Just Your Average Salesforce Admins

Creating and Opportunity Competitor Tracking App

2012-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a simple little App that I built to track Competitors at a deeper level than is possible using the standard SFDC Competitor Related Text List. It allows us to track Competitors as Accounts (just like Opportunity Partners) and gives us visibility into Competitor History directly from the Account and Opportunity object, including Wins against Competitor/Incumbent, Losses To Competitor, and Open Opportunities against Competitors.

Tips&Tricks: Records Created By the Current User

2011-06-29T09:44:00.001-07:00

Here's a little formula that I came up with that comes in handy when you need to create reports and dashboards that display things like Activities, Cases, Leads, Opportunities, etc that were created by one user, but might now be owned by another user.

Unfortunately the built-in Salesforce "My..." and "My Team..." filters only reference the record Owner field, so you're forced to clone reports and edit the Created By filter (making the Running User pretty much useless)

Until now....

Here's what you do:

Create a custom field on the objects that you need to track CreatedBy (User).

Field Name: CreatedBy$User

Datatype: Formula

Return Type: Number, 0 decimals

Formula: IF(CreatedById = $User.Id , 1, 0)

Now just add a simple filter:

Field: CreatedBy$User Operator: [equals] Value: 1

to your reports and now use the Running User to create Scheduled Reports and Dashboards that display anything a user created. Now if you need to create a new "Created By... Dashboard" all you have to do is clone the Dashboard and change the Running User (no more cloning and editing reports for each user)

it also works with List Views too!

Reset Reminder Button - A fix for the Dismiss All Reminder Pop-up window

2011-06-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

Oops! I Didn’t Want to Dismiss All by Kyle Thornton

The infamous Matt Brown threw out a question the other day

After some back and forth with Matt it turned out there are many questions on the Salesforce.com Answers forums related to getting reminders back after a user clicks ‘Dismiss All’ on the reminders pop up. I decided to give this a stab and the following is the result.

I created a Visualforce Page that simply has a button on it along with a disclaimer of what the button will do.

The main purpose of the controller is to query for all open tasks and future events owned by the current user and set the reminder flag to true, allowing them to show up in the reminder pop-up when logging in. The controller will not set the reminder flag for any Tasks that never had a reminder set. We know this because the Reminder Date is null. Had it been set previously, it would still be set; the reminder flag was just unchecked.

Finally, I created a very simply home page component with a link to the visualforce page. The component name is “Reset Reminders For My Open Tasks and Event” and the html (be sure to check the ‘show html’ checkbox) is:

My only change would be here and replace the section of code that created the below Homepage component:

with a button. The button on the Homepage looks like this:

Here is the code for the button:

I figured the easiest way to show the functionality was with a quick demo.

Finally, you can install an unmanaged package of the home page component (don’t forget to add it to a page layout), visualforce page, controller and test method with this link:

https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04tE00000000RkA

*Remember, you can change the path to https://test.salesforce.com… to install to a sandbox.

This excellent Post was from a fellow blogger Kyle Thornton over on his blog knthornt.wordpress.com

Mass moving Reports from one folder to another using the Eclipse Force.com IDE

2011-05-24T06:38:00.001-07:00

In the Eclipse IDE

Create a new project
Include ‘reports’ or more specifically the report folders you are concerned with
Let Eclipse refresh the project with the reports metadata
In Eclipse, navigate to the reports folder you just download and then select the Report Folder you want the reports you want to move from, right click and select Properties

Take Note of the Location. This is the path where the metadata files are located
Open a windows explorer window and navigate to that path

Highlight all the Reports you want to move and right click Cut
Still in window explorer navigate back to the list of report folders and expand the one you want to move the reports to and right click and Paste
Now back in the IDE highlight the folder titled Reports and right click and Refresh and then right click again and Force.com - Save to Server

BOOM! Now you have moved your reports.

