I came across a new blog by Oliver Muthig in Germany called Ruby on Sforce. His most recent post is a getting started example for displaying accounts. If you are a Ruby on Rails developer working with Salesforce.com, you might want to keep tabs on this blog.
The Sforce blog just posted about a tool called File Watcher, created by engineer Steve Buikhuizen of Salesforce.
Per the blog post:
When working with Salesforce data, there are many times when you need to edit records using an editor on your PC. You can do this by copying the data to a local file and then saving back to Salesforce when you’re finished. A good example of this is when you are configuring the PRM portal with your own branding and making little changes to the header, footer, etc.
But what if you need to save back to Salesforce repetitively? In this case, the cut/paste process can take up a lot of time. Now there is a better way. Use a “watcher”… These tools allow you to edit fields, documents and s-controls using any editor. When you save locally, the watcher will save the file back to Salesforce. Simple.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I will soon. Check it out at http://www.buikhuizen.com/watcher/. There is a separate watcher for Fields, Files (Documents) and S-Controls (if you use the Eclipse plug-in, then you don’t need it for S-controls)
Per Steve’s site,
These tools are open source projects, not supported by Salesforce.com.
Mark at salesforcewatch.com posted a nice solution for using a free service called Meebo to provide a way for users to chat with the salesforce admin.
This is a creative idea for Salesforce support. It allows users to spend very little time to get their basic questions answered. It’s usually the answers to the little questions that add a lot to productivity.
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Users of Skype can download the Skype Web Toolbar. The Skype Web Toolbar recognizes phone numbers and Skype Names on webpages, so that you can call with one click, through Skype. It works well when using Salesforce.com. No Salesforce.com configuration required. All phone number fields are transformed into clickable links that launch Skype to dial that number.
This will work well for non-US users too. The toolbar allows you to select your default country so that a country code is not used when dialing.
The Skype Web Toolbar is available for both IE & Firefox.
If you use custom links regularly, you know about this issue. It’s an issue when you decide to open custom links in the existing window rather than a popup window. You can get nested frames where the entire Salesforce.com application is within the frame where the data should reside like in the screen shot below. For this screen shot, I had a custom link from the Account Page Layout to a specific report. I chose to Open in Salesforce window without sidebar.
If I run the custom link 3 times in a row, my screen now looks like this.
You get the idea.
Because of this issue, many people opt for using pop-up windows instead. This can be somewhat annoying to an end user, though. We have pop-up blockers now because people don’t like this. Why open another window? You can fix this problem, by using a simple S-Control for your custom link rather than using a direct URL. All you need to do is copy the code below. Where it says {URL GOES HERE}, replace that with the same URL you put in your Custom Link.
< script language="JavaScript">
function redirect()
{
parent.frames.location.replace(“{URL GOES HERE}”);
}redirect();
< /script >
Note: In order for the code to appear on this blog post I had to add a space in the < script> and < /script> tags. You’ll need to remove those spaces too.
Combine this trick with my old post about Auto-creating reports from web links to do some dynamic reporting right from record (e.g. run an Activity History report for a specific account right from the Account page).
