Perspectives on Salesforce.com

Site has moved

2005-11-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

The Perspectives on Salesforce.com blog has moved. The blog is now located at http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com.

If you are subscribed to the Feedburner feed, everything should take care of itself. I have redirected those feeds already. If everything is working correctly, you should not be receiving this post in your aggregator.

If you are receiving this post in your aggregator, then you are subscribed using the Blogger atom.xml file. You need to remap your subscription to one of the following sources:

RSS

Atom

Both will redirect you to Feedburner.

The new site is being run on Wordpress. I am opening it up allowing people to register if they wish to contribute content. I'd like this blog to be a place where many people author the content and have it act as a supplement to the high-quality Best Practices blog that Salesforce maintains. I have not been too good about it so far, but I'd like the blog to take on more of a solutions-focus than a news-focus. To date, it's been more about Salesforce news and functionality wishes. I want to leave the news to Salesforcewatch.com and stick to the functionality wishes and solutions. This is a bit of an overlap with Salesforce's blog, but should still supplement it by having that independent developer point of view.

The about page on the new site has information on registering and what that means. For starters, all postings by new registrants will need to be authorized for publishing, but that can be changed if this goes anywhere.

I will be creating a similar posting to this one on the new site letting everyone know of the change. I will enable comments on that post. I'd appreciate any feedback on how to make this work and if it's of interest to people.

This Blogger site is officially retired.

Thanks.

Sforce API: What's New in Winter '06

2005-11-03T23:32:00.000-08:00

Salesforce has posted a tech note on the changes to the API for the Winter Release.

Winter Release on 11/12?

2005-10-31T09:27:00.000-08:00

When I logged into Salesforce today, I received a Scheduled Maintenance notice. It’s a notice for being offline for 12 hours.

Could it be the Winter Release?

Scheduled Maintenance Notification
Saturday November 12, 11:00 AM PST — Saturday November 12, 11:00 PM PST

Please be advised that salesforce.com will be performing scheduled maintenance on Saturday November 12, 11:00 AM PST — Saturday November 12, 11:00 PM PST.

During this interval, the salesforce.com system will not be available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and your company.

As always, thank you for your business.

— The team at salesforce.com

UPDATE: Looks like it’s just a Data Center move. I will see what I can find out about the Winter release.

ZD Net Opinion on App Exchange

2005-10-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

ZDNet has a pretty good viewpoint on where AppExchange is at today.

Link

Dreamforce Developer Presentations

2005-09-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Dreamforce News

2005-09-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

Wow. There has been quite a lot of news in the Salesforce.com world this week.

AppExchange
This is such an innovative idea. The more I think about it, the better this idea sounds. We will truly see it in action in the Winter release, but it has lots of potential and looks great on the website right now. Salesforce.com seeded the marketplace with some of the apps and I believe these apps will all be free to customers.

Using AppExchange is also a great way to learn about Custom Objects and advanced configuration. If you want to get a really good, real world look at Custom Objects in action, do the Test Drive on one of the Appforce apps (Appforce Project and Issue Management is a good one to start with because it is not too complex). The Customforce configuration is exposed for you to view.

One thing I noticed from the Test Drives was that each demonstration is completely read-only. It was difficult to get a real taste of the application if data cannot be created or edited. It wouls be really nice to be able to see the Edit view on a page to really understand the user experience. To get around this, I believe AppExchange will allow you to import the functionality into your Org without Deploying it. This will allow your admin to see the functionality in a read-write environment without impacting end-users. I hope something similar will exist for the partner apps as well. The ideal would be to allow anyone to import an app into their own environment for free. Then, for partner apps that are fee-based, they would have a trial period (30 day, 15 day, etc.) determined by the vendor so we can have time to play with the app, get user feedback and put it through some real world scenarios prior to deploying it and paying for it.

AppExchange isn't officially operational until the Winter release, so I am sure many of the kinks will be worked out and we'll also see more as to how these apps will be trialed and deployed in an org. It's a fantastic start.

Siebel Acquisition
In my world, the most important thing coming out of this acquisition is opportunity in the CRM services industry. I am sure many companies will now question their CRM vendor selection. Whether they be existing Siebel customers, Oracle customers or new CRM customers, the pot is being stirred and movement will be occurring in the industry. That is exciting news on the services side!

