RobGTX

EventForce 4 - Force.com Labs - AppExchange

2012-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

After a few months of on-again / off-again programming, I just received approval to publish my 1st AppExchange App for Salesforce.com. The Event Management app had been orphaned a few years ago. I dusted it off and added many improvements. EventForce manages the creation of events, inclusive of tracks and session, vendors and venues.

The app is open source and available for free to all Salesforce.com customers.

EventForce 4 - Force.com Labs - AppExchange

Discover your Solar Energy potential

2011-12-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

The good folks at Solar Trading Post have published an updated solar energy cost calculator. This calculator is intended for residential customers. Just plug-in your state, current average monthly bill and select how much energy you want to derive from the sun and the calculator will crunch the numbers for you.

Salesforce.com Success TV: Chatter Customer Groups

2011-12-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

Shalini Gupta and John Kucera from Salesforce.com discuss Customer Groups in Chatter. Customer Groups extends the functionality of Chatter by allowing you to collaborate with your customers, prospects and partners, in a private and secure environment.

Chatter Customer Groups accomidates "real" collaboration with files, message and embedded videos. This functionality enhances the customer experience and allows you to share large files without clogging up your email box.

Forthcoming Salesforce.com Enhancements (Spring '12)

2011-12-05T11:48:00.000-08:00

Chatter Enhancements

Chatter Bookmarks - Yeah! We now have the ability to keep track of important Chatter posts with Bookmarks. Access your saved bookmarks from your profile page. Any time that anyone else "likes" or responds to a book marked Chatter post you also receive an email notification.
Chatter File Enhancements - You can now post documents or any other files as part of a Chatter Comment. File size limits now increased from 100 MB to 2 GB, wow! Increased ability to share or limit file access to specific people or groups
Recommendations - Chatter now suggests files to follow in addition to people, groups and records. Enhanced UI for recommendations and better suggestions are also added in this release.
Chatter Search improvements - Search now keep track of what you search for and moves common search results up to the top of the list. YouTube Video posts are now included in search results.
Sharing Chatter Posts (Very Cool) You now have the ability to share your posts with multiple people and groups, as opposed to reposting the same thing multiple times. Basically this is an enhanced "retweet" function.
Native Chatter client for Android phones and tablets
Improvements to the @Mention function. In the past Chatter listed people you follow first, then presented a drop-down to get to people that you do not follow. In Spring '12 you now get a consolidated, best match, search result
Chatter Influence now displayed in everyone Chatter Profile
Chatter invitations increased from 5 domains to 200!

SalesCloud Enhancements

User-selectable forecast date ranges and Updated Links in Forecasts
Salesforce for Outlook (SFO) ability to filter-out private items from Outlook by adding them to the Outlook category "Don't Sync with Salesforce"
Create a Saleforce Case from an Outlook email
For emails shared from Outlook to Saleforce, in the event that the recipient's email address is not found, the "My Unresolved Items" has been enhanced greatly.
In addition to Social Contacts, Salesforce also added the concept of Social Accounts. In addition to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, YouTube and Klout have been added ... unfortunately no Google+ as of yet.

ServiceCloud Enhancements

Chatter Answers integrates Cases, Answers, Force.com Sites, Customer Portal, and Salesforce Knowledge to provide you with a Web community for your customers. Post, browse, and reply to questions, flag questions containing questionable posts and comments, voting, etc.
Case Feed adds a new way of creating, reviewing, and updating cases.
Salesforce Console push notifications (pilot only feature)
Enhancements to Salesforce Knowledge - Knowledge Article validation, Knowledge Actions (Pilot), Article versioning, Spelling corrections for Knowledge search (Beta), Enhanced HTML editor

Analytics Edition

New reporting tool integrated into Salesforce.com featuring Bucketing, Cross filters and Joined reports

Mobile

The Salesforce Mobile SDK is an open source suite of developer technologies that simplify the development of mobile applications.
Allows you to create both Native and HTML5 apps

Force.com/Appforce

Cloud Flow Designer - Now GA
Global search enhancements -
global search keeps track of which objects you use and how often you use them, and arranges the search results accordingly
Visualforce Components for Chatter Answers
Visualforce Components for Live Agent
Visualforce Component for Chatter
Visualforce Component for Social Accounts and Contacts
Dynamic Visualforce Components - Now GA
Permission Sets Enhancements: Updated for Single Sign-On, New password complexity options, etc.

