cases received from each Customer, and even identify how those cases originated (email, phone, web) -– but we had no fields tracking if phone calls were missed / returned within 15 minutes, or if email / web inquiries were responded to within 24 hours. We had Case-related fields tracking when a case was opened and closed, but for operational problems in the field, we had no date/time fields tracking when service was "restored".

Fortunately, Salesforce.com excels in this area. It was very easy to add some custom fields tracking all these SLA metrics. We also added some workflows and apex triggers that automatically populated the fields based on various conditions.

With these metrics in place, we created reports and dashboards to benchmark the Support Organization's current performance. We immediately saw that we were, in fact, doing very well across these metrics. Phone calls were answered (or callbacks returned) within 15 minutes 96% of the time. Email and web based cases were responded to within 24-hours 70% of the time. Operational issues were being restored and resolved within SLA almost 90% of the time. This all validated the compliments and feedback we had been receiving from Customers directly. But it was just the starting point for our project.

Now that we were measuring the data, we could easily zero in on the exception / failure cases. Why did we fail that SLA? What changes could we put in place to prevent us from failing in a similar way next time?

We’ve had this program in place since January, and the results (from our Support Operations SLA Dashboard) speak for themselves:

Across every metric, across every SLA, our Support Team has steadily and consistently improved in it's performance. All of this is through our CRM business analytics and service improvement program.

How about you? Are you getting the most from your CRM?

Force.com Sites

2009-05-05T21:12:00.005-04:00

Have you seen the stuff that developers are building with Force.com Sites? Check it out by visiting the Sites Gallery: http://developer.force.com/sitesgallery

Force.com Sites is a new feature offered by Salesforce.com. It was announced at Dreamforce'08 (where Salesforce previewed the LincVolt website), and it remains in Developer Preview mode. Force.com Sites allows companies to build websites fully integrated with the custom databases and applications they've already deployed on the Force.com platform.

The site showcased in the image above, for instance, is GameCraze. It was developed by EDL Consulting, and won the category of "Best Visual Presentation" for the recent Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. It doesn't look anything like the Salesforce.com UI that you might know -- but it's running on the same technology.

Most impressively, the site was built in less than one week. Admittedly, it's only a shell, not a real video game website, but it is a great example of what a team of developers can quickly crank out using Salesforce. With a bit more work, the site could be integrated with the standard/custom Salesforce objects that track customers, suppliers, game store inventory, and online sales. The "Holy Grail" of integrating your front-end website with your back-end database is all built into the concept behind Force.com Sites.

Why is this so important? Think of all the headaches a company might normally go through to build their corporate website or intranet:

- purchasing, installing and configuring web servers, firewalls, database servers
- purchasing, installing, licensing backend databases
- purchasing and installing software applications for building and managing their web content
- annual maintenance fees for all of those things

If EDL had been designing the GameCraze site using traditional methods, the purchased hardware wouldn't even arrive in the time it took them to fully deploy this website on Force.com. Before they went public, their upfront costs would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, pushing back their ROI and break-even. But Force.com sites is "pay as you use", meaning they can build and deploy their web store very quickly, and with minimal up front costs.

Today, Sites is only available as a Developer Preview (the rest of us call that "Beta"). That's one of the reasons you see only a dozen or so sits currently showcased on the Sites Gallery. While many of these have been built by the design teams at Salesforce.com, I'm really looking forward to seeing what John Q. Publicy is currently building, and watching the Sites Gallery grow.

If you'd like to learn more, or even jump into the Customer pilot program, you can check out the Sites FAQ

Why I Do This

2009-05-02T12:55:00.002-04:00

A great many people have asked me why I blog, why I Twitter, why I Facebook, why I Flickr -- why I do any of it. My wife asked me that question as I sat down to write a blog entry one night. My boss asked after noticing TweetDeck running on my laptop. My Dad inferred the question when he commented that while doing some online ancestry research, my name was coming back again and again while his spider bot searched for the surname "Seabury". And truthfully, Dad answered the question without even asking it.

We live in the era of the Social Web. If you spend any amount of time doing contributing content to the web, then you have effectively created a digital identity. Every time you create or even reply to a blog post, add comments to a message forum, upload or mark a favorite video, interact on Twitter -- all of this information is stored, archived, indexed -- and therefore viewable to the public and subject to their interpretation.

Eight years ago, before blogging was trendy and when the web didn't have a "2.0" after it, an office mate jokingly had everyone Google their name. We sat around the same terminal, and watched as people typed their name and pulled up the search results. Many of us didn't have any results returned at all, others had a few links, but they were of other people with the same surname. When I typed my name, I was surprised - no shocked - at the return results.

The return results didn't just fill the page - they filled several pages. Mostly articles that I had written for our Customer Support center, which frankly I didn't realize were viewable to the outside world. I was, then, web-naive.

It's only been in the last few years that I've come to see Google for what it is: my online resume. I don't mean to be so possesive about it, but that's what it is. Everything I do on the web is now out there in the public domain.

It's important for me to be proactive in managing this tool, the internet, as a way of marketing myself. Not because I'm looking for a job today, but because I might be looking for a job some day (and the day you're looking for a job, it's kinda too late to start branding yourself).

There is a risk of putting so much of yourself "out there" on the web for others to see -- but with risk comes reward. My social media connections through Twitter, Facebook and this blog have been incredibly helpful to me. I've learned from them more than they've learned from me. I can get answers on technical questions from this network far faster than I can through traditional channels (support calls into understaffed support centers). I've been invited to speak at user conferences, been asked to join review boards, and have received unsolicited job offers -- all very flattering, but attributed entirely to the fact that I am "doing this".

The web is not just database of information buckets for you to search. It's not just your online news medium. The web is a tool for you to market yourself, brand yourself, and make your identity known by a far wider circle of influencers than you might be exposed to in your daily work and social life.

Don't shy away from it. Take advantage of it!

We Live in Exponential Times

2009-04-07T23:30:00.005-04:00

My dad shared this YouTube video with me not long ago. It's a little dated (is MySpace even relevant anymore?), but I found it fascinating.

There is a lot of fear in our country right now. Uncertanity about the economy, uncertainty about the world, uncertainty about the future.

Let it go.

Yes, we live in exponential times. That simply means we have exponential opportunities ahead of us.

Stop thinking, "This is what is happening."

Start thinking, "This is what I am making happen." Then, go make things happen!

Case Comment from Contact "Locks" Inline Editing on Case

2009-04-02T13:46:00.005-04:00

We ran into an annoying little bug, and when we contacted Salesforce.com about it, they confirmed it is a known issue that occurs “sometimes”. Well, before we spent a couple hours chasing it, the bug had not been known to us. Here are the details, including several workarounds and a “fix”.

First, let’s describe how the problem appears to Salesforce.com Users. Your Customer Service Rep or other internal user opens a Case, and starts updating / changing fields using the Inline editing feature. When they save the record, they get an error message that the record was being updated by a Customer:

All of the edits they made to the case are lost, and they have to re-enter them.

As we look at the Case History, we see that the last Customer update was many hours ago.

In our configuration, Customers are able to create Cases through the Self-Service Portal, but they can’t actually edit them. So we were confused as to what was causing these Cases to get “locked” by the Customer contact. However, we did recently add a Case Comment Workflow, which changes the status of a Case from “Waiting on Customer” to “Investigating” whenever a Customer adds a case comment via the Self-Service Portal. This Workflow was added when Case Comment Workflows were introduced in XXX.

Here’s the workflow that we created:

When those filters are hit, a Workflow rule changes the parent Case.Status field from “Waiting on Customer” to “Investigating”.

Salesforce.com told us this behavior is seen “only occasionally”, although we found that we could reproduce the failure 100% of the time:

1.) Create a new Case, set the status to “Waiting on Customer”
2.) Login to Self-Service Portal. Add a Case Comment.

That’s it. At that point, the record is “locked” to inline editing. The first internal user to open the Case and attempt inline editing on any field will get the error message above.

Two Immediate Workarounds

1.) Use the Edit button instead of Inline editing. This wasn’t preferred by our users, since they’ve become very accustomed to the ease and use of the inline editor.
2.) Train your users to look for the “New Comments Have Been Added” bubble (see below) at the top of the case. If they see this icon, they should refresh the page in their browser before doing any inline editing. This refresh will clear the lock on inline editing.

A Better Way

The story would end here if it wasn’t for an interesting discussion I had with David Schach (of X2 on Demand fame: http://www.x2od.com). @dschach and I were chatting on Twitter the other day, then moved our conversation to the telephone (when 140-characters wasn’t enough to get our message across to each other). He was suggesting a solution to a different problem I had, but it turns out that idea has many applications – including a fix to this Inline Editing lock problem here.

The conversation was discussing a way to simulate Apex triggers on a Case Comment object. Recently, Salesforce.com added the ability to perform Workflows in Case Comments (which we took advantage of in the scenario above). However, there isn’t any method for directly adding an apex trigger on the Case Comment. Then Dave proposed this “Hacking a Case Comment Trigger” method.

@pauloveryjr and I tried it out with the usage case above. Rather than having a Case Comment Workflow rule that updates a parent Case, we can now have a Case Comment Workflow that sends an email to an “email-to-apex” application. In our tests, it works beautifully – it updates the parent Case.Status field without locking the record from inline editing.

It turns out this Case Comment Trigger Hack has a lot of uses! Until triggers are added to Case Comments, I think we'll be getting a lot of milage out of this technique. I'll document other use cases here on the blog. In the meanwhile, I hope this explains any peculiar inline editing locking behavior that you might have seen recently.

Adding an Anchored Logo to Your HTML Email Template

2009-03-24T09:28:00.015-04:00

A friend and fellow Salesforce Geek wanted to know how she could insert a company logo as the header in an HTML email template, such that when the user clicked on the logo, their browser would navigate to her company's website. I tried to describe it in email, but I suspect not very well. I promised her I'd blog about it ... so here we are.

Disclaimer: As with most things in Salesforce, there are a dozen different ways to get from Point A to Point B. This is certainly not the only approach, just the first that popped into mind.

Let's do it by the numbers. First, I created a quick logo image:

Host the Logo Image

Store the logo image in a location where it can be accessed over the internet. For this exercise, I'm going to store the image on the Salesforce servers, under the Documents tab:

1.) Click the Documents Tab.

2.) Click the "Create New Folder" link (we're going to create a new folder to store email images)

3.) In the Document Folder Label field, type "_Images". Click tab and set the other fields to their defaults. Save.

NOTE: The underscore "_" character in front of the word "Images" is intentional. Folders sort in alphabetical order, and this will push your Images folder down to the bottom of the folder list. That's my personal preference, so that my Image folders don't get mixed in with my "real documents" folders.

4.) Now that you're in the "_Images" folder, click "New Document".

5.) Enter the logo name, unique name, description, and browse to the path where the image is located. Because we will be including this image on an external email template, set the "Externally Available Image" checkbox.

Creating the Email HTML Template

Now that the logo image is "hosted" in a public location, create the email HTML Template:

6.) Click Setup -> Email templates. Specify the folder (or create a new one), and click "New Template".

7.) Select the "Custom (without using Letterhead)" option. Click "Next".

8.) Set the "Available for Use" checkbox, give your new email template a name and fill in the description field.

9.) This sample HTML code starts with an anchored logo, then continues with the "form letter" that recipients can read:


<a href="http://forcemonkey.blogspot.com">
    <img src="https://na3.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.ImageServer?id=01550000000Nqqc&oid=00D500000007zyA"/>
</a>
<br>
<br>
Dear {!Contact.FirstName} ,<br>
<br>
Check out our new logo!  Interested in the latest tips and tricks?  Click the logo in the top left corner, and it will take you to our website!<br>
<br>
Best Regards,<br>
<br>
From the Force Monkey Troop

Let's rewind a little bit, to explain the HTML code:

The anchor tag, which starts with a href="http://.../" creates a link to the target website, referenced in the href arguement. In this case, I used the URL for this blug (http://forcemonkey.blogspot.com). Substitute your own target website after the href arg.

