Perspectives on Salesforce.com

The User Adoption Dashboard I created earlier this month is now live on the AppExchange. Click the image below to get to the Dashboard page or search for it on AppExchange.

I have received very positive feedback about the dashboard and I understand it is being used by Salesforce.com during AppExchange seminars, which is very nice to hear.

I would really appreciate additional feedback about the dashboard as a comment on this post and/or on the AppExchange page as a review. Also, please let me know how the dashboard can be improved or additional dashboards that would be helpful to have on AppExchange.

User Adoption is a key success criterion for any Salesforce.com implementation. The metrics by which to measure adoption vary from project to project. My projects typically include some kind of Adoption Dashboard that is used to allow the admins and executives to get an overview of the activity taking place within the system. This is often as simple as measuring who is creating what records, what types of data is being created from a macro-system viewpoint and measuring this activity over a period of time.

I keep a few baseline Dashboards on my App Exchange account to use as a starting point on my projects. I would like to share one of them now and have made it available on App Exchange for anyone to download into their environment. I am planning on submitting this dashboard configuration to be public in the App Exchange directory, but I’d like some feedback on it first. You can get the dashboard by clicking the image below.

The dashboard contains a series of components that look at the data activity over the past 60 days (Leads Created, Accounts Created, Cases Closed, etc). It also contains 2 user lists: one for the number of logins per user over the past 7 days and another for the users that have not logged in over the past 7 days.

The dashboard should work within any environment as it only references standard Salesforce objects & fields. The Dashboard and its corresponding reports both go into folders called “User Adoption Dashboard from AppExchange”. The folders will be publicly accessible, by default. The Dashboard will be setup to run under the user that downloaded the app exchange package.

I am interested in your feedback on this. Please leave comments on your use of adoption dashboards/reports, reaction to the dashboard I created, ideas for other metrics to track in a dashboard like this, etc.

Tech Crunch, the definitive site for tracking “Web 2.0” technologies, has an article today about the newly announced “App Exchange Developer Network”. Salesforce.com is formally announcing the AppExchange Development Network today at the eTech conference.

The TechCrunch article talks about a mashup with Writely will be announced today. This will allow you to launch Writely to edit your Salesforce.com Documents and save them back to Salesforce.com automatically. Writely a very good online word processing / document collaboration website.

The Auto vCard functionality I created a while back is now public on the App Exchange. I encourage feedback on it and how it could be improved. Click the image below to visit the page on the App Exchange.

I recently created a PHP script that allows you to auto-create a vCard from a Salesforce.com Lead or Contact. Quite a few companies choose not to sync their Salesforce.com Contacts with Outlook. This allows you to put a Lead or Contact into Salesforce.com and pull the information into Outlook (or another PIM) on a one-off basis.

I decided to make the functionality available as my first App Exchange application. It is not searchable on the App Exchange yet, but you can click the link below to view its App Exchange page. The package consists of 2 custom links (one for Leads and another for Contacts). Once you install the package, you will need to add those links to your Page Layouts.

The script works by receiving the data from the Custom Link, parsing it and passing it to methods in the Contact_Vcard_Build PEAR package. Once complete, it writes the data to a file and presents it to you for download. It then deletes the file off of my server. At no time does the script have access to your Salesforce.com environment (you are not passing it a Session ID). The custom links open up a small window to execute the script. I have not been able to figure out a way for it to close that window upon completion.