Perspectives on Salesforce.com

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!

A new Facebook Group popped up recently called “Salesforce User Community 3.0“.  The group moderator, Pete Fife, asked me to communicate the following note to my readers:

Do you wonder if Salesforce.com listens to their customers and what they want from the user community? Take it from me, they do even if it takes a little squeaking to get their ear. Join me, Pete Fife, to discuss taking the Salesforce.com community beyond disucssion boards and into the new world of social commuinty. I started the customer salesforce user groups back in 2003 and although we have come a long way since then, there is a long way to go to really enable us customers to define our own vision of the Salesforce.com Community. Take advantage of the chance to bring our collective wishes for the user community to the ears of Salesforce.com. They are our captive audience and ready to listen.

Join the Facebook group Salesforce User Community 3.0 to stay up to date and find out when and were we’ll meet at Dreamforce.

FB group link: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26018154108

Please join the group if you wish to participate in the community.