The image that we're wrapping the anchors around is specified in the img src="https://na3.salesforce..." tag. But what is that crazy long string after the "src" arg? That's the location where the image is stored on Salesforce servers.

To get this URL information for the logo you stored, do this (assumes you're on a PC):

1.) Click on the Documents tab

2.) Select your Logo image "document"

3.) Right click on the image. Click "Properties".

Copy the "Address URL" field to your text buffer. Be sure to capture the entire field, by holding the left mouse button down as you click from the left of the "https:" and drag the cursor downward until all characters of the field are highlighted. Press CTRL-C to copy to your text buffer.

4.) Open your email HTML template and press CTRL-V to paste it in the "src" arg of the img HTML tag.

Add the remaining HTML text for your email template, as necessary. Viola!

If the steps here are still just a little confusing, let me know -- I'll post a video blog of the whole process.

Support for Salesforce S-Controls To Be Discontinued

2009-03-10T13:15:00.003-04:00

SOURCE: All credit to my information source: Sonny Cloward (@sonnycloward), Steve Anderson (@gokubi), David Schach (@dschach) and the Non-Profit Salesforce Salesforce Practioners Google Group.

Salesforce.com plans to discontinue support for S-Controls next year. The following warning announcement is displayed to Salesforce.com Administrators in the App Setup -> Develop -> S-Controls page:

"S-controls have been superseded by Visualforce pages. Salesforce will, sometime after January 2010, remove the ability to create and distribute new s-controls. Existing s-controls will be unaffected. For more information, see How Do Visualforce Pages Compare to S-Controls?."

The “end of life” date on S-Controls is a little vague, I suspect intentionally. Sometime after January 2010 could mean anytime that year, or any time in the following decade.

The announcement is problematic for some Developers. While VisualForce and Apex are great, there are certain governor limits of Apex that prohibit its use in every application. I have a couple S-Controls that I haven’t yet converted over to VF/Apex for this very reason. I have other S-Controls, admittedly, that I haven’t converted over for simply lack of time.

Note that existing S-Controls are unaffected. However, they can't be updated or distributed in packages after this EOL date. Developers must convert these S-Controls over to VisualForce pages. VisualForce allows developers to write javascript and HTML directly into their VisualForce pages, so it should be possible to simply copy / paste existing S-Controls into a VisualForce page. That means this end-of-life shouldn’t be much of an issue to most savvy Salesforce Developers.

On the other hand, I find that a lot of Customers don’t have in-house developer expertise. Their S-Controls are either part of an application they downloaded from the AppExchange, or were developed by a contractor. If you don’t have developers in-house, don’t panic! You’ve got plenty of time to inventory your S-Controls over the next few months. Evaluate these components. Are they crucial to your application? Are they likely to require change / updates? If yes, invest the time now into learning VisualForce (so you can convert them yourself) or contact your certified Salesforce.com partner / contractor / consultant.

Have any questions? Reply below!

The Great Dashboard Clean-Up: Roles, Data Owners and Key Result Areas

2009-01-25T17:18:00.003-05:00

In the previous blog entry, I commented on the problem: the Salesforce Dashboards I had deployed were not driving change in the organization. At least not to my level of satisfaction. From my vantage point, everyone was looking at the data, talking about the data, admiring the data -- but I didn't feel we were learning anything from the data. I wanted our Salesforce Dashboards to do more -- to influence changes in our business practices.

None of this implies that we aren't already running a highly effective organization -- because we are. Our product (SAFARI C3, a VOIP Media Switching System) crushes the competition with incredible performance numbers -- 99.999% uptime last month, and 99.996% overall for 2008. Our Customer Response Team wildly exceeds our competitors in number of categories: response time, restore time, resolve time, and Customer satisfaction. Despite our success, we do have areas were we can improve -- all organizations do. And that's what I wanted our Dashboards to focus attention on.

Step One: Identify the Roles of Your Target Audience
Identify who is using Salesforce.com and Dashboards in your organization. Group them by role. At my company, Cedar Point Communications, we've embraced CRM fully, so I have users from many different roles in the tool every single day: the Executive Team, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Account Management, Partner Management, Field Services, Project Management, Manufacturing, Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Technical Documentation, and Product Training.

Phew! That's a lot of different user groups!

For each department, I assigned a Data Owner -- usually the department/division manager, or someone they specifically assigned to work with me. Next, I had a group meeting with all of the data owners to outline the project objectives. I then scheduled follow-up one-on-one meetings with each of them individually.

Step Two: Define Key Result Areas for each Role
At the 1:1 meetings, I asked each Data Owner what their Key Result Areas (KRA) were -- what were they hired to accomplish?

From Brian Tracy's Blog:

Each job can be broken down into about five to seven key result areas, seldom more. These are the results that you absolutely, positively have to get to fulfill your responsibilities and make your maximum contribution to your organization. Your failure to perform in a critical result area of your work can lead to failure at your job. There is essential knowledge and skill that you must have for your job. These demands are constantly changing. There are core competencies that you have developed that make it possible for you to do your job in the first place. But there are always key results that are central to your work and which determine your success or failure in your job.

A key result area is defined as something for which you are completely responsible. This means that if you don't do it, it doesn't get done. A key result area is an activity that is under your control. It is an output of your work that becomes an input or a contributing factor to the work of others.

With Dashboards focused around KRA, business unit managers would be able to see, at a glance, how their teams were performing. Each Role / Dashboard Owner would see where their team excelled and what areas needed more attention. The goal was to create Dashboards that influenced process changes within the organization.

Next blog post -- we'll start with the Customer Support team.

The Great Dashboard Clean-up Project

2009-01-15T17:00:00.003-05:00

Ok, I’ll admit it: I created a monster. This post is my confessional, and also my pledge to atone.

Very early in our implementation of Salesforce.com, I wanted to show the power of Dashboards to my users. I downloaded the AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. The application is free, and installs all of the many dashboards published by Salesforce Labs. The package had dashboards for every conceivable use: lead flow, marketing campaign metrics, sales forecasting, support KPI, sales / support rep performance tracking, document tab tracking, user adoption, data quality analytics … everything.

I downloaded the app, did a little tweaking (very little), and then published the dashboards to my users. When Summer’08 Release gave us the ability to email dashboards (as an HTML page) directly to users, I enabled that functionality for a few key managers and user groups, too.

Soon after, I saw copies of dashboards distributed at various meetings and screenshots of dashboard components included in PowerPoint presentations. Managers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings. I felt good.

Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It's an absolute glut of information. And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards. They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization. Why not?

Reflecting on that question during my morning commute, I realized it's not the people, it's not the tool ... it's the dashboards. Those original dashboards that I pulled down from the AppExchange were developed as a proof-of-concept, a way of showing report and dashboard writers all of the graphical components and different techniques for using them. They were a learning tool, but I had implemented them as a business solution. And that’s the root of the problem. I have dashboards, but no real business intelligence architected behind them. The dashboards are colorful, they certainly detail a ton of information, but they aren’t oriented around the specific business intelligence needs of my user communities.

Understanding a problem is the first step in dealing with it! I chatted about the problem with the Big Cheese, and got the green light to focus on a complete overhaul of our existing dashboards. In the next few posts, I’ll walk through the process of this Great Dashboard Clean-up Project. Stay tuned!

How about you? How did you implement your Salesforce Dashboards? Are they telling you everything you need to know about your business / organization? We’d love to hear your comments!

No, Chicken Little, the (SaaS) sky is not falling

2009-01-07T23:40:00.003-05:00

Yesterday there was a Salesforce.com outage that lasted somewhere between 30-40 minutes. In the 24-hours since that time, the blogosphere has been filled with various pundits spreading doom and gloom, saying this outage proves Cloud Computing is not a prudent business decision.

Sorry, Chicken Little, the SaaS sky is not falling. Cloud computing is here to stay. If anything, yesterday's outage is proof to me how much better off we are running our business in the clouds.

When the Salesforce.com outage started, dozens of IT engineers jumped into action, working to first isolate the problem and correct it. In the aftermath, today and for the rest of the week, dozens of technical teams will be working to understand what went wrong, how it went wrong, and what they can do to prevent it from happening again.

The best part? None of those people are on my company's payroll. It's a good thing -- I couldn't afford that many IT and support staff. Yet I am very thankful that they're on my "cloud", helping me run my business. I wouldn't be able to administer such an incredible CRM tool without their help.

When the outage started, I didn't call Salesforce.com; I saw that several folks on Twitter had already done so. I sent out an internal email telling colleagues "we are aware of the problem with Salesforce.com, and have people working on it right now." Yep, I had people working on it!

I switched our Support team over to our Salesforce Offline Viewer. It's a custom PHP application accessing a SQL server database that we designed several months ago. Through the Salesforce API, we update the SQL database every 24-hours with a complete copy of all transactions we've entered into Salesforce.com. The GUI isn't as pretty as Salesforce, but it contains all the data they need: Cases, Solutions, Contacts, Accounts, and various custom objects.

I then set up a "Salesforce" Twitter search on my TweetDeck, sat back, and watched for news that people were able to finally log in. I've never had to spend less resources and manpower managing a crisis.

This 40-minute service outage was a blip. Let me tell you about another recent outage at my company, this one not related to the services we have running in the Cloud.

A few weeks ago, we had a little ice storm here on the east coast. It knocked out phone lines and electrical power for hundreds of thousands of New England residents. Our company lost power for 4-days. The backup generator lasted for about 10 hours, and then it went offline, too. Everything was down: telephone service, electrical power, heat.

Employees couldn't communicate with each other over Blackberry or email, because the Outlook exchange server was down. Customers couldn't access our corporate website. All of our critical IT systems are redundant, with a co-lo on a completely separate power grid. Even that didn't help us, as this storm had knocked out both power grids (yes, we're moving the co-lo further away -- and let me tell you that is a huge project in itself!).

Every member of our IT and support staff began round the clock shifts, working to get our back-up generators back online, contacting utility vendors and facility managers, shutting down servers and equipment to protect from power spikes, etc. It was exhausting!

The one aspect of our business that was unaffected? Salesforce.com. We were able to communicate outwardly to customers via Salesforce. That allowed us to send a Mass Email to all Customers, providing them with alternate contact numbers for accessing our Customer Support staff. We modified the home page layout, to include status updates for all employees logging in to Salesforce from home.

The sales team, 90% of whom are remote, were able to conduct business as usual. After we altered the call routing for our main support phone #, the entire customer support team was able to work from home, too. They had full access to Cases, Solutions, and other information they use in Salesforce -- as if they were in the office.

The four-day service outage was seamless to our Customers, thanks to the Cloud. Thanks to Salesforce.com.

I compare these two outages -- especially the manpower and resources that went into restoring service fully and I know that Cloud Computing is the right model for our CRM service.

Perhaps all these blogging pundits have Cracker Jack IT teams, allowing all their in-house systems to operate with 99.999% up-time. If so, I hope they give special thanks to each and every member of their IT staff, and maybe a nice fat bonus at the end of the year.

Me? I work in a place called reality. And even though my company has the very best of IT folks, they are resource constrained. They do capacity planning, integration testing, and constant tuning of our many complex business systems. But Salesforce's IT team is bigger, and comparing the availability numbers between our in-house and cloud-based systems just wouldn't be fair.

So cheer up, Chicken Little, you've got people.

Wearing Many Hats

2008-12-15T14:37:00.005-05:00

I started working with Salesforce.com about three years ago. Back then, I was a member of the Technical Support Staff, taking direct support calls from our Customers in a 24x7 response center. My company was using ProbWeb for tracking all trouble tickets (Cases), but we were experiencing a lot of problems with it. The system would crash several times a day; there were database management issues, and all kinds of problems integrating the Cold Fusion front end with the SQL server back end.

