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.

A post yesterday on the Moonwatcher site run by Spanning Salesforce’s founder leads one to believe that customer-created custom feeds will be available in the service in the future. The service already provides the feeds most users would care about, but this will be a welcome improvement for power users or for admins that want to monitor system usage dynamically.

If you don’t know what Spanning Salesforce is, then check out my review from last April or visit their site.

Spanning Salesforce is now in version 3.0. They have included a number of new feeds and best of all, it’s free!!!

If you are an end user and have been hankering to get some notification out of Salesforce.com, but haven’t been able to get your admin to setup the workflows you want, check out Spanning Salesforce. For someone that follows up on web submissions regularly, the My Unread Leads feed is mandatory.

Spanning Salesforce is in the queue for a product review on this site. I’ll be providing more information about this service and its plans for the future in an upcoming post. If you have any specific questions about Spanning Salesforce or RSS that you’d like me to try and get answered, pop a comment in below.

Thumbware.com has another integration between a popular web tool and Salesforce.com. First was del.icio.us and now gmail. Check it out at http://gmail.thumbware.com/

Thumbware.com has created a cool little integration between Salesforce.com and del.icio.us. Using a “bookmarklet” in your browser, you can easily associate external links to your Salesforce.com data. This allows your users to later view related links to your Contacts, for example. The demo shows it being related to Contacts, but it appears that you can use this functionality against any object.

Check it out at http://bookmark.thumbware.com/.

Using del.icio.us and the bookmarklet maintains a user’s productivity by allowing them to save the information without having to leave the page they are on to visit del.icio.us and/or Salesforce.com. Great job to Ian at Thumbware.com!