Evernote – The Salesforce Admin and Developer’s Other Brain

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Jeff Grosse in Productivity, Tips, Tools | 31 Comments

Arguably, if you have a brain, you need Evernote. We’ve all got the one in the cranium that works really well, but truthfully, it tends to fail us in many ways when it comes to recalling the details. That’s why you need an external brain; a place where all the other stuff you work on in life, from Salesforce to sandcastles and formulas to fondue go. That’s Evernote.

Evernote is a web service that securely stores your memories and gives you immediate recall of them from anywhere, and at any time. Capture a picture or audio from your phone, a clipping from your browser, a file from our computer or a an email you receive. Once you capture it, it automatically syncs between your phone, the web, and any computer you want. And search is a snap. Even text in images, documents and handwritten notes are made searchable automatically. Search using words, tags, or even by location. It’s right there anytime you need it.

So how does this help the Salesforce administrator or developer? You’ve got a lot on your plate to work with. Release notes, writing formulas, creating validation rules, outlining workflows and approval processes, taking screenshots, gathering documentation, writing Apex classes, creating SOQL statements, reading blogs, remembering tips from friends on Twitter, the Salesforce Community site or the Force.com Developer forums. Where do you store all those memories?

You could use notepads, printouts, text files, Post-It Notes, cocktail napkins, Google Docs, emails to yourself, shared drives, your arm, stone tablets, file cabinets, CD-ROMs, bookmarks, MS Office documents, the deep-dark corners of your laptop bag or just your cranium. The trouble is, where do you look when the thing you thought was so obvious you’d never forget it isn’t where you thought it would be. Can you find it on your phone, your Mac, your Android tablet, your iPad or your Mom’s PC? If you put it in Evernote, you could, and you’d have just one place to search, anytime, anywhere.

Need to email that thing to your boss, a coworker, your wife or your lawyer? You’re just a couple of clicks away from sending it privately. Need to preview that PDF on your iPhone? You can do it. Need to print a note from your iPad or iPhone? You can do it.

What do I put in Evernote?

Formulas – That crazy formula I made way back when will always be with me, no matter where I work in the future.
Tips I learn from smart bloggers – When I see something I may EVER want to look at again, I read it, clip it, and know it’s there if I ever want to look at it again or share it.
Release notes – I used to have folders where I stored them, but now I put all of them in a notebook in Evernote and they’re completely searchable as well. On top of that, I’ve shared the notebook publicly so anyone who wants to can link my notebook to their Evernote account. It doesn’t take up any of their monthly upload limits and it’s always available to them.
Old versions of files – Just the other day I was discussing an issue with the Apex Data Loader on Twitter and someone asked if I had an older version of the Apex Data Loader that I could share with them. I gathered all the ones I had (versions 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, and 21) and put them into a shared notebook on Evernote so now anyone can grab them when they want.
Press releases – I have a rule setup in Google Apps Gmail that whenever a press release from Salesforce is delivered to my Inbox, it immediately gets forwarded to Evernote so I have a full archive of all press releases at hand.
Writing documents – I can start writing via the web interface at work, continue it on my iPhone, and later finish it on my laptop at home. It’s syncs automatically and effortlessly.
Whiteboards – When we have a meeting that leads to a wall full of diagrams, ideas, flows, tasks, and inspiration, I snap a picture of it with my phone and put it right in Evernote.
Business Cards – As soon as I receive a business card from someone, I take a picture of it, put it in Evernote with some details about the person and I’ve got it forever.
Presentations – When I see a slide I like at a local Salesforce user group meeting from one of my fellow user group members or from a vendor, I take a picture of the slide and throw it in Evernote. Since I used my phone to take the picture, Evernote even knows the location of where I was when I took that picture using the GPS data.
Dreamforce – I start a notebook for Dreamforce that includes all my travel details, information on where my friends are staying in San Francisco, the restaurants I want to try while I’m there, reminders of things I have to do while I’m there, and anything else I could possibly want to know, reference, show my friends, or think about while I’m at Dreamforce.
Offline reading – Individual notes and entire notebooks can be taken offline and stored locally on your phone and iPad to read on the plane, away from the Internet, or on the beach. The desktop version of Evernote is completely available offline so you don’t need the Internet unless you want to sync.

So how does it work? Evernote has a web clipper that works in almost every browser on the planet. It lets you clip a word, picture or even the whole page with just a click. Tag it if you want to. Put a description if you want to, and you’re done. Not only is the part of the webpage you wanted saved in Evernote, the URL of the page you got it from is saved as well so you never have to wonder where you clipped something from. On your phone, take a picture, record some audio, type some text and hit Save. In your email, forward a message to the unique address Evernote assigns you and that email is immediately in Evernote. Drag files from your desktop to the Evernote icon and they’re added. Have a flatbed scanner? Scan in your handwritten notes, agendas, and meeting handouts to have them at hand forever.

How much can I store? If you’re a Free user, you can upload 60 MB per month of whatever you want. If you’re a Premium user, you get to add up to 1 GB per month. Suppose you want to add a bunch of notes in one month, pay $5 to go Premium for that month, add a gig of stuff, then go back to Free. All your stuff is still there for you to access. The other great thing is, your space is cumulative so as compared to some web services that offer you 2 GB of synced storage and that’s it, the possible size of your Evernote storage is constantly growing.

So how do you get started? Creating an account with Evernote is free and always will be. Phil Libin, their CEO is known for saying, “We want you to keep your memories forever in Evernote for Free. If you someday decide you want to pay us a little money once in awhile for using the service, that’s great, but we’re not going to ask you to.”

How does Evernote make money? According to Phil Libin, their business model was built with a goal of 1% conversion to Premium accounts would equal break even financially. What they find though is that the longer people use Evernote, the more likely they are to go Premium and their conversion rates are anywhere from 5% to even more than 12% when people have used Evernote for more than a year.

What about security? Evernote uses SSL encryption for all user authentication and data transfer. Your data is your data. When you use a desktop version of Evernote, your data is stored on that machine and you always have access to it, whether you’re connected to the Internet or not. There are also import and export mechanisms built into Evernote desktop that allow you to move your memories.

Does Evernote have a following? Their user growth has been stunning. I started with Evernote when it was still in beta back in March of 2008. They now have more than 7 million registered users and the number of days between each million is now less than 50.

So what’s stopping you? You’ve got a brain. You use it a lot. Make use of an external brain with Evernote. You’ll be amazed at how much it will transform everything you need to remember. Administration and development on Salesforce will never be the same when you know where to go, to get all the bits and pieces you’ve collected that make you smarter.

To learn more about Evernote, check out their website. To get started, create your account today. If you’re already a user just log in.

Teach Those Old Dashboards of Yours a New Trick

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in News, Productivity, Tips | 9 Comments

Today I discovered a quick little tweak that can make your dashboards make more sense. It’s really simple, yet makes a big impact on reading the data.

When you see dashboard tables with “Record Count” on them, it’s not completely intuitive what kind of records you’re talking about. I found a simple way to relabel that dashboard component with the real label of what it is like Accounts, Contacts, Quotes Generated or whatever your data.

This simple tweak uses the Custom Summary Formulas available in the Report Builder tool to give you the same data as a Record Count would, but it’s with your label.

In the video, I show how you can relabel a dashboard table from Record Count to Contacts. This can be particularly useful when creating new tables with more than two columns and when you create Combination Charts with a line of other data. The Record Count label can be changed to be much more specific which makes your chart more readable.

Try it out and enjoy.

Plan for Success with Tips on Deploying Salesforce Content

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Content, News, Tips | 20 Comments

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

Content 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.