Enter Salesforce.com.

I have to confess, I was very much in opposition to this cloud computing model. Of course, back then it was called application hosting, which doesn't sound nearly as cool as "cloud computing". I just didn’t like the idea of not being able to touch the servers on which my data was stored. But after looking closely at all the problems we were experiencing with our existing ticket tracking tool, I realized they were all centered around IT management issues – problems that I wouldn’t have to deal with if our ticket tracking database was hosted on Salesforce.com servers. No more failed backups (that we didn’t know failed until it was too late), no more re-indexing of the database, no more site crashes rendering the tool useless to customer and employees, no more software / hardware integration headaches.

My first project was the data migration – getting two years of support calls, emails and activity from our legacy SQL server imported into Salesforce.com. Our Salesforce.com Account Manager was encouraging my boss to engage a local consulting company for the initial migration and turn-up. I choked when he told me about the contract proposal: $50,000 in two months. I told my boss I wanted first crack at the job. He was reluctant at first. After all, what did I know about data migrations, GUIs, and managing a project? In the end, I convinced him.

It took two weeks to scrub and clean the data from the old SQL database and import it into Salesforce. It took a third week to customize the page layouts, creating a similar “look and feel” as our old PropWeb system. Customizing the Salesforce.com standard interface was so easy, and I was converted from “hosted applications” skeptic to cloud computing, SaaS fanatic.

I saved my company $50K in contractor fees, and learned a TON about the capabilities of the Force.com platform. I started looking outside the Customer Support organization, searching for other ways that Salesforce could benefit my company. I soon became aware of various Access databases and Excel workbooks that other departments were storing company data in. Manufacturing had created their own Access database for tracking hardware repairs, engineering change orders, RMA returns, and component failure analysis reports. Finance had also created their own Access database for sales orders and revenue. Various individuals were responsible for writing quotes; all using different templates and tools (Word for some, Excel for others). Marketing leads were captured and distributed in Excel worksheets. Opportunities were discussed during weekly Sales Team conference calls, but not captured in any electronic medium outside those meetings.

I became obsessed with pushing more and more of our business tools into Salesforce.com. Over time, I started taking fewer Customer Support calls, and spending more time working with the Salesforce.com platform. I walked through all the steps of developing a project schedules: activity definition, sequencing, resource estimation, duration estimation, and resource leveling. Weekly status updates to my boss became less focused on managing customer tickets, and more focused on monitoring projects, addressing scheduling and cost variances, and summarizing weekly project status meetings. I talked with users or potential users of the CRM platform, trying to understand their business requirements and how they managed their organizations. I spent hundreds of dollars at Barnes & Noble, buying books on Business and Systems Analysis and Project Management. I downloaded client apps like Visio and MS Project, and I became a student of system development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies. In short, I re-tooled my resume from a technical engineer to project manager, building all manner of PM skills and disciplines.

Over the past six months, my related job skills have been shifting again. I’ve come to realize that as flexible and powerful as the Salesforce.com platform is, I’m using less than 1/10th of its potential. In order to provide more value to my organization, I’ve decided to dig deeper into the Force.com platform. I’m learning new programming languages, like Apex, Visualforce, PHP, Python, HTML and Java. I’ve plugged myself in to social networking streams like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and a vast number of blogs written by other people much smarter than I, all forging along this same path.

A few months ago, I decided to “give back” to the community. Inspired by a keynote address at Dreamforce 2007, I contacted the Salesforce Foundation and asked if there was anything I could do to help non-profits with their Salesforce.com implementations. This has been particularly rewarding and challenging, exposing me to a vast number of product experts, while also giving me a glimpse into the special needs of non-profit organizations.

At the end of three years, I find myself wearing so many different hats: Salesforce Administrator, Business / System Analyst, Project Manager, Developer, Consultant, Advisor, IT Strategist. It’s been amazing fun. I didn’t mean for this to be a sappy post about how Salesforce.com has changed my life, but in this seasonal time of reflection and thinking about next year's resolutions, I see that it really has.

What about you? Did you start off as a Salesforce.com Administrator, and find that your job suddenly transformed in some way? If so, share your comments – I’d love to hear them.

Prioritizing Your Salesforce Ideas / Projects

2008-12-05T13:04:00.021-05:00

I am the Salesforce.com Administrator for a small company, but I still get a ton of requests to customize and change things in the system: custom fields, objects, tabs, workflow, validation rules, reports, dashboards, applications, you name it. Help! There are so many requests, I can’t keep up with them! Some of these requests are very practical, and I know they’ll help our CRM initiatives greatly. Others aren’t so very useful (at least from my perspective). And of course, everything is URGENT! How do I track and priortize all these “urgent” change requests?

Great question, and a problem every Salesforce.com Administrator faces, I’m sure! Let me share an approach I use, perhaps it will help in your situation.

First, implement Ideas. Ideas is a “free” Salesforce.com application, available to organizations with Professional, Enterprise or Unlimited edition user licenses. If you’re familiar with the Salesforce.com IdeaExchange, the concept is the same. In fact, Ideas is based off the tremendous success Salesforce has recognized from their IdeaExchange. For more information about Ideas and IdeaExchange, check out my previous blogs here.

Inform and train your users on the use of Ideas. Set their expectation that all change requests to your CRM platform MUST be submitted through the Ideas tab. Prime the pump by creating Ideas! Through the newly deployed Ideas tab, post all of the projects and change requests you’re currently aware of. Get them off the yellow stickies, excel worksheets and email messages that you've been tracking them in -- get them in Ideas.

Every time a User approaches you in the hallway, or sends an email / voice message with an idea request, ask them to add it to the Ideas tab. Don’t worry if your users are initially reluctant to create, promote or comment on Ideas. Change takes time. Just make sure that YOU aren’t implementing any new changes to your organization's CRM platform UNLESS it has been submitted as an idea.

Now your Idea bucket is starting to fill up. Users can see the ideas they have submitted, and also those submitted by their colleagues. Users become aware that there are a lot of competing ideas and change requests in your queue. Furthermore, you can update the Idea Status field, showing your users which ideas have been reviewed, which ideas are coming soon, and which ideas have been implemented. Create Public Dashboards that track and show this information for your user community.

I created a Workflow Rule which sends a “thank you” email to Idea originator, and copies myself. I review every email as they come in, and create a “project” for each Idea. Some projects are fast and easy, some take longer and may require a more disciplined approach -- but every idea is tracked and worked on as a project.

Keeping track of these projects is easy! I created a custom object called “CRM Projects”. Here’s a sample page layout for the custom object (click image to enlarge):

All the important information is tracked in these CRM Project records: a unique project number and name, a link back to the Idea, originator of the request (my "internal" customer), drivers, constraints, pictures, etc.

“Ok, JP, but how does that help me prioritize all these Ideas and Projects? You’ve just given me more work, because now I have to go look at all these ideas, review them, qualify the ones that are worthy as projects, and then do some data entry describing what the project is!”

There are several fields in this custom object which help me prioritize the projects:

Importance: Picklist field, with 3 values: high, medium, and low
Urgency: Picklist field, with 3 values: high, medium and low
Effort: Picklist field, with 4 values: hours, days, weeks, months
Priority: A numeric formula field that provides a weighted priority for this project. Here is the formula that I use (alternatively, click the image to the left)

CASE ( Importance__c , "High", 1, "Medium", 2, "Low", 3, -999)
+ CASE ( Urgency__c , "High", 1, "Medium", 2, "Low", 3, -999)
+ CASE ( Effort__c , "Hours", 1, "Days", 2, "Weeks", 3, "Months", 4, -999)
- 2

This last field, Priority, is the most important in the bunch. Check out this List View, which shows all of open CRM Projects, along with their individual Importance, Urgency, Effort and Priority values (click to enlarge):

Wow! That's a lot of projects to work on -- more than can fit on one screen! The List View is sorted by Priority and secondarily by date. This gives me a weighted view of all the projects.

For example, the first project (Project ID: 2008-114) has High importance to the organization, High urgencyto the idea originator. It's a fairly simple request, should take only a few hours effort – certainly less than a work day. So based on the priority formula, this project goes right to the top of the list – even though it’s comparatively new to other projects on the list.

The key, of course, is setting proper values in these picklist fields. In general, I use the following criteria:

Importance: How important is this change request to the business organization? Don’t factor how long it will take to implement or deadlines – just assess the importance of this project to the company. Guiding Rule: Weigh the importance of the project to the Company, not the original submitter. Here’s the litmus test: put yourself in the CEO’s shoes (I love doing that!). If the CEO were aware of this request, would he consider it highly important? Somewhat important? Not so important? If I have any doubts, I'll just head up to the corner office and ask, “Hey, J.C. … how important is this project to you?” We’re a small company, too, and I’m not known for my timidity!

Urgency: How quickly is this feature needed? Sometimes I can determine urgency from what the Idea originator has written. More often, I can't really tell until I follow-up with them in person. That's right, I always talk to these Idea people face-to-face before setting up the project. From those discussions, I can gauge if the feature is a “Nice to Have”, “Must Have”, or “Heeeeeellllllllppppp”. And based on that, I can rank the project urgency as Low, Medium or High, respectively.

Effort: This is my estimate of how long it will take to implement the project. Custom fields, tabs, reports, dashboards are easy. We can bang out lots of those types of Ideas in few hours. Workflow rules, validation formulas, apex triggers, and Visualforce page changes might take days. Not always, as some workflow rules can be implemented very quickly. However, when you factor in our company policy to do all changes in a Sandbox environment first, and also to careful document, test and manage revision control of all changes, the cycles quickly add up. More complex Apex, Visualforce pages and application changes might be sized at weeks or months.

Priority: This field is updated automatically through the formula rule defined above. It’s a very simple weighting algorithm. Highly important, highly urgent and simpler projects jump to the top of the list. Projects that are less important, less urgent, or more difficult to implement settle somewhere lower.

One final note: as CRM Project Manager, I don’t use the priority value as the ONLY assessment for determining what my team should work on. Projects are not worked in top-down order, based solely on their priority. It’s simply a tool for determining the weighted priority of projects in my queue. However, if I’m working on projects that are NOT on the top of this list, I make sure my boss knows it – and the reason why.

Case Comment Workflow Rules

2008-12-04T16:49:00.007-05:00

Here’s a tricky little problem that stymied me today – and the solution!

THE PROBLEM
In the “Status” picklist field of the Case Object, we have defined a “Waiting on Customer” value.

If a Support Rep is working a Case on behalf of a Customer, they'll often come to a point where they can progress no further -- without additional diagnostic or support information from the Customer. When this happens, they'll contact the customer, let them know what information is required, and change the Case Status to “Waiting on Customer”.

When the Customer provides the information, either through the Self-Service Portal, or through an email, the Case Status remains “Waiting on Customer”. Naturally, this frustrates the Customer! When they review their open cases through the Self-Service Portal, they expect to see this status field updated. The Case is no longer waiting on Customer, it's waiting on us!

My Support Team wanted a Workflow rule that would automatically change the Case Status from “Waiting on Customer” to “Investigating”, whenever the customer added a Case Comment through the Self-Service Portal, or if they send in an email related to the Case (to our email2case application).

When I reviewed the Release Notes for Winter'09, I knew this functionality -- the ability to create a workflow rule on Case Comments -- had been recently added in. But as I started playing with the rule criteria in my sandbox, I got stuck. How do determine if a Case Comment was added by a Self-Service Portal user?

THE SOLUTION
A quick search on the Salesforce Community forums gave me this helpful information.

As len123 observes, every user has a type – but Customers accessing through the Self-Service Portal are not “users” (i.e., no user license required). Therefore, any Case Comment added by entities in which the $User.UserType is NULL must originate from Self-Service Portal users.

