Don’t know what a Google Gadget is? It’s a small piece of code that you add to your own personal Google homepage that gathers data for you so you don’t have to go hunting it down.

See my example below.

The four gadgets that Appirio has freely given out are Sales Sleuth, Opportunity Knocks, Task Watcher, and Case Watcher. This makes the retrieval of data much simpler as you will see this data in your own Google portal rather than having to log into Salesforce to get the data.

For a demonstration of these gadgets, contact me and I can show you how it works.

Put your “what problem could that solve for us?” hat on and keep an open mind. Though I don’t yet know how this might help us in the future, we should keep it in mind and come back to it as the need arises.

Steve’s blog

When it comes to Marketing awareness and knowing what people are saying about your company, this seems like pretty valuable information. On top of that, what if you were tracking those who are big proponents of your company or brand and became aware of their sphere of influence across the Internet? Sounds potentially useful.

You can read John’s thoughts on it here.

Adam Gross from Salesforce.com demonstrates three uses for the new Flex toolkit in a screencast he recorded. This shows the use of realtime Salesforce data, inline with detail records in Salesforce that gives graphical representations of desired data points. It allows interaction of data across records to illustrate relationships.

What also makes Flex a compelling tool for application building is the fact that it comes with many component libraries which make development much quicker than traditional tools which provide a framework, yet no “pre-delivered” components. Whether that’s graphs, charts, dashboards, or UI components, Flex gives developers a jumpstart to application creation. And because the Flex code can be packaged up and run on the Salesforce.com Apex infrastructure, there’s no need for a backend server to run the Flex code. It’s all delivered in Salesforce.com natively.

At the end of Adam’s presentation, he gives a quick peek at Adobe’s new Apollo project which allows mashups of data from online applications such as Salesforce.com and offline or back office (non-web) applications from the desktop. That extends the reach of Salesforce.com data beyond the traditional “get it on the web” interface.

You can read more about the Flex toolkit at the Salesforce.com Developer blog. http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2007/04/annoucing_the_f.html

Bottom line, this could be the answer to creating dozens if not more dashboard components for individuals.

Read about it here. http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/274887/17684830

The idea of allowing you to setup dashboard components to use the current user instead of the running user has been suggested at the Idea Exchange, but if you’d like to help promote it, click here to vote it up higher.

What if relevant content was handed to you?

Picture yourself looking at an opportunity and wishing you had all the marketing collateral, competitive analysis, white papers, press releases, emails, and just about any other bit of information located somewhere in the Lawson cyber-world at your fingertips.  Could that really be possible?  How would it affect your ability to close a deal if you knew what was out there and could use it to your advantage. 

Somewhere out there, there is information you could use to your advantage, but if you can’t find it, you can’t use it.

What if you could know which documents are most often used in the vertical you’re trying to sell to that result in closed deals?  What if you could subscribe to an author or topic and know when that person publishes or changes a document? 

What if you opened a spreadsheet or document on your desktop or in your email and your were notified immediately that you are not working on the most current version of the document? 

OK, enough questions, how about some answers?  While it’s not an answer to world hunger, Koral might be a heck of a stride forward in the world of content management and document management. 

Koral is a relatively new company that was just acquired by Salesforce.com.  It’s part of what Salesforce is now rebranding as Apex Content.  You can watch a brief demo of what it can do here.  Notice how easy it is to publish data, but beyond that, see how easy it is to get relevant content into an opportunity.  If you’re interested in more, look at Robert Scoble’s interview with one of the founders of Koral here.  They talk about what brought the need for Koral about and why Koral is important in the enterprise. 

There’s a lot of information out there, but how useful is it if you can never find it

With what sounds like a little Apex code, you can really speed up the process and avoid data entry and maintenance mistakes. 

Check it out here at his website. 

This requires an s-control for each report you want to display, but for those reports which require more than what a standard dashboard component shows, it would be worth the effort.

Read all about it here at the Official Salesforce Blog.

One enhancement is the ability for you to schedule the delivery of dashboards and reports.  This would allow an administrator or user setup a schedule by which regular, or even exception reports would be delivered.  The method is still under development, but thoughts are to allow a report and dashboard Inbox as well as email distribution. 

If you have thoughts on how this should be designed, I encourage you to the ideas.salesforce.com site and voice them on the appropriate ideas.  See below for a few links that you can not only vote on, but expand on.

Scheduled & Emailed Reports
Freeze Column Headers in Reports
Sub-folders within Report Folders

Voting is how change gets put in.  Salesforce is very clear that those items which are most popular are the ones most likely to be introduced.  This is very evident in the last two releases as they can now trace new and enhanced features to specific customer requests. 

Keep watching for more news about reporting and analytics. 

Video demo

The four minute video gives two examples of duplicate accounts being created and the error message, as well as a reminder given to the user to view and potentially fix the data. 

This give some insight to the power of Apex as the entire application is written on Apex to run within our standard Salesforce.com environment. 

Things to consider

• How do we prevent users from adding duplicates today?
• What tracking mechanism to we have today to know how many possible dupes are created?
• What is our ongoing strategy to prevent duplicates from existing from user data creation?