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

» Ideas

Ideas – Allow Numeric Fields in List Views to be Totalled

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

calculatorTim 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 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

SetupI 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 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas | Leave a comment

Grand TotalKudos 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 by Jeff Grosse in Ideas, News, Tools | 1 Comment

Thumbs upSince 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.

What do you want to learn? Salesforce is asking for your ideas

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Dreamforce, Social Networking | 2 Comments

Ideas_logoCount on Salesforce to use their own tools to the n’th degree. They’ve launched a new Ideas portal that’s designed specifically for making Dreamforce sessions exactly what you want to learn about. They call it Help Create The Conference. It’s a new way they’re using their Ideas product for the conference and I think it’s a great idea.

Be sure to add the sessions you want and vote on those you feel passionate about. One thing to remember is that since you can’t possibly go to all 250 of the sessions, you’ll still be able to benefit from them after the conference. Almost every one of them is published afterwords on Google Video and Successforce.