Make your Salesforce Project More Successful by Inviting a BA to the Party (Or Thinking Like One)


Today I welcome my good friend, Garry Polmateer as a guest blogger at CRMFYI. Garry is not only a Salesforce community rockstar, but he's planned and executed some great Salesforce implementations,

A Little Help from My Friends


In a demonstration of community and collaboration, Mike Gerholdt and I have created a blog post / demo video of utilizing inline Visualforce to display rich text info in standard page layouts without

Chatter-vantage #1 - No Need to Rush the Stage


Salesforce has created a conference attendee experience using Chatter that blows away all other conferences. Their Dreamforce Attendee Portal allows attendees to connect with speakers before, during

I Need You; to Join The Salesforce Channel Community


If you follow me on Twitter, it's hard to miss my regular status updates like,  "21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today," but what's that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website

Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce


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

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Integration

Salesforce Heads Cross Country On AIR

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Dreamforce, Integration, Tools | Leave a comment

632338829_0c5c3a89ccSalesforce is co-sponsoring a cross country bus tour Adobe is subtitling “Cross Country Coding.”  The On AIR tour consists of three months, eighteen US cities, a big red bus, and evangelism about Adobe AIR ((Adobe Integrated Runtime) formerly Apollo).  It’s a little hard to see, but to the left of the O’Reilly decal is the Salesforce logo.  You can see more pictures of the bus on Flickr.  I’m registered already for the Minneapolis event in September which should prove pretty interesting.

Put simply, AIR is a way to develop applications that give a rich, user experiences both in a browser and on a desktop, across platforms.  Developers don’t need to write different versions of their apps for Mac, PC, or Linux.  They can develop once and deploy widely, even across browsers without worry of compatibility issues. 

How’s that fit in with Salesforce?  Salesforce has been working with Adobe to provide developer resources that let you make unique, richer Salesforce applications both through your browser with your Salesforce data, but also through desktop apps that don’t look anything like your browser.  The Flex Toolkit for Apex is a storehouse of coding wizardry that extends your data in ways you could never work with your data before.  Rich graphics, smooth transitions, drag and drop data, fields, and columns are just a few of the things Flex offers to Salesforce users.  The Flex Toolkit works hand in hand with Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to help create apps that may just blow your mind.  Give it time, there aren’t many apps out there yet, but watch and see.

The only publicly available, free AppExchange application built with some Flex code that you can download and try right now is Conference Manager.   Interestingly enough though, it’s also the app that Salesforce uses internally to manage Dreamforce.  I’ve installed it and it’s slick stuff.  It uses inline S-controls let you work with your data in a really unique way.  Take it for a Test Drive or install it in your own development org. 

If you want to get a taste of what AIR can do with your Salesforce data, check out Dave Carroll’s Salesforce Widget. 

Adobe is putting a lot into the launch of AIR and from what I’ve seen so far, AIR has a good shot at making some compelling apps, and ways to see and work with your data unlike you do today.  It looks like Salesforce is working very tightly with Adobe to make it that much easier for developers to work through Flex and AIR.  Salesforce folks will be at numerous bus tour events showing off what they’ve done.  Watch for the “coolness” of AIR both in standard Salesforce apps, widget like applications like Dave Carroll’s, and even in dashboards.

Between seeing what literally “develops” on the bus around America On AIR and what’s shown at Dreamforce 07, it looks like you’re going to be seeing Flex and AIR quite a lot before year-end.  (And that’s a good thing.)

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If a Customer Complains About Your Company on the Internet and You Don’t Notice It, Will Anyone?

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, Integration, Marketing, Sales, Service and Support | Leave a comment

John Ragsdale, of the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), writes about a new service called TruCast by Visible Technologies that brings visibility to what your customers or anyone is saying about your company across the Internet and blogosphere. What I find potentially even more interesting is that this tool not only identifies what is being said about your company, but it brings into view the overall sentiment of their posts and even maps out their sphere of influence across social networks.

TruCast enables you to

  • Keep a pulse on what people are saying about your brand, products, or services.
  • Respond to individual posts to address angry posters before they gain enough momentum to reach a large audience.
  • Use information gleaned from consumers to improve your product, or create a new product to satisfy an unforeseen need in the marketplace.
  • Stay ahead of emerging trends in the marketplace.
  • Identify current and emerging influencers.
  • Start buzz about a product, service, announcement, or initiative.
  • Learn more about your most vocal critics and fans.
  • Tailor your message with the help of data on opinion leaders.

When it comes to Marketing awareness and knowing what people are saying about your company, this seems like pretty valuable information. On top of that, what if you were tracking those who are big proponents of your company or brand and became aware of their sphere of influence across the Internet? 

Now, what if you tied TruCast to Salesforce and set that kind of sales intelligence before your account executives?  Use the positive proponents of your company to boost customer reference programs and find champions within each industry you serve.  Find out about discussions that are negative and do what you can to approach those issues. 

Bottom line, it does matter what people say about your company.  Now how are you going to find out what they’re saying?

You can read John’s thoughts on it here.
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If You Pitch It, They Will Fund….At Least Some Have – To the Tune of $225 Mil

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Customization, Integration | Leave a comment

If you’ve watched the AppExchgange over the past 16 months, you’ve seen it grow from 150 initial applications to almost 600 today.  And in that time, entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers have pitched some great applications, technologies, business practices, and concepts to venture capitalists.  Some two dozen companies have already received more than $225 Mil USD in funding to develop for the AppExchange and propel them through this new age of on-demand services.

Today, Salesforce announced the formation of the AppExchange Venture Network to to bring together the people that are building the next generation of on-demand.  The idea is to bring together the idea people, with the funding people, with the channel people to accelerate the growth of applications on the Salesforce platform.

It’s also the literal incubator that will most likely lead Salesforce to its next acquisition.  Since Salesforce will be at the heart of forming this community, they’ll get a chance to not only be blown away by the ideas and developments of these entrepreneurs, but gauge the reactions of VCs and the market to these products and services.  Koral had little more than a concept to deliver, but that was enough to grab the attention of Salesforce and not let an on-demand content management system slip away. 

Who benefits from all this?  Salesforce does since they’ll gain revenue from customers who want these goods.  Entrepreneurs do as they get a chance to show off their ideas and get funding to deliver their products.  VCs do as they get to focus tightly on products that accelerate on-demand.  And lastly, Salesforce customers do as they’ll get deeper, richer, applications that help drive their business forward. 

Marc Benioff’s dream of 10,000 applications on the AppExchange might not be so far fetched.  The question then will be, which of 15 ways do you want to solve that business problem you initially went to the AppExchange for?

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Jira Bug Tracking Connector Made Available for Salesforce

Posted on May 16, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Integration, Service and Support | 4 Comments

Go2Group has announced the availability of a plugin that bridges bug and issue tracking from Atlassian Jira to Salesforce.com. 

The plugin allows Salesforce Service & Support users to enter issues right within Salesforce, porting all the relevant account information into Jira.  Likewise, your Jira data is made available through Salesforce cases. 

From my look into Jira before, it’s a pretty robust issue tracking system that is quite inexpensive to purchase and maintain.  Since issue tracking has not had a native app in Salesforce before, this may serve as a good alternative for more complex issue tracking.

You can download documentation on the plugin at Go2Group’s site. 

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