How big is your social influence?

2011-12-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Klout.com aims to help you understand your social influence. Currently the site analyzes data from your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. Personally I use LinkedIn to manage my career and keep in touch with business contacts whereas I use Facebook strictly to keep up with friends and family.

While I used Twitter for a while, other then letting people what I am up to on Blogger, I find it pretty useless.

Currently my Klout reach is 11 of 100, I wonder how they calculate the score?

Kindle Touch

2011-12-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

Just ordered up a new Kindle Touch from Amazon for our upcoming vacation. Excited about taking my library on the road once again. I had been using Kindle on the iPad, however I never found it particularly useful for reading outdoors.

For starters, I will be catching up on the life and times of Steve jobs.

What am I doing to get ready for Dreamforce '11?

2011-08-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

AppQuest: Meet the Final Four

2011-08-18T23:36:00.000-07:00

Force.com AppQuest: Meet the Final Four

Dreamforce '11 for free - salesforce.com

2011-08-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

Get a free keynote pass to Dreamforce '11

See Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts.

Plus Metallica, Will-i-am, and more...

Dreamforce '11 for free - salesforce.com

Chatter: 15 Seconds

2011-02-07T07:12:00.001-08:00

Chatter.com: Will.I.Am

2011-02-07T07:10:00.001-08:00

Just out of beta: Salesforce.com Chatter

2010-06-24T08:11:00.001-07:00

On June 22, Salesforce.com Chatter made it’s public debut. After a lengthy private beta, consisting of over 100 customers, Chatter was officially launched to all of SFDC’s over 6000 customers.
Having participated in the beta, both from an internal perspective as well as part of Dell’s internal trial, I must say that this application is nothing short of revolutionary.

I have worked in the CRM software and consulting business for over a decade, in all that time we always talked about how CRM fosters collaboration among your sales and service teams. However, when you put that statement into context with Chatter, we were truly just giving CRM lip service.

Chatter is in many ways like a mash-up of both Facebook and Twitter, with a dash of Yammer round things out. Like Facebook you can define a personal profile and “friend” other people and send short messages to their “wall”. Like Twitter, you can post regular status updates to your followers, as well as follow your friends. Finally, like Yammer you can define and follow groups of people.
However, where Chatter differs from other social media tools is where it really shines.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, Chatter is private to your organization and leverages the security of the force.com platform to keep things private.
Functionally, in addition to following people, you can also follow, and post to, objects in your CRM system. Objects being any “table” defined in your database, such as Account, Opportunities and Service Incidents. To me this is the single biggest differentiator, it gives your posts context, thus fostering collaboration.
Both public and private groups can be defined to link together birds-of-a-feather.
Salesforce has alos provided an API, this will allow third party developers to create add-ons for Chatter as well as allowing your IT team to build integration with Chatter
Finally, Salesforce has build the system, not as an overlay, but to leverage existing content management functionality. By posting a document in your feed, you are actually creating a piece of collateral in Salesforce Content. The document can therefore be shared, tagged and revised as appropriate.

More on leveraging Chatter’s integration capabilities tomorrow.

Black Friday is here!

2009-11-27T07:36:00.001-08:00

Every year on the day after Thanksgiving retailers across America offer huge discounts on a wide variety of products. Many retailers open extremely early, with most of the retailers typically opening at 5AM or even earlier.

The term "Black Friday" originated in Philadelphia in reference to the heavy traffic on that day.

However, by the early 1980s, an alternative theory regarding the term "Black Friday" began to be circulated. Accountants traditionally use red ink to represent financial losses and black ink to represent profits. The theory goes that most retailers operate at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving.

Whatever the origins, there are great deals to be had, this year yo do not even have to leave the house!