My first Workflow Rule formula looked like this:


AND (
   ISPICKVAL (Parent.Status , "Waiting on Customer"),
   ISPICKVAL ($User.UserType , "")
)

Every time a new Case Comment is added, this workflow rule is evaluated. If the related Case status is “Waiting on Customer” AND the $User.UserType is null, go do some action. In my case, the action was changing the related Case Status to “Investigating”.

The Workflow rule worked great. If the Case Status was something other than “Waiting on Customer”, the workflow never triggered. Of if an Internal user added a Case Comment (no matter what the Case status was), the workflow would not trigger.

But some of our customers communicate with our Support organization through email. We have custom Apex application that processes these emails, looks for a certain tags in the email subject line, and finds the Case that email is related to. The app adds the email to the case, and copies the body of the email into a Case Comment. The Support team wanted to make sure these customer updates would trigger the same workflow.

Here is the final Workflow Rule that I implemented:

If that’s hard to read (click to enlarge), the rule criteria formula text block is below:


AND (
   ISPICKVAL (Parent.Status , "Waiting on Customer"),
   OR (
         ISPICKVAL ($User.UserType , ""),
         $User.Username = "mail2case@cedarpointcom.com"
   )
)

Now, the Workflow rule fires only when Case Status is “Waiting on Customer” AND one of the following is true: 1) UserType is Self-Service Portal user, or 2) case comment was added by our Apex app (which adds the body section of the email to the Case Comments.

What workflow rules have YOU implemented with Case Comments since Winter'09?

PS – Thanks to Twitter follower @CRMFYI for the good tips, and len123 for the workflow formula!

Force.com IDE - Not Just for Developers

2008-11-25T16:04:00.012-05:00

If you’re a Salesforce.com Developer, you probably know all about the Force.com IDE. If you’re a Salesforce.com Administrator dabbling on the dark side of development (S-Controls, Java, Apex and Visualforce), you SHOULD definitely become more familiar with it.

What is the Force.com IDE

What is it? Force.com IDE is a client application that you install on your desktop. It's designed to maximize a developer’s productivity, by providing integrated system components on a single user interface. That means that all of your development, testing, debugging and deployment tools are provided through one simple tool.

"But JP, I'm not a developer ..." Do you redesign page layouts? Do you write workflow rules and validation formulas? Do you create custom objects and custom fields within your Salesforce.com instance, and then deploy these changes to your users? Don't look now, but you're crossing into the dark side, from Administrator to Developer.

Nervous? Don't be. We have cookies!

IDE is an industry standard term, an acronym for "Integrated Developer Environment", or sometimes "Integrated Design Environment". The Force.com IDE is based off of Eclipse, a free software IDE written in Java. While Eclipse was originally designed for developing Java, it also has plug-ins for C/C++, Python, Perl, PHP, and many, many more languages -- including a plug-in for Force.com development. As of the Winter’09 Release, the Force.com IDE has been marked "Generally Available", and is now the development platform of choice among Force.com developers.

Why Is It Cool?

Prior to loading the Force.com IDE, I wrote my Apex code and Visualforce pages inside the Salesforce.com GUI. I was constantly shifting between browser windows when I wanted to look at components, Apex classes, Visualforce pages, and static resources together. With the Force.com IDE, it’s much easier to load up all the code from those different elements, and associate them with a single project. The Package Explorer allows the developer to specify which metadata components are included in the project, which is especially helpful if you have multiple projects being worked on concurrently by different developers. The Online Project Mode is also helpful for such conditions, as it helps developers identify and resolve conflict changes within their Salesforce.com instance.

I really like the Schema Explorer (see above), too. This tool allows developers to view all of the standard and custom objects, their child relationships, object fields – you can even write SOQL queries to view actual data in your organization's instance. With the expanded metadata support in the Winter’09 release, the Force.com IDE has become extremely useful. In addition to Apex classes and triggers, you can download other metadata types, including workflow rules!

Pushing code from the Sandbox to your Production environment is made simple, through the “Deploy to Server” wizard included in the Force.com IDE.

So now you can bang out code, “compile” it (as much as we compile anything, in the SaaS world), test it in your sandbox and deploy to production … all from within one tool. Very cool.

Who should use it?

If you’re doing any Apex development, the Force.com IDE tool is a “must have”. Even if you’re an Administrator, doing heavy customization of objects, workflows, S-controls / Java, and Visualforce, I strongly recommend downloading and becoming familiar with the Force.com IDE tool. You will encounter a learning curve, particularly if you’ve never used an IDE before. In the long run, it will ensure a more secure development and change process for your entire organization, and will become a real time-saver.

Where can I get it?

Download Eclipse here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Download the Force.com IDE here: http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Force.com_IDE_Installation_for_Eclipse_3.3.x

Learn more about the tool here: http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Force.com_IDE

Caveat emptor

2008-11-24T17:04:00.003-05:00

About a year ago, my company signed a two-year contract with Salesforce.com for 150 Enterprise user licenses. Despite what you’ll read in the rest of this blog, signing a long-term agreement is something I highly recommend other companies take advantage of. With longer term agreements, you can leverage steeper discount pricing. Our 2-year agreement gave us a nice 36% discount off the standard pricing, which certainly made the resident bean-counters happy.

Our 2-year contract is now due for the 2nd annual payment, and Salesforce sent us an invoice. I don’t normally review / approve vendor invoices, but I’m filling in temporarily for my boss. While reviewing the invoice, I noticed a transaction that didn’t seem right: a Customer Web Portal license had been added to the contract. 150 Enterprise licenses, 1 Customer Web Portal license … that’s not right. What is this? I racked my brain, trying to figure out what that was all about – then I remembered:

Earlier this year, my organization was looking into the Customer Web Portal feature. Our Salesforce.com Account Manager hooked us up with a 30-day trial, and we used that time to develop a Customer Web Portal prototype. Unfortunately, the development cycle brought us right up to the end of the trial. Midway through the following month, while trying to provide a demo for a visiting Customer, I discovered that our free Customer Web Portal trial had ended.

In a panic, I called my Salesforce.com Account Manager. I explained our situation, and asked if Salesforce could extend the Customer Web Portal trial. He indicated that he could not do that (Grrr!) – but if I were to purchase a Customer Web Portal license, Salesforce could enable and disable those accounts at any time. Great, sign me up, let me get to my Customer Demo.

There were some technical problems getting the Customer Web Portal active. It took several weeks for Salesforce Customer Support to determine why I wasn’t able to use the licensed Customer Web Portal account, and I lost the opportunity to demo the feature with my end-user. No worries, I continued to use the account for internal demos. Advocating the tool, I tried to build a stronger business case internally by demonstrating the web portal to our Account Teams, Sales, Field Engineers and Executive Management. In August, when it became clear that we would not have funding for the web portal project in 2008, I told Finance to cancel the web portal license.

Fast forward to today. The Customer Web Portal user license was apparently never canceled, and it’s still on the renewal invoice for next year. I opened a Case to get this transaction removed from the invoice. It took 10 days (TEN DAYS!!!) for Customer Service to respond with a canned “we can’t do that, you’re under contract” form letter. I escalated to my Account Manager, and he also indicated there was nothing he could do. Despite what I had been told previously about turning these portal licenses on and off "on-demand", the 1-user Customer Web Portal license agreement was coterminous with our 2-year contract.

Caveat emptor. Never shop on an empty stomach. Read the fine print. Never upgrade in a panic.

I only wanted to cancel a single user license agreement for a feature that we aren’t using, something I was told previously I could do “on demand”. It’s a piddly $300 expense, and while it’s not going to break my bank, it sure does annoy me.

I thought I had a better working relationship with Salesforce. I’m one of their reference accounts: over the past year, I’ve given freely of my personal time, doing private conference calls and impromptu GoToMeeting sessions with some of their prospects -– trying to help Salesforce win new business. I’m the community leader for the local Salesforce.com User Group. I blog and twitter on Salesforce all the time. More importantly, I intercept the NetSuite and Microsoft CRM sales dogs every month, keeping them away from the internal decision makers and coaches in my company.

Am I still a big fan of Salesforce.com? You bet I am! It remains the most flexible, powerful, and innovative SaaS tool on the market. But am I just a little jaded over this silly $300 invoice line item that we couldn't wipe from the slate? You betcha.

How to Show Actual vs. Target on a Dashboard in Salesforce.com

2008-11-17T17:26:00.007-05:00

A member of the LinkedIn Salesforce Power Users Group asked, "What is the best way to show Actuals vs. Targets on a dashboard in Salesforce? The only thing I've come up with is using the gauge and setting the max to twice the target. You don't see the target number, but know it is half of the max."

I already answered on the LinkedIn Group, but sometimes it’s just easier to show it in pictures. Todd, this blog’s for you!

Gauges are a good dashboard component to use when you want to identify where you measure in a range of values, or against a Target metric. Here are a couple ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

First, keep in mind that the Gauge has several value settings, but you don’t need to fill in all of them. For example, if you’re only tracking actual vs. target, then you only need to set a single breakpoint value:

Here, the target is $3M in sales, as defined in the Breakpoint #1 Value field. Breakpoint #2 and Maximum values are not set.

As sales opportunities are closed throughout the reporting cycle, the odometer needle will track toward the $3M target. But what happens next? As we push past the $3M Breakpoint #1 Value, the Gauge component is going to display the sum total of all Sales, and Dashboard viewers will lose visibility as to what their Target value was. Todd’s original question (above) implies that he knew this, and wanted to avoid his sales team losing track of what their Target was after they had passed it.

One simple remedy is to reference the Target in the footer or title fields of the component:

Here, we’ve closed a few more sales, pushing us past the $3M Target. Note that the Middle Range Color (Yellow) was never used, because no value was set for Breakpoint #2. Instead, the Gauge component displays the color of the High Range Color (Green). To help Dashboard viewers recall what our goal was, now that we’ve surpassed it, we added the Target: $3M in the Dashboard footer.

Here’s another example that uses all settings in the Gauge component, including Breakpoint #2 and Max Values. The ABC Company has determined that their extended break-even costs for doing business is $47.8M annually. The current Sales Target is $55M; incentive programs for the entire company have been put in place if Sales exceed a Stretch Target of $62M.

Said a different way: Under 47.8M, the company is in the red. After that, their operating in the black, but Sales has a target of 15% over break-even. Finally, if Sales can push the company 30% of Break-Even, it’s party time, and we fly the entire staff down to Bermuda, with families, for the weekend.

Here’s how the component was mapped out in the Dashboard:

Note that we set the Min Value to $43M, rather than $0.00. This creates some interesting display dynamics as the odometer needle moves toward Target:

Through the early part of the reporting period, the needle stays flat, but the red colored section of the gauge dwindles smaller and smaller as the report total approaches the Minimum Value setting. Once we hit the break-even (Breakpoint #1) of $47.8M, we’re no longer in the red. But even though the company is operating in the black, we haven’t yet hit our sales target ($55M).

Why Do You Twitter?

2008-11-15T11:45:00.021-05:00

The other day, a colleague noticed my Twitter page, and asked what it was all about. I explained, although rather poorly, I think. He didn't get. He thought it was a distraction and a "complete waste of time".

I confess, when I first started "twittering", I didn't really understand what it was all about either. I now liken the experience to when I was a young teen, and my father brought home a CB radio. He installed it in our kitchen, threw a big antenna on top of the roof, and we listened to all the conversations happening on the citizen's band airwaves. Gradually we became less timid, and joined those conversations, introducing ourselves as the Big Brownie (Mom), the Purple Typewriter (Dad), and the Minnesota Viking (me) -- my sisters never got into CB all that much.

I've had a similar experience on Twitter. At first, after subscribing, I simply lurked -- watching all the Twitter conversations around me. Slowly, I came out of my shell and into the wide Web 2.0 world. Today, I suspect half my Twitter friends are hoping I'll soon crawl back into that shell; I've become a Twitter Maniac!

