Dreamforce is just around the corner and Arrowpointe will be there.  There are a number of ways to learn about Arrowpointe’s apps and also to contact Scott Hemmeter.

• Arrowpointe has a Dreamforce booth in the Expo.  Find it at…

• Scott is presenting in the “Advanced Force.com Code (Apex) Development and Performance Considerations” session. Several opportunities to attend.
  • 1:15pm on Monday, December 6 at Cloudstock (Moscone West)
  • 3:45pm on Tuesday, December 7 at Dreamforce (Moscone West 2003) (follow in DF Chatter App)
  • 11:00am on Thursday, December 9 at Dreamforce (Moscone West 2004) (follow in DF Chatter App)
• Follow Scott Hemmeter in the Dreamforce Chatter App
• Follow Arrowpointe in the Dreamforce Chatter App
• Follow @arrowpointe on Twitter

Dreamforce looks to be very exciting and full of good information.  Whether you are a customer, developer, partner, prospective customer, journalist or just a techie at heart, there is content for you at Dreamforce.

If you are attending the show and have not yet gotten involved in the Dreamforce Chatter app, be sure and participate in that.  It has already changed the pre-conference experience and added to the excitement significantly.

See you there!

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If you install any of the above apps, they will not count towards your app/object/tab limits:

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Salesforce has announced the Best Apps of 2008 and I am pleased to report that Auto vCard was named Best Productivity Application!  The “Best App” honor is given to the application in each AppExchange category receiving the most 4 and 5 star reviews.

In case you didn’t hear, Auto vCard 2.0 was released.  This is a major improvement to the app, allowing for total flexibilty and configurability in the creation of vCards from Salesforce data.  In fact, you can now create vCards from any object, pass any field through, use International characters and it all runs on the force.com platform!

To learn more…

• Auto vCard 2.0 Announcement
• Auto vCard on AppExchange
• Auto vCard Info on arrowpointe.com
• All Arrowpointe Products

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As you probably know, Salesforce announced the Google Data API Toolkit on Monday.  Per the site,

The new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs provides a free and open-source set of tools and services that developers can use to take advantage of Google Data APIs from within Force.com.

The end result for developers is a set of classes, written by Salesforce, that allow you to easily communicate with Google services.  For example, suppose you want to create an entry in Google Calendar, the following code does it.

GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('MyCalendar');
event newEvent = new Event(
subject = 'Tennis with Beth',
description = 'Meet for a quick lesson.',
ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
DurationInMinutes = 60);

That is actually just 2 lines of code (line #2 was broken into 5 lines for easier reading). The reason you can do this in 2 lines is because of the toolkit.  The toolkit does the “heavy lifting” for you to communicate with Google.

From a developer standpoint, the best thing about this is that, to do this, there is no dependency on changes to the Salesforce platform.  The Google Toolkit was created by the Developer Marketing Team at Salesforce, not the folks building the platform.  Apex Code is already part of the platform. The toolkit uses what Apex Code already offers.  What you get with the toolkit is a set of pre-written Apex classes that do the heavy lifting for you on talking to Google.  Much like the Salesforce Java/PHP/.NET/Ajax/Perl toolkits do the heavy lifting of talking to the SOAP API for you on those programming platforms.

There is no reason that the developer community cannot create similar toolkits.  I am sure Salesforce has some more up their sleeve and did the community a service by building some foundational ones for us to use as working/useful examples.

This is open source at work.  To make an analogy… one thing I love about PHP is that these types of toolkits are prevalent and have made my life much easier. For example, when I wanted to build Auto vCard, I Googled for PHP classes that created files in the vCard spec.  I found many and chose 1.  Similarly with the Web to Lead Spam Check I built.  I chose Akismet as the spam checking service because I was familiar with it and trusted it and I found a PHP5 toolkit that took care of the hard part of communicating with Akismet from PHP.  Same thing with my old Google Maps mashup. There are PHP classes that do the hard part of talking to Google Maps.  Having these classes at my disposal gave me the ability to focus on adding the business value of tying functionality into a Salesforce-related use case.  If these PHP classes didn’t already exist, I never would have created any those apps.

