I just read this press release.

Looks pretty nifty, its a Salesforce.com and Facebook advertising platform.
You control and manage a Facebook Site via Salesforce.com.
You then can invite facebook members to interact with the facebook page.
You can then interact with the company for example, get notified of job positions, or news and announcements, and this is all powered by Force.com... kinda cool.

Salesforce.com recently launched the 'Service Cloud'.

What is it?

Well I watched all the tours and I still don't understand....

I think they are just re-branding their service and support suite as an integrated offering.
And have thrown in a few neat little extras like facebook integration...

If anyone else can understand more than this, let me know.

I keep getting emails about Spring '09, but I searched the web (albeit for only 15 minutes), and I couldn't find any information on which date it will actually be rolled over.

I gather it must be soon, maybe next weekend? If anyone knows, let me know!

From my view the major features that I am looking forward to:

* Mobile Enhancements, including simplified provisioning
* Advanced Page Layout Editor, glad this tool is getting a face lift
* Visual Force Controllers, we can now create custom UI for the Ideas object
* MS Office Edition 4.0, still cant wait until we get better google apps integration!

On the whole, this seems to me like a minor release package, with some basic enhancements, still, having this delivered automatically to myself and my customers is great, I'm still so glad I dont need to ask my customers "what version of salesforce.com are you running?", since we are all always on the latest version.

Versioning and patching is always a pain, every 2-3 months I'll get an email from my web designer saying a Patch is available for my CMS system... this signifies for me another upgrade process that I need to pay them for... if only I could find a good On Demand Website CMS! At least salesforce.com doesn't pain me in this way.

I'm still waiting with baited breath for Sites to come out... fingers crossed for the Autumn 09 release? Maybe that could solve my CMS problems too...

Interesting, it seems Netsuite, another On Demand vendor, is offering 50% off the price of your salesforce.com subscription if you transfer from salesforce.com to them.

I have my doubts about this form of promotion. To compare this to our business, I guess people like Accenture are the people we look up to, and see them as one of the leaders in CRM Consulting, but I would never offer 50% off our services costs if people switched from Accenture to us. In fact, I never discount our services, I believe the value we offer is clear and the price we charge is valid.

By discounting your product or service, what impression do you give to the market? Does Net Suite have a profit margin so large that they can afford to discount to 50% of salesforce.com's price? If so, why dont they invest that margin back into R&D and making their product better, rather than giving 50% off to customers who switch from salesforce.com?

Isn't now offering 50% off a huge slap in the face to existing customers who paid full price to Net Suite for their offering?

To me this looks like an act of desperation rather than a promotion.

I guess I am not a fan of huge discounting in order to get new customers, I prefer to new customers through referrals from my existing and happy customers.

If I owned a Ferrari, and say, Skoda were offering 50% off to people who swapped their Ferrari for a Skoda, I wonder how many takers they would get?

Also, isnt offering 50% off to people switching from Salesforce.com an advertisement for salesforce.com themselves? Isnt this Netsuite admitting that salesforce.com is a better product, and the only way they can compete is to be cheaper?

I'm not sold. Sorry Netsuite.

Makes me wonder why I ever left. Salesforce.com was a great place to work, their Foundation was a great differentiator for me, being part of a company who gives back to the community was important.

So like many other small businesses, my own small business has a need for proper accounting.

And just like many other small businesses my accountant was doing my accounts for me, and she would use MYOB.

I must admit, it was a bit frustrating, whenever I needed an update on my P&L or Balance Sheet, I had to email my accountant, and whilst she was quick, it would still take maybe a few hours for her to email me the data I needed.

Emailing back and forth data files? This sounds like the old days of small business CRM?

So after doing some online research, I found 3 major vendors who actually offered On Demand small business accounting.

- Saasu www.saasu.com
- Xero www.xero.com.au
- Coda2Go www.coda2go.com

They all seemed like they had Pro's and Con's, but I elected to go with Saasu, and I must say that I'm really enjoying this product so far. Saasu will keep your contact list synchronised with salesforce.com, but I'm also lead to believe that they are writing a full integration piece with salesforce.com, which should hopefully synchronise my invoices, and payments between Saasu and SFDC - if so, I'd be in heaven.

This type of problem, getting select accounting data to your sales and marketing teams (or other salesforce.com users), is a typical one, no matter how large the business.

There are many integration designs you can use to solve this issue, but it is still a large effort. I'll write another post on integration another day explaining all the options and issues you may face with integrating salesforce.com to an accounting package (or any other system).

But hopefully as more and more systems provision built in salesforce.com integration, we can look to the future where integration is done in a point and click way, rather than needing an army of consultants to spend months to achieve this.