Siebel does have a very good product (the on-premise one) that has a fit in many large-scale organizations. Especially ones that require very sophisticated workflows and high-levels of automation and interactivity in the app through the use of event-driven scripting and other tools. This cannot be totally achieved in Salesforce.com (yet) with the same level of interactivity for the end-user. I believe that the greatest movement will occur from existing Siebel customers when 2 things have happened: 1) the next major Siebel release is out and customers question whether to upgrade or not and 2) more advanced development capabilities are included in Customforce such as event-based scripting logic that does not require a user to click a web link, more advanced workflow allowing scripts to be initiated based upon database triggers, and the advancement of record types to create classes of the main object. Prior to these things happening, I think most Siebel customers will stick with what they have for a while unless they are only using the most basic of functionality.

I have actually never heard a good thing about Oracle's CRM product and have never had a customer actually decide to use it, so I know little about it. Ellison says that Siebel will be the center-piece of Oracle's CRM platform. In other words, existing Oracle CRM customers will need to migrate to the Siebel platform. That'll be a headache. I think there will be a lot of opportunity for Salesforce with these companies as many of these customers will opt for the minor aches of migrating to Salesforce vs. the migraine of migrating to Siebel. Many of these companies probably use Oracle Financials. The biggest challenge for Salesforce will be convincing these companies that Salesforce can support the integration processes between the two apps. Especially the ability to maintain the customer and product masters and in supporting a seamless quote-to-order-to-cash process.

CSS-Based UI
An article on silicon.com references Benioff speaking about the new UI. According to the article, Benioff said the following regarding the new UI, "If you don't like it you don't have to use it. Soon you will be able to create your own user interface as well.". That sounds to me like they are heeding the advice of those that provided feedback on their blog that the UI should be CSS based. Nice! For starters, I think they'll allow a customer to select from a few options. A follow-on release will probably open that up further to allow for custom configuration of the UI.

Winter ‘06 Overview on CRM Success Blog

2005-09-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

There are too many postings to count about App Exchange and what's coming in the Winter release. Salesforce boiled down the Winter release key points for us in a recent posting on the CRM Success blog.

I am especially looking forward to the new Quote Management and Campaign Management capabilities mentioned there. Those will have the most immediate impact on my customers. Features such as the new UI will also be great attention-getter in selling customers on Salesforce. The current method for creating a campaign member list and associating it to a Campaign is very cumbersome. That and performing mass mail merges are the two things that are difficult to train and gets most people confused. I am excited to see how the Campaign enhancements turn out. Hopefully, the mass mail merges will come too! (hint hint).

AppExchange

2005-09-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

An article today in Business Week Online talks about an upcoming announcement from Salesforce called "AppExchange".

According to the article, AppExchange is a marketplace for On-Demand applications that will be managed by Salesforce.com. It sounds like these are all apps that would be hosted by Salesforce.com (not 100% sure about my interpretation there) and could be trialed and purchased through AppExchange. I presume that these will all integrate with Salesforce.com, but the article indicates that they will also host apps that have no interaction with Salesforce; stand-alone On Demand apps. Salesforce will be seeding AppExchange with some apps they built when it goes live.

Sounds like an interesting idea that will open up the door for a lot of innovation in and around the product.

Upcoming Functionality

2005-09-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

With Dreamforce coming up, Salesforce is very likely to be announcing some big improvements to the software and new initiatives. I have not heard much, but am anxious to find out. Hopefully some of the improvements I recommended in other posts (ref 1, ref 2) will be implemented.

