Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I have recently completed some custom Salesforce.com / Google Maps mash-ups for clients and have made some improvements to the whole integration.

First, it has been updated to utilize the Salesforce.com PHP5 Toolkit. Performance is improved from the nusoap toolkit. Also, if you are running a PHP 5 version after 5.1.2, the toolkit supports compression, which is great.

Second, I found a really good Google Maps PHP class that allows for additional functionality beyond what Phoogle provides. The adapter I am using now is by Monte Ohrt from phpnsider.com. You can get it here. I had to make a couple changes to it, but those changes should be going into his next release. Some of the improved functionality this adapter provides is:

• Ability to use Yahoo! or Google Geocoder APIs: Yahoo! currently supports the US only. Google supports many countries such as United States, Canada, China, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. I have been opting for the Google API, but both work well.
• Include a sidebar that lists the returned records: Clicking on a sidebar link pops up the corresponding map marker
• Caching of Geocode lookups. Cache your successful lookups to a MySQL database for faster retrieval the next time you Geocode it. This is an optional feature.
• Auto centers the map based upon the map markers placed on it
• Better error handling.
• Has all the same functionality as Phoogle, so I didn’t lose anything in the transition

I put up a new demo of it in action. For this demo, I decided to get a little fancier and show how a form can drive the results returned in the map. My clients typically want the querying capabilities to be dynamic, so adding forms is common. This demo has a very simple form to demonstrate the capabilities. However, for some of projects, I am building forms dynamically based upon the metadata in the Salesforce.com org. Pretty cool!

If you are interested in this functionality being customized for your organization, please visit the product page on the Arrowpointe website and complete the form on that page.

I have created a new application called the Info Center.

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.

It is only available as a Test Drive right now, but I am very interested in your feedback. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on:

• Would this be a useful tool to have within Salesforce.com? (it would be free)
• Are Messages, FAQs and Links core items that need to be communicated? Any others?
• How is the user experience?
• Is the performance acceptable? It is a little slow to load, but once loaded it responds very well. Is that acceptable from your point of view?
• What would you do differently? How would you improve it?
• If you had it in Salesforce.com, would you use it? Do you think your users would respond to it?

Please take the Test Drive and provide your feedback as comments on this post or on my support page. 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!

A very small update was made to the User Adoption Dashboard package (which, I am proud to say, is ranked #6 in the Most Popular list on the main AppExchange page). There is a report there that shows people that have logged in over the past 7 days and another that shows who has not logged in over the past 7 days.

Steve pointed out to me that someone logging in exactly 7 days ago was not appearing on either report. Through this, we discovered that there is a difference between selecting Last 7 Days in the date widget at the top of the report and putting LAST 7 DAYS into your criteria of a report. LAST 7 DAYS starts with yesterday and counts back. The date widget starts with today and counts back. This is contrary to what the Help says about how LAST n DAYS works, but still seems to be the case. Because of this, the not logged in report needed to have its criteria updated to LAST 6 DAYS.

What should you do? You have two options (besides doing nothing):

1. Replace the package: If you did not customize the package after you installed it, then I would suggest uninstalling the old package and then downloading the new one. The new one is located at the same URL on AppExchange.

   

2. Fix the report: Go to the “Users Not Logged in Last 7 Days” report in the “User Adoption Dashboard from AppExchange” report folder. Edit the report criteria and change the existing criteria from LAST 7 DAYS to LAST 6 DAYS.

Bikramfinder.com is running a customized version of my Salesforce.com/Google Maps mashup to help people find locations of Bikram yoga studios across the U.S. I helped them customize a version that uses their Salesforce.com instance as a back-end and allows a search by zipcode or city. Check it out at http://www.bikramfinder.com/find_studio/. The overall site is still getting setup, but the mapping functionality is there.

If your organization is looking to utilize your Salesforce.com database as a back-end for mashing up data with Google Maps, you can download my sample PHP scripts as a start. If you are interested in some outside assistance in doing this, please contact me.

For more information, you can visit:

• The main Salesforce.com/Google Maps Mashup page on arrowpointe.com
• The original blog post about the functionality
• The Google Maps Mashup category on this blog.

A minor nuisance to the Auto vCard functionality was fixed tonight. Outlook automatically prepends the website field with http://. If you had this value in your website string in Salesforce, the resulting vCard would have http://http\://.

This was fixed so that the website will be cleanly added to Outlook now. If you are using another PIM, let me know if this causes you problems. You can submit a support ticket here.

No changes are required if you use the Auto vCard functionality. This was all taken care of at the server level.

Get Auto vCard from the AppExchange