If you are a developer looking to create something similar to what Salesforce did, I suggest you:

• Visit Programmable Web to identify useful services that could be connected to and learn about their APIs
• Build your class(es) (Look at the XMLDom class that’s part of the Google toolkit to handle the complicated XML parsing you might need to do)
• Publish it open source and let the community react/improve it
• Offer up some example code for how the class can be used to help people implement a use case of it.
• Become a star

Some services that I think are ripe for developers to concentrate on (that are very applicable to businesses):

• Google Checkout
• PayPal
• Authorize.net
• Freshbooks
• Google (Apps) Mail
• Google Charts (with tie into Visual Force)
• Blog Services
• UPS
• FedEx
• Google Search
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Open Social

There are countless others.  Get cracking!

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Continuing on from Mark’s post, Robert Scoble’s interview with Marc Benioff was published today. It’s embedded below.

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Ribbit has officially released its “voiceware” application that integrates with Salesforce.com.

• Main Product Page
• Overview Video
• AppExchange Listing

I have been using Ribbit with Salesforce for ~3 weeks now and have been pleased. More important than anything for me was simply getting my voicemail digitally. Ribbit handles this for me. All I needed to do to activate it was call a special number on my cell, which sent AT&T a command to forward my voicemail to Ribbit (the Ribbit documentation says how to undo this change if you ever need to).

When someone leaves a voicemail, I can get it in a couple of ways:

Email

I opted to have Ribbit notify me of my new voicemails via Email. This way, I get an attachment with the file and can play it right on my Blackberry. The voicemail is also archived in my Google Apps account for reference purposes should I ever need it (even if I am no longer using Ribbit, I can still have that voicemail. It’s just a WAV file.). The downside of moving voicemail to Ribbit is that I no longer have visual notification that I have voicemail on my Blackberry. Getting it emailed to me eliminates the need for me to call in and check it. SMS is another option, but I wouldn’t be getting the file attached that way.

Salesforce

When I log into Salesforce, I see a nice message window on my homepage. All my voicemails are right there. The audio file itself is stored on Ribbit servers, but a record of the call is in a Messages object in Salesforce.com. This has call information as well as a text transcription. From the home page, I am able to tag my messages for easy searching later and I can also associate them to a Salesforce record. When I associate it to a Salesforce record, Ribbit creates an Activity with a link to the message file and a copy of the text transcription.

On the sidebar is a small message window and a dialpad. One of the biggest benefits of Ribbit is that of a “cell phone backup”. When a call comes to my cell and I send it to voicemail, the sidebar softphone rings. I have a chance to answer the call right from the Salesforce UI and talk through my PC. Alternatively, I can let it go through to voicemail. I am able to make outbound calls too, which is nice in the event that I don’t have cell coverage or just want click to call convenience.

Pros

The benefits are all about productivity:

• Digitize your voicemail – You have the data and can do with it what you please.
• Cell Phone Backup – Use the Ribbit softphone in Salesforce and put your cell phone away.
• Link voicemails to your Leads/Contacts – you get a nice record of the call with a text transcription
• Voice to text transcription is above average. It is by no means stellar, but it’s good enough to use as a reference for what the call was about without having to listen to it. Accents and slang tend to mess it up.

Cons

• Cost – If you compare the cost to Salesforce licenses, it ain’t cheap. $25/user/month. If you compare the cost to your cell phone bill and think of the added benefit you get, it starts to make sense. Individual purchasers will likely compare it to their cell phone bill and it’ll make sense for them. Enterprise purchasers will likely compare it to the cost of Salesforce and that will be a harder sell. If you want voice to text transcriptions (which are extremely useful), it’s even more money.  What’s harder to quantify is the productivity benefits you might get out of such an application.  Productivity improvements is an area of cost savings that should further justify the price.
• Can Slow page loads a bit – Even with the flash objects cached in my browser, the experience of loading my home page is slower with Ribbit on there. In my install, I decided to keep the Ribbit components on the homepage only and not have them follow me around Salesforce on the sidebar.  On Lead/Contact detail pages, you have a choice of the Flash component or a Messages related list.  l opted to put the Messages related list on my Lead & Contact for performance reasons and also for consistency sake.
• You give Ribbit your login credentials – In order to have your voicemails there when you login, Ribbit needs to do background processing. This makes sense, but it requires you giving Ribbit a login to your system. Many company’s can’t afford a new license just for Ribbit, so they’ll end of giving them the admin login. I trust Ribbit with the login info, but it’s a risk to hand anyone login credentials. Ribbit doesn’t have much choice, though, if they want to get the data populated and ready for users when they login.  I think this issue could be eliminated if Salesforce allowed for a special user to be created for this purpose that did not take a hit on the customer’s license count. This is how Salesforce does it with their License Manager application. This should be a benefit of being a partner with a certified application.