Guest Post on ButtonClickAdmin.com - Core Admin Productivity

2011-05-24T06:37:00.000-07:00

Mike Gerholdt has an awesome blog ButtonClickAdmin.com that is worthy of a read. I was asked by Mike to write a post for a series he has been covering titled "True to the Core Series." My post is concerning Admin Productivity and some of the deficiencies around Salesforce.com Admin functionality. Take a look: Core Admin Productivity

How to create an Email Button with a record link

2011-04-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

Hi Gang,

Here's a little nugget I just wanted to pass on. It's a piece of code that you can use to create a custom button on the Record Detail Page in SFDC that will open the users default email program and create an email with a URL Link to the record in SFDC, and the SFDC Object and Record Name in the Email Subject.

It comes in handy when one of your more Technology Challenged users is having a problem with a specific record and you don't feel like having that awkward "What is a URL and Record ID???" conversation with them.

Label: Email

Name: Email

Object Name: Opportunity

Display Type: Detail Page

Button Behavior: Execute JavaScript

OnClick JavaScript: javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href);

It's Official: Winter 11 is almost upon us!

2010-09-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

I come fresh and excited from the Salesforce Winter 11 release webinar with news of the latest and greatest to hit our Salesforce shelves (metaphorically speaking of course).

I waxed a little in an early post of what seemed to be making its way to us based on a little insight and the Ideasexchange "Next Release" category. Well I was blown away by how far the release has come and what will eventually be delivered. By the way you can find out when the release will hit you at trust.salesforce.com.

The full release can be found in the Winter 11 release notes PDF found here. For a snippet here is what you can find in an Oscars style top 5 lineup in reverse order.

5. The Force.com Platform App Login and Security developer upgrade highlights

SFDC can now act as an Identity provider for Oauth authentication
Many governors removed or increased
Cloud based log viewer (More like the Eclipse IDE experience)
Pilot program for REST API (Submit a SFDC Case for access to this Pilot)
Single Sign-On (Login to Salesforce and non-Salesforce Apps)

4. Other Developer related User Interface enhancements

Setup gets a makeover with same skin release we have all come to love ;)
Global Search gets the addition of searching for Content
Some enhancements for Visualforce including a View State Inspector allowing you to debug a page

3. Force.com Sites upgrades

Website URL redirects
Self-Registration for Person Accounts
Customizable "My Profile" page

2. Salesforce Database

New Report Builder (we love to drag and drop!)
Chatter analytics (now you can build Reports and Dashboards around Chatter)

1. It's all about Chatter and the Collaboration Platform

This releases Oscar gets picked up by Chatter

Chatter Files - Store, update, and share your Chatter files in one place
Chatter Search - Search across every Chatter feed, file, profile, and update
Chatter Recommendations - Smart recommendations to help you collaborate with the right colleagues
Chatter Filters - Find targeted information fast
Chatter Email Manager - Tailor your Chatter email settings to receive only the information you need
Chatter Email Digest - Get the latest updates from your Chatter feed so you never miss a thing
Chatter Topics - Use hashtags in posts to create shared topics
Activity Chatter - Collaborate on tasks and events

So that's it folks! If you would like to check out the Webinar Jeff Grosse (@CRMFYI) has placed them on his website the Salesforce Channel. What do you think about this next release? We would love to hear you thoughts.

Admin Tips & Tricks: Accounts and Opportunities owned by Inactive User Reports

2010-08-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

Did ever want to see which Account or Opportunity records on your SFDC.org are owned by users who are no longer active?

Well now you can!!!

Just create a new Custom Field on the User object.

Field Name: User Status
Datatype: Formula(Text)
Formula: IF(IsActive, "Active", "Inactive")

Now take your favorite Account or Opportunity report and add your shiny new custom User Status field to the Report Grouping or the Filter Criteria.

You'll be seeing results faster than you can say "Sham-Wow!!!"

Winter 11 Release Early Shape Up

2010-08-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

Many of us are wondering what will Salesforce release at the end of this year and in conjuncture what will be the buzz at Dreamforce10. Are we going to ride the coat tails of Salesforce's momentous year with the release of Chatter or is there a ace up Salesforce's proverbial sleeve?

Certainly there is not a lot that could top Chatter but I for one hope that they have a line up for the end of year release that is not completely eclipsed by Chatters launch. Recently made available, although not so available via the Ideaexchange's "View by Status" picklist, is the coming releases line up. To get a peek into whats coming up go to the link here: Coming in Next Release.

