Monday, September 13, 2010

Salesforce Updates - Sept 10, 2010

#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…


Sunday, September 12, 2010

How Do You Follow?

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?