A quick rewind for my Dad, who follows my blog and points out the many grammar and spelling errors found here (thanks, Dad, lub yew ... mean it!). He's almost certainly asking, "But what IS Twitter?". An explanation is in order. The sidebar on the upper left is an example -- click to enlarge.

Twitter is a conversation on the web. You join Twitter (it's free) at www.twitter.com. You can search for other subscribers, using their Twitter alias (if known) or email address. For example, my twitter alias is jpseabury, and you can follow me from my Twitter home page: http://twitter.com/jpseabury. Just click the "Follow" button under my picture.

Once you follow someone on Twitter, you can monitor all of their tweets from your own Twitter home page. A tweet is a 140-character message that they type into their computer. That message then gets pushed out to all the people who "follow" them.

I found myself navigating to my Twitter home page several times a day, whenever I sat down at my desk, and before checking my email. Later, I found the BeTwittered gadget and added it to iGoogle.com. Now I have auto-updated Twitter conversations constantly streaming to my browser home page. I haven't loaded the TweetDeck yet, but I saw it in action on @colinloretz laptop last week, and may well give it a try.

Following various conversations, I learned that many people were sending tweets from their phones. I did a little exploring and found all types of applications written for web-enabled smart phones (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.). These applications allow subscribers to Twitter "on the move". Stuck in a boring staff meeting? Pull out your smart phone and feign like you're reading eMail -- but catch up on your Twitter conversations instead.

There is, perhaps, a certain amount of voyeurism in all this twittering. Yet, it's also a wonderful tool for learning and networking with other people. Here are some examples:

Through Twitter, I was able to connect with a whole bunch of folks as passionate about the Salesforce.com platform as I am: @judis217, @CRMFYI, @colinloretz, @sonnycloward, @MemeStorm, @gokubi, @arrowpointe, @dschach, @calista_carter and more. At the recent Dreamforce 2008 User Conference, we twittered to each other the entire week, chatting about presentations we were attending or presenting at, where to meet-up for breakfast / lunch / dinner, the wretched Wi-Fi coverage, and the phenomenal presidential election. Through Twitter, we found each other at d'apres conference cocktail parties, banged out Apex code at the Monday Night Hack-a-thon, and sat together at the keynotes. Even when we weren't sitting together (and with approx 9,500 attendees, it was sometimes difficult to find each other), we were chatting to each other over Twitter:

From my Twitter Log at the first Keynote:

@Kingsley2 Sites is really, really powerful.
@gokubi 500K free page views with Enterprise Edition -- great for Non-Profits!
@jpseabury Force.com sites is a game-changer for the industry
@MemeStorm More about Sites here: http://developer.force.com/sites
@Kingsley2 What will people build?
@MemeStorm http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Facebook_Toolkit
@dschach #Dreamforce On sign behind Benioff: "r u bored" Haha. Not much audiencew enthusiasm for Facebook here.
@colinloretz I can has facebook queries in Salesforce and can create force.com facebook apps?
@sonnycloward #Dreamforce The Facebook integration could be huge for nonprofit fundraising
@judis217 Is it my imagination or did everyone just say "wha?" at the idea of force.com on facebook. #dreamforce

All these conversations -- to people I hardly knew, but already felt connected to -- made Dreamforce simply more fun.

Before and after Dreamforce, my Twitter network has shared links to news articles they are reading or blogs they have written, all stuff that I'm keenly interested in. I follow them, because they're interests match my own: Force.com, cloud computing, Web 2.0, business intelligence, philanthropy, civics, blogging, and project management.

Through Twitter, I've found speakers for my local Salesforce.com User Group (thanks @lucidera) and rides to the airport. They've shown me tech articles, wiki notes, and development tools that have proven really useful in my daily work ... things like Plone, Jing, Facebook, Friendfeed, TweetDeck, Salesforce Codeshare, Air and Flex toolkits, centraldesktop, Twitterforce, syntax highlighter, and more.

They've helped me debug my code. I posted a problem I was experiencing to a message board, and then followed by posting the same question to my Twitter network -- and I've gotten Twitter replies in minutes. Twitter is invaluable source of information, and helps with my continuing education on all things "in the cloud".

I don't believe every Twitter user will have the same positive experience that I've had. Remember, Twitter is just a conversation that you share on the web. If the only thing you twitter about is the latest gossip, or why you're bored, or what you had for supper last night -- and all the people you follow have similar conversations -- than you probably won't get a lot from Twitter. On the other hand, if you keep your Twitter network filled with interesting and knowledgeable people, you may learn quite a lot.

I've kept my Twitter friends list pretty small. Unlike @guykawaski, I have no interest in picking up throngs of random followers. The twitters I follow are topics I'm interested in. If someone follows me, I'll look at their recent Tweets -- and if the conversation is interesting, I'll return the follow. Together we share, we learn, and we grow.

Aliza Sherman wrote a great article, "How Twitter is a Communications Game Changer". It's worth reading, and pondering how you currently use Twitter, and how you might start using it more effectively.

NOTE: From the blog comments, here's a neat Youtube video about Twitter, recommended by @colinloretz (the "n" is silent). :-)

How Can I Get a Job as a Salesforce.com Consultant?

2008-11-13T17:11:00.004-05:00

Several of my LinkedIn contacts have told me they are in the process of leaving their job, or plan to soon, and start working as a Salesforce.com consultants. I've heard from others who are getting laid off, and want advice on landing another Salesforce.com Administrator position like the one they're leaving.

Here's how I advised them:

(1) Best Job Search Tool -- www.Indeed.com
If you're just looking for a Salesforce.com Administrator job -- not necessarily a consulting job -- use Indeed.com. It's the best job search engine out there, in my experience. Enter your zip code, max driving radius, and "Salesforce.com" as the search keyword, and you're off to the races. If you live in a particularly rural area, you may need to widen that driving radius.

(2) Get Certified
All the industry trade rags are reporting that the value and importance of IT certifications is dropping rapidly. All certification programs are seemingly affected, including application development, programming languages, database, web development, networking, and project management. Despite this, I do believe that Salesforce.com Administrator and/or Developer certification are worth getting. The SaaS industry is comparatively new and the technology is changing rapidly. Certification demonstrates that you're part of its evolution and that your head is in the clouds.

(3) Network, Network, Network
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Social networking is the key to future career options. Visit the Salesforce.com Community website and find a user group in your area. Join, participate, and meet other professionals like you -- some may be hiring. If there isn't a local user group, talk to your Salesforce.com Account Manager about starting one.

While on the Salesforce Community website, check out the message boards. Not just the "Jobs" message board, but all of the message boards. See what other users are talking about and/or struggling with. Can you help them? Do it! Strive to become a "Trusted Contributor" within the community by responding to user questions and issues. You'll earn name recognition and reputation, two powerful assets for career growth.

(4) Updated Your LinkedIn Profile
If its been awhile since you've updated your LinkedIn profile, go clean it up now. While you're there, subscribe to the following LinkedIn User Groups: Salesforce.com, Salesforce Developers / Contractors, Salesforce Consulting Network, and Salesforce Professional Network. Don't just join and lurk ... network, network, network! Participate in the discussions.

(5) Donate Your Expertise
Ask your Salesforce.com Account Manager how you can get involved with the Salesforce.com Foundation. There are a lot of non-profit organizations out there who could use the talents of skilled administrators and developers. You don't even need to be local to the non-profit entity in order to help them. I've done full data migrations, deployment customizations, and custom apps for non-profit organizations scattered all over the country. Afterall, Salesforce is web technology, and we're all on the same internet. Generally, the work is pro-bono, which may be less feasible if you're currently jobless. However, if you can afford to donate a few hours a week, this can be a great way to put your consulting talents to practice. I can tell you from first hand experience, it is incredibly rewarding to donate your services to these organizations.

(6) Learn from the Masters
If you already know a lot about Salesforce.com, but aren't quite sure if you're ready to start your own consulting business, consider learning at the heels of the Masters. Find a consulting organization that is hiring, and submit your resume to join their team. It's not as flexible as working for yourself, but it can be a great way to learn the ropes from mentors and peers. If you follow my previous recommendations, you'll find these Masters out there soon enough -- they blanket the message boards and user groups with offers to help struggling user communities.

Get your head in the clouds, your dream Salesforce.com job is out there!

Are These Buttons Too Sexy?

2008-11-10T14:56:00.004-05:00

I love Steve Andersen's Salesforce.com-ish Button Creator. It makes buttons that have a similar look and style as the standard buttons created through the Salesforce.com user interface.

When I lost track of the URL to his button maker, however, I searched Google for some button-making goodness ... and found a few interesting sites.

The buttons on the lower portion of this screenshot come from www.buttongenerator.com. Very sexy, n'est pas?

Unfortunately, they're just a little TOO sexy. In order to make these buttons not look out of place, I'll have to spruce up the rest of the page -- maybe bring in some pretty graphics via the Google API, like Sam has been doing over on his Salesforce blog.

Customer Satisfaction Survey Card for Hotel Nikko, San Francisco CA

2008-11-06T01:13:00.005-05:00

This year, while attending Dreamforce 2008, I stayed at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. Overall, it's a very nice hotel, although a bit too lavish for my taste. The spacious lobby featured soothing waterfalls running alongside marble staircases, a concierge with a lilting British accent (and really tight, curve-hugging slacks), and gorgeous cherry wood furniture. The room had a large floor to ceiling window with a great view of the city, was reasonably sized and very clean. What's not to love?

Maybe I'm overly provincial, but I associate extravagance with excess and waste. When traveling, I normally go for the Motel 6 flavor. Cheap, economical and comfortable -- for a place that you're mostly just using to get a few hours of sleep. I'd normally drive right past the fancy schmancy Hotel Nikko with it's $210 per night room rate (and that's with my Dreamforce and AAA membership discount) -- unless I was trying to impress my date.

I assumed that any hotel in the middle of the city was going to be charging high rates. Certainly, all the hotels on the Dreamforce pre-registration list were in that price range. I figured that was just the price of a typical room in the city. So I was a little surprised to open the curtains in my hotel room, and see a large sign hanging from a hotel across the street: $55 per night. Ah well, it was too late to cancel my reservation at the Nikko ... I was checked in and unpacked. I opted to stay where I was and splurge for the week.

The difference between these two hotels, aside from the $155 / night price difference and aforementioned decor? Not as much as I'd hoped.

Hotel Nikko didn't have a Customer Satisfaction survey card for me to fill out, so I'll just have to blog it:

WiFi: FAIL
For $210/night, you’d think I’d be able to jump on to the internet for free, right? All of the public WiFi connections were blocked, and my only option was to subscribe to the In-Room WiFi connection … at $12.99 per night! Internet Highway Robbery! I couldn't justify spending that amount of money for 2-3 hours of internet usage (that's how many hours I planned on being in my room during the conference, across 5-days, awake and idle). Ergo, no blogging until I got home.

Comfort: FAIL
The room was beautiful, I'll certainly admit that. Large king-sized bed, big fluffy pillows (about 8 of them, 7 of which I had to throw on the floor each night ... because who needs that many pillows on their bed?), gorgeous wall-mounted flat screen TV, lots of mirrors, big roomy bathroom. But the bed was soooooooo uncomfortable; I tossed and turned all night long. Some of that was due to the time change, I'm sure. My body never really acclimated to the 3-hour time zone change and 1-hour shift to daylight savings. My eyes popped open at 4:00am each morning, and I never really got back to sleep. After a week of this, I’m utterly exhausted.

Technology: FAIL
The programming on the TV Remote Control was teh suck. This was the week of the 2008 presidential election, and I really wanted to channel surf all the networks to catch their coverage of this historic event. I was thwarted by the Hotel Nikko Remote Control.

Here is the remote control button combination I had to press to get CNN: POWER, MENU, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, RIGHT, SELECT.

