Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Salesforce posted their Dreamforce presentations. Below are links to some of the more interesting developer-focused ones. There is no audio.

Sforce and Customforce Hacks – Provides a good look into new functionality being offered in Winter ’06.

AJAX Toolkit – Nothing here you can’t learn from the manual, but is a decent getting started presentation.

Open Source Software – Decent presentation points you towards the Sourceforge site.

Gearing Up – Overview of the PHP, Perl and ForceAmp tools.

I posted a while back about how someone published Salesforce.com to an RSS feed. I didn’t receive any details about how this was done.

I decided to give this a try on my own using tools that I was familiar with and without having to write any code. I accomplished this using Blogger to create my blog and Salesforce.com workflow to perform the publishing to the blog. It took about 1 hour including testing time. I did the example with Leads, but this example could work with any object that supports workflow.

All I did was:

1. Created a new blog at Blogger.com. Any blog tool will work as long as it supports posting to the blog via email (most, if not all, do).
2. This blog could be hosted on blogspot.com (Blogger’s hosting site), but then it is publically viewable on the Internet. You can help your cause by not putting in the blogspot listings and not pinging weblogs, but it’s still out there. Instead, I published it to a folder on my web site and added password protection to access that folder. I created a “blogger” FTP user on my site that has direct access to that folder and nothing else on my site.
3. Create a workflow in Salesforce.com based on the Lead object. For testing purposes, I set it up to only trigger on new leads and had criteria where the Create Date > 1/1/2000. Thus, it triggered for every new lead. The workflow alert I setup sent an email to the posting email address of the blog. Blogs support HTML formatted emails, so you can create a nice looking email template to post the information to the blog and make it look nice. Be sure to include a link to the record in the email template so a blog reader and go right to that record in Salesforce.com is necessary.
4. The blog posting was published immediately. After adding a lead, I immediately refreshed the blog page in my browser and the data was already there.
5. For added convenience, I added the blog RSS feed to my Newsgator Online account and was able to see the postings from there.

I was able to do all of this in ~ 1 hour and everything I used is free and required no fancy code. It does take knowledge (if you do step #2) about setting up a folder on your web site, password protecting it and adding an FTP user to access that folder as their root. However, with my ISP, I can do all of that with point-and-click, so it was a piece of cake.

Personally, I don’t see much use in publishing leads in this manner because people should be encouraged to use Salesforce.com instead of another tool. However, this concept could be powerful in other capacities. For example:

• Run a script to pull statistics out of Salesforce.com and publish the results to the blog for executives to view. This only makes sense if your organization is particularly frugal about licenses. Option 1 would be to use Dashboards for this, but if people don’t have access, this could be a good way.
• Run a script to post to your CRM Project Blog about the success of the project thus far.
• When running an integration, use a blog to post the integration run summary. This posting could then have links to the detailed log files on the network. Use multiple blogs too. Perhaps have 1 for the standard summary and 1 for high alerts.
• Use it as an escalation path for cases when the escalation team is not yet online with Salesforce.com. This would be an alternative to emailing people directly or using a mailing list.

The point of this posting is about the value of RSS and how it should not be forgotten when thinking about solutions in your Salesforce.com implementation.

Over time, the Reports tab can be cumbersome to navigate through. You can only create 1 level of report folders and the reports are simply listed alphabetically. Try using an HTML component on the homepage with links directly to reports to help your users get right to the reports they need.

1. First, determine the public reports being used most often in the organization. This can be done by surveying users. Also ask your users the type of reports that they are creating for personal use. Perhaps everyone is creating reports that are very similar, but not identical. You could create a public report that gets them 90% of the way there.
2. Next, make sure all of the public reports are created properly and accessible in the Reports tab.
3. Create the HTML component. The HTML component will allow you to use the flexibility of HTML to create a user-friendly look and feel with links pointing directly to your reports. Since every report (and every record, for that matter) has its own unique URL, you can link directly to those public reports. If desired, you could also create links to pages in the setup area such as Change Password, My Templates, My Personal Information, etc. Another useful thing would be to create links directly to any documents you have in the Documents tab that users reference regularly.
4. Communicate and obtain feedback from your users. Then build this out over time. You will likely receive varying requests from different groups. Using separate homepage layouts, you could display differing HTML components on each, giving each profile its own component.

I have received a positive response from users when they see this functionality. Give it a try. Let me know what you think too.

There is a little documented trick for building dynamic reports that can be launched from Web Links on a specific record. You can setup reports with pre-set criteria and pass the criteria values dynamically to the report through a URL string. To do so, pass the parameter values in the URL string where

pv0 is the value of the first parameter
pv1 is the value of the second parameter
pv2 is the value of the third parameter
and so on…

The URL would be:

https://na1.salesforce.com/id_of_the_report?pv0=value&pv1=value

Build this link this using a weblink or sforce control.

