Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Company: Kieden (website) (blog)
Product: Kieden For AppExchange
App Exchange Page

Kieden for AppExchange¹ provides a means for Salesforce.com users to manage their Google Ads right in Salesforce.com. With an initial price point of free, this application is very appealing.

Per their website:

Kieden is the only search marketing application designed and built for customers of Salesforce.com. Kieden allows marketers to place ads online with leading search engines, and track exactly which ads generate leads and result in revenue.

When you install Kieden, a new application called Kieden for AppExchange is installed. There are 2 new tabs that are added into the app. The Search Campaigns tab is where you will perform all of your work (setup campaigns, configure text ads, view statistics, etc.). The My Account tab will only be needed once to provide your payment information.

The Search Campaigns tab is many levels deep. The graphic to the right explains the Kieden structure.

Functionality

Search Campaign List
To show you how it functions, I setup a campaign in my org called the “Initial Arrowpointe Campaign”. I limited my daily budget to $1/day. This is referring to how much I am willing to pay Google per day for my ads in this campaign. I can set this to any value I wish. From this screen, you get a view of the stats per Campaign. This is all kept up to date by Kieden through its access to the Google AdWords API.

When you setup a campaign, Kieden provides you a small bit of JavaScript for you to place on your landing pages and web-to-lead forms. This is what allows Kieden to measure the number of Leads you receive against your search campaigns. The Lead Setup Test button allows you to make sure the pages on your website are functioning properly with the Kieden code.

Search Campaign Detail Page
The Search Campaign Detail page shows you the Ad groups for your campaign. You can have as many ad groups as you want to. I created 1 ad group for this example. Kieden updates statistics at the Ad Group level too.

This page also allows you to pause a Campaign. Perhaps you want to get your ads all setup properly before displaying them on Google. Just pause the campaign. Activate it again when you are ready.

Ad Group Details

This is where you do all your work. The ads pertaining to this group are displayed here. You can create as many text ads as you wish. A text ad is simply a title, 2 lines of text (35 char each), a display URL and the destination URL. Kieden will then show you a preview of what your ad will look like in Google Ads.

The Keywords section is below the text ad section. Setup as many keywords as you like. The Kieden help system provides some pointers on setting up keywords. I setup 7 sets of keywords for my ad group. You are able to edit the keywords on active campaigns and the updated information is sent to Google AdWords in real-time.

The really cool thing is seeing the stats come through at the keyword level. You can see how many times you ad was displayed vs. clicked by keyword. You can also see the number of leads by keyword and the Google cost of any clicks by keyword. Over time, you can use this information to refine your keywords.

Reports
Kieden provides a number of basic Salesforce.com reports to measure your success.

When you are using the Kieden screens, you are actually using pages served from kieden.com. However, the Kieden application also contains custom objects in Salesforce.com. These custom objects are not setup with Page Layouts for you to access the data. Instead, Kieden populates your custom objects behind-the-scenes with the statistics, allowing you to report using Salesforce.com’s reporting engine.

Other Stuff
Kieden currently only supports Google Adwords. Yahoo support is slated for a future release. Their original plan was to get this implemented sooner, but based upon customer feedback, they were pointed in the direction of focusing on a tight integration with Google Adwords.

One nice thing about this application is that the Help system is very thorough. Like it is in Salesforce.com, every list in Kieden has a Help link to take you to specific help for that item. I was able to answer most every question I had by referencing the Help.

Pricing

There are 2 cost components to be aware of with Kieden: the cost to Google and the cost to Kieden. Kieden handles both sides of it for you.

Your cost to Google is a pass through cost. Your ongoing costs are displayed on your Search Campaign views and you have the ability to setup a maximum daily budget or pause campaigns to protect yourself.