Predominantly the line up seems to be the new Salesforce CRM for Outlook (aka Outlook Connector) and some revisioning of Reports. There is a lot of talk going on in the Salesforce Community about the upcoming changes to the Outlook Connector because apart from the dynamic Add Email, Salesforce org administration control, and a few other nifty features it is totted to be supported on Office 2010. This is a relief to many I know.

While the speed, or lack thereof, of Office 2010 support from Salesforce seems to be coming to conclusion there does not seem to be anything new in the Google Apps offering which comes as a bit of a surprise.

Even though my company is a slow moving turtle and a move towards the Cloud technology from an IT perspective is an almost dead cert no, I am in love with Google Apps and the initial Salesforce integration is just plain a right step in the right direction. However, the spring has seemingly run dry with no real updates from Salesforce in this area.

So what else looms on the horizon for us mere Salesforce.com user mortals? Rumor has it that the Chatter application for Mobile may be taking a slightly different approach than an extension to the existing Blackberry or iPhone Salesforce apps. You haven't heard it from me but it's going to be faster and slicker than what can be provisioned inside the current applications and standalone at that and Web facing. I probably know enough to be dangerous here but not enough to give any qualified confirmations so I will zip it before I go too far, but watch this space.

I for one hold out hope that there will be something bigger than the Outlook Connector, improvements on the Reporting engine and a few new Chatter nice to haves. I guess we will have to wait and see.

Business Impact of Online Community Involvement

2010-08-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

This is a post I made to the Dreamforce 10 Ideas Community as a paper. I would love your vote!

Many of you have experienced the impact of the Salesforce Community personally with other users coming to your aid in times of need when that Custom Summary Formula just doesn’t do what you wanted it to do, or you have had a brain fart and are not quite sure where that place was that allowed you to change the name of a standard field.

Whatever it might be you have logged your issue with Salesforce Support and are awaiting an answer and just wanted to see whether some kind Pliny the Elder loving Community User could answer it before Support got back to you. You have posted your plea and within minutes you have had a reply and and you have escaped the wrath of your boss as your new wow report has finally been completed.

I for one have sat that same side of every Answer hungry Salesforce User and marveled at the collective experience of you all. I also sit on the other side of being a Community Contributor with the desire to give back to those who have given to me. It is a feel good place to be in that position when you feel you have helped out someone else either because you know the answer or you are just challenged enough to search for the answer yourself and create that formula or workflow rule to see whether there is a viable solution that can turn the corner in your project and make you a better SalesforceUser.

I have come to experience another reason that keeps me coming back and jumping in to the fray and trying to provide order out of your Answers chaos, and that is that it has brought enormous value to my own company. My executive team are so aware of the value of my contribution to the Salesforce Community because of what it has meant to the driving value of our own Salesforce org in our companies business automation. Where once we were under appreciating the value of what Salesforce could do for our company we are now whistling the Salesforce tune and dancing in the light of its automation power (ok I got a little carried away!).

Unfortunately I don’t have any metrics to give you but the experience I have gained as a Salesforce Community contributor has been the catalyst in many of the projects undertaken in our company to drive better business success. Daily I come away from my time spent answering posts with a new snippet of knowledge that I have been able to weave into the fabric of our Salesforce usage.

Now is there a best practice in this story I am not sure, maybe so. If the better practice is to help out others so that you in turn maybe helped out I reckon that is a good thing for your company too.

Customer Portal Profiles Watch Out!

2010-08-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I contributed anything on my blog. I sometimes wonder how others manage to keep up with all the forms of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn, and Chatter as well as maintain everyday work, husband and father responsibilities. I for one find it hard but was recently prompted to try to Blog more.

So here is my first comeback. Now this obviously won’t affect you all but hopefully to you fledgling Salesforce.com Customer Portal creators/admins this may be helpful.

I recently posted this on the Salesforce.com Answers Community and here is the link: https://sites.secure.force.com/answers/ideaView?id=08730000000IVpKAAW

So I stumbled on this little gottcha just the other day when I was trying to inactivate some Lead record types. I received a message indicating all the profiles that had assigned to them the particular record type I was trying to inactivate. And there amongst all my standard and custom profiles were the Customer Portal profiles I had created. I then scratched my head and wondered aloud, “but Leads is not an object available to the Customer Portal.”