The only insight I've been able to find has been:

A multiforce ERP solution (reference article). This might just be another partnership, but using the term "multiforce" leads me to believe this would be incorporated into the Salesforce.com UI. If so, I would hope it would also allow enhancements to it using customforce. Will this be part of an Enterprise license or a small addition to an Enterprise license? I have had projects where we struggled to determine how to complete the opportunity to cash process. Salesforce.com currently stops you at the opportunity, which is a weak form of quoting. A solid quote and order solution has been missing. I have long heard they use an Order and Invoicing solution internally (you can see it when you check your order and invoice history in the Company Information section of Setup).
Salesforcewatch.com notes two possible somethings. The first is a refernce from an employee blog and the second has something to do with "multiforce app packaging" (link). The post has a reference to an Sforce forum posting from Salesforce.com. It leads me to believe that they will be allowing developers to port their multiforce app configuration from one ORG to another. Hopefully, if it is something along those lines, it will allow for more granular porting of specific configurations (like a specific object or specific profiles) rather than the entire multiforce app.
I have also heard that there will be some improvements to the Offline Edition and that it will support Leads in the next release, but I am not sure if its next release is the upcoming one.

Skypeforce

2005-08-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

I came across someone who had built an integration between Salesforce.com and Skype. It's called Skypeforce (link to screen shots and more detail). I haven't had a chance to play around with the integration yet, but I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has. It appears to be a free connector.

Publishing Salesforce.com to an RSS feed (the easy way)

2005-07-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

Random Wish List

2005-06-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

Wanted to document a few "wish list" items that Salesforce.com should put into the application. Hopefully someone from Salesforce.com is checking out this blog.

Mass Email Activities (more detail)
When using the mass email feature today, it can log an activity for each Contact. However, the activity says next to nothing. It does not contain the text of the email and has no reference to the email template. The activity created should provide the text of the email that went out and any attachments included (just like the Send Email feature does). If that is too much text and SFDC fears it'll increase database size too much, at least have a reference to the email template that was used.

Campaign Visibility & Sharing
Right now, the Marketing User user profile field gives someone control of the Campaigns. It'd be fantastic if Campaigns were made to work just like the other objects with their own default Sharing Rule and the ability to add Campaign Sharing Rules to extend visibility to Campaigns. I think Campaigns were designed for a centralized marketing group to use. However, the functionality is applicable to a sales user too whereby a Sales person may want to run a personal Campaign. In today's world, they would need the Marketing User flag set on their profile. This would let them do that, but it'd also let them edit/delete anyone else's Campaigns.

Keyboard Shortcuts
Some keyboard shortcuts for things like Save, Cancel, New, etc. would be nice. SFDC currently requires heavy use of a mouse. Keyboard shortcuts are especially important on the Supportforce side of the house.

More than 1 personal reports folder
Give users the ability to create more than 1 personal reports folder. It is currently the equivalent of having 1 folder on your harddrive for all of your documents. Users should be able to create multiple folders. That's step 1. The second (and less important) step would be to allow for a hierarchy of folders. This functionality would negate the need for the HTML component I mentioned in a earlier posting.

Sales History Related List being Customizable
The new customizable related list functionality is great. It'd be nice if the Sales History list was editable too. For example, Expected Revenue is stuck on there. I have yet to see an implementation where my clients puts any significance on that field. We should be able to remove it.

Additional To people on an email
In the summer 05 release, the CC and BCC fields can bring up a list of Contacts to pick from. That link needs to be on the Additional To field too. This may have been a Summer 05 release oversight.

Mass Mail Merge
Allow users to do a mass mail merge similar to how the mass email is performed.

My Personal Mail Merge Templates
Just like having personal email templates, personal mail merge templates should exist.

Personal Bookmarks on Homepage
The ability to add personal bookmarks on your homepage. This might be links to external sites, but could also be a link to a report or another record in Salesforce.com.

Use an HTML homepage component with links to public reports

2005-06-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

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.

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.
Next, make sure all of the public reports are created properly and accessible in the Reports tab.
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.
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.

New Custom Formula Fields Blog

2005-06-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

CRM Success.com has a new blog focused totally on the new custom formula field functionality in the new Summer 05 release. I would suggest subscribing to the feed.

Custom Formula Fields Blog

Auto Create Reports from Web Links

2005-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Salesforce.com via RSS

2005-06-03T11:06:00.000-07:00

I came across a very interesting idea in another blog. Someone has used RSS technology to syndicate Salesforce.com leads. I think this is a fantastic idea and one that I would hope Salesforce.com might latch onto and include some syndication utilities for data into the sforce platform. If they are truly going the on-demand platform route, then this would be a necessary feature for all data objects and would provide ways to build alternative UIs for the data for particular purposes. If they want to keep people inside the user interface of Salesforce.com, then they'd want to pick their spots on incorporating this technology.

