Perspectives on Salesforce.com

I meet a lot of people who are very excited about Salesforce.com, but have let their 30-day trial expire before they can finish analyzing the product. Everyone should know that Salesforce.com offers Developer Edition accounts that never expire. You get nearly the same functionality as a 30-day trial (most Enterprise Edition functionality) except you are limited to 2 user licenses and and you don’t have access to the Online Training modules offered behind the Help link.

I would encourage anyone to sign up that is currently managing a Salesforce.com environment, responsible for analyzing the product as a potential customer or who is a developer that needs a playground environment. It’s a great tool to have at your disposal for a variety of reasons.

To sign up, you are joining the “Appexchange Developer Network”, which has some other benefits too (like the ability to post in the forums). Visit the sign up page for more info.

For more information on getting started with Salesforce.com, check out one of my first posts.

As you might have read about by now, Salesforce.com has made their system status page public. It is located here. I think it is great that they are doing this and it is very interesting to see this information.

Across the top, you see the current status. Each server (AP, EMEA, NA1 and SSL (used for PE edition only, i think)) is listed and a red/yellow/green status indicator is there telling you the system status. I would expect, should the status be yellow or red, that there would be an explanation of the problem. It will be interesting to see how they handle this during actual outages. Will the explanation be there in real-time or will those be delivered after the fact? Ideally, there will not only be explanation on the problem, but information on which parts of the application are down (API vs. GUI) and the expected time to come back online.

Then they show historical status. As you can see in the picture, clicking on the red status from 02/09 on NA1, they give a detailed explanation of the problem that occurred. Also interesting in the historical section are the number of transactions and avg. speed. It gives some appreciation as to the size of the application and what they are dealing with over there. Kind of makes you wish that NA2, NA3, NA4, etc. all existed for failover purposes.

I came across a toolkit called ActiveSalesforce being developed as an extension to the Rails framework. Per the site,

“ActiveSalesforce is an extension to the Ruby on Rails framework that provides direct access to Salesforce.com hosted data and metadata via the ActiveRecord model layer. Standard and custom objects, standard and custom fields are all automatically surfaced as active record attributes. Something that is unique to ActiveSalesforce is that all salesforce metadata relationships are also automatically surfaced as part of the model interface!”

It looks that this is utilizing the latest 7.0 API. If anyone knows more about this, please elaborate in comments.

The App Exchange allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed for apps submitted into a specific category. There is an XML link on the left-hand side of the category page to do this.

I tweaked the URL from one of these and made a feed for getting every submission across all categories. You have to include, but leave blank, the Category parameter. Then you have to set a length. The default Salesforce uses is 20. I set mine to 1000 so that I got a download of all the apps up there so far.

http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/rssfeed/appexchange_feed.rss?Category=&Length=1000

The link above will take you to the one I am subscribing too. You might want to knock down the length variable. There were 162 submissions that I received when I added the feed to my reader.

Since I work with a number of different customers and access multiple Salesforce.com instances, I have to keep track of a bunch of usernames and passwords. Rather than write it all down and type in the username and password on the login screen, I keep a bookmark for each login that puts me right into Salesforce.com without having to type in the username and password.

To do this, you want to start your bookmark’s URL with the standard login page. Make sure and use HTTPS.

https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp

If you want to access the salesforce sandbox, you should use https://test.salesforce.com/login.jsp

You can then add parameters for your username and password. For example, if your login in scott@example.com and your password is qwerty, the rest of your bookmark’s URL will contain the following:

?pw=qwerty&un=scott@example.com

The ? is used to start tell the browser that name/value pairs follow. You should put a & between each name/value pair. pw is the name for the password parameter and un is the name for the username parameter.

Putting it all together, your bookmark’s URL would be:

https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp?pw=qwerty&un=scott@example.com

NOTE: Do not save these bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us. Since your password is in the URL, everyone could see it. Del.icio.us is a public bookmarking system. Keep these bookmarks closely held.