Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Evernote is a very cool and useful application for taking notes, saving web clippings and archiving images that represent notes (sometimes its faster to just take a picture).  One really great thing about it is that it does OCR on you content (event the text in your images!) and makes it all searchable.  I use it all the time and love it.  It can be a bit of a novelty, but if you decide to really use it, you can get a lot of utility out of it.

What if you could save your Notes right into Salesforce?  You can (only as Documents for now)!  Coming soon is integration with standard and custom objects, which would let you do things like take a picture of a business card and import it into an Account/Contact combo.  Maybe take a picture of a whitboard of notes and save it as an Activity.

Steve Buikhuizen has created the Note Wizard application.  It’s definitely worth looking into.  It’s an integration with Salesforce and Evernote all running on Amazon EC2 and S3!

• Main page for the project
• Videos that explain a lot
• AppExchange listing (a private listing for now. This is linked to on the About page of the main site.)

Good work, Steve!

The demandblog has been posting some AppExchange application reviews recently.  They did a good one for ActevaRSVP, who has a pretty impressive product.  See their review at http://demandbase.typepad.com/demand/2008/10/dreamforce-prev.html.

Note: ActevaRSVP is a current advertiser on this blog.

Lifehacker (one of my favorite blogs) has a post today about YubNub. If you don’t know what YubNub is, they bill themselves as

A (social) command line for the web

Basically, it lets you use their site as a way to run commands on other sites. To use it, you start with the command and then follow it with the context. For example, you could type “g arrowpointe” to search Google for “Arrowpointe”, “weather 60601″ to get the weather in Chicago. There are literally 1000s of options and it’s not all about searching. It is a way to avoid going to every individual site to do things. It’s pretty interesting once you start messing around with it. I can’t say I’ll be using it every day, but I could see how one could master it and get quite a bit more productive. I added the Firefox Search Plugin for it to start using it and see what I think.

A cool feature to it is that anyone can create new commands. To do so, you go here, give it a name and then put in the URL the command should use with placeholders to drop in the context of your command. To try it out, I created the command apex that searches the AppExchange.

To use it, go to YubNub (or use your Firefox YubNub search engine) and type “apex WhatToSearchFor” (e.g. “apex arrowpointe” will search the AppExchange for Arrowpointe’s applications). I will be using this one. It’s one less step to going to the AppExchange site first and then searching.

Publisher: Salesforce Labs
Product: Auto-Complete Lookups
AppExchange Page

Salesforce Labs has another cool application out on AppExchange. This is a great add-on for usability. It is called Auto-Complete Lookups and it affects Account, Contact and User lookups right now, but more are planned.

Once you install it, you need to visit it’s web tab to get started. From that web tab you will be instructed on how to set it up. In short, what you do is:

• Generate JavaScript on the Web Tab. Copy it to your clip board
• Paste the JavaScript into the Messages & Alerts section of the homepage. If you have other text in there for your users, just paste the code at the bottom.
• On the Setup | Customize | User Interface screen, set the “Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages” to true.
• Start using it

After you have completed your third letter, the lookup starts.



It uses the AJAX toolkit to perform the lookup. In my org, the performance was pretty good. I have no idea how it will perform with a large dataset.

This is a great add-on that is very easy to implement and could be of great value to end users. I recommend it. It will get 5 stars as soon as it supports all objects.

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/.