Perspectives on Salesforce.com

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/

I switched the email subscription provider from Feedblitz to Feedburner for this blog. Feedburner doesn’t require you to make an account with them and you will receive the full content of the blog post in your email.

If you would like to subscribe to Perspectives on Salesforce.com by email, visit the subscribe page and enter your email address in the form on that page.

As a Salesforce.com Partner, I am able to take advantage of a new offering from Salesforce for Partners, Syndicated Content. This allows partners to add a page to their website that pulls in content from Salesforce.com and allows website visitors to learn about Salesforce.com products without leaving the partner’s site. There are also links that allow visitors to start a Salesforce.com trial and the partner gets a referral from it.

The cool thing about it is that it’s implemented with about 20 lines of code and the code is provided, so it’s a simple copy/paste action. Arrowpointe’s page is located at http://www.arrowpointe.com/salesforce.

I think it’s a nice offering from Salesforce on several fronts:

• It’s optional
• Partners have incentive to use it to get referral fees via trials that are started that eventually lead to license deals for Salesforce
• It adds a lot of very professional content to a partner’s website
• The content’s design is clean and does not dominate my website’s design. Although, it would be nice if I were able to modify the CSS to do things like change the font size to match my website font and some other things. Maybe I can, but I need to investigate it. It’ll be a hack if I do it. No information on this was provided to me.
• A website visitor does not need to leave arrowpointe.com to read the content
• As a partner, I don’t need to keep this content up to date. It’s all pulled from a content server controlled by Salesforce. This ensures the content on my site doesn’t grow stale.

I don’t know how successful it will be for Arrowpointe specifically, but it’s a nice offering that does not seem to discriminate between large and small partners.

I have created a Twitter account for Arrowpointe. Follow it at http://twitter.com/arrowpointe. A direct RSS feed can be found here.

This will be an informal line of communication. I have it hooked up to my IM, so I am more likely to post nuggets of info about Salesforce.com as I am learning it rather than saving things for a longer post or, perhaps, forgetting to post them. It will probably be relatively active during Dreamforce too. Use of it will probably evolve a little as I get used to this mini-blogging thing.

My last 5 “tweets” also appear on the right-hand side of this blog.

I am taking a break and will be back again towards the end of March. I will be missing all the happenings for the Spring ‘07 release. A few of the cooler items in the upcoming release are:

• Customizable Search Results - you can go a step further than you can today and add Filters. This allows the end user to perform a generic search and then perform additional filtering on the search results without having to re-search. (Wish this was added to Views, so users wouldn’t have to create a new View everytime they want to filter for something.)
• Time Based Workflow - Allows workflow events to be triggered based upon time passing. Looks like the timing can only be in Days. Hopefully, hours will be implemented as an option in the future.
• Email Approvals - accept/reject your Approvals from your email client rather than having to log into Salesforce.
• Rich content Solutions - allows you to document you Solutions in HTML format using a WYSIWYG editor. (wish this was on Activity comments too or, even better, as an option on all Long Text fields).
• Enhanced Data Model Customization - allows you to create lookup relationships between Standard Objects, create recursive relationships on Standard Objects, etc.

I look forward to catching up on the new release when I get back. It’s not as grand as the Winter ‘07 release, but it’s encouraging to see another release take place so quickly afterwards.

If you submit comments to the blog while I am out and don’t see them published on the site, now you know why. Have a good March!