A link to the article I read: Moonwatcher Adoption: Salesforce.com via RSS

I'd love to hear from a developer on how this idea could be easily implemented. I am not familiar with the structure of RSS quite yet.

SugarCRM

2005-05-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

I am seeing a lot of chatter on SugarCRM. I am interested in hearing the virtues of it as a viable competitor to Salesforce.com. I am interested in true functionality/capability advantages and disadvantages of the product. If you have implementation experience with it, please give your candid opinions on it. Good and bad.

In your comments, please include any references to other sources for information on this subject.

Thanks!

Feed Location

2005-05-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

The URL for the feed changed. You can resubscribe by using a feed link on the bottom of the sidebar or just use the feed URL of

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PerspectivesOnSalesforcecom

Summer 05 Sneak Peak

2005-05-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

I have had a chance to take a sneak peak at the Summer 05 release and I was very impressed with it.

Custom Formula Fields
They are impressive and work just as they are being marketed. However, they do not yet support aggregate functions so you can SUM or COUNT data from child records. I hear that is coming in a future release to expand on the functionality. The report formulas work great too.

Multiforce
Multiforce seems pretty cool. There is a new link under the Extend part of customforce called "Custom Apps". Salesforce and Supportforce are listed by default. This is where you can create additional Apps and assign tabs to them. Then, in Profiles, you say whether or not the Profile has access to the App.

Self-Service Portal
I also noticed a new tab that isn't written about in the release notes called "Portals". When I clicked on it, it was a new tab for managing your Self-Service portal. This tab has some key reports right on it and a preview of the portal itself. Configuring the portal allows for more granular capabilities such as changing fonts and colors on each portal page and for various objects across pages like dropdown boxes or the mouseover characteristics of a tab. It is simpifying the management of a stylesheet. In fact, there were places I could click "Advanced Setup" and it actually had a text box with the information that I could edit straight up.

Mass Address Update
Works great. Piece of cake to use. Will help improve data quality greatly.

Customizable Related Lists
Work just like the customizable ones on custom objects. In a page layout, you highlight the related list to configure and click the "Related Lists Properties" button. Make your adjustments and voila.

I didn't get a chance to test Customizable Forecasting, Sales Methodologies or Email to Case.

All in all, I'd say Summer 05 looks good and developers will be much happier working with it.

New Look and Feel for 2005?

2005-05-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Salesforce.com made a posting on the CRM Success website about changing the look and feel of the application for 2005. Their blog provides a forum for providing feedback on the design concepts.

Design 1 is my preference. I like the updated font, the updated graphics and the grey background to the page layout sections. Much more professional looking.

Getting Started with Salesforce.com

2005-05-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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.
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
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.
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.

Clippings section

2005-05-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

I added a new section to the sidebar. It contains clippings from other blogs that I find interesting and wish to share with you.

Summer 05 Preview

2005-05-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

CRM Success.com has a preview of the Summer 05 release that can be downloaded on its website.

Summer 05 Admin Preview

Short-Term Wish List

2005-05-07T10:58:00.001-07:00

I wanted to list a few features that I feel would be extremely beneficial to be added to the platform. I have heard bits and pieces as to how the Summer 05 release will address some of these and how others are on the "roadmap". We'll see. The exciting thing is that when functionality is released, it does not require an upgrade. It's just there and ready to go. That may not sound that exciting, but after having implemented products such as Siebel On-Premise for a long time, it is great to be able to take advantage of new functionality without the expense/headache of going through an entire project focused purely on upgrading. That is a HUGE advantage of Salesforce.com's product.

Features I would like to see addressed soon:

Calculated Fields
Calculated Fields represent the ability to create a new field on an object whose definition is a formula rather than a piece of data stored in the database. I have heard that this functionality may be coming in the Summer 05 release. It has been described as "Excel-like" formulas can be added as a calculated field. This sounds exciting and should be able to fully support formulas that calculate across a record. For example:

OpportunityLineItem.Calc Field = SalesPrice / ListPrice

This would calculate the discount % on an Opportunity Line item

Account.Calc Field = If (Annual Revenue > 1000000000, "Strategic Account")

Uses IF, THEN logic to calculate a value based upon other values.

