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Salesforce on the iPhone

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

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Upcoming Security Changes – overview of impact

Salesforce.com is making security changes on Monday Nov. 26, 2007. (Note that the rollout was pushed back a week from their original communications. It is now Monday Nov. 26, 2007)

There were a couple of webinars today about the changes. The customer-focused webinar will be available at http://www.salesforce.com/security soon. The partner-focused one will be available in the Partner Portal.

Below is my understanding of what was said and a high-level overview of the main impacts. Please add clarifications in the comments.

API Logins
  • If you connect via a Session ID passed from a web link/tab, none of these restrictions apply as the user is explicitly providing you with login access to his/her active session.
  • To login with a username and password, the IP address you are logging in from needs to be white-listed.
  • Salesforce will pre-populate the org’s whitelist with IPs used in the past 4 months.
  • Each end-user can generate an API token to replace their password for API logins.
  • API logins using the API token do not require their IP to be whitelisted.
  • API tokens do not expire. Only 1 is active at a time. It can be replaced by the user generating a new one. This automatically invalidates the old one.
  • API tokens cannot be used to login at https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp.
  • Going forward, the best practice would be for end users to provide their API token to any app/service they use other than the main Salesforce.com login page.
Logging in at https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp
  • Username and password will still be the way to access Salesforce.com from the main login page
  • A new feature will be added requiring you to confirm that your computer is valid to login using that username.
    • The login page will check if you’ve logged in from that computer before (by looking for a browser cookie)
    • If not, the email address on the user record will be sent an email to confirm that you are, in fact, the one trying to login now.
    • You will click a link in that email “activating” your computer for login with that username
    • Unless you delete the cookie or clear your broswer’s cache, you should be good to go for a while without repeating these steps.
  • There are no new IP restrictions affecting logins at the main login page. The profile-based IP restrictions that have been around for a long time are still the way to go there.

If you are a consultant, you may fall victim of the new security measure when you try to login as your client (maybe they couldn’t afford another temporary username just for you). On the call, I was told that you can request a temporary one via the Partner Portal or ask your customer to forward you the email to confirm your PC is okay.

My thoughts

I think it is great to see Salesforce taking a step to tighten up the API, especially. I like to think that my old API Authentication List post had something to do with it, but who knows.

The biggest impact to me will be using client’s logins to get into the system from my PC, but I’ll just have to workaround that one. Security and convenience are generally a trade off and overall I’d rather use/subscribe to a service that is tightened down with my business data. If anyone can handle the inconveniences of logging in, it’s developers since we are used to doing hacks/workarounds in the first place.

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Summer ’07 Features

As you may know by now, Salesforce has an Idea Exchange category for upcoming Summer ’07 features. There are a lot of great features to be excited about including improvements to Mass Email, Workflow and Reporting. However, for me, the most exciting/useful feature will be the Cross-Object Formulas. Salesforce product management added a note to that idea saying that:

This idea really encompasses two features – referencing parent fields on a child, and rolling up child information to a parent. The latter of these is on schedule to be available with the Summer ’07 release! Stay tuned for more information in the coming months!

The ability to create formulas that COUNT, SUM, MIN, MAX, etc. values from child records will be huge. It will especially huge if conditions can be added within that. For example, from an Account, you might have a formula field to SUM(all Won Opporortunities from a particular Lead Source). Another might be to simply SUM(all Won Opportunities).

Until the release notes are out, we won’t know exactly what this functionality will (not) do, but it’s exciting to know some aspect of it is coming. This will save users a lot of time from having to run reports to get this information and it will save developers a lot of time having to create those reports!

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Salesforce & Google Adwords Alliance

Techcrunch is reporting that the big announcement tomorrow will be that Salesforce & Google have teamed up on

a marketing and distribution alliance that will tightly bind Google Adwords to existing Salesforce tools that track sales from online advertising.

Based upon the description in the Techcrunch post, it sounds like they are merely providing the existing Salesforce for Google Adwords functionality to users that wouldn’t otherwise have it via the “Group Edition”. Techcrunch provided this link to Salesforce’s site, but it was redirecting to the homepage when I tried it. It might work by the time you read this.

There is also an AP article discussing the announcement, which makes it sound like this alliance will make Salesforce for Google Adwords available to all customers, not just through a Group Edition.

Speculation: Perhaps the alliance is setup to subsidize the subscription to the service so all customers can use it with Salesforce & Google doing revenue sharing on the back end of the transactions so that its transparent to the Salesforce end customer? That setup would be of great benefit to a lot of companies looking to utilize Adwords and link it into Salesforce’s Lead Management module whereby the cost barriers to enable Salesforce’s functionality would be eliminated.

The AP and Techcrunch articles are written as if they have official information as opposed to speculation, but we won’t know for sure until the actual announcement or a press release direct from Salesforce.com or Google.

Click here for information on the announcement event and to listen to the webcast.

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Salesforce / Google Announcement on June 5?

According to ZDNet, Salesforce.com will be holding a press conference on June 5 with a “leading Internet company based in the Bay Area”. Makes sense that this would be Google.

Lots of theories exist on what the partnership/acquisition will be about. My guess is that it’s a partnership (not an acquisition) and it’ll be a deep integration of Google Enterprise apps with Salesforce.com. I think this could include:

  • Google Apps gMail: Similar to the Outlook Edition, you’ll be able to add emails to Salesforce from Google Apps gMail. Hopefully, email to case is all integrated into this too.
  • Calendar sync: I think this is the least likely of all features.
  • Docs & Spreadsheet: Create Google Docs & Spreadsheets from within Salesforce so they are auto associated with your records. Also would include the ability to upload a document and have it uploaded to Google Docs & Spreadsheet rather than just being a file in the Documents tab. When turned on, this functionality will be native in the Documents section of Salesforce.com rather than an AppExchange application that uses all new functionality
  • Data indexing: Have Google index your Salesforce.com data in a secure environment and replace the Salesforce search with Google Search
  • Google for Adwords tied in with Google Analytics & Salesforce.com Campaigns
  • All of this will cost extra $$$

If it’s something like the above, I think the announcement will be a bit anti-climatic what with all the speculation about an acquisition. However, it would still be pretty cool.

My idea is all pure speculation, but its fun to think about. Applying Google technology to the Salesforce.com platform could make for some very exciting capabilities.

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