Perspectives on Salesforce.com

In the feed I use to track new AppExchange applications that get published, I saw an interesting one today from Salesforce Labs called the Scripting Toolkit.

It only installs 1 web tab and the tab points to http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/ and sends parameters such as your Org ID, Session ID and User ID over to the page. After downloading it, I was a little suspect of the URL, so I went directly to http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/ and was able to get what I needed.

Basically, the scripting toolkit is a “JavaScript Ajax wrapper around the API”. It only runs on Windows. It is very much like the AJAX toolkit except it also allows you to host your own JS files and run them via a command line rather than using a browser. In other words, you could use it to schedule things or just run JS files (AJAX Toolkit) from your desktop. There are a number of good examples in the documentation. It’s yet another useful way to use the API.

I would assume accessing it via the web tab in the AppExchange package is fine, but you can also get what you need directly from http://www.interclasse.com/toolkit/.

The new Apex Explorer (formerly known as sforce Explorer) has been released. You can download it from the ADN Wiki.

The Form Assembly, which I reviewed back in September, is now available on the AppExchange. The service is largely the same as when I last reviewed it, but additional functionality is in the works.

The Form Assembly allows you to easily create web forms and collect responses. You build the web forms on their site. To deploy, you have the choice of having your form hosted on formassembly.com or downloading the code needed to run the form on your own site. They have an integration with Salesforce.com to auto-generate web-to-lead forms.

Check it out on AppExchange.

The Salesforce Analytics Blog has a good post on passing report criteria via the URL.

I posted about this a while ago, but their solution shows how you can pass field name, comparison operator and value via the URL. Mine only shows how to pass the value over, which required the report to already be setup with the criteria lines waiting for the value. This new solution allows a single report to exist with no criteria lines whereby you pass over those criteria lines via the URL. Pretty slick!

Part 3 of the the O’Reilly Network’s 3-part series about Salesforce.com was posted today. It’s called Packaging for Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

I updated my original post with the a link to part 3. You can get to all of them from there.