The cost to Kieden is a flat monthly rate that is based upon your monthly search marketing ad spend. Visit http://www.kieden.com/pricing/ for the most up to date pricing information. As of authoring this review, the pricing structure was:

• Free: for a monthly ad spend of < $100/month
• $99/month: for a monthly ad spend of $100 – $1,000
• $299/month: for a monthly ad spend of $1,001 – $5,000
• $799/month: for a monthly ad spend of $5,001 – $10,000

I believe the pricing is dynamic based upon the previous month’s ad spend. This allows you to move from tier to tier each month.

Getting Setup

Getting started was very easy. After installing the application from the AppExchange, it was a matter of completing the My Account page. After that, I was all setup.

Kieden will setup an AdWords account for you. They do not provide you with the account name and password for this account, so you cannot go to Google AdWords to view it. They want to keep you working in the Kieden application. However, while writing this review, Kieden posted a message to their blog indicating the ability to import an existing AdWords account so everything is all linked together.

Opinion

I am really impressed with Kieden. I am brand new to Search Marketing advertising, so my opinion is based upon the seamless user experience with Kieden and Salesforce.com, as well as how easy it is for a Google Ads novice to use. Once I setup my ad, it was online in about 10 minutes.

The help information allowed me to get moving along quickly and answered most of my basic questions. Their blog contains a very good 12 part essay on using the product, which is a good read if you really get into using Kieden. I am going to keep this application in my org and manage my search campaigns with it. Since I should be staying within the free realm, this is really handy. As I learn more and more about search marketing and as my business grows, I will already have the framework and knowledge in place to leverage Adwords even further.

If you are curious about this product, I would suggest giving it a try.

If you have been using Kieden, please add comments with your experiences.

1. Kieden is an advertiser on this blog. This relationship has not biased this review. This review is based merely on the merits of the product being reviewed. [back]

Company: Spanning Partners (website)
Product: Spanning Salesforce 3.0
Product Page

Spanning Salesforce is a service that allows you to subscribe to various Salesforce.com data queries via RSS. It is a one of a kind service for Salesforce.com customers. I originally learned about what Spanning Partners was doing back in June 2005 and have been following the evolution of the service ever since. Spanning Partners specializes in RSS and is an advocate and thought leader in RSS In The Enterprise. If you are interested in tracking RSS in the Enterprise topics, I suggest subscribing to Charlie Wood’s (founder of Spanning Partners) Moonwatcher Blog .

Per the Spanning Salesforce web site:

Spanning Salesforce lets you track your most important Salesforce.com information—including leads, opportunities, contacts, events, tasks, documents, and more—using RSS. And by using the same technology that powers podcasting, Spanning Salesforce delivers price lists, collateral, and other documents stored in Salesforce.com right to your laptop, desktop, or mobile device.

Functionality

The number of feeds is growing every day. At the time of writing this review, the number of feeds totaled 26. In a March 15 post on Spanning Salesforce, the feed count was only 14. 12 new feeds were setup in less than a month. This goes to show that a) the ability for new feeds to be created is pretty easy for them, b) They are listening to user requests for new feeds and c) There are likely to be many more feeds in the future that are automatically included with your subscription.

One particularly unique feed, New Attachments, allows you to monitor file attachments as they get uploaded. Salesforce.com does not currently have any reports to obtain this information. It is only accessible through the API. This feed can be very helpful for administrators to keep real-time tabs on file usage. It could also be used to invoke back office processes when, for example, a final contract is uploaded.

Spanning Partners made a number of architectural improvements that provide better performance on their back-end and also gives them the ability to setup new feeds very quickly.

Custom fields are now supported. This is fantastic and makes the value of the feeds so much greater. The custom fields are located at the end of each feed item after the Created/Last Updated information.

One thing that is required to use this service is a feed reader that supports secure feeds. Popular choices include FeedDemon for Windows, Attensa for Outlook, NetNewsWire for OS X, and Newsclip and FreeNews for mobile devices.

You can see how the feeds render in these readers by going to the Screenshots page.

