Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Company: Upside Outcomes Ltd (website)
Product: Developers’ Sidekick for Salesforce.com
Product Page
On AppExchange

Developers’ Sidekick for Salesforce.com is a nice little item to have in your quiver. It’s a free application for download (my license defaulted to 1 year of activation) that provides you a quick look at your Salesforce objects, references to those objects and, for picklist fields, available values. Per the website:

Developers’ Sidekick for salesforce.com is a free client application that displays objects and their fields, their properties and parameters, including pick-list values. Developers’ Sidekick provides a handy instant reference for people developing custom apps or designing reports.

Upside Outcomes Ltd, the maker of this tool, has other Salesforce.com related tools, most of which are in development. I have not had a chance to check them out yet.

In order to use the application, you need to complete a contact information form with, at a minimum, an accurate email address. A serial number will be emailed to you to enter into the application for activation.

Once you enter your Salesforce.com login credentials, the application imports all of the information about your environment. This makes the navigation of the app very fast since all of the data is cached. I didn’t test it too much, but I assume you’ll need to logout and login again in order to refresh the schema.

The Schema Browser (image below) provides you a quick look at an object. As you can see, I have selected the Account object. Within the “Object” frame, I can see other objects that related to the Account object and the properties of the Account object. Within the “Attribute” frame, I can see all of the fields related to my selected object. Once I select a field, I can see other information such as the object it references (for lookup fields), picklist values (for picklist fields) and the properties of the attribute.

The Developer’s Helper screen puts field information into a text box for easy cutting and pasting into your code. Each object is listed along the left. Once selected, all of the fields are listed. You can then “dress the text” to have the app quickly setup the fields so you can cut and paste the text for various purposes.

This app seems pretty handy. You can actually get most of the same information from sForce Explorer with the addition of things like an SOQL tester and syntax helper. Also, sForceHerder provides another type of look at this same information. Sidekick just has a different UI and does a few things differently. I recommend having all 3 in your quiver and using the one that works best for you as you need it. The installs are all pretty light.

One thing I don’t know is what information, if any, is being sent to the vendor’s servers. I assume they are only collecting your contact information when you sign up and then associate the serial number from your registration to your record. Beyond that, it’s between you and the Salesforce.com API.

This, and their other tools, will eventually be listed on the App Exchange.

As is being proven by the hundreds of available downloads on the App Exchange, many innovative mashups and the stats about API usage, Salesforce.com is (becoming) equal parts platform and CRM application.

However, their licensing model is CRM application first and platform second. Today, you cannot purchase Salesforce.com licenses to utilize just the platform. Is this coming? What would it include? In my mind, it should include:

• Very Important
• Full access to the user & security components (users, profiles, public groups, field-level security, secure authentication, password generation, etc.)
• Full access to Custom Objects, Custom Tabs, Custom Applications, S-Controls and Get/Share with the App Exchange
• Sharing Rules (role hierarchy, including functionality to setup sharing rules for custom objects)
• API Access
• Reports
• Ability to brand all system communication (welcome emails, notifications, etc.)
• Somewhat Important
• Activity Management
• Notes & Attachments
• Documents
• Workflow
• Email Templates
• Sforce Data Loader
• Dashboards

The ability to buy this kind of license should be self-service with no need to work through a sales rep. I can envision going to the Salesforce site to sign up for a Platform Edition org (a unique instance of the application), input my information (contact info, billing information, etc.) and I am in. The cost model could be based on user logins and volume (API calls or storage). Perhaps there are cost tiers with maximum thresholds on # of users and/or volume before you auto-move to the next tier. This would make it easier to manage and predict cost. Billing would take place automatically at the end of each month against a credit card or other payment service like Paypal.

If something to this effect is done, it opens Salesforce up to a whole new market. Gone is the limitation of having a CRM license to take advantage of the platform.

I would suspect that something like this is on its way, but I have no evidence to support this. Does anyone know anything about this?

User Adoption is a key success criterion for any Salesforce.com implementation. The metrics by which to measure adoption vary from project to project. My projects typically include some kind of Adoption Dashboard that is used to allow the admins and executives to get an overview of the activity taking place within the system. This is often as simple as measuring who is creating what records, what types of data is being created from a macro-system viewpoint and measuring this activity over a period of time.

I keep a few baseline Dashboards on my App Exchange account to use as a starting point on my projects. I would like to share one of them now and have made it available on App Exchange for anyone to download into their environment. I am planning on submitting this dashboard configuration to be public in the App Exchange directory, but I’d like some feedback on it first. You can get the dashboard by clicking the image below.

The dashboard contains a series of components that look at the data activity over the past 60 days (Leads Created, Accounts Created, Cases Closed, etc). It also contains 2 user lists: one for the number of logins per user over the past 7 days and another for the users that have not logged in over the past 7 days.

The dashboard should work within any environment as it only references standard Salesforce objects & fields. The Dashboard and its corresponding reports both go into folders called “User Adoption Dashboard from AppExchange”. The folders will be publicly accessible, by default. The Dashboard will be setup to run under the user that downloaded the app exchange package.

I am interested in your feedback on this. Please leave comments on your use of adoption dashboards/reports, reaction to the dashboard I created, ideas for other metrics to track in a dashboard like this, etc.

I have had a chance to check out ConnectOnDemand (thanks to Mark for inviting me). It is a really nice idea and I appreciate Salesforce’s efforts in putting this together. As a consultant looking to gain exposure to a wider audience, I like the idea of having ConnectOnDemand as a tool to communicate with Salesforce customers, prospects and developers.

I cannot help but think of LinkedIn when I use ConnectOnDemand and there are a number of things that I really wish could be in this system that are in systems like LinkedIn and other similar tools. I am hoping that only a fraction of the functionality is exposed. Right now, you can do some searching, but there is no real way to connect with someone. I am assuming this is because the system is in beta right now and being deployed.

Below is a list of recommended improvements that spring to mind.

• Provide the ability to search by first and last name. I have no idea whether people I know are signed up.
• Ability to see first name, last name and company in the search results.
• Ability to add a person as a connection. I envision this being a request that can be made through the site. That person would receive an email with the request and could approve the request via a link in the email. Upon approval, you each would see each other in a “My People” list. You should be able to see the contact information of your connections.
• Ability to subscribe to the discussion groups and topics via RSS. Is this forum replacing the existing forums? If so, then I have a lot more recommendations since it doesn’t seem as robust as the current forums.
• Ability to create a custom group. For example, I might want to create one called “Independent consultants on the West Coast” and allow people to request joining the group. Like a Yahoo! Group of sorts. Within a group, you should be able to see members, connect directly with them and have discussion groups.

What are your suggestions?

I came upon a new site in my Salesforce.com RSS search. Does anyone know what this site is all about? It says it’s sponsored by Salesforce.com and is a networking site related to the Success On Demand events going on now. Is it like a LinkedIn for Salesforce.com users?

http://connectondemand.leveragesoftware.com/