All Salesforce Blogs

Service Cloud 2 - The Next Chapter in the Customer Service Revolution

2009-09-10T00:14:46Z

Today, salesforce.com hosted an event in San Francisco to unveil Service Cloud 2, announcing incredible market momentum and some new game changing innovations for the Service Cloud. Originally announced in January of this year, the Service Cloud is the next generation solution for customer service - it exponentially increases the quality of service and lowers costs by leveraging community expertise.

More than 8,000 customers, including Extra Space Storage, NJ TRANSIT, and Plantronics are already using the Service Cloud to improve their customer service initiatives. Here's a video of Kraig Swensrud, vice president of product marketing, that gives an overview of today's news.

The technology innovations rolled out today include:

Salesforce Knowledge, the world's first knowledge base designed for cloud computing. Here's a demo of Salesforce Knowledge.
Salesforce Answers, an entirely new way to look at customer communities and discussion forums
Salesforce for Twitter, which allows companies to monitor and join the customer service conversations taking place on Twitter. Here's a demo of Salesforce for Twitter.

To learn more, or get started with the Service Cloud, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud2/ .

AppExchange Service Listings--Now Live!

2009-09-09T22:22:23Z

We are very excited to announce that Service Listings are now live on the AppExchange. This means that our community of systems integrators, consultants, custom app development partners, and training partners can create listings for their service practices, just like ISVs do for apps today. This is great for both customers and partners as now there is ONE central source for information on all cloud computing solutions.

These new listings leverage several features that are already in use on the AppExchange like search & categorization, lead capture, and customer reviews. Additionally, service listings integrate data directly from the new partner portal like the number of joint projects a partner has completed and their average customer satisfaction scores.

We encourage you to check out the AppExchange to view this exciting new upgrade. Also, if you are a service partner who would like to create a listing, please view this step-by-step publishing demo to get started: http://salesforce.acrobat.com/p87769964/

Announcing Service Listings on the AppExchange

2009-09-09T22:24:09Z

The AppExchange is officially your complete marketplace for cloud computing solutions. In addition to browsing application listings from our community of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), now you can find information from all of our service partners including:

- Systems Integrators

- Business Consultants

- Training Providers

- Custom App Development Partners

These listings leverage many of the existing AppExchange features you have come to know and love like search and categorization, screenshots and videos, and everyone's favorite....customer reviews! Watch this 5 minute demo to learn how you can take full advantage of these listings today.

September Salesforce Mobile Events

2009-09-09T19:37:33Z

Regularly Scheduled Events

Introductory Overview Webinars

We'll cover all the basics of Salesforce Mobile including key customer examples and top field uses. See live device demos with your use case examples. Get the latest on supported devices and platforms and see what the Mobile Administration Console looks like. We'll also have an open forum for questions and answers regarding your Mobile objectives.

Occurs EVERY WEDNESDAY

11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern - 1hr.
Dial In: United Sates (866) 342-2541 International +1 (706) 643-5414
Conference Code: 415-536-4564#
Web Session: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/729118097

Mobile Administrator Training Webinars

This session is focused on how mobile administrators will actually configure, deploy & manage Salesforce Mobile.

We'll cover best practices, system architecture, device & network requirements, building mobile configurations (data set criteria, mobile views & mobile layouts) and deploying users.

This is a GREAT session for customers who would like to migrate from our legacy mobile console.

Occurs 1ST & 3RD THURSDAYS

11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern - 1hr.
Dial In: United Sates (866) 342-2541 International +1 (706) 643-5414
Conference Code: 086-610-2274#
Web Session: https://www.gotomeeting.com/join/354466548

It's About Time

2009-09-09T05:24:51Z

A superior technology improves the solution of a nearly universal problem. "The market drivers are product quality, comfort and aesthetics, say manufacturers," as reported by an industry observer -- and the product in question is one that most people replace every two or three years, at most.

And so, the result? "The technology appeared eight to ten years ago and now we have penetration...of almost 100% which is a relatively short period," says an industry executive. Technology adoption takes time...

...even when you're talking about something as easy to change as the shape of your windshield wiper blades.

