Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Foodservice Rewards is using my Google Maps mashup to allow people to see which distributors participate in their program.

They announced it in a seminar last week to their manufacturers and received very positive feedback. Here is their blog post announcing it.

Go see the functionality on their site.

For more information on this functionality, please visit the product page on arrowpointe.com

MapQuest recently released a mapping application on AppExchange. This is a free application that lets you map an Account or Contact (like you would using the default link to Yahoo! Maps), but adds a cool new feature on the landing page that allows you to find nearby Accounts and Contacts. Pretty slick. Chris Kramer has a good write up on it here.

This obviously has some overlap with the mapping work I do with Salesforce.com and Google Maps and it also attacks it in a different way.

I can think of many possible approaches towards mapping data and many different user experiences Salesforce.com users would enjoy. How do you choose one?

What do you think? What would you like to see in an application that maps Salesforce.com data? How would you design it?

The Info Center is now listed on AppExchange.

Feel free to leave me a review on the listing.

As I have mentioned in previous posts

The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise.

Why not have a place where you can publish the answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)? You could do this on your company intranet or in a document, but why not use Salesforce.com and allow the business the ability to manage the content themselves? Enter the Info Center.

If you are a developer, the Info Center would be a good reference for s-Control development using the AJAX toolkit. The reason I went and created this application in the first place was to teach myself how to develop s-Controls using the AJAX toolkit. I needed a purpose otherwise I’d never really learn it, so I came up with the Info Center.

Next up, APEX code! 🙂

As discussed in a previous post, I created a new AppExchange application called the Info Center. Thank you to everyone that provided feedback to me. I have incorporated most, if not all, of it.

The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise.

Why not have a place where you can publish the answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)? You could do this on your company intranet or in a document, but why not use Salesforce.com and allow the business the ability to manage the content themselves? Enter the Info Center.

The Info Center is now in beta and is available for you on the AppExchange. It is not publicly listed on the AppExchange yet. I am still interested in your feedback. I loaded the test drive with content to answer the Frequently Asked Questions about the Info Center. I’ll let the Info Center explain what the Info Center does!

Please let me know what you think through comments on this post. Comment on the functionality, ease of install, necessity of an application like this, etc.

Auto vCard usage has been climbing steadily since I released it in February. A graph of monthly usage since February is below.

Auto vCard allows you to add a custom link to both Leads and Contacts and automatically create a vCard file from the record. These files will open into Outlook and other PIMs. In short, you click a link in Salesforce to save that contact/lead to Outlook.

• Get Auto vCard from the AppExchange. It’s free.
• View the Auto vCard product page on arrowpointe.com
• Read the Auto vCard privacy policy to learn about how your information is handled in this application.