Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Dreamforce, Ideas | 3 Comments

Earlier this year, I wrote about being a hero to your users, and the gist of it was that through social media, you can surround yourself with fantastic people who will make you a hero to your users. I know for a fact that many of you have done extremely heroic things for your Salesforce users and have something that you should share with the rest of us.

The time has come for you to step up and share that spark of brilliance with the global community through the venue of Dreamforce. Right now is your chance to offer up your expertise through a presentation at the next Dreamforce event in December.

To gather all these ideas in one place, the Dreamforce Ideas site is now open. It’s not hard to browse current papers and submit your own. People will appreciate that you shared what you’ve done. The time is now to step up and submit what you’ve got to share. Papers are being accepted through May 31. As a bonus, if you are chosen to present, conference registration for you, is free.

Step up and share. People like you are what make the Salesforce Community of users, administrators and developers strong. We want to hear from you.

Summer 09 Sets Sail this June with Features You Want and Need

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, Ideas, News, Productivity, Service and Support | 8 Comments

Summer 09 Excitement builds around three times a year about what goodies Salesforce will deliver to their users via a painless application upgrade. A few months before a release, you get some glimpses from the Idea Exchange of what’s coming, but then about a month before the release goes out the door, you get the final Release Notes that detail all the stuff they’ve been working on. Summer 09 is coming this June and has a good dose of enhancements and new features. Let’s take a look at a few highlights.

Case Sharing with Salesforce to Salesforce

A few years ago, I worked with some companies who were forming something they affectionately called coopetition. They were some technology companies like HP and Storagetek who knew that when their joint customers had issues, it was not always so cut and dry whose problem it was. These vendors used a technology platform to share telemetry about their joint customers and keep from finger-pointing between the vendors. Case Sharing in Salesforce to Salesforce is similar to that. Two companies who both use Salesforce can work together to immediately share selected case information that can ultimately help the end user get resolution faster, and with more accuracy.

Case Sharing

Workflow Visualization

Sometimes a picture explains something much better than words can. With Summer 09, you can now see your Salesforce workflow processes graphically and explain your workflows better visually, from start to finish.

I had a chance to see this feature and try it out during the Usability Testing phase of development and I have to say it’s going to be a real help in documentation of more complex processes. Besides, there’s always someone in the crowd that wants to see your diagram, and now you can get the exact, up-to-the-minute one, right inside Salesforce

Workflow Visualization

Chart Analytics 2.0

Two of the long-missing chart types in Salesforce have been the Donut and the Funnel. Now they’re both available to you and much rejoicing can be heard at the Idea Exchange from the many people who voted them up. Other significant additions to Reports and Dashboards in this release are values displayed on charts, new colors in charts, available color-blind-safe colors, and a slightly different look to the Dashboard panels. Let’s call it some very useful additions, but nothing particularly mind-blowing.

Chart Analytics

Misc.

Lots of other features can be found throughout the Release Notes, but here is a summary of some you may want to look into.

Significant changes to both iPhone and BlackBerry app (including the availability of Salesforce Mobile Lite for free, if you didn’t know about that already)
Automated multi-wave Campaigns
Generic from-email address support
Sharing setup UI enhancements
Enhanced declarative logic for picklists
Sites usage reporting
Search result ordering
SAML 2.0 support
UI option to help load detail pages more quickly
Auto complete of User fields with Users in your Recent Items list
Mexican Spanish and Romanian language support

Want to See the Future of Salesforce? You Can

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas, Productivity, Prototype | Leave a comment

Next Gen UI How would you like to see the next generation of Salesforce user interface and influence the features that they work on for the future? You can do that by participating in usability studies with Salesforce that are going on all the time. Not only can you see all this, you’ll get compensated for the hour of your time that it takes to participate. Depending on the testing, you can get a $50 or $100 Amazon gift card for just that hour of your time and ideas.

I’ve participated in this program for years and I’m impressed to see how the user experience team has grown and just how many people they hire, just to make sure that these apps look, feel, and act the way we need and expect them to.

Whether you can participate now, or sometime in the future, the person to contact is Miriam Melo. She’ll get you added to the list and as opportunities come up for testing, you’ll just get an email invitation. Respond if you’re available and she’ll work on getting you in. It’s that simple.

Ideas – Allow Numeric Fields in List Views to be Totalled

Posted on September 25, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

calculator Tim Alsop had a great idea that he posted to the Idea Exchange.

How many times have you seen a list view of related data and had to add it up by yourself? Think about it. There are probably a lot of places this could be helpful.

It seems likely that such a function would happen maybe within two parts of the setup process. Maybe a checkbox on Field setup that says to allow totalling if it’s a numeric field. Then maybe in the Edit mode of your View, you could select any number of “totallable” fields to be totalled on the View layout. Now the trick is, could it handle pagination. Suppose there are 550 records, how much would it total and where would it put it? If you have any ideas, please add them to this idea when you head over there.

Drop by the Idea Exchange, leave your comments and vote it up!

Ideas – Alphabetize the Setup Options

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

Setup I want to give a “bump” to this idea sent my way from Johan in Sweden. Originally posted by jkubi, this idea centers on the idea of giving some semblance of order to the Setup options. Right now, I’d be hard pressed to explain for sure why it looks the way it does.

I’m not sure alphabetizing is the best way, but there needs to be some method to the madness. I echo Johan’s sentiment that an “Object” view might be helpful to see all your standard and custom objects together. I’m a fan of color and grouping similar functions by color might help some.

If you’ve got ideas on how to make Setup more user/admin friendly, please add your comments to the Idea Exchange and help vote it up!

Ideas – Allow Dashboard Components to Show Grand Totals

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

Grand Total Kudos to Aaron for posting this Idea.

When you create a dashboard component from a Summary Report, you often times want to see not only the parts which made up that report, but you’d like to see a grand total tool.

While it was noted that you can create another dashboard component and put it directly beneath your first component to list the grand total, it would be great to not have to waste another component for it, let alone make changes to two reports when you need to tweak it.

Drop by the IdeaExchange and read more about this Idea, leave your own comments, or vote it up!

Introducing Featured Ideas on CRMFYI

Posted on July 30, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas, News, Tools | 1 Comment

Thumbs up Since its introduction in 2006, the Salesforce IdeaExchange has been a powerful source of customer involvement in improving Salesforce.com. Part of the success of the IdeaExchange has been opening the mic and letting every person have their say. Another part of that success though is the involvement Salesforce has mandated on their Product Management teams to be on the IdeaExchange and knowing what people want from each of their products.

One thing I’ve struggled with though is getting my favorite Ideas to the top. I want to spread the word and get enough votes around features I’d really like to see. That’s why I’m introducing a new feature on CRMFYI to highlight great Ideas from the IdeaExchange, some old, some new. I want to help you find some great Ideas that could benefit us all and bump them up in popularity.

Watch for Ideas and participate in the community. Seriously, not that many companies you work with really want to know what you think. But here, you not only have a voice, you’re part of building the next generation of Salesforce.com apps and platform.

If you’ve got an Idea you’d like to see promoted, please send me a link at jeff<at>crmfyi<dot>com.