You'll pardon me, then, I hope, if I feel that the adoption of cloud computing is coming along quite nicely. Most of the elements of a true platform as a service have not even been available to developers for as long as three years yet -- but already, there are more than 80 million lines of multi-tenant custom code and more than 300 thousand user interface customizations, shaping the capability of Force.com into whatever business process someone wanted to support.

Ready to wipe the floor with your competition? Come to the cloud.

There's No Right Answer to the Wrong Question

2009-09-08T19:23:56Z

People are saying and writing a lot, these days, about whether cloud computing is ready to displace the model of thick-client PCs in client-server architectures.

Personally, I'm inclined to say, "Never trust any paradigm over 30" -- and yes, the notion of a self-contained "personal computer" is almost 35 years old.

The question, however, should not be, "is cloud computing the answer?" -- because the proper answer to that query can only be, "what is the question?"

Is cloud computing the best way to edit your camcorder's output to produce an HD-quality DVD? No, for that you'll still do better to have a local, multi-core CPU and operating system plus a whole lot of memory on a fast local bus.
Is cloud computing the best way to run climate models that require almost 24 hours to run a 24-hour forecast -- even on a machine with 13 TBytes of memory and an 8-week boot time? The numbers, staggering as they are, probably continue to justify dedicated hardware for that kind of 24x7 processing.

Does either of these examples say anything about the value of cloud computing in the typical workplace? I would say not -- but the workplace is the context in which we should be looking at what the cloud can do, and how best to do it.

What got me thinking along these lines were Ian Wright's comments in an interview with Forbes.com. Wright was one of the early leaders of Tesla Motors, of electric-roadster fame, but he's more interested in boosting the mileage of a FedEx truck from 10 to 11.2 mpg than he is in boosting a Prius-class vehicle from 50 to 100 mpg. Why? Because the truck is driven all day, so the total fuel savings are far greater than those for the light-duty car.

That's the right way to think about the proper role of cloud computing. In an enterprise workplace, whether real or virtual, even incremental economies are hugely multiplied -- and the costs of making a cloud-based service adequately secure, robust, and integrated with other IT assets are rapidly amortized.

Can you find use cases that make the cloud look worse than the thick-client PC? Sure. Are those cases relevant? Well, that's the right question.

This isn't the first time that mainstream perceptions of an IT transition have been warped by the choice of viewpoint. Sometimes, innovations are pushed too soon -- for example, the laptop computer.

Back in 1980something, Esther Dyson observed over lunch that the laptop computers of that time were not the best choice for most people's everyday workloads -- limited in capability and/or absurdly expensive for what they did -- but that they got a huge amount of coverage in the trade press anyway, because they were actually useful to the journalists writing those stories. It took more than another decade for laptops to achieve 25 per cent market share, and it wasn't until May 2003 that laptops were a majority of retail PC sales.

Today, the laptop has become a lagging rather than a leading indicator of where things are going. Journalists and consultants -- opinion leaders, in general -- spend a lot of time on the road, in airports and hotel rooms, wanting to carry their body of work with them in a form that lets them do anything, anywhere. Students, who represent a big seasonal peak in PC sales, likewise -- and so, the thick-client laptop remains a key topic for PC vendor product development and for trade-press buyers' guides.

These workloads and task environments, though, aren't representative of the vast majority of the labor force. If an industry analyst does research into the buying choices of students and parents, and that analyst gets interviewed by a trade press reporter -- well, that's a perfect storm of in-depth irrelevance to the needs of the enterprise.

Before you examine the answers, put at least as much effort into the questions.

App of the Week: greenerStimulus

2009-09-08T02:35:10Z

Happy Labor Day! This week's app of the week is greenerStimulus by Greener Applications. If your organization has received stimulus funds, this free solution helps you track your spending activities so that you can stay in compliance with federal reporting requirements. The app makes use of standard government terminology enabling you to easily import and export recipient, sub-recipient and vendor data in the appropriate formats. Finally, using dashboards and reports, you can analyze your progress and identify opportunities for improvement.

Take a test drive today!