So just in case I was deceived I hoped on over to those profiles and checked and correct no Leads object, no Leads page layout, no Leads permissions and no Leads record types.

There is a fix, however, and again a stumble upon trying anything to get it to inactivate on the Customer Portal profile. Here is what to do:

Select one of your Customer Portal Profiles and go to the Record Type Settings section. Select the Edit link against your Account Master Record Type and in the URL you will need to remove the word Account at the ***id=Account*** point and type in its place capital L Lead and hit enter. You can now remove the Lead Record Type for that Customer Portal Profile. You will need to do this for every Customer Portal Profile you have.

All I can say is you better keep an eye on those Customer Portal profiles!

Salesforce’s Customer Portal Tip#2: Custom Homepage Components

2010-01-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered how to customize the way your Portal homepage looks? You have this big blank space only broken up by some left sidebar components you checked on your Portal Homepage Layout and you want to put some information or maybe a poll or even the 10 most recent Solutions.

Here are my tips for doing this.

You need to consider the information you want to display and style/layout in order to display it correctly.
To do this you need to look at 4 components for each piece of information/section and maybe a 5th if sourcing images as well.

First is your CSS document for styling and layout. The first information section in the image above has a header, a left and right column and a footer. The header contains my title, the left column some text and hyperlinks, the right column some images and the footer for style purposes.

Once you have created your CSS and saved it as a text/css file (I do this in Notepad and save as a .css and file type text) you need to upload it as a Static Resource.

Now you need to create the actual content of the section. I did this as a new Visualforce Component.

(Zoomed in Area)

For the poll I used Polldaddy.com (free) and used Flash Embed as my source and created my Visualforce Component like this:

Polldaddy.com actually gives you its flash code via embed tags. I chose to redo it using object tags for styling purposes. If you need help on this let me know and I will gladly do so.

You can see from two images above that I sourced the images into the Visualforce Component using the apex:image tag:

apex:image url={!URLFOR($Resource.SolutionImage)}”/

Obviously I had already uploaded my images as Static Resources.

The next step is to create your Visualforce Page. Here you call your CSS Static Resource and your Visualforce Component. This is a simple page.

Now you can create the Homepage Component. You need to have an HTML Area Component and select the Show HTML check box. Very simply you are now creating an iframe.

You may find you need to tweak the iframe height to display the full section based on your CSS layout.
And the last step is to actually select it on your Homepage Layout for your Portal.

Hope that helps you think through some options for display stuff on your Portal Homepage.

Salesforce’s Customer Portal Tip#1: incorporating HTML

2009-12-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

I thought I would start a post on some tips on using the Customer Portal. Up until recently there was not too much in the way of information regarding the Customer Portal. In fact when our company rolled out the Portal to our Customers in March of this year all I was able to find was a couple of implementation guides and a short video demo. Recently I stumbled across http://developer.force.com/consultants/crc_page?name=CustomerPortal quite by chance. I was doing a search for “Customer Portal” in Developerforce and came across it. Not sure how long it has been around but it certainly was not a resource back in March and to think you have to be thinking “Consultant” to even find it.

Anyhow, I wrote a Developerforce Discussion Board post back in July with a tip for incorporating HTML in the header/footer sections of your Customer Portal which has received quite a few views and I have been told by Salesforce’s very own Partner Enablement team that it is going to be an article in the “Configure” section of the Consultant Resource Center Customer Portal sometime in the New Year.

In a nutshell the tip is for incorporating an HTML header section that is a full width image. The issue was dynamic resizing of an image based on a web browsers screen resolution settings. Below is the issue presented and the proposed fixed. Hopefully it helps someone out there!

Through trial and error I discovered that placing a graphic on the Customer Portal via Setup>Customize>Customer Portal>Settings [Your Portal] Edit>Look and Feel(section)>Lookup for a HTML Document to include in your Header or Footer you have to do some trickery to display it properly.