Microsoft thinks that the cloud cannot be trusted - Join the debate

2009-11-17T05:45:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting debate underway on The Economist website. From my perspective, Marc Benioff is absolutely correct. Given that Salesforce.com is under continued pressure to maintain rigorous standards regarding data security and privacy, they will always outpace the majority of individual companies and their on premise security solutions.

Show your support for the cloud, and vote "NO"

http://www.economist.com/debate/debates/overview/157

Speaker Details for Dreamforce 2009

2009-11-15T21:05:00.000-08:00

Well, I am back from a much needed vacation. I have to say that after a week on the Disney Wonder I am refreshed and fully prepared for Dreamforce 2009, Salesforce.com's annual event.

With all the recent chatter about the Service Cloud 2 and Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, it should come as no surprise that executives from Adobe, Google and Twitter will be joining Marc Benioff on stage later this week.

I am really excited to be part of this...see you there!

1080p HD Is Coming to YouTube

2009-11-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

YouTube starting to break new ground. On Thursday, the official YouTube blog announced that YouTube will soon be broadcasting in 1080p.

I think that this will help break new ground by:

Getting service providers and infrastructure manufactures to work toward faster download standards.
Forcing cable companies to wake up and recognize that a new threat is emerging. Currently the only thing that they have in their court is content.
Allowing me to do something cool with my new Flip UltraHD video recorder, particularly since I just purchase one and since Salesforce.com's Dreamforce, the CRM event of the year, is right around the corner...next week in fact
Further accommodating my HD-hungery Tivo Series 3 DRV

The question is, when will traditional Cable TV and Satellite be replaced by IPTV?

Audiobook Review: Crowdsourcing

2009-08-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I took my kids to the library. They were all excited to finally get their own library cards and pick out books on their own. I, on the other hand, was excited to see Crowdsourcing available on Audio CD and took a copy home.

As an employee of Salesforce.com, I know all to well about Dell’s Ideastorm user community website, as well as a few other examples that Jeff Howe discusses.

I found this Audiobook to be well written, not to mention well read by Kirby Heyborne.

The book discusses the concept of Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Howe back in 2006, its early pioneers and its evolution.

Listeners will find the audiobook descriptive and fun to listen too on the drive home. Fortunately the audiobook does not go into intricate details and formulas. While this makes it a great listen, this might be seen as a shortcoming in the text based version.

The Audiobook focuses on describing how regular people (in crowds) are being tapped to provide research, solve problems, create products (photos, programs, audio, etc.) and feedback in unique ways, sometimes at a nominal fee and sometimes for nothing more than the modern day version of bragging rights.

Crowdsourcing succeeds in being both entertaining and enlightening and I found it quite motivational…perhaps enough to get that special project of mine started.

Salesforce.com Secrets of Success

2009-08-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

Check out the latest book from David Taber, Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability, now available for sale. The book focuses on real-world best practices that David has pulled from his experience working on dozens of deployments. The salesforce.com deployment is covered in detail with results-focused tips across a number of departments including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT.

Book Review: The Elegant Solution

2009-03-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

I recently read "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation" by Matthew May. This book really hit home with me and I was able to implement a few of the key ideas from the book in my business life almost immediately.

I am in the professional services business, so while it is not my official role to build products; this book has shown me the light … everyone within an organization is responsible for that organizations “product”. Weather that “product” is a physical good, a service sold to customers, or even an administrative “service” that is “sold” internally.

If you an individual contributor stuck in a job, a manager stuck in the day-to-day or an entrepreneur looking to build the next iPod, this book is for you.
Some key points from the book:

Discipline and Creativity are not mutually exclusive, the creative process can be enhanced through control
Leverage conflicting goals to invent superior products and services (Do more with less)
Baby steps are generally more effective then radical change
Build solutions that will solve today’s problems
Innovation requires all people in an organization, not just the folks in R&D
Reflection is critical for growth

Take the time to read this book, and create a new tomorrow.

Great AppExchange Video and Presentation

2009-03-14T14:04:00.001-07:00

I came across this video, featuring Guy Kawasaki, from the Salesforce Developer conference back in 2007. If you have ever thought of starting your own SaaS company, this is definately worth an hour of your time.

