Perspectives on Salesforce.com

We just implemented improved geocoding for the UK in Arrowpointe Maps. If you were getting some suspect results when plotting certain UK addresses, those issues should be resolved now.

We are not aware of inaccuracies for any other countries, but to be thorough, we’ll be performing analysis to ensure we get the best possible geocoding results for every country. If you are using Arrowpointe Maps and find that some countries geocode better than others, please let us know.

Version 1.0.6 of Arrowpointe Maps was just released. You can read about all the improvements on the Change History page. The changes that most impact user experience and the application’s capabilities are:

• Campaign Member mapping is now supported. Your subscriptions have been updated to include a new Campaign Member Map Object and Map Page. The Map Page is in Admin Only status so that it not visible to your end users. Once you test it and like it, change the status to Active to deploy it.
• Customers are now allowed to use their own latitude and longitude values rather than having MapQuest determine the coordinates. To setup your system to use this functionality, edit your Map Objects to specify a field that holds your Latitude and Longitude values.

  When a map is processed, it will look to see if the Latitude and Longitude values are present on the record. If so, those values will be used to plot the record on the map. If not, the address will be geocoded by MapQuest.

• Added new options for Date and Date-Time Filter Fields:
  • This Quarter
  • Last Quarter
  • Next Quarter
  • This Year
  • LastYear
  • Next Year
  • In The Past
• Added the ability for users to show or hide the map page query form in order to gain more real estate on the page and use a larger map.
• Fixed an issue where the Info Window for points on the map would go transparent.
• Other Usability, Performance & Security Enhancements

NOTE: If you are using Arrowpointe Maps and are confused by these posts about new versions, just know that these updates are happening automatically for you. You do not need to re-download the AppExchange application. Changes to the AppExchange package will be few and far between and those will be communicated very explicitly.

About Arrowpointe Maps

Arrowpointe Maps is an on-demand mapping platform that facilitates a conversation between Salesforce.com & MapQuest allowing for easy deployment of mapping capabilities in your organization and providing end-users a simple means for mapping their data. Arrowpointe Maps is configurable and can be tailored to your organization, so that your users can work with their information in a meaningful way.

The official location for information on Arrowpointe Maps is its product page at http://www.arrowpointe.com/maps. There, you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions, screencasts and links to its AppExchange page.

As Mark points out, the Winter ’08 Release Notes are available.

One of the really nice additions to the release notes is a section in the beginning called Summary of Winter ’08 Features and Impact on Salesforce Users. It is a table with a row for every major new feature and tells you, at a glance, which ones have immediate user impact after upgrading. This is critical for admins so they can communicate things prior to the upgrade. For example, in the Winter ’06 Release, the UI changed for all customers right after the upgrade, which necessitated communication beforehand. If you are an admin, you should review that section to see if you need to do anything prior to the upgrade.

Some of the more exciting features (in my opinion) are:

• Campaign Sharing: Finally, you can treat Campaigns like you do any other object and use sharing rules to drive security. This will provide major benefit to sales people because you can now open up Campaigns for them to use as a List Management feature. It will also, obviously, provide marketing benefit as they will be able to distribute the management of Campaigns throughout the Marketing organization without worrying so much about someone having too much authority.
• Group Tasks:
  

  “You can create a task so that up to 100 users are each assigned an independent copy of the task.”

  This takes the Create Tasks for Entire Team AppExchange app and puts the functionality native into Salesforce with a much better user flow.

  “To build a list of users you want to assign to a newly-created task, open the assignee lookup on the New Task page and click the Multiple Users tab in the lookup dialog.”

• Field History Tracking Available on Accounts and Contacts
• Product Search Enhancements: This will make the Add Product screen on Opportunities configurable in a number of ways.
• Printable List Views: This will allow you to nicely print your Salesforce views. This will be handy for people that don’t want to deal with using a report, exporting to Excel and then tweaking the “Printable View” of a report in Excel.
• Floating Report Headers: The ever-popular idea is getting implemented.
• Inline Editing: Edit a record without refreshing to an Edit page! This should be a major productivity enhancement and save lots of click/wait time. Once it’s out, I am certain people will be clamoring for it in related lists.
• Tagging: Tags are private for every user, allowing a user to categorize (“tag”) records as they please. When clients of mine have migrated from ACT!, they always missed the Group feature there. Tags will allow user to do this in Salesforce. For this release, the tags are private to the user. I imagine this will change in the future with functionality to allow teams to collaborate through the use of tags. Tagging will probably not have tremendous take up from the masses, but savvy users will pick it up and usage will grow over time.
• Apex Code for Enterprise Edition: It’s an additional fee, but at least it’s an option. It speaks to Salesforce’s confidence in its scalability.
• Many API improvements. One of particular interest to me is:
  

  Developers of AppExchange packages can specify whether or not to restrict the API access of components in the package for greater security. Installers of AppExchange packages can view the API access given to components of a package they are installing, and after installation can modify that access.

  This means that you could download the Arrowpointe Maps package and restrict it so that it only has read access to the objects you want it to. You can tighten up the security on all your installed apps. Even if the app you download already does this, the end customer has the ability to restrict it further.

• Related Object Fields in Formulas: You can now reference “joined” fields in some formula areas such as Workflow Rules, Validation Rules and Escalation Rules. For example, you will be able to have an Opportunity Workflow that fires when an Opportunity is Won and the Account Type = ‘Prospect’.

  With this release, you cannot use joined fields in a formula field on an object. For example, you cannot create an Opportunity field that shows the Account’s Rating on an Opportunity record. The closest thing to being able to do this is using the hover feature, but the hover feature is limited to detail pages and the recent items list..

All in all, a pretty nice release. I am looking forward to it. Feel free to comment with your thoughts.

As a Salesforce.com Partner, I am able to take advantage of a new offering from Salesforce for Partners, Syndicated Content. This allows partners to add a page to their website that pulls in content from Salesforce.com and allows website visitors to learn about Salesforce.com products without leaving the partner’s site. There are also links that allow visitors to start a Salesforce.com trial and the partner gets a referral from it.

The cool thing about it is that it’s implemented with about 20 lines of code and the code is provided, so it’s a simple copy/paste action. Arrowpointe’s page is located at http://www.arrowpointe.com/salesforce.

I think it’s a nice offering from Salesforce on several fronts:

• It’s optional
• Partners have incentive to use it to get referral fees via trials that are started that eventually lead to license deals for Salesforce
• It adds a lot of very professional content to a partner’s website
• The content’s design is clean and does not dominate my website’s design. Although, it would be nice if I were able to modify the CSS to do things like change the font size to match my website font and some other things. Maybe I can, but I need to investigate it. It’ll be a hack if I do it. No information on this was provided to me.
• A website visitor does not need to leave arrowpointe.com to read the content
• As a partner, I don’t need to keep this content up to date. It’s all pulled from a content server controlled by Salesforce. This ensures the content on my site doesn’t grow stale.

I don’t know how successful it will be for Arrowpointe specifically, but it’s a nice offering that does not seem to discriminate between large and small partners.

The ADN Sessions from Dreamforce are online now. The videos show what the session attendees saw on the screen (presentations and demos) rather than just showing a speaker talk. This will make watching them online much more meaningful than how we had to do it after last year’s Dreamforce (where we watched the presenter talk, but couldn’t see the screen).

I presented in the PHP Session which is located here. I presented on Web to Lead Spam Filtering. The table of contents is a little messed up on the video. My part starts toward the end of the PHP Overview section.