The major issue is that a graphic will not dynamically resize to the end users screen resolution settings. So, as in my case, I wanted to display a graphic to fill the entire Header section of the Customer Portal.
I created my graphic, which happened to be 1440px in width and 100px in height, and uploaded it to SF Documents as a .jpg image. I then created my HTML doc with a simple <> tag referencing the unique path of the image with will be something like, https://na6.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.ImageServer?id=[an id]&oid=[another id]&lastMod=1247154430000.

(In order to get the image path you have to go to Documents and locate the image you want, click on the file to see its details, and then right click over the image and do a “Copy Image Location.”)

I then uploaded that to SF Documents. I then referenced that HTML document in the Customer Portal Setup as my Header.

All looked great, until I changed my browser to display on a screen with a 1024x768 resolution. The graphic displayed so long here that I had to scroll horizontally to see the entire graphic. I tested this with other resolutions and well much dismay.

So the Solution: Your either have to use JavaScript in your HTML document to handle the image resizing based on the end users screen resolution or you can use a <> tag. I chose the latter. Here is the code:

A caveat on this though. You must create your image to be the width of the largest screen resolution you may encounter. That maybe 1280 or 1440 or even bigger. The above code will allow that image to display correctly on all resolutions settings, dynamically.

I have since discovered that the resizing to display on the appropriate end users screen res settings for even HTML components used on the Customer Portal Homepage layout you will have to use the above code somewhere as well. If you do not your may see your square HTML component change size.

A philisophical adjustment to SF releases!

2009-12-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

Argh! So to revisit the Quotes Pilot for a moment. Today I was trying to set up some Workflow rules so that via a field update we could adjust the Subtotal or TotalPrice of the Quote. Alas no! Subtotal and TotalPrice is not available via the merge fields in the Formula Engine.

This got me thinking about the underlying philosophical persuasion of the SF product team when it comes to releases. It seems that on several occasions they have released a product without holistically looking at all the ramifications of a product without the basic core functionality including critical fields being exposed to the Formula Engine, for example.

This leaves me wondering whether the Senior Product Managements attitude is a little cavalier towards product releases with a “Just get it out there!” mentality.

Ok maybe I am being unfair, granted, but come on product team you wet our appetite with new products/features/functionality but you cut appendages off so we are using the product in a less the optimal and efficient way.

Oh no! Another thought struck me. I so hope that there is not a persuasive attitude of give 75% functionality and allow them to develop the further 25%. That would suck, especially for us non-developers.
What is your experience?

Chatter

2009-12-21T13:10:00.000-08:00

Salesforce Chatter!

What are your thoughts and feeling about the next iteration of Salesforce with an integrated Social Platform? Does it make sense for all business sizes or another SFDC Product offering geared for the Large Business?

Answers Pilot and the future of SF Communities

2009-12-17T15:00:00.000-08:00

So we are seeing the next evolution of Salesforce with its Service Cloud 2 offerings and now the Sales Cloud 2 offerings and many of you have notice the seeming corporate jump on the proverbial Social Networking Bandwagon. What are you thoughts about this?

Also Dreamforce unveiled the new Chatter Application which will be among us soon. So Social Networking and collaboration seem to be the general dance being danced.

One may think my tone shows some skepticism but in truth not so. I am seeing the great possibilities that then move into the Social Networking arena SF can have. From a Support point the more “Channels” available for your Knowledge to be seen the happier your Customers, or something like that.

Anyway, the move forward SF is taking in the nature of Communities, first with Ideas and soon to be Answers, gives our own SF Users something to use to interact with one another but has even greater benefits for our Customers. Ideas was a start and was ideal for granting your Customers the ability to suggest Product enhancements etc. Answers will hopefully fill the other gab.

SF Cases helps solve issues your Customers may have in traditional sense but is it not more satisfying when those forums that do work have Product Team members, Sales folk and Support Techies chiming in a dialog of sorts to bring a satisfactory conclusion to that frustrating bug or question you have had?