Seriously. There was no way to select a channel number directly. You had to navigate through a mass of fee-based programs (movies, porn, and three screens of other crap) to find the free channel television networks. Even worse, once you were on a normal television channel, you couldn’t cycle to the next channel. You had to go back to the MENU option, and start all over from the beginning. So I couldn't pop from CNN to ABC, to CBS, to FOX, to NBC, to local ... it was just CRAZY!

Oh, and the fee-based movies? It cost me $14 to see Hancock, which I'd missed at the theatres and wanted to see. $14 ... that's twice what you'd pay to see it on a real movie screen. Yowzers.

Ammenities: OK
There was a 16 oz bottle of water at the bedside, a cylindrical, new age container – looked pretty cool. But it if you wanted to drink from it, you were charged $6.00. Hello? The 1-liter bottle that I bought at the airport (still over-priced at $3.75) was filled with water that came from the same bottling company – how does Hotel Nikko justify charging that much money for that little water?

So why isn't this category a FAIL? I gave this one a passing “OK” grade, because the room did come with a free iron, ironing board, hair dryer, coffee maker, and coffee. I didn't use any of these, but it was nice to see I didn’t have to swipe a credit card to use them.

I did appreciate the New York Times dropped daily at my door.

Environmental Conscious: FAIL
Hotel Nikko had signs posted in the bathroom, asking patrons to help with the hotel's efforts to "Go Green". If you planned to re-use your bathroom towel, just hang it from the hook on the back of the door. I'm a eco-concious American, so I did that. Every morning. And yet, every morning Housekeeping took my towel from the hanger, and replaced them with fresh, clean ones.

A little card on the bed stand read, “Leave this card on your pillow if you want your sheets changed. Otherwise, leave it on the bed stand and we will leave your current sheets. Thank you for helping us Go Green”, or words to that effect. Housekeeping stripped my bed each morning and changed the sheets (don't ask me how I know, I won't confess; what happens in San Francisco stays in San Francisco).

The first day, I left a $3 tip for Housekeeping, and the gal came and thanked me personally. I had the impression that not many people leave tips for Housekeeping these days. I wonder if the reason she kept making my bed with clean sheets and replacing towels was because of those tips.

Security: FAIL
I liked the in-room security safe. After all my other experiences, however, I was surprised I didn’t have to stuff quarters into it in order to make it work.

The FAIL grade on security came Tuesday night, when I finished my dinner, reached for my wallet ... only to find I didn't have it on me. I had accidentally left my wallet (and room key) in my hotel room! My waitress at the nearby diner was gracious enough to let me run back to the hotel (I left my Blackberry as a collateral hostage). Once at the hotel, I approached the front desk clerk and explained my situation. She asked for my room number, confirmed my last name, and gave me a new room key.

Huh? No “please confirm your mother’s maiden name”, or “do you know the last 4 numbers of the credit card you reserved with?”, or “This is Bruno from our Security Staff. He’ll accompany you to your room and let you in. Once there, he’ll need to see your ID before we can give you a replacement room key.”

I appreciate getting a replacement room key (and my wallet) so easily. I was able to rush back across the street to clear my dinner tab. But the lack of security is a little concerning.

I should have tried the same thing the next night … "Hi, my name is Sonny Cloward, and I’ve left my wallet in my room … " =)

Overall, I enjoyed my stay, but I’m disappointed at the lack of amenities that come with the 4-night $620 price difference between Hotel Nikko and the dive across the street. I think next year I’ll stay at the dive, and that $620 I save can go toward something meaningful. Like getting Calista Carter hooked up with a phone she can Twitter from!

What if electing a President were more like American Idol?

2008-10-25T10:58:00.006-04:00

DISCLAIMER: I confess right out of the gate, I'm not a fan of either major-party candidate. As with many past elections, I won't be voting "for" someone in this election cycle -- my vote will be because I don't want the "other guy" to get in office.

I'm frustrated by our political process. It's broken. Increasingly, election campaigns are degenerating into a contest of popularity -- what a person looks like, rather than their values. We elect candidates based on their oratory abilities, rather than, what they stand for, their experience, or their abilities.

And it always comes down to a contest between members of two parties: Democrats and the GOP. Third party candidates (Libertarian party, Reform party, Green party, etc.) have some really thought-provoking and powerful ideas. Hardly any one knows about them, because these candidates get zero air time. Their parties lack the funding to get their message out, and the deck is stacked heavily against them.

Did you know, for instance, that there isn't one ballot for the presidency? There are actually 50, one for each state. Party candidates need to petition to each state individually to get on their ballots. Each state has their own procedures and steep filing fees that must be paid before a candidate can get on their ballot. Doesn't that seem incredibly inefficient?

And if you're not a member of the DNC or GOP, forget about getting your message or plan in front of the American people. Sure, you can build a website, maybe even get a few thousand followers behind your platform -- but that's as high as you'll rise.

Why don't we just run elections the same way we run American Idol? Perhaps a twist on Donald Trump's "You're Fired!" ... we'll call it "You're Elected!". Or even better, an election process similar to the reality show "Survivor"?

Sixteen candidates, four parties, and weekly 2-hour broadcasts of candidate footage as they move through a maze of simulated political situations. Each week, the American public would get a chance to vote someone off the island, or in this case, the campaign trail.

I mean, if we're only going to look at how good or bad a candidate looks for the few weeks of the campaign, and not give any attention to the last 40+ years of their life or the substance of their political agendas and plans -- why not run the election like a reality TV show? I daresay we'd learn more about the candidates, get more involvement from the public in the process, and end up no worse with the final surviving candidate.

Hey, that’s a great Idea!

2008-10-24T23:18:00.006-04:00

Thinking about deploying Salesforce Ideas for your organization, but worried that your users won’t use it? An Anonymous poster to yesterday's Force Monkey blog is:

I'm the Salesforce admin and also most of the support staff for a company of ~75. I've thought of putting ideas out there for the company through the support portal. My question to anyone that's done it- does it actually get used? I could point it out to everyone but I'm fairly sure I would be met with blank stares and it would sit untouched...

My feedback? Yes, it will get used – if deployed right! One of the organizations I administer has 120 users, and they've been using Salesforce Ideas since the product went beta last November. They've averaged 12 ideas per month -- not bad!

On the other hand, if you just turn the feature on, and do nothing else, it will sit untouched.

Like so many other aspects of a CRM project, it’s not simply a matter of deploying a new feature and hoping people come along and use it. User Adoption requires careful planning, preparation, and follow-through. Here are some “Best Monkey Practices” for getting Salesforce Ideas up and running for a small (< 100 users) organization.

First, for readers who don’t already know ...

What is Salesforce Ideas?
Ideas is an “online suggestion box”. You're licensed Salesforce.com Users can submit an idea, which creates a forum for discussion. Other users can discuss the idea, promote it, or even demote it. As Ideas are voted on, their score value changes. The most popular / best ideas get higher scores and “bubble up to the top”. The concept is designed after Salesforce.com’s highly successful IdeaExchange, which I’ve blogged about previously.

Ideas is a standard application meaning it’s FREE with your Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions. New organizations have the feature activated automatically, but you may need to enable the feature manually if you were a Salesforce.com customer prior to product launch (Summer'08 Release). To enable it, click Setup -> Ideas -> Settings -> Enable Ideas. You may need to tweak the settings in various custom profiles, as well: the Ideas app must be marked Visible, Ideas tab settings may need to be marked “Default On”, and the Standard Object Permissions may need to be set appropriately (Read / Create for standard users, Edit / Delete for your “Idea Managers”).

Now that you have it enabled, what next?

Step One: Customize the App

Salesforce Ideas is pretty good “out of the box”. It has some nice built in features – but you will almost certainly need to customize it for your organization.

1.) Setup Categories: If you’re a small organization (like Anonymous, with 75 users), start with just ONE category: “Salesforce”. Every idea submitted by your user community is feature or customization request directed at you, the Salesforce.com Administrator. Later on, after you have healthy user adoption, you can expend to other categories ("New Product Ideas", "Company Ideas", etc.). Click Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Fields -> Categories.

2.) Setup Status: Similar to Cases and Opportunities, Ideas have a "Status". As Ideas move through the evaluation, planning and implementation cycle, their status should change. Users monitoring this idea pool will want to see those changes. Here are some suggested picklist values for Idea Status:

- Fresh Idea: Default for new ideas
- Under Review: Ideas that have been prioritized / put on a "project board"
- Coming Soon: Someone is actively working to get that idea implemented
- Now Available: Idea implemented!

To set the Status fields, click Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Fields -> Status.

3.) Set the Half-Life value of the ideas (Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Settings). Set this to a relatively high value (30 days) if you expect a low submission rate of ideas (less than 10-20 a month). The half-life value affects the score weighting, as ideas are promoted / demoted in the system.

4.) On that same setup screen, click "Enable Text-Formating, Images and Links". These will allow "savy" users to submit some colorful, clearly illustarted ideas, using pictures and hyperlinks.

5.) Make sure the Idea tab is visible on each application (Setup -> Create -> Apps -> Edit each app used in your organication). For instance, at my organization, Manufacturing runs a custom “Asset Tracker” application, Sales runs the standard Sales Force Automation (SFA) application, and Customer Support runs a custom case management application. I edited each of these apps and added the "Ideas" object to the Tabs associated with each application.

6.) Custom reports and dashboards are a great way to encourage and monitor user adoption. Salesforce Labs makes it easy with an Ideas Dashboard available on the AppExchange (click here to download),

7.) While you're on the AppExchange, you may also want to consider downloading the Ideas in Action custom app, as well. It’s a handy tool for tracking the projects and work associated with user-submitted ideas.

8.) Create email templates, workflow rules and/or apex triggers: Small organizations will want to create email templates and use workflow rules to automatically send the System Administrator (or other Idea Manager, if the process is managed by someone else) an email whenever a new idea is submitted. You may want to CC the originator of the Idea, so they know that their Idea has been submitted. Larger organizations may want to use something more pratical, like scheduled reports.

Step Two: Prime the Pump
Enter a half-dozen or more ideas as a way of "priming the pump". Don’t be sparse on these – include all the features that you turned up in step #1: rich-formatted text, pictures, and links. Your demonstrating, by way of example, the detail and clarity you want to see ideas submitted by your user community. Submit ideas that you that other users have mentioned to you in past conversations -- stuff that's already on your "to do" list.

Step Three: Inform and Train Your Users
Prepare a training presentation for your user group. You might include this Salesforce.com Ideas promo video from YouTube:

You should also check out the Ideas Learning Center for other Salesforce resources to include in your training.

Have a team meeting of all your Salesforce.com Users to announce the new application and train them on its use. If you can’t fit all your users in one room, schedule smaller department-size meetings. Bring bagels, cream cheese and fruit for morning meetings, pizza or finger sandwiches for afternoon meetings – that always gets attendance up!

After the first wave of training is done, send out a mass email to all users, including the training slides. Inform the user population that, going forward, all change requests and/or customizations MUST be submitted through the Ideas tab.

Step Four: Lead the Horse to Water
You’re still going to get users asking you for feature changes, customizations, etc., the way they’ve always done it in the past (email, hallway conversations, coming to your office, etc.). Acknowledge them, just as you’ve done, but also ask the requestor to submit their idea on the Ideas tab (“Lots of folks are vying for changes, and I’m using the Ideas tab as a way of keeping track of them. Adding your request to the Ideas tab will ensure that it gets worked on as soon as possible.”)

Step Five: Make Him Drink
You’ve laid down the law, now follow-through. Don’t work on any change requests from your user community UNLESS it’s documented as an Idea. At the very least, give your documented ideas higher priority and attention than non-documented ones.