For example, suppose your company uses a Parent-Child account hierarchy. Suppose you do business with a number of GE subsidiaries and have a parent GE account is used to bring all of those accounts together. You want to easily run a report for all of the Opportunities related to the child accounts of that GE parent account.

To do this, create a Web Link to dynamically generate the report from an Account record.

Here’s how you do it:

Create an Opportunity report with the format you want. Add a single criteria line using the Parent Account ID field. Set the condition to “equals”. Leave the value blank. Save the report and note the URL of the report.

Create an Account web link that is a URL. The URL is “/id of the report?pv0={Account ID}“. Put that web link on the account page layout. When you run this report, the weblink will pass the Account ID into the first report criteria value. In this case, that’s the Account ID. So this report will pull all Opportunities where the Parent Account ID equals the Account ID of the Account record you clicked the weblink from. If you run that report from the GE record, it will pull up all Opportunities for child accounts of GE.

The parent-child situation is just 1 example. The concept can be used for a lot of situations where you cannot hardcode the criteria you need into the report.

If you are an implementation consultant, it takes more than simply knowing what the product does to be good at what you do. It takes an understanding of CRM as a philosophy, understanding the On-Demand software market, knowing implementation best practices and being able to understand how Salesforce.com can be used to enable a company’s business processes, not how a company has to change its processes to fit Salesforce.com.

Below are a few recommendations on getting started with Salesforce.com:

1. Gain an understanding of CRM and the On-Demand software movement
Refer to sources such as Gartner, Forrester to get an understanding of CRM and the implementation best practices associated with it. There are 100s of sources, but those two are pretty good. Forrester recently did an analysis on the top on-demand CRM packages, which has some very good information in there. If you do not have a subscription to those services, I suggest going to the web sites of many Salesforce.com partners to understand the various approaches and philosophies they have on CRM.

Blogs and newsfeeds are also an excellent way to understand the market.

2. Understand the Salesforce.com Product line
Peruse the Salesforce.com website to gain this understanding. Check out the demos and presentations about the products on that site.

3. Understand the implementation methodology
Traditional best practices such as aligning a project to a CRM vision, creating success metrics and having a strong communication plan apply to Salesforce.com implementations. However, delivering an on-demand solution is different than implementing an on-premise product. For example, the dilineation between requirements and design is a bit blurred with Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com requires more of a JAD (joint application design) approach than the traditional approach. This helps these projects move much more quickly. The CRM Success website is probably the best place to learn about the methodology and best practices.

4. Create a Salesforce.com account
You have 2 options here. You can setup a 30-day trial or go to Sforce.com and create a Developer Editions account. I recommend the latter. A Developer Edition account never expires. It allows you 2 licenses (an admin and a test user acccount, for example) to play around with. This is a great way to prototype what you learn and always maintain a copy of it.

5. Immerse yourself
Now that you have an account, you need to take time to learn about how the application works. I recommend 3 things:

• Online Training

Go to the Help and Training link in the upper-right of the application. Go to the Training tab. There are a lot of very good online training course that will help you get up to speed on things like Fundaments, basic SFA, reporting, Campaign management, etc. If you cannot see the Training tab in the Developer Edition, you may need to do a 30 day trial for this purpose.

• Play Around

I recommend configuring each module very simply and walk through them as if you are selling to and supporting a customer. I recommend starting with Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Activities and Reporting. Then move onto the Support side with Cases & Solutions. Once you get the basics, take it to the next level with Products, Opportunity Line Items and Forecasting. Then onto the web tools like Web to Lead and the Self-Service portal.

• User Guide

In the Help section, there is a little Adobe Acrobat icon. That is a link to a PDF version of the User Guide. I recommend downloading that and walking through it as you continue to play with the application.

6. Take it to the next level
Check out other resources to learn the tricks of the trade. Good places to start are:

• This blog and others like it (see the sidebar for links to other blogs)
• CRM Success Best Practices blog
• Sforce Connector – This is probably the best utility out there for messing around with Salesforce.com data. For people like me that are semi-techie, but not great coders, this is a fantastics tool. It does the heavy lifting of working with the API and still provides flexibility in working with the data. This is a great tool for an administrator to perform data cleansing or for a small data migration effort.

User Guide
Download Page

7. Learn the API
The Sforce website is the place. Here you will find toolkits, API documentation, tech notes and more. Use the platform of your choice (VB, Java, Perl, etc.) to get going. If you are not super-techie, I’d recommend using Office to get started. Either MS Excel or Access will work great.

8. Join the community
Get involved in the community of Salesforce.com developers and users. Participate in the Sforce community forums, comment on blog postings, start your own blog, let me know how I can improve this one, etc.