Answers helps here, or at least it will do. Right now Answers is in its Pilot phase and yes I have access to it. At first I was like what the heck is this as it does not have the interface that Ideas has. In fact at this time the Answers tab in my org takes me to an Enhanced List view. I was intially confused and wondered what I could possibly do to give it more of an Ideas or forum interface. I started getting all hot under the collar with the thoughts of more Visualforce and Apex development.

Fortunately a quick email to the Answers Product Management team gave me an Answer, excuse the pun. The next release (February time) will see something similar to the below, with the caveat that it might look slightly different. The sreenshot shows the SF Dev teams Dev edition as of today.

Quotes Pilot and the future of

2009-12-15T12:48:00.000-08:00

So for those of you who have access to the Quotes Pilot what are your thoughts thus far? For those of you who don’t have access as yet here is what you can look forward to.

Quotes is a SF Object in itself but obviously has tight dependency upon Opportunities. Right now the Pilot Quotes does not even have a Tab, so the only way you can access it is via Opportunities and that via a Related List.

The idea is you select your Products on your Opportunity and then Create a Quote. The Quote then displays standard field info like Quote Name, Number, Expiration Date, Status, Discount, Sub-Total, Total, Grand Total and Address information.

Once you save the initial data you can then add new Quote Line Items similar to Product Line Items on the Opportunity and you can apply individual Line item Discounts, qty etc if need be and you can edit the existing Line Items that were populated upon the converting the Opp Line Items into the Quote.

You now have the ability to Create a PDF version of the Quote (of which the Visualforce page can be customized with your companies logo) and you can email the Quote directly from the Details page.
So to the limitations. You can check out the IdeaExchange Idea for the Quotes Pilot here.

First thing one notices once you have played around with the Quote, adding Discounts etc you have a different Grand Total from the Amount shown on your Opportunity. Could be a problem I hear you say! Yes exactly! Not sure about the rest of you but in our Company our Quote needs to reflect the Opportunity. What this has meant until now is a plethora of Custom Fields on the Opportunity to handle Discounts etc.

I queried this with the Product Manager for Quotes and thankfully they are building a syncing mechanism into the next iteration/release with a possible February slot.

Great News!

The second limitation is that you can only grant Discounts to individual Line Items and not a overall discount after the individual Line Item Discounts have been applied. News has it that this may be a feature in the Summer Release.

So some thoughts about the new Quotes Object. About time! One does find himself wondering how this is viewed by all those Application Partners of Salesforce. Is this considered competition by them? Anyway all I can say is that I am patient enough to watch and ride the evolution of Quotes and hopefully reap the benefits of this being taken care of Salesforce and not some third party App.

Just our of interest for those who require further functionality such as invoicing etc take a look at Financialforce

Update 2 to the SF Knowledge App Post

2009-12-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

My call with a marvelously friendly and knowledgeable Frenchmen who is one of the Senior Product Managers has just ended. He graciously answered all of my questions and I feel I have some good information to move forward with our own implementation of Knowledge and some helpful information to share.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding the newly released Knowledge was the costing factor of which I included the link to my Idea in my original post. The understanding here is that this initial release of Knowledge came with a price for many different reasons. The primary one that made sense to me is kind of backward thinking but still makes sense. Eventually SF will replace Solutions, which answers why they are not investing in further development in regards to it. What they will be replacing Solutions with is a slightly scaled down free version of Knowledge. It seems based on our conversation that the strategic vision for Knowledge is much larger than what Solutions presents for us today and therefore SF feel justified in associating a cost with the Knowledge Application out of the gate and then following up with a free version sometime in the not too distant future. Stay tuned for a possible Winter 2011 release or at least somewhere within the 2011 release windows. Did I say Winter 2011? Ok that could float over to 2012 or what the heck maybe even 2013.

The second concern, that I had at least, was the seeming targeted focus that SF Knoweldge scalability to the large public facing SF Customer that channels like web searchable Knowledge Article and access to Article via Social Networks have a big contributing factor. Apologies, a mouthful of a sentance I know! I was thinking “what about us SF Customers who cannot serve our Customers Knowledge in a public fashion but have to serve them something that should be worthwhile and usable none the less!” Here I am concerned about the self-service angle. Where is the Suggested Article for the Portal User to encourage self-closure of their Cases and where is the Create an Article on Case Closure functionality that maybe I have come to be secure in because let’s be honest it’s all we have had to serve up Knowledge to our Customers to date. Thankfully functionality that has not been forgotten and enhanced upon. These capabilities will be available, hopefully, in the Summer 2010 release along with some API functionality and a probable migration tool/wizard to handle the gap between all those Solutions and how the heck to turn them into Knowledge Articles.

