Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I’ve been reorganizing the way blogs and social media will be used for Arrowpointe and wanted to inform you about what’s changing.  A new application is being launched very soon and, once it is, I will be picking up the pace and getting back to the business of blogging.

Website Redesign
The Arrowpointe website was recently redesigned (new logo too).  There, you will find links to all that I am explaining in this post.  (you can also get a bit of preview information about the new application that will be launched)

Blogs
I have decided to separate content into 2 separate blogs.

• Developer Blog - This blog (subscribe) will be focused on broader force.com topics such as news, developer tips, etc., as opposed to Arrowpointe-specific product information.
• Company/Product Blog – A new blog was created on the company site that will focus on company news and announcements regarding Arrowpointe’s applications. While I transition, I will cross-post across the blogs, but over time product information will be put onto the company/product blog. You can subscribe to that blog via rss or email.

Social Media

• Our You Tube channel will be the best location to get video about our applications.
• Our Facebook page is a great place to find a collection of all our content from the web.
• Our Twitter feed will collect notifications about all our postings around the web as well as informal commentary about force.com, life on the web and other information that may be of interest. Our Facebook feed will post to Twitter, but not the other way around.

In January I posted about how to invoke Apex from a Custom Button using a Visualforce Page.  It has been a popular post and is a topic which is of interest to many developers.  I wanted to draw your attention to another post.  Sam Arjmandi, from Salesforce Source, posted about how to invoke Apex from a button by calling the Apex directly from JavaScript whereby the Apex must be available as a web service.

Both methods work just fine and there is a choice of approach.  Recently, my personal choice for implementing this kind of functionality is to use Sam’s approach and it’s mostly due to the user experience.  Using this approach, the code is called directly and there is no time spent by the browser needing to load a new blank page only to return to the same page.  It works much more seamlessly.  You also get the benefit of having less objects to develop (no VF page) and tie together.  The only real downside (outside of requirement-specific ones) is that Salesforce won’t bark at you if you delete the web service class because it doesn’t know that the web service is tied to JavaScript.  If your Apex Code is a controller for your VF page, Salesforce will protect you from deleting it accidentally.

Kyle Peterson has released the Force.com Debug Log Parser, a nifty little .NET app for parsing the mess of a debug log you get from Salesforce when executing Apex code.   You can see a video demonstration here.

Great work, Kyle!

P.S. The comments to the post suggest an interest by Salesforce to include this into the IDE.  Hopefully that happens.  Until then, I’ll install this version and use it regularly.

I had the privilege of being asked to present to the San Diego Salesforce User Group this past Friday.  The topic for the day was Appexchange Applications, Tools, and Components that you can download for Free!

I presented on a number of Arrowpointe Products as well as some 3rd party ones that, over the years, I have come to really appreciate.  I included apps that are both free and ones I consider well worth the money.  The list is not exhaustive and there are lots of good candidates.  For 3rd party apps, I tried to pick ones that were useful to all Salesforce Customers and not ones that were focused on specific business processes or technologies to be integrated with.  That pares down the list quite a bit.

If you are interested, you can download my slides.  For each app I presented on, there are links on the slides to learn more about them.

Thank you San Diego User Group for being a great group to present to and I hope to make it down that way again soon!

Evernote is a very cool and useful application for taking notes, saving web clippings and archiving images that represent notes (sometimes its faster to just take a picture).  One really great thing about it is that it does OCR on you content (event the text in your images!) and makes it all searchable.  I use it all the time and love it.  It can be a bit of a novelty, but if you decide to really use it, you can get a lot of utility out of it.

What if you could save your Notes right into Salesforce?  You can (only as Documents for now)!  Coming soon is integration with standard and custom objects, which would let you do things like take a picture of a business card and import it into an Account/Contact combo.  Maybe take a picture of a whitboard of notes and save it as an Activity.

Steve Buikhuizen has created the Note Wizard application.  It’s definitely worth looking into.  It’s an integration with Salesforce and Evernote all running on Amazon EC2 and S3!

• Main page for the project
• Videos that explain a lot
• AppExchange listing (a private listing for now. This is linked to on the About page of the main site.)

Good work, Steve!