Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I’ve been messing around with Evernote as a personal solution for “clipping” various things I want to remember as I peruse the web. It’s a nice application and it’s free. Worth a try if you’ve been looking for a note taking / clipping application to store your memory.

It has a sharing feature, so I figured I’d try it. I created a notebook for shared Salesforce related clippings. You can check it out at http://www.evernote.com/pub/hemmeter/SFDCShared/. There is even an RSS feed for the clippings I put out.

This is going to be a very casual thing for me, but is just another way to collect, consume, publish information and wanted to share it.

If anyone has an interest in developing on the MapQuest mapping platform, I wanted to point you to a few resources. Their API works in many contexts (server-side API, JavaScript API, ActionScript API). Their API may not have the street cred that Google has, but it’s a really solid platform to work with and on par with the competition and superior in some cases.

• MapQuest Developer Site: This is a relatively new and re-organized. they are making a push for developers to get onboard now.
• MapQuest Developer Blog: This is relatively new and is really picking up.

If you develop on the MapQuest platform, please drop me a line in the comments and share your thoughts.

Newsgator just announced they are making all their consumer RSS apps free. If you are looking for a new way to follow RSS feeds, check them out. They are my preferred service. I would use Google Reader, but it doesn’t support secure feeds and doesn’t have all these nice options.

Some of the Newsgator service’s highlights (all this is free):

• No matter what client you use, everything is synced (feeds, read/unread status, saved items). This is key to it all for me.
• Support secure feeds
• Has a decent web interface
• Has a Desktop Windows App (FeedDemon). I use it every day and love it. Better than any reader of any kind that I’ve used. Why use the web interface when this is nicer looking than any web interface, is faster and syncs all your data with online.
• Has a Desktop Mac App (NetNewsWire). Mac users typically feel the same way about this app that I do about FeedDemon.
• Has a feed reading solution for MS Outlook
• Has a mobile web HTML interface
• Has a Java mobile app for Java enabled phones (e.g. Blackberry)

Just thought I’d pass it along to everyone as a good RSS option.

Did you know that you can add a + within your gmail address to automatically give yourself a new, unique email address that acts as an alias for your main address? Then, using Gmail’s filters, you can label/delete/forward those emails as needed. It’s a handy way to create a new unique email address on the fly without needing to go somewhere and actually create an account or explicitly setup an alias.

For example, the following email addresses will all go to myemail@gmail.com.

• myemail@gmail.com
• myemail+adn@gmail.com
• myemail+developer@gmail.com
• myemail+app1@gmail.com
• myemail+app2@gmail.com
• myemail+client1@gmail.com
• myemail+client2@gmail.com
• myemail+client3@gmail.com

This works for gMail as well as Google Apps for Your Domain.

The main reason I bring it up is that it’s a handy way to create new Salesforce usernames without needing to take an extra step and setup a new email address for yourself. Also, it’s a handy way to keep your email organized because you can use Gmail’s Filters to do so.

As a Salesforce.com Partner, I am able to take advantage of a new offering from Salesforce for Partners, Syndicated Content. This allows partners to add a page to their website that pulls in content from Salesforce.com and allows website visitors to learn about Salesforce.com products without leaving the partner’s site. There are also links that allow visitors to start a Salesforce.com trial and the partner gets a referral from it.

The cool thing about it is that it’s implemented with about 20 lines of code and the code is provided, so it’s a simple copy/paste action. Arrowpointe’s page is located at http://www.arrowpointe.com/salesforce.

I think it’s a nice offering from Salesforce on several fronts:

• It’s optional
• Partners have incentive to use it to get referral fees via trials that are started that eventually lead to license deals for Salesforce
• It adds a lot of very professional content to a partner’s website
• The content’s design is clean and does not dominate my website’s design. Although, it would be nice if I were able to modify the CSS to do things like change the font size to match my website font and some other things. Maybe I can, but I need to investigate it. It’ll be a hack if I do it. No information on this was provided to me.
• A website visitor does not need to leave arrowpointe.com to read the content
• As a partner, I don’t need to keep this content up to date. It’s all pulled from a content server controlled by Salesforce. This ensures the content on my site doesn’t grow stale.

I don’t know how successful it will be for Arrowpointe specifically, but it’s a nice offering that does not seem to discriminate between large and small partners.