So what else do we have to look forward to in SF Knowledge? Obviously these are raw and not promised and by no means comprehensive a list but the Spring 2010 release we can look forward to Analytics surrounding Knowledge and also User Permissions and Security. There is a big play to position the underlying Dimensions engine in other aspects of Salesforce with the inclusion of that engine and the availability of Articles in the Answers Object/Arena. Answers is a sort of Ideas sort of Forum capability still in the process of being released by SF but it will be a solution to those of us with Portals and the desire to build private communities as well as the public sphere.

Anyhoo that kind of sums up my conversation with the SF Knowledge Product Manager and hopefully helps anyone reading this who is interested that Knowledge is going to be a very interesting and worthwhile ride.

P.S. I forgot to mention yes Knowledge will become available for Salesforce 2 Salesforce sometime after the API work is done, probably not until 2011 and there is a package of sorts that SFDC Professional Services have put together to handle your migration from Solutions to Knowledge. I am sure a call to Professional Services will unearth it, albeit with a cost.

Update 1 to the SF Knowledge App Post

2009-12-05T10:45:00.000-08:00

I had an email reply from a Salesforce Senior Product Manager late yesterday saying that SF Knowledge “will not replace Solutions in the short term” and that he will send my email to him onto the Senior Product Manager for SF Knowledge.

…And how about that I just start writing this and I get an email from the Product Manager arranging a time to call. I will post what I can after my call. I am looking forward to hear the news about SK Knowledge.
Stay Tuned!

The NEW SF Knowledge App (Thoughts, Confusion & Questions)

2009-12-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

This is a post I made today on both the Community Forum and the New Answers Community.

Lots more thoughts and questions surrounding the SF Knowledge App, like Why no more development on Solutions? Will Knowledge replace Solutions? And most importantly why the added cost? I created an Idea surrounding the costing of the Knowledge App that I would welcome some feedback on titled: “Please consider the upcoming Knowledge app to have a no fee association!”

So to my Community post today.
We are trialling the new SF Knowledge App and are trying to gage the benefits of it over the use of SF Solutions as our Customer Self-Service model.

Has anyone implemented Knowledge? If so, what have you done with Solutions? Did you export your Solutions and then re-import them as Articles? What are some best practices for this?

One would assume that if you have exposed Solutions in the past to your Customers either via the Customer Portal or via the Self-Service Portal you would want to create Articles for them.

The only benefits I see at this point in time is a better organized way of Managing the creation and distribution of the Articles, a better search mechanism for those Articles (over Solutions) but no facility to self close a Case with the help of a “Suggested Article” feature like there is for Solutions within Cases and a richer UI experience. For sure there is the whole avenue of Article distribution via the likes of the Social Networking communities that make the new SF Knowledge App a nice feature but I am at a real loss as to how this either compliments, enhances or replaces Solutions.

It would be a real plus if SFDC communicated some vision surrounding SF Knowledge in the form of where this fits into the existing Service & Support model with Solutions, Cases and Content(sorry the Video Clip of an Article being presented to a Twit(what does one call a Twitter Member anyway?) and also being found as a Web Article via Google does not really cut it).

Also, some serious answers need to be given with respect to the confusing placement alongside Solutions. Is this going to replace Solutions? Will there be the facility to provide Case self-closure with Articles? Why is Articles not available via Workflow or something simpler like a “Create an Article” checkbox within the Solution Edit Mode(no easy way to continue our existing business process surrounding Solution creation and turning them into Articles)? Why is there no “Create Article screen upon Case closure?

One is left scratching his head as to SF Knowledge’s placement alongside Solutions and how one can either use both or just the one. Solutions seems redundant but with Articles not meeting the same functionality as Solutions why would one want to use Articles apart from it being nice to look at?