The only thing I can think of is the way the 2 browsers handle CSS and markup. You might want to add some HTML in there and style is appropriately to force everything to be in the right place.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp is a good reference.

The strange thing is that using Firefox the input name and number show up on the bottom as expected, but in I.E 7.0 it renders the two added controls at the top, even though the code is at the bottom.

Do you know why?

Thanks for this “spiffy” tool, it is great!!!

Those are good suggestions. It will be hard for me to get around to them, though. I will add the Sidebar Summary to the Arrowpointe Open Source repository and others can help improve it. Want to help?

Thank you for the fast reply and the suggestions. I have gone and done what you have suggested in Idea 1 and it is working well, eventhough the load time on our EMEA hosted SF homepage is much slower than without the Sidebar. This will suffice while I work on another more complete solution.

Idea 3 sounds good but from what I understand with the new security settings and with the SF Message and Alerts hack to have the Home page referesh every 10 mins, etc. . . that cookies have been turned off and are not available as before.

Two thoughts . . .

1. Maybe your code should be based on an function that looks at the time of day and then refreshes the data. A bit more complex but doable.

2. Maybe instead of using OnLoad maybe a DOM Event that would query and pull the data before the page finishes loading.

Thanks,

Paul

I have experienced a similar problem. A few options. I recommend trying them in this order too, as it is in order of difficulty:

• You can make it so custom sidebar components only appear on the Homepage. Go to Setup | Customize | User Interface and UNCHECK the “Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages” option. This is what I do for the very reason of performance. The downside of this is that you might have other components you want always available. I also minimize the queries to essentials. I currently have 4 on mine (unread leads, not contacted leads, opptys in next 30 days and past due opptys).
• You’ll need to modify the code a bit and have it display as a wide Homepage Component. You can see this done here. This will not require too much re-coding. You’ll just need to have the results go into a table. I could try to help, but you may as well comment on that other post and ask Matt for help.
• You could re-code the component to use Cookies somehow and store the result. If you do this, just make the cookie expire in however many minutes you want. If the cookie is there, use it. If not, requery the data. This will require the most coding on your part.

Let me know what you think about these and what comes of it.

First off fantastic blog and fantastic explanations and contect. I have implemented the Sidebar Summary and have received rave review from all my users and management. We have been running it for 3 days and I have been customizing the summary options (I´ll posts those shortly) that made it very effective for our Sales team. There is just one problem that I would love some help with . . . the OnLoad function that causes the script to run each time a new page is loaded is really slowing down user´s experience. It there any way to set it so that it loads fresh data say every 30 page loads, or 15 minutes, etc . . .?

Would that be something that I would code in the scontrol script or should I control it in the Home Html component?

Right I have turned it off for my users so that they can move through SF as fast as possible. But if I can get it too update only every 15 mins it will be great. Look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks again,

Paul