Shamrock CRM - Salesforce.com Consulting, Implementations and Web Development

Dreamforce 2012

ShamrockCRM — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:09:27 +0000

It seems like a long time from now, considering it is only January, but I can’t wait for this year’s Dreamforce.

Dreamforce 2012 will be from September 18-21 at the typical Moscone Center in San Francisco. You can register for the early bird price of $699 until the end of January here.

What band can they hire that can possibly top Metallica?

Spring 12 Salesforce Release Notes

ShamrockCRM — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:05:45 +0000

Just a quick note, but here is the link to the full Spring 2012 Salesforce release notes.

Salesforce Spring 2012 Release Features

ShamrockCRM — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:51:59 +0000

Salesforce.com Spring 2012 Release is just around the corner and there are several very interesting and helpful features (e.g. cross object workflow) that should make a lot of people’s lives much easier. Take a look below for the highlight of Salesforce Spring ’12 features. There will be much more released later when they come out with the full release notes.

As probably expected, Salesforce is continuing with the social revolution with many new Chatter social enhancements. First off is Chatter Bookmarks, allowing you to bookmark your favorite, most useful Chatter posts. Is anyone else envisioning that Salesforce is trying to become the replacement for email?

In addition, Chatter Favorites. Search for a specific string “medical referrals” and save that Chatter search as a favorite.

In every organization, there are social “influencers,” the tech savvy users that post the most, influence other posts, comment a lot and more. Salesforce has introduced Chatter Influence, which allows you to find the most influential people in your org.

Chatter Messenger is the GTalk, AIM, MS Communicator of Salesforce, allowing you to instantly communicate with anyone in your Salesforce organization. I’m not yet sure if this is a benefit or a burden from adding one more IM service.

Chatter v2.0 will be released in Spring 2012 for the iPad, bringing an all new UI that is easier to use.

Chatter Smart Search, bringing the most important items to the top and intelligently categorizing them. Not world changing, but nice to have to organize the sea of information.

Data.com is making it a lot easier to search for the exact types of contacts and leads that you would like to target with advanced Google-like filters.

Cross object workflows, finally! This is a long overdue feature that everyone has been waiting for and should reduce the need for APEX Triggers for some very basic scenarios. I wonder what types of limitations will be placed on this.

The drag and drop schema builder (Database.com) will be available and should be a nice visualization / building feature for the backend.

Siteforce is making the publishing of dynamic data a lot easier with some of their new features. I don’t feel that this is a fully fledged, competitive Content Management System yet, but they are certainly trying to get there.

Siteforce Web to Object is a much needed feature as well. Instead of utilizing a tool such as FormAssembly or having to build code that ties into the API’s, Siteforce will allow out of the box building of externally facing web forms. Outstanding. I’m not expecting this to be fully featured immediately, but it has true potential!

Radian6, the social monitoring package, is releasing new features that tie in with the Service Cloud to allow monitoring and tracking of Cases generated from the social networks. This, of course, requires the Radian6 license.

I’m not sure if you heard, but Salesforce has spun off a new product for separate licensing (ugh), Salesforce Analytics Edition, which is focusing more on the BI crowd. This is adding additional reporting capabilities like below. This can expand horizons quite a bit with exception reporting and more, but the need for an additional license is saddening.

Email to Case functionality has now been built into the Outlook Edition tool. Hasn’t this always been there? Maybe I haven’t kept up enough with the Outlook plugin.

Salesforce Mobile for Android will now allow for full editing capabilities with Spring 2012 in January 2012. Finally!

Shared Tasks are an interesting new feature, but seem very useful, e.g. Send Holiday card to all Florida contacts. Why create 100 tasks when you can create 1.

Social Accounts, person accounts, and social leads are now available, just like the already existing Social Contacts.

Service Cloud case feeds are becoming a little more beautiful with all relevant data in one location. The Service Cloud is really a great product lately and is getting nothing but better.

Chatter Answers, the enabling of social self-service. Answers can come from knowledge articles, customer service agents, and a community of experts. This really could be the wave of the future with customer service.

Salesforce Live Agent and the integration with the service cloud. Live chat with your customers, manage cases, and log everything that was discussed. Another nice service cloud enhancement.

Overall, a nice set of Spring 2012 features released by Salesforce.com.

Salesforce Winter 2012 Features

ShamrockCRM — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:27:38 +0000

Salesforce Winter 2012 features. I know this is a little (very) late, but it is better than never.

There are a lot of big releases during this upgrade and a lot of new things for everyone to learn, like Siteforce and Visual Workflows. Take a look below to see my platform overview

See the release notes in PDF form here.