According to a new Gartner report, "nearly 90% of organizations surveyed expect to maintain or grow their use of SaaS in the coming year, citing cost-effectiveness and ease/speed of deployment as primary reasons for adoption."

Interesting stuff...

Download the report

I was at dreamforce when this was announced, and we are all really excited here about the release of sites.

As companies move more and more to the web, it's becoming imperative that your internal CRM system communicates in some way with your website.

Previously with salesforce.com, you only had a few options, for example, Lead Capture forms, Case Capture Forms, Public Customer Support Knowledge Bases, or Customer / Partner portals which neeeded authentication.

There have been many integration projects, connecting salesforce.com to a website, in order for it to deliver dynamic content on the public web... these integration projects are always costly and difficult to execute correctly.

Now with Force.com Sites, it really becomes as simple as a button push.

Any data you have in salesforce.com can be rendered as a "Site", which is essentially a public visualforce page.

So if you have a product catalogue, or if you want to display all your upcoming company events (e.g. Campaigns), or if you have content published in the Documents or Content area in salesforce.com, you can now selectively expose this directly to your public website - just build a 'Sites' Visualforce page, and you are done.

So if you have ever wanted to expose your CRM data directly to the website, in an un-authenticated way, but thought integration was too risky, complicated or expensive, I would suggest you take a close look at Sites.

See a bit of a demo here:
http://www.salesforce.com/platform/sites/

This is really cool, I was told the other day that Barack Obama has deployed the salesforce.com Idea Exchange product to take opinions from the public....

Did a quick google search, and there it is! I honestly dont know why more organisations arent using Idea Exchanges... they are very good.

This is really amazing, to see an American President use technology in this way, lets try and get Kevin Rudd to deploy the Ozzy Idea's Exchange, I guess we'll be all voting for more public holidays right?

One of the questions I get asked very frequently is, "How do I generate a PDF from within salesforce.com?".

Well I'm not sure if everyone knows this, but in fact, Visualforce has a built in PDF renderer.


So this means that you can have buttons on your pages in salesforce.com, which when clicked, generate a PDF that you've designed.

This particular feature is available to all users of salesforce.com, from Group and Professional to Enterprise and Unlimited.

But if you do have Enterprise or Unlimited, you can even use the PDF & Email API's to automatically send emails with a PDF attachment.

Once you've built the class, it is then accessible via your standard workflow rules, so you can use it in many scenarios.

We have deployed this for a number of clients, and we use it ourselves internally.

To achieve this in Group or Professional Edition, try creating a new Visual Force Page, Call it "PDF" and use the following code:

< standardcontroller="Opportunity" renderas="pdf" standardstylesheets="false" sidebar="false" showheader="false">
Hey Hey!
< / apex:page>

Then you are done - well kind of! You can now view this new page at:
https://emea.salesforce.com/apex/PDF

But it's a bit useless right now, so why not decorate it with data from salesforce.com. You can place any standard HTML code within the center of the page block and it will render it nicely.

Then create a custom button on the Opportunity Page which links to:
https://emea.salesforce.com/apex/PDF&id={!Opportunity.Id}
Probably best to have this custom button open in a new screen.

So if you want to pull across any fields from the salesforce.com opportunity, just place references within your HTML Code:

E.g.
{!Opportunity.Name} - Brings back the opportunity name
{!Opportunity.Account__r.Name} - Goes to the related account, and brings back account name.

The fist part of this parameter references the object you are currently on, so in this case, we defined this VF Page to use the Opportunity Controller, the next part is a field name, or it can be a relationship, so you can traverse through more objects.

So hope this gives you a bit of an idea, get someone to design up your forms in HTML, replace all the dynamic data with {!} dot syntax, and add a button and VF page to render it as a PDF.

A couple of caveats, this uses the standard controller, which means we can access any fields on the opportunity or on related objects. In some cases, you may want to pull data from multiple objects at once, in this case you'd use a Controller Extension Class or Custom Controller class, alas only available in EE/UE.

Also, I've written a lot now, so I'll put another post later on how you can use the Email API to trigger emails with PDF attachments.

I think this article is very useful for people who have not been involved in a CRM deployment before. It has been developed by salesforce.com as a guide to best practices in CRM deployment. Our advice if you decide to deploy any CRM system is to clearly define what you are hoping to achieve, make sure you get executive level sponsorship within your organisation, and take a phased approach dont try and deliver everything in one hit.

Download Here

A neat video from salesforce.com, it speaks about the history of computing technologies, and what they believe is the future, On Demand Application Platforms, namely their Force.com platform.

As of the time of writing, Hallman Consulting have the only two Force.com Certified consultants in Australia (Level 3 Salesforce.com Certification).