Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I came across this on the forums. I guess this was a video played at the May 21 Developer’s Conference. Pretty funny.

Watch below or go to the YouTube page.

Salesforce posted their Summer ’07 landing page. Get all the info on the Summer release there including Release Notes, Admin Preview Notes and landing pages for each of the new functionality pieces.

It looks like a rather large release. It’s pretty impressive, I must say. Some of the nice features that jump out for me and past clients are:

• Intelligent Workflow: Use formulas as workflow criteria are a big highlight. Other improvements as well.
• Extended Customizable Help: Include help hovers next to a field where you can include a short bit of help text.
• Lookup Hovers: No need to drill into an Account from a Contact to view its data. Hover over the Account link and see a mini page layout of Account data. I personally think it’d be better to include joined fields onto the Page Layout so you don’t even need to hover, but this is still an improvement.
• Extended Mail Merge: Mail Merge has been one of those features where the answers to commonly asked “Can it do…?” questions is “No”. Well, some improvements were made. First and foremost is the ability to create a Mail Merge for more than 1 person at a time. Also, mail merge will have cross-browser support. No need to fire up IE just to use Mail Merge anymore. This feature needs to be enabled by request to Salesforce.
• Extended AppExchange Packaging: This will be helpful for my Info Center application since it is an unmanaged package. If you uninstall an old version in favor of a new one, you will be able to export the data, uninstall, reinstall and import the data back in.

If you want an early look at Summer ’07, you can sign up for a pre-release account and see it all in action in your own sample org.

And the logo winner is…

Thanks to Salesforcewatch and CRM FYI for actually letting me know about the landing page even before Salesforce blogged about it.

Since creating the Akismet Spam Check for Web to Lead forms, I have been using it on my websites. So far the script has worked very well and Akismet has done a very good job of catching spam.

Since May 29th (when I setup my web forms to do the check), the following has taken place:

• 34 total web to lead submissions
• 13 of 34 (~38%) are spam (based upon my visual inspection)
• Akismet successfully identified all 13 as spam (100% success)
• Of the 21 honest leads, Akismet did not suggest any were spam (no false positives) (100% success)

A Salesforce.com Lead Assignment Rule put all 13 of those leads into a “Spam” queue and got them out of the way. All of my workflow & auto response rules use the spam flag populated by Akismet to determine the notification to send me and whether or not to send a notification to the lead submitter. The end result is that I know about all the spam and I NEVER send an auto response to spam submitters. Yahoo!

Has anyone else implemented the scripts? What’s your experience been?

I am pleased to announce Arrowpointe’s newest product, Arrowpointe Maps.

Arrowpointe Maps is an on-demand mapping platform that facilitates a conversation between Salesforce.com & MapQuest allowing for easy deployment of mapping capabilities in your organization and providing end-users a simple means for mapping their data. Arrowpointe Maps is configurable and can be tailored to your organization, so that your users can work with their information in a meaningful way.

What It Does

Arrowpointe Maps currently supports mapping your Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Cases (with Custom Objects coming soon). There are currently 2 ways of mapping your information:

1. Map Pages – Your administrator configures “Map Pages”. A Map Page is a dynamically generated query form that includes the key criteria you need to map your data. Based upon my experience implementing these kinds of solutions, I have found that end-users really respond to this approach because it is SIMPLE. The image below shows how a Map Page can be configured and the end result that a user sees when that page is run. The end result is the query form. The user would use that form to generate their map.

   

2. From a View – A button comes with the Arrowpointe Maps AppExchange package for you to include on your List Views for all supported objects. On a View, check the records you want to map and click the Map Records button.

   

Some other functionality of note:

• Custom Address Fields: In the admin area of Arrowpointe Maps, you specify where your addresses reside. Thus, it is a non-issue to have your addresses in custom fields (which about 50% of my clients do).
• Create as many Map Pages as you desire: For example, suppose you wanted a separate Map Page for each of 5 Lead Sources. You create a separate Map Page for each and pre-filter the data by the specific Lead Source. Thus, no matter what a user does on that Map Page, their results would always be limited by the Lead Source you (the admin) specified.
• International Support: MapQuest has very good international support and can handle addresses in lots of countries.
• Supports joined fields: For example, from an Opportunity, you could pull information in from the Account or Owner records. Only certain joins are supported.
• Recognizes Field Level Security settings: If you include a field on the map that some users can’t see, they won’t see it. If there certain objects they can’t see, they won’t even have the option of running maps for that object.
• License subsets of your user base: Arrowpointe Maps is priced per user per month, but you can select from a subset of your total Salesforce.com user base to determine who should have access.

The functionality of the product will not end there. We have other enhancements in the pipeline, but more importantly, we want to implement the functionality YOU (the customer) needs. This product will be evolving.

Guiding Principles

Mapping your Salesforce.com data (any data for that matter) has proven to be a much desired, yet very difficult thing to do. There are some key requirements that I hear over and over again from Salesforce customers contacting me about mapping solutions:

1. Ease of Use: For adoption purposes, the solution must be easy to use. End users should not need to know how to run complex queries, but should have a simple way to pick and choose how to map their data.
2. Supported Objects: At a minimum, Leads, Accounts and Contacts should be supported. The ability to map Opportunities and Cases is a nice-to-have. For many Salesforce customers, mapping custom objects is a necessity.
3. On Demand: Salesforce customers have already adopted the on-demand model. Typically, they are not looking for a solution that requires them to house the code.
4. Configurable: The solution must be able to support the customer’s unique configuration such as storing addresses in non-standard fields, including custom fields in the info windows on the map, accounting for Field Level Security settings and more.
5. Affordable: Mapping business data can be expensive because, in most cases, you need to obtain a license with your preferred mapping provider. Most mapping services you read about have restrictions on using the service for business or internal use. A mapping solution should spread such costs across customers, thereby making it more affordable to use.
6. Reliability, Accuracy & Security: You want to use a solution that is reliable and can be counted on to provide accurate mapping results. Also, it must run on a stable platform and adhere to Salesforce.com’s strong security requirements.
7. Support: The solution must have a good support model in place to ensure your needs are met.

Arrowpointe Maps was designed to deliver upon those principles.

Getting More Information

The official location for information on Arrowpointe Maps is its product page at http://www.arrowpointe.com/maps. There, you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions.

Arrowpointe Maps is currently live, but is not yet publicly available on the AppExchange. It is being made available by invitation only at this time. If you want to be invited to trial the product, please submit your contact information to Arrowpointe on the Arrowpointe Maps product page. If you have contacted Arrowpointe before regarding our Salesforce.com & Google Maps mashup, then you are already on the list and don’t need to submit your contact information.

I will continue to post more information about Arrowpointe Maps on this blog. If you are interested in subscribing to the contents of the blog, you can get more information here.

Lastly, Arrowpointe has many other products that work with Salesforce.com. Many of them are available on the AppExchange. To see the entire portfolio, please visit our main Product page.

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!