CRM FYI

I’m excited to bring you a guest blog post today from Mike Gerholdt, a fellow Salesforce blogger and avid Twitterer.

So your back from Dreamforce and your all jazzed at the announcement Marc Benioff made that Content for Salesforce is now free for all users. Bubbling with excitement you want to go back to the office and implement it now! But before you do, let me give you some tips on implementation that aren’t included in the Help & Training section of Salesforce.com.

1. Workspaces are not folders. It would be really easy to just create workspace that mirror your existing folders from your Document tab—but you must resist the urge! You owe it to your users to make the experience of Content for Salesforce better than the documents tab. Everyone is familiar with folders and subfolders, but Content is different; it uses collaboration spaces called Workspaces to organize the files. If your Document tab was (is) like mine, then you probably have dozens of folders. Workspaces eliminates that, now you can have one workspace for all of your marketing materials. In fact, I did a data dump of all my documents stored in the Documents tab. Then I called a brief meeting with each department to review existing documents, eliminate any old ones, and we group the documents together by type. Which meant I had about four workspaces, one for each department- Marketing, Technical, Sales, Reseller. This made it simple for my users to navigate and find documents.

2. Tag, tag, tag! Content utilizes tags to help organize information. That way within each workspace you can tag a document with a key term to help you find it later. In the example above I set up a Marketing Workspace and within that workspace I placed all of our Case Studies and tagged it – Case Study. Additionally, I also tagged each case study with the products mentioned in it, and the state that company resides in. Why? Imagine you’re a sales rep talking with a customer in Indiana about your xyz widget. Now all the rep has to do is click on the following tags- Case Study, XYZ Widget, Indiana- and boom all the case studies for that product in that state appear. This is a big time saver and your sales rep doesn’t have to say the dreaded “let me get back to you on that.

3. Make the transition easy for yourself and your users. Now that you can utilize the API to move content I would recommend it or there are free tools on the AppExchange to help you out. I used Dox from Dreamfactory to make my life easier.

Sharing and collaboration is really what makes Content a more powerful tool than the documents tab. So think of your users when setting up the workspaces, it can be tempting to prevent everyone from authoring documents. But people really want to share, so make sure at least every department or workgroup has one workspace that they collaborate in. Along those lines, Content will be a big shift for your organization. Many of your users will have established templates and go to documents in the documents tab- as well you may have workflows that prompt users to send documents at particular stages of a project or opportunity. So make the transition easy on your users by moving all of your files from the Documents tab to Content, but don’t immediately take away the Documents folder.

4. Workspaces are like a garden. If gone unattended they will be full of weeds and junk. In my first paragraph I told you that I set up my workspaces to mirror our departments in the company. Additionally I also made one person the ‘Manager of the Workspace’. As administrators we have a lot to manage, I found it effective if each workspace had its own gardener—someone to keep after it and enforce and clean up tags as well as watch for duplicate content. When you have your initial department meeting- think about common terms that you can tag each document with and put those in place as ‘suggestions’ for your users when they upload content.

5. Train, train, train. The look and feel of content is going to be different from the stale Documents tab. So when you roll it out, I would suggest starting with your power users first. Then what I did is host a training class in my company to get the rest of my users on board. At that training class I made a custom users guide (which I host in Content and link to from the homepage) to help some of them who may struggle through the process. In addition, I hold monthly webinars to reinforce the training. During those webinars I make sure to point out useful content packs that have been created since the last time we met. I also try to bring on the user who created it give best practices and help my slow adopters.

Overall, the migration to Content for us was simple and its paid dividends to our staff by giving them the ability to track and manage all of our collateral in one location. Our customers have told us they really appreciate not receiving large files in emails and having the ability to download only certain documents. It’s been a positive and smooth transition for us and I look forward to its integration with Chatter.

You can follow Mike on Twitter @mikegerholdt and be sure to read his blog.  Thanks Mike for tips that can make us all successful.  I know I’m really excited to roll out Content, now that it’s free, and your tips are at the top of my planning session.