Pricing

One of the changes in the move to 3.0 is that the feeds are no longer free. You get a free 30 day trial and then can signup at a monthly rate of $12.95 for all feeds or a yearly rate of $129.95. The yearly rate is the price of 10 months, so you are getting 2 months free. It’s a simple model where your subscription gives you access to every public feed available, present and future.

I signed up for a trial and it was a piece of cake. Purchases are made through PayPal only right now. If you are a company purchasing on behalf of many people, you can contact Spanning Partners to work out other billing arrangements.

Getting Setup

Once you are signed up, you have a few options for getting your feeds. I tried it both ways and they were equally simple. You can either subscribe to each feed one at a time if you only care about a few of them. Alternatively, you can import the OPML file located on the Spanning Partners site and have all of the feeds download to your reader. The OPML file is pre-organized with several folders containing the feeds. It also included a subscription to the Spanning Partners blog so you can keep up to date on any announcements they make.

View of Subscription Folders in FeedDemon

I preferred starting with the full feed set in the OPML file. Once you have the feeds in your reader, it is easy to delete the ones that are not needed or seem redundant. However, get them all and give them some time to work so you can see what is most relevant to your needs.

Opinion

Spanning Salesforce is a very well built and user friendly service. A very positive sign about Spanning Partners is that things outside the service itself (for example, the signup process) were well thought out and provide a good user experience. This is a good sign that Spanning Partners is very knowledgeable about the technology and also very cognizant of the user experience, which is key. Those types of companies have a tendency to succeed. If you follow the Moonwatcher Blog, you will quickly learn that Charlie is on the leading edge of RSS in the Enterprise and the service will be quick to adopt new standards as they develop.

Spanning Salesforce is great for any RSS savvy Salesforce.com user: sales, support and admin users. Spanning Salesforce is aimed directly at the end user. The end user signs up directly for the service. Utilizing this service requires no involvement from the Administrator of your Salesforce application. This is different than most other AppExchange applications that require installation administratively.

As RSS adoption increases and the functionality starts getting embedded in everyday applications like IE7 and Outlook, look for Spanning Salesforce to become even more popular with Salesforce users. For now, it’ll probably sell mostly to the early adopter crowd. If you are among them, rely on your Salesforce information regularly and are not tethered to your computer all day, I would suggest signing up for a trial.

Company: Upside Outcomes Ltd (website)
Product: Developers’ Sidekick for Salesforce.com
Product Page
On AppExchange

Developers’ Sidekick for Salesforce.com is a nice little item to have in your quiver. It’s a free application for download (my license defaulted to 1 year of activation) that provides you a quick look at your Salesforce objects, references to those objects and, for picklist fields, available values. Per the website:

Developers’ Sidekick for salesforce.com is a free client application that displays objects and their fields, their properties and parameters, including pick-list values. Developers’ Sidekick provides a handy instant reference for people developing custom apps or designing reports.

Upside Outcomes Ltd, the maker of this tool, has other Salesforce.com related tools, most of which are in development. I have not had a chance to check them out yet.

In order to use the application, you need to complete a contact information form with, at a minimum, an accurate email address. A serial number will be emailed to you to enter into the application for activation.

Once you enter your Salesforce.com login credentials, the application imports all of the information about your environment. This makes the navigation of the app very fast since all of the data is cached. I didn’t test it too much, but I assume you’ll need to logout and login again in order to refresh the schema.

The Schema Browser (image below) provides you a quick look at an object. As you can see, I have selected the Account object. Within the “Object” frame, I can see other objects that related to the Account object and the properties of the Account object. Within the “Attribute” frame, I can see all of the fields related to my selected object. Once I select a field, I can see other information such as the object it references (for lookup fields), picklist values (for picklist fields) and the properties of the attribute.

The Developer’s Helper screen puts field information into a text box for easy cutting and pasting into your code. Each object is listed along the left. Once selected, all of the fields are listed. You can then “dress the text” to have the app quickly setup the fields so you can cut and paste the text for various purposes.