What is also needed is the ability to roll up values from child records. For example:

Account.Calc Field = If(Opportunity.Won = 1, Sum(Opportunity.Amount))

A calculated field on an Account displays the sum of all Opportunities that have been Won for that account.
Today, this must be obtained through a report. Having a calculated field will allow the user to spend their time on the Account record rather than having to toggle between the Account and a report on it.

Personal Contact Groups
Ability for a user to create personal contact groups. For example, suppose a user wants to create a list of Contacts they want to invite to an event in Chicago, IL for the Auto industry. They should be able to create a Contact Group called "Auto Event in Chicago". To populate that with Contacts, they should be able to run a report and, from the resultset, click a link that says "Add Contacts to Group ..." where they can auto add that list to the Group. Additionally, functionality should exist on the Contact itself allowing them to easily add a contact to a Group.

From the Group itself, they should be able to easily edit whose in the group and who is not. Suppose, they want to remove a few of the people that came up in the auto industry report. They should be able view the group, check the contacts to be removed and remove them.

Campaign functionality could be used for this purpose. However, this would be more focused for a sales user. It should be simple and personal. In some applications, this type of functionality is called List Management. The issue with using Campaigns for this purpose is that Campaigns do not have sharing rules. You cannot have "Private" campaigns. Also, adding Contacts to campaigns requires a report --> Excel --> member import process. This is pretty cumbersome for the average sales person.

Dynamic Dashboards based upon the User
A dashboard has a property that identifies the user that it should run under. If you want to create a common dashboard used by Sales Reps, Sales Managers, etc., you need to create a common template and have them clone it for personal use so it can execute under their user name and make it so they only see their own data. Rather, Dashboards should be capable of being run based upon the user that is looking at it. This is how Reports work today. I imagine it was not done this way for performance reasons, but the current design makes Dashboards limiting.

Discount %
Ability to add a discount % on an Opportunity Line Item and having the Sales Price auto calculated.

Record Type Tabs
It would be so very cool if new tabs could use existing objects, but be based upon a specific record type. For example, suppose you wanted to have a Competitors tab, but leverage functionality in the Accounts module. Rather than having to use a custom object, it'd be very cool if you could create a record type called "Competitor" under Accounts and assign the use of that Record Type to a new tab. The result being that they would NOT appear under the main accounts tab and would only appear in their own tab.

Lookup Custom Fields
The ability to add a field to an object that is a lookup to another object. For example, add a new "Billing Account" field on an Opportunity that would reside on the main Opportunity section of the layout resulting in another 1:M relationship from Accounts to Oppotunities. The only way to do this now is through a custom object. However, the custom object would be a M:M relationship, not a 1:M.

Filtered Picklists
Ability to filter a picklist based upon certain criteria. For example, ability to filter the Partner picklist on an Opportunity to only filter by Accounts that are of the type "Partner". This type of functionality would result in better data quality.

Configurable Related Lists
Ability to modify the standard related lists to exclude inapplicable fields and to include custom, applicable ones. I hear this one may be coming soon.

There are a lot more that come to mind, but I will save those for another day. I would be very interested in anyone providing their knowledge about any of these coming in the upcoming release.

Summer 05 Edition

2005-05-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

The summer 05 edition of Salesforce.com looks to be on its way. The company has touted a few features that should create a big impact. At IntegrationForce day, an introduction to a few of these features was made. Among those are:

Multiforce
Partner Portal Toolkit
Sforce Data Loader

I highly suggest listening to Mark Benioff's keynote address. It provides a lot of insight into where the company is going and a preview of this new release. It will be very interesting to see the next several releases of the product. The company is at a bit of a cross roads between focusing on the success of its CRM product vs. focusing on creating a development environment whose initial bit of pre-packaged functionality happens to be CRM. It appears that they are focusing on the latter. Personally, I think that is very exciting because it should provide a tremendous push to the overall On-Demand software market. By doing this, I imagine you will begin to see competitors such as Microsoft enter the market and toolsets will be created to allow for much stronger on-demand application to be built by business users rather than by IT departments.