Perspectives on Salesforce.com

This post actually has nothing to do with Salesforce.com, but I thought it might be of interest…

I have recently become intrigued by Google Calendar. It’s ease of use is great and it’s ability to subscribe to published iCal calendars is very cool. The catch is that I can only access it from a browser. Catch #2 is that I use Outlook’s calendar extensively. Outlook is great, but subscribing to other calendars using iCal is not there. Over the past month, I’ve needed to subscribe to about 5 calendars. I did this in Google Calendar, but then I had to keep visiting that site in order to see the calendars. I needed another solution.

Enter Remote Calendars. It’s an open source add-in to Outlook 2003 that allows you to subscribe to iCal calendars. It also has functionality that lets you sync your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. I wasn’t able to get the sync working yet (I actually deleted my entire calendar in the process. Thanks for backups!), but I am subscribing to a bunch of calendars now. I’ll try the sync later.

Remote Calendars homepage
Remote Calendars Sourceforge Project

I would assume Outlook 2007 will have this built in (anyone know?). For now, this works just fine.

I came across a new blog by Oliver Muthig in Germany called Ruby on Sforce. His most recent post is a getting started example for displaying accounts. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer working with Salesforce.com, you might want to keep tabs on this blog.

http://rubyonsforce.blogspot.com/   

The Sforce blog just posted about a tool called File Watcher, created by engineer Steve Buikhuizen of Salesforce.

Per the blog post:

When working with Salesforce data, there are many times when you need to edit records using an editor on your PC. You can do this by copying the data to a local file and then saving back to Salesforce when you’re finished. A good example of this is when you are configuring the PRM portal with your own branding and making little changes to the header, footer, etc.

But what if you need to save back to Salesforce repetitively? In this case, the cut/paste process can take up a lot of time. Now there is a better way. Use a “watcher”… These tools allow you to edit fields, documents and s-controls using any editor. When you save locally, the watcher will save the file back to Salesforce. Simple.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I will soon. Check it out at http://www.buikhuizen.com/watcher/. There is a separate watcher for Fields, Files (Documents) and S-Controls (if you use the Eclipse plug-in, then you don’t need it for S-controls)

Per Steve’s site,

These tools are open source projects, not supported by Salesforce.com.

I will be at Dreamforce this year (my first one). I am really looking forward to it. I will be participating in the Building an Effective Community Strategy with On-Demand and Salesforce panel on Wednesday, October 11 @ 10:15am, which is part of the Marketing Executives track. On the panel with me are:

• Mark Mangano (salesforcewatch.com)
• Joe Kleinschmidt (Leverage Software)
• Erica Kuhl (Salesforce)
• Jamie Grenney (Salesforce)

Echoing what Charlie Wood and Mark Mangano already wrote, here’s where you can keep up to date on what’s happening during Dreamforce:

• Perspectives on Salesforce.com: I will be blogging the event on this site and posting to the Dreamforce 2006 category.
• Salesforcewatch.com: Mark Mangano will be tagging the posts on Salesforcewatch.com with dreamforce2006
• Charlie Wood of Spanning Partners: Charlie’s tagging the posts on his Moonwatcher blog with Dreamforce 2006
• gokubi.com: Steve Andersen will be blogging at gokubi.com in his CRM category.
• del.icio.us: Posts from the above blogs and others people find should be added to del.icio.us with the tag “dreamforce2006“. This will be the best way to get a consolidated list of posts related to Dreamforce.
• Flickr: There’s a Dreamforce 2006 group. If you will be at the event taking pictures, please use Flickr and add them to the group. Also, tag them with “dreamforce2006”.
• Connect On Demand: There is a Dreamforce 2006 group on Connect on Demand.

If there are other people blogging the event, please comment here and let us know about it.

In case you didn’t read all the way to the end of the product review I just wrote…

I will be attending Dreamforce this year. If you will be too, submit your contact information to me so we can get in touch during the event. I will be sure to email you my contact information before the event and, hopefully, we can meet each other at Dreamforce.

https://secure.formassembly.com/forms/24948

I built the contact information form using the Form Assembly. Read the review I wrote of the Form Assembly here.