Salesforce Mobile for iPhone v4.0.3 is now available on App Store!

2009-09-04T23:44:13Z

What's new in iPhone v4.0.3?

Performance improvement: the general performance of the application has been improved through a number of bug fixes.
New application icon: the new application icon features the company logo with a cloud image to reflect the company's leadership position in cloud computing. This is the new icon:

How do I install it on my iPhone or iPod touch?

The new client is now available on App Store. Tap the App Store icon on your iPhone and search for Salesforce Mobile.

Where do I go to learn more?

Read the Salesforce Mobile User Guide for iPhone for more information about how to use the client application on iPhone and iPod touch.

Don't get left behind! Get in front of a targeted audience at Dreamforce and start building your 2010 pipeline!

2009-09-04T22:14:33Z

Do you consider yourself a force to be reckoned with in the cloud computing space?

Dreamforce is the cloud computing event of the year. This 4-day experience is a must for any company competing and playing in the cloud computing arena.

We are just weeks away from finalizing the Dreamforce Expo. This is your last chance to sign up! Any sponsors coming in after September 25th will incur rush fees. Please view our online brochure for more details.

Want to differentiate yourself and really stand out? Don't forget about the available a la carte opportunities!

Please email partnersuccess@salesforce.com with any questions.

The Web ⊂ The Cloud

2009-09-03T18:28:25Z

That ⊂ symbol in the title of this post means "is a subset of": I thought about using the better-known ≠ ("not equal"), but that's too general. I didn't want to say that the Web and the Cloud are completely different, but rather that the Web provides only a partial view of what the Cloud contains.

What brings this to mind is the foofaraw over a recent, temporary loss of Web access to Gmail. As one might resignedly expect, this incident is being gloom-and-doomed with pronouncements like "cloud computing is a more tenuous proposition than I realized" -- although it's a relief to see that the vast majority of comments are more along the lines of Jessi Hempel's observation this morning that "Most e-mail goes down. According to Osterman Research, based in Black Diamond, Wash., e-mail systems in mid-size and large organizations have a mean of 53 minutes of unplanned down time in a typical month." Cloud services are, in general, vastly more reliable than on-premise alternatives.

But even Hempel's comment misses a key point. Gmail did not go down. If you were using an IMAP client such as an iPhone, or if you prefer the simplicity and diversity of using a POP interface, Gmail remained accessible by either of those means. People who assessed the risks of even an occasional interruption of access to cloud-based mail, and found those risks unacceptable, have always had -- and will continue to have -- many options for providing as much redundancy as they need for as much as they're willing to spend.

The point, therefore, is that the cloud is not the client: the cloud is the capability, regardless of how that capability is delivered to a person or incorporated into a process.

We take this point quite seriously here, because it's been at least two years since we passed the point where more than half of our workload is driven by requests to our APIs -- in addition to the work we do in response to the clicks and keystrokes of subscribers to our Web-delivered applications.

We continue to extend and refine those Web-interface capabilities, of course. After all, to turn the previous sentence around, Web interaction represents nearly half of what we do, so of course it's still important. But the salesforce.com cloud is twice the size of what our own applications' users directly see.

Over time, every mode of access to the cloud will become more ubiquitous, more powerful, more reliable, and more cost-effective. Three years ago, hand-held Internet access was like looking through a keyhole; three months later, the iPhone opened a window to the Web from almost anywhere.

The exponential curves (yes, "exponential growth" really does have a meaning) of connectivity have yet to show signs of a sigmoid slowdown -- unlike so many of the elements of the aging thick-client platform, which are clearly at the stage of diminishing returns.

If you're using the cloud as a consumer, you'll relish the low cost and continually improving convenience of Web interfaces. If you're using the cloud in the enterprise, you'll invest in additional services and technologies that reduce the number of single points of failure, and assure graceful degradation when things aren't working as well as they usually do.

Can you make on-premise solutions arbitrarily reliable? Well, you can always spend more money. Must you give up that freedom of choice in the cloud? Emphatically not -- but in the long run, any given level of information security and operational assurance will inevitably wind up costing less in the cloud.