Salesforce Social Contacts – this feature sounds great, but I am not overly enthusiastic. You can link your contacts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can add in their picture and see their posts. Great! The problem is that you need to do this contact by contact and social network by social network. The system does not automatically scour the web and update all of your contacts. Even worse, Salesforce searches the social networks by the contact’s name. Have you ever tried searching Facebook for a common name? You ALWAYS get 100 results. Have fun with that.

Customer Chatter Groups – This is a great feature. Create your own “customer portal” for collaboration and discussion. Invite your customers into a Chatter group and chat with them, share documents, and more. I like it. Maybe try tying this in with an actual Salesforce customer portal?

Dynamic Dashboard filtering – This is one of those features that should have been there since day 1. Now, you can filter individual dashboards by criteria, such as region, industry, product line, etc. For all of the large organizations out there that have SO many dashboards created in a specific (hokey) way, I wonder how difficult it will be for them to migrate 1000 dashboards into this format.

Case flows – Wow, Cases have become beautiful in the Service Cloud. Everything seems very social. It is very easy to add comments, send emails, log calls and more. This is really a great UI makeover.

The Service Console has somewhat of a small overhaul as well and makes it very easy to find data quickly.

Pinned Lists – For the service console, you can now pin vital lists on the left side of the screen to always have the data available. Very nice. Time for everyone to invest in wide screen monitors.

Chatter Private Messages – This is another “should have been day 1″ feature. Very simple. Send messages to 1 or many people in Chatter.

Chatter Approvals – Integrating approval requests directly into Chatter feeds for the manager that does not like digging through many records to find an action he needs to take.

Chatter Now – Integrating instant messaging directly into Salesforce with Chatter Now. How many instant messaging clients does everyone have now? Well, here is one more.

Chatter for Microsoft SharePoint – Allowing for simple integration of Chatter functionality into Microsoft SharePoint. This seems very useful for making all of your boring internal websites socially enabled. Great idea.

Admin quick links – This should make it a lot easier for the new SFDC admin.

One-click App Creation – Salesforce is trying to make it a LOT quicker to create a new custom object, app, and tab. Simply click the “Create App” button, fill in a few fields and you are ready to start. A little bit easier than before.

Visual workflows – This is where I get excited. Visual Workflows allow you to use a cloud designer tool to visually create VisualForce wizards. So, instead of building a lot of VisualForce, it can all be drag and drop, point and click. This is something everyone needs to spend a couple of hours learning over the next few months.

Siteforce - is generally available in Winter 2012. It is essentially a web designer tool and content management system all in one, allowing you to utilize Salesforce as a backend database/admin console and build a dynamic front end website with nothing but point and click.

There are also several smaller features available, such as:
-Likes on Chatter comments
-Cloud designer for Visual Workflows
-Sharing Chatter files via email/IM inside and outside of SFDC (awesome!)
-Upload and Share Files at same time
-More Chatter filters
-Chatter Desktop
-Chatter for Android
-New Forecasts generally available
-Salesforce Mobile Beta for Android phones
-Presentations can no longer be assembled
-Enhanced reports tab (here’s to confused users that just got used to managing their reports)
-iPad mobile dashboards app
-Jigsaw is now Data.com
-Permission sets are now available – no longer need to create an infinite number of profiles to solve small needs!
-Just in Time provisioning for SSO portals
-APEX REST API

Salesforce for iPhone and iPad

ShamrockCRM — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:03:27 +0000

Salesforce released iOS apps well before any glimpse of Android applications, so here is a quick preview of what is available from iTunes.

Salesforce Mobile – the original iPhone app. It is still VERY basic in the overall UI experience, but it will allows you to accomplish a lot. Create/Edit/View your standard and custom objects. View dashboards. Log activities. It is certainly not pretty, but if you have an iPhone (or even an iPad) and use Salesforce, this is a must. It can even be used as a quick way to build very basic iPad applications, but it will not scale up in a pretty way.

Salesforce Chatter – Works great for both the iPad and iPhone. Outstanding collaboration app for your iOS devices. I wish Chatter functionality was built directly into the Mobile app above, but I understand that they are marketing to more customers than just CRM and want a standalone product. CRM feels neglected.

Salesforce Mobile Dashboards – Fairly straightforward and to the point. View your dashboards on a big screen on the iPad. Great standalone app to prevent confusing executives!

Dragon for Salesforce – Free standalone app to utilize the Voice to Text features provided by Dragon software. Who really wants to type about their site visit or call log on their tiny mobile phone keyboard when they can just speak. Pretty nice.