Step Six: Keep Preaching from the Soapbox
Whenever an Idea is implemented, make a big deal of it! Send out a quarterly email / mass mail announcing all the new Idea(s) that have been implemented. Consider announcing "prizes" for the best idea (highest score value) each quarter. It doesn't have to be fancy -- a box of donuts or a team pizza party is pretty cheap for even the tightest department budgets. At the very least, make sure your Idea submitters get name recognition for their ideas. And, of course, every newsletter should also include a marketing pitch at the bottom: "Do you have an idea, suggestion, or feature that you want to see added to Salesforce.com? Don’t delay, add it to the Ideas tab today!"

Whenever you start working on an Idea, be sure to update its status. Users will be monitoring those status fields, to see which ideas are on the way -- and where there idea is in the "pecking order".

Consider implementing workflow rules that send email status updates back to the idea creator, whenever the status of their idea is changed. (“Thanks for your idea submission: XYZ. This idea has been updated to "Coming Soon!"). Frequent communication and feedback fosters strong user adoption.

Finally (this one's for Michelle), recognize that your role in all this is not just that of a "System Administrator". You're really a "cat herder". Herding cats is not easy. They're stubborn, proud, defiant ... and some cats (especially those you report to) have really sharp claws. But with constant coaxing, encouraging, prompting and maybe just a dash of catnip, you'll get them all moving in the same direction eventually.

Winter’09 – Features to Explore

2008-10-23T23:39:00.005-04:00

On Oct 16th, I started this thread on “Getting the Most from the Winter’09 Release”. In that first article (and the Oct 20th Article that followed), I described my “Best Monkey Practices” for deploying a new Salesforce Release:

1.) Start by reviewing the release notes, and carefully read about each feature
2.) Make three lists, and group each feature into one of these lists
--- Features Implemented / Turned Up Right Away
--- Features to Explore
--- Features I won’t Use
3.) Write a Newsletter for your Users, Announcing the Features you’ve implemented right away

That brings us to Release Management Best Practice tip #4 … tackling that list of “Features to Explore”. What do you do with all those features?

Start by reading each feature again. Identify the project or business need in which that feature will be useful. For instance, at the top of my “Features to Explore” list were several items related to Salesforce Mobil. This is a special Salesforce product offering that allows organizations to make their data accessible from mobil devices (iPhone, Blackbery, etc.). This was significant to me, because several users have talked about such a feature with me in various hallway conversations.

I went to the Ideas tab (which is where I send all Users who have really neat ideas of things they want added to our implementation of Salesforce.com) – but there were no ideas related to mobile access of Salesforce.com data. I thought back to all those hallway conversations, and how I had ended every one of them with a request: “That’s a neat idea – can you add it to the Ideas tab?” For some reason, users have all these great ideas in the hallways, but when it comes time to writing them down … they suddenly lack follow-through.

So I added the following Idea:

<SIDEBAR>I've blogged before about the Ideas app, which is free for all Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions. If you're not using Ideas, you should be! The concept is similar to the IdeaExchange, but for your own user community. We use the Idea tab for all internal change requests / customizations. Want a custom field added to an existing tabbed object? Submit an Idea! Want a custom report developed? That's an idea! Want a full-fledged custom app built -- good IDEA! I shorten a lot of hallway conversations by encouraging users to go to the Ideas tab, and submit their change request. </SIDEBAR>

So I posted the “Mobile CRM Project” idea, and then did the same for each bullet item on my “Features to Explore” list. In all, I ended up creating 12 new projects for my CRM Project Team to work on in the coming weeks. Those ideas are now “in the system”, where my CRM project team will have to pay attention to them. Each time we finish a project, we’ll go back to the wishing well (the Ideas tab) and look for the next project to work on. The actual process is a bit more formal, but that’s a topic for another blog.

The important thing is that you want to make sure you don’t forget about these new features. Put them on your own project board – be it the Idea tab, your white board, or a paper napkin. When you’re done with your current “projects”, come back to that list of ideas, and figure out which one you’re going to tackle next.

Announce New SFDC Features to Your Users with a Newsletter

2008-10-20T11:18:00.006-04:00

In our last article, we created three lists related to new features in the Winter'09 Release:

- Features to Be Implmented Right Away
- Features to Be Explored (at a later date)
- Features you don't plan to use at all.

Now that you've got your three lists, let's tackle the first one -- features to be implemented right away.

Review the Release Notes carefully; many features must be enabled before you can take advantage of them. Once enabled, they may change the "look and feel" of your application. Avoid the flood of questions from users asking who moved their cheese -- with a quarterly newsletter.

I create all my newsletters using Word, filling them with lots of pictures and text. Salesforce is a graphical interface, and your communications will have much greater impact if you include screenshots about the features you're describing. After the newsletter is done, I use the mass email feature in the Administrator Setup section to distribute it.

Writing a community newsletter isn't difficult. If you're stuck staring at a blank page, check out the free newsletter templates available from Microsoft Online. There are lots of clever ideas here. I downloaded several, but ended up only keeping the banner from one of them. The rest is just a one-column document, with lots of pictures included in the mix.

To include pictures in your Word Newsletter, try this:

(1) Navigate to a view in Salesforce.com that shows the screen or feature you want to talk about.

(2) Click the PRINT SCREEN button on your keyboard, to capture your screen image in memory.

(3) Open an image editing application. I use Paint because it's fast and easy, and we're not doing a lot of image manipulation for this exercise. To launch Paint, click Start --> Programs --> Accessories --> Paint).

(4) Press CTRL-V to paste the captured screenshot into the image editor.

(5) Use the toolbars to crop only the portion of the image that you want to focus your readers. If necessary, highlight the area, by drawing thick red borders around it (as I've done with many images on this blog).

(6) Once you have the image just the way you want it, save it as JPG format. Then import the image into your Word document. Right click on the imported image, and play with the border and text wrap settings, as needed.

I recommend that your quarterly newsletter be timed in conjunction with Salesforce.com releases. Inform your users about all the new features that have been made available to them. Include details about all the customizations (custom fields, objects, tabs, dashboards, reports, VisualForce pages, Apex Triggers, etc.) you've implemented since the last newsletter was published, as well.

The quarterly newsletter keeps users informed about changes and features that have been added to your instance of Salesforce.com. It also reminds your managers and executive stakeholders just how valuable you are to the organization. Save these newsletters in a folder archive -- they're handy to have when it comes time to write your annual self-performance appraisal!

Getting Everything You Can Out the Winter'09 Release

2008-10-16T16:55:00.004-04:00

"Why did the orange popsicle go away," the voice on the other side of the phone asked.

"Huh?" I confess, it takes awhile for my brain to process these types of questions.

"There's a coffee picture there now, or something. Hot Chocolate? In Salesforce --"

I'm surprised when I run into other Salesforce.com Administrators who don’t know about new features in the latest release – aren’t even aware that their system has been upgraded.

“It has?”

“Oh, sure! In fact, you’ve probably had six or more upgrades since you started your Salesforce.com subscription a couple years back.”

“Really? No way!”

Yes way.

It's a testament to the seamless service that SaaS companies offer. When you don’t have to worry about the hardware or software operating under the application, you tend to forget it’s there. You forget that someone out there IS worrying about the technology, and they are constantly improving on it. And yet, if you don’t pay attention to those new releases, you’re not getting as much out of the platform as you could be. I’ve found that many Salesforce.com System Administrators casually glance at the release notes, or don’t review them at all. Consequently, they don't take advantage of the more powerful (and free!) features that Salesforce.com rolls out to it's customers each release cycle.

In the wake of the Winter’09 release, I’m following up with various System Administrators I’ve worked with over the past few years, and asking them to do a Winter’09 Feature Audit. It works like this: I ask them to list all the features in the Winter’09 release (over 50 of them!), and group them into three categories: Features Implemented / Using Now, features that might be helpful to my business (need to explore), features I won’t use.

Do this with every release (including the past releases that you "casually glanced at"), and I promise you’re going to learn a thing or two. This process is going to enforce you to read the release notes carefully. You’ll understand the potential impact of every release feature on your organization, and you’ll soon start to see how you can get more from Salesforce.com than you have in the past.

One week after release, here’s my Winter’09 Feature Audit List:

FEATURES IMPLEMENTED / USING NOW
- Salesforce Idea Enhancements
- Ideas HTML editor
- Case Teams
- Storage Enhancements
- Edit “Case Comments” permissions
- “Transfer Cases” permission
- Notify Case Owner when Case Ownership Changes Setting
- Schedule and Email Reports
- Support for Tagging Dashboards
- Password Strength Checker
- Community Nickname Userfield

FEATURES TO EXPLORE
- Mobile Object Permissions
- Mobile View Criteria Enhancements
- Partner Portal Enhancements
- Email-to-Case Now Supports the CC and BCC Fields of Inbound Email
- Email-to-Case Preserves File Extension on Attachments
- Salesforce Call Center Supports the *, # and + Characters
- Click-and-Create Events
- Email to Salesforce Enhancements
- Account Lookup During Lead Conversion
- Choosing Lead Status Defaults During Lead Conversion
- Opportunity Dependant Fields and Custom Save Logic
- Visualforce Enhancements
- Visualforce Email Templates
- Apex Enhancments
- Force.com Web API Enhancements
- Force.com Development as a Service Enhancements
- Force.com Connect for Outlook: Streamlined Contact Associations
- Support for New Logical Operations
- Support for Self Relationships in Cross-Object Formulas
- Language Support
- Improved Component Management
- User License Enhancements for Developer Edition
- Support for Activities, Workflow, and Approval Processes on Junctor Objects
- Recall Actions for Approval Processes
- Case Comments Workflow
- Default values for Encrypted Custom Fields on User Records

FEATURES I WON’T USE
- Ideas Multi-select Categories Field
- HTML Messages for Customer Portal
- Salesforce Content Support for Google Docs
- Salesforce Mobile for iPhone
- Record Ownership Filter Enhancement for Activities
- Salesforce-to-Salesforce Enhancements
- Campaign Influence
- Budgeting and Planning Fields for Campaign Influence
- Mass Removal of Campaign Members from Campaigns
- Converting Existing Files to Google Docs
- Force.com Connect Offline: Custom Object Tabs
- Force.com Connect for Lotus Notes: Streamlined Contact Associations
- Images Supported in Dashboard Emails for Lotus Notes
- Custom Objects Managed Package Field Changes
- Custom Report Types Managed Package Changes
- Managed Folders and Letterhead Editable and Deleteable in Subscribers Organization
- Removing a Released Component from a Managed Package
- Field Management
- Protected Components
- SAML Start and Logout Pages

But wait, we're not done yet! I’ve got my list, have you made yours? Come back tomorrow with your Winter'09 / Organizational Feature Audit list, and we’ll discuss what to do with them.

Meet Anna, My Personal Trainer

2008-10-14T15:39:00.005-04:00

Ok, I'm going off topic to introduce you to my personal trainer, Anna. That's right, she's all pixels and polygons. Sadly, a lot of women have entered (and left) my life that way (Ahh, Lara Croft, how I miss thee!). But Anna is DIFFERENT. Different, because she totally kicks my ass!

It started a few weeks ago. I decided I would need another exercise routine for the coming winter months. I already jog 3-4 days a week, and I was looking for something to do on alternating days when I'm not jogging. I don't like driving to the health club, nor the pricey membership. I've always preferred my own private work-out room in the basement, but haven't had one since we moved into the new house.

Don't ask me why I was in a gaming shop looking for exercise routines, but I saw this Eye-Toy: Kinetic (click the link for a great review by Dave Warner; images are reproduced here with his gracious permission). The game box was in a category called "exergaming". Thehre were no cartoons on the cover, just some actors gyrating in strange contortions.

We have an Eye-Toy, so I'm familiar with it. It's a a USB camera that hooks up to your PlayStation gaming console. I've played endless rounds of other Eye-Toy games with my kids: Anti-Grav, Operation: Spy and Nicktoons Movin'. But as I eyed this toy (bad pun, sorry) on the discount rack, I was skeptical. The cute, bouncy brunette behind the counter said Kinetic was a GREAT exercise program. For $5, I figured I couldn't go wrong, so I grabbed the last copy.

