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Building the AppExchange

On the new AppExchange blog, there are 3 posts providing background into how the AppExchange came to be. Interesting read.

Part I: Building the AppExchange
Part II: Creating the Data Model
Part III: Launching AppExchange.com

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Auto vCard Bug Fix

A minor nuisance to the Auto vCard functionality was fixed tonight. Outlook automatically prepends the website field with http://. If you had this value in your website string in Salesforce, the resulting vCard would have http://http\://.

This was fixed so that the website will be cleanly added to Outlook now. If you are using another PIM, let me know if this causes you problems. You can submit a support ticket here.

No changes are required if you use the Auto vCard functionality. This was all taken care of at the server level.

Get Auto vCard from the AppExchange

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AppExchange Conference, May 24th

Salesforce is hosting the AppExchange User, Partner & Development Conference on May 24th in San Francisco. There are separate breakout sessions in the afternoon for Customers, Partners and Developers. Each group has its own “track”. The breakout sessions look quite good.

I was very excited when I saw this event was taking place and was excited to be a part of it. Unfortunately, I am unable to attend. I am very interested in hearing about how it goes. If you are blogging the event, add a comment here and point to your blog so I (we) can keep an eye on what comes out of it. Or comment here directly with your updates on the event.

The morning calls for a keynote from Marc Benioff and an “Exclusive Preview of New Applications”. I am interested in seeing what announcements come out of it!

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Reporting on Test Drive Login History

If you have an application on the AppExchange and have setup a test drive, you were supplied 2 usernames: an admin user and a eval user. The admin user allows you to configure the system for your test drive and the eval user is the one that your test drive runs as.

How can you measure important metrics such as:

  • How many people have downloaded my application?
  • How many people are test driving my application?

I cannot help you with the first question (can Salesforce?), but you can get some information on the second question without asking Salesforce for the information.

To do so, log into Salesforce as the Admin user and navigate to the Setup | Manage Users | Users screen. Click on the Evaluation User record that you use to run the Test Drive as. Scroll down and you have a Login History listed there.

login_history.png

From that list, you have an option of downloading the Login History. One nice thing about this is that the IP address is listed. If you wanted to, you could use this information to append data to the records and report on usage by region. If anyone has suggestions on a good way to append this information en masse, please comment here.

Add a little Excel magic to the downloaded file using a Pivot Chart and you can get a nice graph on the Test Drive usage. Below is a graph of the Test Drive Usage for my User Adoption Dashboard as of today. Once I downloaded the file, it took me about 5-10 minutes to get this chart the way I wanted. This requires some knowledge of Pivot Tables/Charts and Excel formulas.

login_history_graph.png

This only answers the question of how often your application is being Test Driven and is not a complete measure of success. It’s a start. Other uses for this data include.

  • Measuring how often the same IP address is test driving the application
  • If you are appending region or network name information to your file, you can measure how often members of a specific Network Location are accessing your Test Drive
  • Did the number of Test Drives increase in line with various marketing activities you have going on to promote your product/service?

Note:
While writing this post, I received an email from Salesforce about the Lead Service from AppExchange. This answers the questions I raised at the beginning of this post. It provides a mechanism to populate your own Salesforce instance with information on who is performing Test Drives or downloading your app. They do this by having the user (optionally) complete a Web-To-Lead form that maps to your own Org. This is great news and is the best way to report on Test Drive and Download usage. I just learned about this and have not enabled this on my Test Drives. It does not appear that they will be passing IP Address, Browser or Platform information in this service. That is only available in the Login History.

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Adoption Dashboards by Salesforce.com

Salesforce one-upped me and published some Adoption dashboards of their own. They look nice and measure things in ways that are different from my User Adoption Dashboard. I suggest checking this out if you are looking for more adoption dashboards. You can never have enough as an Admin!

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