Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Auto vCard 2.0 was released in January of this year with major functionality improvements, one of which was it running native on the force.com platform.  The older 1.x versions of Auto vCard used scripts running on Arrowpointe web servers.

The 1.x scripts are being retired.  If you are running a 1.x version of Auto vCard (go to your Setup | View Installed Packages page in Salesforce to check), you should be aware of the following changes taking place.

• Beginning  Tuesday, June 16, 2009, the behavior of the 1.x version will be changed.  Instead of the app automatically giving users the option to open/save the vCard, a link will be available on the popup window to get the vCard file.  Also, a new browser window will open directing them to this page explaining that they are on an older version that is set to expire.  Initially, this new behavior will only occur once every 2 days, but it will be more frequent as the July 31 date approaches.

• Auto vCard 1.x is expiring July 31, 2009.  At that time, anyone on version 1.x will start receiving an error message when creating a vCard.

• You can avoid issues related to either of the above 2 bullet points by upgrading your Auto vCard installation now.

To learn more about version 2.0, you can visit the product page on our website or the AppExchange listing.  Version 2.0 offers a free 60 day, 5 user trial.  After that, it is $1/user/month to subscribe and you can subscribe any number of your Salesforce users to it.  Non-profits can use it for free.

The Summer ‘09 Release is just around the corner.  In fact, NA1 and NA6 are going live tonight.  You can see the schedule at http://status.salesforce.com/trust/status/.  I’ve made a copy of it below.  The first table is in US Pacific time and the second is UTC.

This release is not extremely exciting (unless Sites goes GA), but some of the more exciting features to me are:

• Recurring Tasks
• Automated Campaigns
• Enhanced Declarative Logic for Picklists
• Sites?  The word on the street is that Sites is becoming generally available this release, but I have not seen any official documentation stating that. 

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.