Ribbit is definitely a nice product and their thinking is beyond just Salesforce.  It’s really a new platform for “voiceware” applications. Salesforce was their first target for a specific application aimed at the Enterprise. I would expect to see more.

You can get a free trial on their AppExchange listing.

Have you tried it? What do you think?

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The Salesforce for Google Apps functionality is live now! To get started, go to Setup and find the Google Apps Settings menu.

Step 1 is to identify your domain. Your company must have an existing Google Apps business account to do this.

Step 2 is to enable the features you want. This will be your main control panel for managing these settings.

Some observations:

• The Add Google Docs to Salesforce feature is very cool and will be very useful! It adds onto the existing Notes & Attachments related list and lets you create/associate a new Doc, Spreadsheet or Presentation to a record. You can also look for an existing document you have and associate that. I am not sure how it handles access to the document by others. You might have to specifically collaborate with people.

  

  I did not see any Mail Merge capabilities with this feature.

• When you enable the Google Docs tab, it adds the tab onto every application you have rather than asking you. You have to edit each application to remove it. This feature is nothing too special. Just a tab to Google Docs. I don’t see any special development Google did on their end to refer to Salesforce in their UI.
• Enabling Email to Salesforce gives each user a new Email Settings screen where they can edit their personal settings. The idea here is that you BCC a special email address and Apex code will process it and associate the email to your Lead/Contact. I tested it and attachments do not get saved.

  

  Email to Salesforce is not limited to Google Apps. The image Salesforce has includes gMail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail.

  

• Enabling gMail Buttons & Links adds a gMail link to every email address field. When you click it, a gMail window opens to compose a new email. A special Salesforce email address is BCCed on the message so that it will be processed right into Salesforce for you and associated with the record.

  

  

• Enabling the Google Talk Sidebar Component puts the same Google Talk widget you see in gMail on the Salesforce sidebar. I opted to keep this turned off as I’ll keep using my Trillian client. This feature is not pulling Contact names into gTalk. It’s simply putting your current gTalk contact list on the sidebar. You’d add people the same way as if this integration never existed.
• I didn’t try any of the 3rd party apps. At first glance the Calendar Sync and Report Collaboration sound the most interesting.

What do you think about the new functionality?

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The Salesforce / Google Apps integration news is coming out now. You can cut to the chase by watching the Salesforce Video on YouTube (embedded below), which explains how it works.

Salesforce’s main announcement page is http://www.salesforce.com/googleapps.

The permanent Salesforce product page is http://www.salesforce.com/products/google/apps.

Some of the notable sites are tracking it too. I am sure there will be lots more by morning.:

• Techmeme Discussion
• Techcrunch
• Mashable
• C|Net
• Associated Press

Some highlights:

• I believe this is offered free to all Salesforce users
• Save email right to Salesforce like you can do with the Outlook Connector already. Not sure if it has 100% of this functionality such as Attachment saves.
• Generate Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations right from Salesforce and have them linked to your records. The Google Docs side will allow for strong collaboration and the linkage to Salesforce will ensure that everyone is working off the right document. I was unable to tell via the video if you can do Mail Merge to Google Docs like you can with MS Word.
• Google Chat is embedded in the Salesforce sidebar allowing you to chat with people right from within Salesforce
• Sync your Salesforce & Google Calendar via a 3rd party app
• Export your Reports to Google Spreadsheets with a 3rd party app

Check out the new Google Apps category on AppExchange to see all the 3rd party apps.

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Keep an eye on the Paul Greenberg’s blog. A while back he issued a challenge to Salesforce and Microsoft to configure the application in an effort to compare the configuration capabilities of the 2 systems. Both have agreed to it. Should be interesting.

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I have setup a knowledge base using my Salesforce org to contain solutions for Arrowpointe products. Going forward, this will be the official location for help documentation on all Arrowpointe products. It is currently well populated with information on Arrowpointe Maps and Info Center. I am in the process of populating it for Auto vCard, User Adoption Dashboard and the Akismet anti-spam solution.

The direct URL to the knowledge base is:

http://www.arrowpointe.com/support/kb/

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Salesforce demonstrates a sample Salesforce application built on the Apple iPhone SDK.

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