I’m very excited for Touch.Salesforce.com and the mobile capabilities that should hopefully spur from the usage of HTML5.

Salesforce for Android – Mobile App and Chatter

Salesforce for Android – Mobile App and Chatter

ShamrockCRM — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:35:47 +0000

How did I seem to miss this news. There is a Salesforce app for Android now? It seems so. But of course, in typical Salesforce style, it is released with minimal features. It is read only with no edit/create capabilities, very similar to the iPhone Salesforce Viewer app. C’mon Salesforce! Try it out here.

In addition to that, Salesforce Chatter has been released for Android and looks pretty great on tablets if you happen to have one. Looks like Salesforce is finally giving Android a little love.

Salesforce.com User Adoption – New AppExchange Application

ShamrockCRM — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:00:19 +0000

I am excited to announce a new product created by Shamrock CRM built specifically for improving user adoption in Salesforce.com and Force.com. Imagine having 1000 users and only 50% user adoption. @ $1000/license, this is $41,000 WASTED in licenses/month.

Welcome to the solution, AdoptionMax – Salesforce.com User Adoption Management!

Try AdoptionMax on the AppExchange Here (Click View Screenshots to see More)

Take a look at my overview of AdoptionMax Here

With Adoption Max, you can send regular notifications to users and their managers/adoption champions based on certain levels of inactivity. Notify users by email, chatter posts, tasks, reports. Customize when to send messages, to whom, and how they should be sent. All of these notifications are customizable, reportable, and automatic. Turn the app on and forget about it. All notifications will be handled by the app.

The best way to obtain user buy in is to establish a level of accountability. Users MUST know what you expect from them and they must be held accountable for their successes/failures. Adoption Max will provide them and their managers will visibility into their system usage or lack thereof.

We suggest establishing “Adoption Champions.” These would be power users that are responsible for the adoption success of a certain group of users, such as a region, an office, a product line, etc. These adoption champions would be assigned in Adoption Max and would have their own adoption reports to monitor. They would communicate with users to encourage usage of the system and regularly report to management about the level of adoption progress. e.g. A European Adoption Champion might be based in London and be responsible for all users in Europe. They would encourage usage, provide tips & training, help users when needed, and escalate to user management if there is lack of performance. The user, the user adoption champion, and the managers should all be held accountable for the adoption success. Adoption Max makes this VERY visible.

Read more about AdoptionMax and how it will improve your User Adoption here

Try out AdoptionMax on the Salesforce AppExchange

Let me know if you would like to try it out for FREE or if you would like more information.

Thanks for reading. We have just found that SO many companies, big and small, have huge problems with user adoption management. We want to help!

Dreamforce 2011 Site is Live

ShamrockCRM — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:09:53 +0000

Hey everybody, the Dreamforce 2011 website is now live with a listing of sessions and activities.

Take a look here for Dreamforce 2011

The dates are August 30 – September 2, 2011. This leads nicely into a holiday for most people.

Early bird price of $699 is supposedly available until April 14th.

Dreamforce 2011

ShamrockCRM — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:52:38 +0000

Hey everybody, just to let you know, the dates for Dreamforce 2011 will be from August 31-Sept 2, 2011. This year was a blast and very informative. I hope everyone had a great time!

Chatter Knowledge Portals

ShamrockCRM — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 14:56:33 +0000

Chatter Chatter Chatter. All of the news lately is pretty much revolving around Chatter. There are multiple benefits, such as closer teams, better collaboration, passive tracking of data and now, Knowledge Portals.

Chatter Groups are a great way to segment your Salesforce users into different groups based on region, function, department, teams and more. This also allows you to have a communication platform specifically for them. For example, imagine you would like to rollout a new pilot group of users for customer complaint tracking, not sales like your existing users. What is the best way to form a community within Salesforce.com amongst them for change notifications, training information, useful documents and more? Chatter Groups of course!

When rolling out a new set of users, I like to setup a Chatter group specifically for them. I create the group, add all of the users, and pick and assign a “champion” for the group. The champion will be the person on the team responsible for motivating user participation in the group and posting announcements.

Once all of the users are assigned to the group, they can ask questions directly within the group and have them answered by people in their same team as opposed to mass posting questions that would essentially not be important to the other sets of users (e.g. customer support rep process issues broadcasted to all sales and marketing people).

Once the group is setup, I also post all training documents and useful material directly in the group. I make all announcements and “useful tips” in this group. Any time anything is posted, it will show up directly on their home page.

What a great way to communicate to one subset of users without bugging everyone else! This is a very simple, easy way to form a knowledge portal directly in Salesforce.com. You can create as many of these groups as you need.