Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I came across a toolkit called ActiveSalesforce being developed as an extension to the Rails framework. Per the site,

“ActiveSalesforce is an extension to the Ruby on Rails framework that provides direct access to Salesforce.com hosted data and metadata via the ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes. Something that is unique to ActiveSalesforce is that all salesforce metadata relationships are also automatically surfaced as part of the model interface!”

It looks that this is utilizing the latest 7.0 API. If anyone knows more about this, please elaborate in comments.

Open Access has created an ODBC driver for Salesforce. This allows you to use any ODBC compliant software to access the Salesforce database. You can get a free 30 day trial on their site. I have been playing around with it the past couple days to see how it worked for me in migrating data from one Salesforce environment to another. So for so good. The price seems pretty reasonable too, $99/year for a single user license.

There is also a free option to does pretty much the same thing at Sourceforge. The Forceamp tool allows you to create a Linked Server in SQL Server to your Salesforce instance(s). That tool is free, but requires SQL Server. If you don’t have SQL Server, you can get SQL Server Express free from Microsoft.

I came across a cool web service called Tagcloud. The site creates a tag cloud of keywords based upon whatever RSS feeds you give it. I decided to create a Tag Cloud that included some Salesforce blogs: mine, Salesforcewatch.com, Successforce and the Sforce blog.

The permalink to the tag cloud is http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Salesforce/default/50

To change the number of tags displayed, just change the number at the end of the URL (currently 50 tags are shown).

Since most rss feeds do not contain a full history of posts, the cloud is only made up of the posts in the current feed.

After reading this post, check out a more recent post on an improved mashup or visit the Arrowpointe’s product page for this functionality.

I have developed a mash-up of Salesforce.com and Google Maps. The script was developed in PHP and utilizes the PHP Nusoap Sforce Toolkit, created by Ryan Choi, to communicate with the Sforce API and Phoogle, developed by System 7 Designs, to communicate with the Google API.

Using the PHP Nusoap toolkit, this script logs into Salesforce and queries for all Account records that have a complete address. After setting up a Phoogle map instance, the script adds each address to the map. In addition to sending the map the latitude and longitude values, it also passes an HTML formatted string that populates each pin with the Account Name, Address and a link to the record in Salesforce.com.

The demo is now closed because my web host turned off calls to file_get_contents and I am not planning on re-writing the functionality. I noticed that the code is not running properly on IE. It gets an error and says “Operation Aborted”. I am not sure why. I have found a bunch of posts giving some solutions, but none of them seem to work. Still working on that.

The script has been tested on PHP 4.3.11, 4.4.1 and PHP5. In order for this to work on PHP5, you must download the latest version of the code, which came out on 12/6/2005. Older versions of the code need to use PHP4 because the soapclient class conflicts with another class in many PHP5 installs.

The script is free for download and licensed under the GPL. To get this setup on your own webserver, do the following:

1. Download the scripts. The zip file contains all of the files you need.

   The included files unique to my development are:

   • MapAccounts.php: This is the primary script.
   • google-map-api-key.php: Holds the Google Maps API key for the web directory.
   • phoogle-extensions.php: I had to extend the Phoogle class.

   The PHP NuSoap Sforce toolkit code was not changed. The master source for this code, as well as other sample files for it, are at its Sourceforge page. The included PHP NuSoap Sforce toolkit files are:

   • salesforce.php: Primary file that defines the salesforce class.
   • nusoap.php
   • partner.wsdl

   I had to make some changes to the Phoogle files. I have communicated these changes to the Phoogle developers so they may get incorporated. The master source for the Phoogle code and documentation on its functionality is located here. The included Phoogle files are:

   • phoogle.php
2. Sign-up for a Google API key. Google requires you to have a new API key for every web server directory you use.
3. Enter your API key into the google-map-api-key.php file.
4. Open the MapAccounts.php file and search for the phrase Enter a default username here. Update the file with your username.
5. Open the MapAccounts.php file and search for the phrase Enter a default password here. Update the file with your password.
6. Load all of these files to your web server.
7. Run the MapAccounts.php file

Phoogle geocodes addresses using the Yahoo Geocode API. I have noticed that the current code has some trouble with multi-line addresses. If you are receiving errors, that could be why.

Please comment on this post and let me know what you think. Also, comment here and add links to how you have used this script or modified it. Have fun!

Updated 12/8/2005:
I made some small tweaks to the code that allows it to be run from within a custom tab so that it leverages the existing Salesforce session and applies all of the user’s visibility settings. I was able to get it working by having a Custom Tab with the following URL:

http://www.arrowpointe.com/dev/SalesforceGoogleMap/MapAccounts.php?sess= {!API_Session_ID}&srvr={!API_Partner_Server_URL_60}

You are welcome to try it out with the URL at arrowpointe.com if you want to, but I encourage you to host the PHP files yourself and link to your own files. My pages are NOT running in HTTPS. That’s why you should host them yourself. Also, I could change the code in my files at any time, so your link might break too.

In case you didn’t notice when looking at the code, you can alternatively pass in a username and password using the “un” and “pw” parameters the same way you can do it to log into Salesforce.

Note that the code is sensitive and, therefore, only pulls back Accounts with a complete addresses. Also, things like multi-line addresses or addresses that cannot be geocoded will result in script errors. I don’t have the error handling working now and this is not intended to be service I am providing at this time.

It works in PHP5 now too. The Salesforce PHP Nusoap package was updated on Sourceforge.

I came across a very interesting idea in another blog. Someone has used RSS technology to syndicate Salesforce.com leads. I think this is a fantastic idea and one that I would hope Salesforce.com might latch onto and include some syndication utilities for data into the sforce platform. If they are truly going the on-demand platform route, then this would be a necessary feature for all data objects and would provide ways to build alternative UIs for the data for particular purposes. If they want to keep people inside the user interface of Salesforce.com, then they’d want to pick their spots on incorporating this technology.

A link to the article I read: Moonwatcher Adoption: Salesforce.com via RSS

I’d love to hear from a developer on how this idea could be easily implemented. I am not familiar with the structure of RSS quite yet.