The slides can be found on www.scribd.com here,

and the video can be found on the Salesforce website here

Salesforce.com for Dummies

2009-02-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

Order from Amazon

What can I say, I am a long time CRM advocate, and a Client Services Exec for Salesforce.com. I routinely distribute this book to my customers

New users to Salesforce.com, might not know where to start with their CRM initiatives. The presentation of information in Salesforce.com for Dummies has given many a great jump-start.

This book is for users, not developers and it is laid out in a concise, easy-to-understand manor that even busy sales rep can appreciate.

I will continue to recomend this book to all using, or thinking about using, Salesforce.com. It makes a great CRM program even better...now you can leverage all those inovative Salesforce.com features!

Salesforce.com Named to FORTUNE's 2009 '100 Best Companies to Work For' List

2009-01-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

Salesforce.com Named to FORTUNE's 2009 '100 Best Companies to Work For' List

Book Review: Little Green Book of Getting Your Way by Jeffrey Gitomer

2009-01-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

Years ago I was given a copy of Jeffrey Gitomer's "The Little Red Book of Selling" and promptly did nothing. Wow, what a mistake. After being recommended, and this time reading, the "Little Green Book of Getting Your Way", I immediately started reading other Gitomer.

No this ain't no piece of historic literature, but is a down-to-earth view on what life is all about.

Jeffrey presents practical and ways to implement key principles of persuasion and influence. This is a valuable read for anyone in sales, including those like me, that need to sell theirself every day.

I highly recomend this fun-to-read and practical book for just about anyone in business.

Book Review: The Dip by Seth Godin

2009-01-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

I very much like the writing style of Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) excels in plain-English commentary about when to quit and when to stick with it. Seth explains that there are three potential paths to most decisions: The Dip, The "Cul-de-sac" and the Cliff.

The Dip: Your project/initiative/whatever is all fun in the beginning, your all jazzed up and highly motivated. Then, quit all of a sudden somethign happens and things get really hard. Now you have a choice to make, stick with it or cut your losses.

The "Cul-de-sac": French for dead-end, no matter what you do, you spin your wheels and stay stuck in the mud, these are your typical dead-end jobs and go-nowhere projects. Cut losses here!

The clif: Situations where you cannot quit until the whole thing falls apart. Quitting is often difficult but necessary.

Find a way to quit Clifs and "Cul-de-sac" projects, jobs, etc.

Questions to ask yourself before quitting:
Am I panicking?
Who am I trying to influence?
Am I making measurable progress?

So at the end of the day if there is no pay off, quit!

Reflecting on goals from 2008

2008-12-31T07:34:00.000-08:00

Last December I stumbled across the Personal MBA, self-paced business education program. I came to know about the PMBA through Lifehacker. In January I made the commitment to "start" the program and gave it a decent amount of attention throughout the year. While I did not go into any details around my commitment, internally I was thinking 1 book per month and active participation in the PMBA online community.

I am happy to say that I exceeded my personal goal and actually read 20 books, 18 from the PMBA recommendations and 2 of my own picks. The online community participation part was a little less successful. I gave it a go, but it does not seem like people are all that interested in sharing all to much...I gave up on the community in about April. I will have to get back to that in 2009.

Part of my other commitment was to blog "book reports" as I progressed throughout the year. Well the blogging part never made it passed February. I hope to make amends to that goal and blog about the books that I missed from 2008 this January.

Here is my completed list thus far:

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The Dip by Seth Godin (book summary)
StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (book summary)
The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way by Jeffrey Gitomer
The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker
All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin (book summary)
The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
12: The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner & James Harter (book summary)
First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman (book summary)
Growing Great Employees by Erika Andersen (book summary)
The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (book summary)
The Personality Code by Travis Bradberry (book summary)
Seeing What's Next by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony
Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got by Jay Abraham
Getting Things Done by David Allen (Audiobook)
Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham
Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles (book summary)

So has the PMBA program helped me thus far? You bet! My attitude toward business and work greatly improved, so much that I quit my dead-end job at CDC Software, and leveraged my new found skills to land a position at Salesforce.com. I have to say that I am much more positive and feel like I grew professionally as part of my participation in the program.