This app seems pretty handy. You can actually get most of the same information from sForce Explorer with the addition of things like an SOQL tester and syntax helper. Also, sForceHerder provides another type of look at this same information. Sidekick just has a different UI and does a few things differently. I recommend having all 3 in your quiver and using the one that works best for you as you need it. The installs are all pretty light.

One thing I don’t know is what information, if any, is being sent to the vendor’s servers. I assume they are only collecting your contact information when you sign up and then associate the serial number from your registration to your record. Beyond that, it’s between you and the Salesforce.com API.

This, and their other tools, will eventually be listed on the App Exchange.

Company: Sesame Software (website)
Product: Relational Junction for Salesforce
On App Exchange

I was recently introduced to the Relational Junction for Salesforce product by Sesame Software. Per their site’s product page,

Relational Junction for Salesforce simplifies legacy data migration, integration and reporting by creating and synchronizing a local data warehouse that is a perfect mirror of your Salesforce.com site. This Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, or Sybase database includes all custom objects and fields, including long text and attachments. No programming is required, and the database schema is always in sync with your Salesforce site.

I was given a temporary license to play around with the product and I have to say I am quite impressed. I am running Windows XP and used a local MySQL database for my replica database. I was able to get a replica created locally in about 10 – 15 minutes. I spent another 30 minutes learning about its intricacies and was able get my replica tweaked just the way I wanted.

The biggest thing that sets this product apart is its ability to easily send data back to Salesforce.com. It lets companies have their developers focus on interacting with the DBMS of choice (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc.). Inserts/Updates made in the replica database are sent back to Salesforce.com in the next SetUpdated command. This works for standard and custom objects. The Relational Junction for Salesforce scripts do the work of interacting with the Sforce API, leaving developers to focus on the replica database. Another nice thing is that DELETES made in Salesforce.com are not deleted in the replica. Rather, they are marked as having been deleted.

The process of setting it up was simple (a PDF they provide explains what you need to do):

1. Unzip the files into a new directory. “c:\rj4salesforce” is the recommended location in order which minimizes the amount of editing required in the config files. There is no install program.
2. Edit the connection properties file with info on connecting to Salesforce.com and to your local database. There is also a command for encrypting the password in the file.
3. Edit the upload.config and download.config files to document the objects that should be included in the download from Salesforce.com to the local database and the objects included in the upload of changes back to Salesforce.com.
4. Run a GetAllGlobal command to get your Salesforce.com database replicated locally. Alternatively, you can run GetSchemaGlobal to just get the schema.
5. From there, you can run all kinds of commands like GetUpdated on specific objects to get changes from Salesforce, GetUpdatedGlobal to get all changes for all objects in your download.config file, SetUpdated on specific objects to send changes back to Salesforce, etc.

Relational Junction for Salesforce definitely practices the Keep It Simple philosophy. There is no user interface for it. All commands are run via command line. The programs are written in Java, so it is cross-platform, and they provide BAT files for Windows execution and files for Unix execution.

The documentation includes sample scripts, best practices and an example approach to use the product for converting legacy data to Salesforce.

If you are looking to integrate your Salesforce.com database with multiple datasources and are hesitant to train a large group of developers on the Sforce API, Relational Junction for Salesforce is a good option for handling the work with Sforce, letting your team focus on interacting with the databases they are used to.

Sesame Software also makes an ETL Manager product to manage the loads between non-Salesforce.com databases. I did not look at that product, but you learn about it here.

Open Access has created an ODBC driver for Salesforce. This allows you to use any ODBC compliant software to access the Salesforce database. You can get a free 30 day trial on their site. I have been playing around with it the past couple days to see how it worked for me in migrating data from one Salesforce environment to another. So for so good. The price seems pretty reasonable too, $99/year for a single user license.

There is also a free option to does pretty much the same thing at Sourceforge. The Forceamp tool allows you to create a Linked Server in SQL Server to your Salesforce instance(s). That tool is free, but requires SQL Server. If you don’t have SQL Server, you can get SQL Server Express free from Microsoft.