I've been working out with the program for about two weeks now. I'm a lot more out of shape than I thought. How can that be? I run ... three days a week! Surely I can't be THAT out of shape. Wrong. Eye-Toy: Kinetic has found muscles I didn't even know I had.

Because I run, I use the Eye-Toy program to work on upper body and abdominals. It shames me that my animated pixel trainer can do more full plank push-ups and bicycle crunches than I can, and that she doesn't even break a sweat or get out of breath while doing it. And there are a number of cardio routines that exhaust me in a way that running never has.

Anna shouts out encouragement from behind the TV screen, "Come on, let's really push it for these last 30-seconds. Go, go, go, go!" She also chastises me when I miss a training session. "Well, where were you yesterday? Let's make up for it, I really want to see good performance today."

I'm down 6 lbs, which really wasn't a goal. Still, I won't complain about weight loss! I'm also very achy and sore in my arms and abdomen, proof that I'm working muscles that haven't been exercised in a long, long while.

The best thing about Eye-Toy is that I don't need to worry about getting attacked by vampires while doing it, but that's a topic for a different day.

Practicing Safe SaaS: Understanding the Identity Confirmation Feature

2008-10-13T16:08:00.005-04:00

In yesterday’s blog, I advocated User Education as your best and for all pratical purposes, your only real defense against Phishing. This article is written to help system administrators understand the security options available in Salesforce.com. In particular, we're going to focus on the Identity Confirmation feature.

In November 2007, Salesforce.com implemented a new feature called Identity Confirmation. This feature basically restricts what computers can access your data in Salesforce.com. The idea is that if a scammer somehow gains access to one of your employees usernames and passwords (through a phishing scam), they wouldn't be able to use that information from their own computer. The first time they tried to login, Salesforce.com would detect that they were not logging in from a trusted network location, and their computer was not authenticated.

Say again? In order to access your Salesforce.com instance, a computer must either reside on an “trusted” network, or the computer must have the security activation feature enabled.

What is a "Trusted" Network

Click Setup -> Security Controls -> Network Access. The listing shows all IP Address Ranges that are considered “safe”. Any computer that tries to login to your Salesforce.com instance from one of these IP Network Address ranges will not be challenged by the Identity Confirmation feature. In general, you’ll want to keep this list as narrow as possible. The most secure configuration would be an empty list -- delete EVERY IP Address range. That means that no IP Network is trusted, and every computer that accesses your instance of Salesforce.com must be individually authenticated. It’s more practical, however, to allow your corporate network, and perhaps those of your remote branch offices.

If you’re looking at the Network Access list for the first time, you might be surprised at the number of Trusted IP Ranges already in the list. I sure was! I had IP ranges in Belgium, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and the USA. Where did they all come from?

When the Identify Confirmation feature was enabled this past November, Salesforce.com initialized this trusted IP address list based on the login history of your users. If you have a lot of traveling sales folks, or corporate users accessing Salesforce.com from home, their login history made its way into this Network Access listing. Appropriately, Salesforce wanted to minimize the impact of the new Identity Confirmation feature on existing users, so it assumed that any location existing users had accessed the system from over the past several months were trusted IP networks.

Salesforce.com Administrators should review this list with their IT organization, identify which IP Address ranges are valid, and then gradually delete the rest. Before you delete any entries, take a screenshot or record all of the IP addresses. If you delete the wrong entries, you'll want to refer to that "backup" copy, so you can re-add the IP Addresses mask values correctly. Don’t delete the non-valid IP address ranges all at once, or you might be swamped with users seeing the unfamiliar identity confirmation login feature for the first time. Instead, gradually delete a few of the entries over time.

What Happens If a User Logs In from a Non-Trusted Network?
The first a user tries to login to Salesforce.com from outside the trusted network (perhaps they're on the road, logging in from a hotel, or logging in from their personal home computer), they will be prompted to "activate" (authenticate) that computer.

Click the "Send Activiation Link" button, and Salesforce.com sends an Activation Email. The email contains a link, which can either be clicked, or copy/pasted into a web browser. That computer is not "activated" (authenticated), and will be able to log in successfully.

It's not bullet proof, especially if you're using web-based mail services, like Gmail, Lycos, Yahoo, etc. In recent US political campaign news, we've seen how easy it is for some runny-nosed punk to gain unauthorized access to someone's web service email account. If the Phishing Scammer does not have also have access to your users email account, the Identity Confirmation feature in SFDC is an effective safeguard on your corporate data.

What Other Security Measures Can I Take to Safeguard My Corporate Data?

1.) Enforce strong Password policies. Click Setup -> Security Controls -> Password Policies. For the most part, the default settings are pretty good. I changed the 90-day password expiratin to a 60-day password expiration, to match our other system security profiles. I also set the lockout effective period to Forever -- users have to come knocking on my door (or rining up my phone) if they locked themselves out with 10 failed password attempts.

2.) Enforce strong Session security. Click Setup --> Security Controls --> Session Settings.

- Set your session time-out value, based on the content of your system data. If you have a lot of sensitive data (credit card numbers, user account / password information, etc.), select a shorter time-out period.
- Always lock sessions to the IP Address from which they originate. This will protect your user community from a more sophisticated type of hacking known as browser hijacking.
- Always require secure connection (HTTPS)
- Disable caching and autocomplete on the login page. Most browsers can store user name and passwords. After a user logs in once, the browser prompts if they would like to auto login on subsequent attempts. Very useful, if you forget your password a lot. Imagine one of your users absent-mindledly taking advantage of this feature -- while logging in from the Internet Cafe. Now any one who accesses that same terminal can come along and login to your Salesforce.com instance, without even knowing anyone's password! Disabling caching and autocomplete prevents this problem.

3.) Contact Salesforce.com and request a FREE security briefing. Salesforce will do a tailored approach, specific to your own instance of Salesforce.com, and the way in which you and your users work every day. Their security experts will review your implementation, and recommend a set of security measures to deploy. To get more infomraiton, contact security@salesforce.com.

There are many other options that you can implement, such as restricting login to certain IP ranges (for specific profiles), two-factor authentication (such as secure IT tokens), and third party solutions, like the Barracuda Spam Firewall. Taking advantage of the free security briefing from Salesforce.com will help you identify the best solution for your specific business need.

Educate Your Users About Phishing

2008-10-07T14:49:00.000-04:00

Phishing methods are becoming more and more sophisticated. The only thing a scammer needs to start a phishing campaign is an email address of your user community, and those aren’t very hard to guess. Most companies use a standard naming convention for their email addresses: name@company.com. Once a scammer figures out what syntax you’re using for the name field (jseabury@company.com, jp.seabury@company.com, jp_seabury@company.com, etc), they can get employee name information, and start phishing your employees directly.

Bah … how are they going to get the names of my employees? Social networking sites make it easy. A scammer can create a bogus LinkedIn profile, and indicate that they worked at a particular company. They can immediately get a list of all the other employees of that company, including their first name and last name. Wham – now they’ve got a phishing list.

As a System Administrator, your best defense against phishing attacks starts with education. If you don’t have a periodic newsletter, company blog, or Security Awareness training program, start one. Get in front of your users and educate them about phishing. Show samples of fraudulent email and phishing attempts. Demonstrate how easy it is to be lured to a false website. Instruct them to verify the browser address of the site they are logging into: https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp or https://login.salesforce.com. Show samples of bad URL addresses, like http://salsforce.com and http://go-salesforce.com. The differences can be very subtle, and it’s easy to be fooled by them.

Caution your team to never fill out personal information in an embedded HTML form of an email. Train users to hover their mouse over links in an HTML email, and read the URL address embedded beneath the link before clicking on it. The link can look perfectly legitimate, but the embedded URL might navigate to a non-Salesforce.com website:

Instruct your team about malicious attachments, like key loggers, viruses and other malware. Keep your anti-virus signatures up to date, but don’t trust them to be your only defense.

Renew these training programs every couple of months, and include samples of phishing attacks that have been seen at your company.

Finally, if users think they have been targeted by a phishing attempt, train them to log out of their computer, power it completely off, and contact their System Administrator immediately. Compromised computers should be turned over to IT, so they can be checked and cleared of malware. System Administrators should immediately reset the password of the affected user, to prevent unauthorized access.

After educating your users about phishing and malware, your next defense is setting up tighter security within Salesforce.com – and that’s a topic for tomorrow.

Phishing 101: Know Thy Enemy

2008-10-06T11:41:00.004-04:00

In my work, I have the opportunity to speak with a good number of Salesforce.com Administrators. I’m often surprised at how many of these folks don’t come from IT or computer-related backgrounds. They displayed an aptitude and willingness to embrace the new technology, and so their senior managers put them in charge of system administration. Many Salesforce.com Users (and quite a fair number of administrators) don’t understand the malicious phishing methods that are out there today. So that’s the topic of this article, phishing: what it is and how it works. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about ways you can protect your users (and your sensitive company data) from phishing attempts.

What is Phishing? Phishing is the process by which scam artists try to acquire user names, passwords, and other sensitive data, by masquerading as a trustworthy source in an electronic communication. Phishing attempts generally start as an eMail or Instant Message, and ask the user to download an attachment. The attachment is malware, very often a key logger, which captures all username / password information that a user types into their computer. The malware packages all these user name / password entries, and sends them back to the scammer, without the victim being aware anything has happened.

Another popular method creates an email that looks authentic, but contains links which send the reader to a fake website (for example, a website that looks like a Salesforce.com login screen). The unsuspecting user logs in, gets an error message that their password was incorrect, and is asked to try their password again. Meanwhile, under the web page, their username / password entries have been recorded, and the application has redirected their browser to the real Salesforce.com page. The subsequent login attempt works, and the user isn’t aware that they’ve just given their login information to phishing scam.

It’s Easy. It sounds complex, but it is incredibly easy to start a malicious phishing campaign, particularly the latter method which sends an unsuspecting user to a fake website. It takes a minimal amount of HTML experience to mirror the look and feel of a website login page. Want to see how easy? Navigate to the standard Salesforce.com login screen: https://login.salesforce.com. Right click your mouse, and then click “View Source” or “View Page Source” (depending on your browser's menu options). You’re now looking at the source code for the page loaded in your browser. Copy and save that HTML to a local directory on your harddrive, and give the file a ".html” extension. Now run that HTML page, by double clicking on it.

It’s not pretty, but finishing it off is very simple – just download a few images from the login page, do a little TABLE and FONT formatting in the HTML page, and find a website to host it on. Poof! You’ve got your own Salesforce.com login screen. It took me 15 minutes to make this identical mock-up of a Salesforce.com login screen ... would your users know the difference between this fake version and the real thing?The only visible difference between the fake website and the real website is the URL, but how many of your users pay attention to that?

Next, the scammer needs to modify the HTML code so that any entries in the username / password fields are saved to a local database, and then redirect the user to the real SFDC login screen, and your almost ready for business. Write an email that prompts users to login to Salesforce.com and look at something (a custom report, a dashboard, or anything else) by including a link to that object – only the link provided will take the viewer to your fake website.

Known Phishing Attacks on SFDC Users. Think this type of stuff only happens in the movies? Think again. Salesforce.com publishes a list of known phishing attacks that have been targeted toward their customers here: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/security/.

Phishing scams are on the rise. I’ve intercepted an average of 3 phishing scams per employee this year. Many employees caught on to the fact that these were scam emails (when will the phishers learn to use proper English?), but some employees went ahead and downloaded and/or installed the attached malware, or clicked through to fake websites that asked for their private information.

As administrators, we need to be vigilent about the security of our company data. Tomorrow, we'll look at methods you can use to safeguard your data and your users.