Reminder - Community Demo Series #2 - Sites

2009-09-03T16:46:22Z

Hello Administrators,

Just a friendly reminder - we will be hosting our SECOND demo series today at 11 am PST which focuses on building an application on Force.com. Our first demo on workflow, held earlier this month was well received by the community, with 85 community members attending!

We asked you what Force.com topics you were interested in learning more about…you answered Force.com Sites. We listened and will continue our series with a Salesforce expert demoing how to leverage Force.com Sites. Don’t miss this great opportunity to ask an expert your burning questions on Sites!

Here are the webinar details:

What: Community Demo Series #2 - Force.com Sites

When: September 3, 2009

Time: 11 am - 11:30 am PDT

Where: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/118350208

Participant Dial-In Number(s):
*US/Canada Dial-in #: ( 866 ) 551 - 3341 /Conference ID: 29039993

Reporting and Dashboard features in Winter10 the list and Color tuner.

2009-09-03T00:31:09Z

Now pre-release is available, we can start to talk about the features in Winter’10. There were 5 features destined to be in Winter’10. Internally, our list was:

colors
hover
others
multi
drill

This made it (oddly enough) easy to remember. But now there’s the list, we can go on to the first one. Colors, and the Color Tuner.

Color Tuner

Color tuner is a simple idea – the idea here:

and here

and is “if this thing appears in one chart as one color, it should be the same color in other charts, and I want to set the color”.

Most tools

Many tools would let you set the color in the chart for each element. Some might even not let you set the colors, even if they are fancy BI tools that cost lots of money per seat. But that seemed bad:

you’d have to redefine the colors for each chart
If you and a co-worker build charts, you’d have to discuss the colors beforehand to stop “fisheries” showing up red in one set of charts, and green in your co-worker’s charts

So, we took a different tack… We wanted to fix the colors of chart everywhere in salesforce.com.

Part of the metadata

In the picklist definition, you have the set of picklist options:

so, here seemed the right place. If Fisheries is supposed to be green, make it green when you define it. When anybody edits something, you define a color, and the colors are applied everywhere. Let’s see that list in Winter’10:

Now, I can do 3 things:

Globally assign a set of colors
Globally remove all colors
Set or unset a color from a specific picklist value

So, looking at one of the edit pages for one value, I can see the color choice:

and I can set the color

Now I can see the list of picklist values with their colors

Now, returning to my chart, I can compare the before and after:

	Before	Winter’10 with colors assigned
all months
just october 2008 and august 2009
	Technology goes from Orange to Green as the values visible change	Technology stays a super pink!

Also, this affects all charts in all dashboards – technology will now be pink everywhere, so two charts next to each other with Industry as a grouping will show technology in pink also

No, It Isn't Obvious

2009-09-01T21:04:44Z

Among the more famous (and printable) mathematician jokes is the one that has a professor assert that something is obvious, then stop a moment to think about it...then leave the room for several minutes...then come back, beaming and saying, "Yes, I was right: it is obvious!"

We're in the same situation, I believe, when it comes to the benefits of adopting a cloud-based development platform. It's much too easy to forget that for the vast majority of IT professionals, the benefits of the cloud are still unrecognized; further, that those benefits are often badly obscured by hype and FUD.

In particular: I was asked, earlier today, how I'd respond to an IT manager who said, "We buy, almost entirely, packaged applications. If I'm satisfied with my current CRM, and if our tiny amount of custom development is OK as it is on another platform, why would I want to add Force.com to the mix?"

This was my response:

Many applications can be built on Force.com with "power user" skills, using clicks rather than code to define workflows and enable powerful data integrations -- thereby reducing demands on scarce and expensive coder teams.

Coders will find the Eclipse-based developent environment and Java-family Apex Code language to be quite familiar and rapidly mastered. Actions such as data sharing are far less complex to perform, making the burden of adding this environment much less than might be expected. (The photo at left, and the hyperlink above, are linked to a video discussion of Apex Code development.)

In return for that incremental effort, developers will be able to create new function five times as quickly:

nucleusresearch.com/research/notes-and-reports/force-dot-com-drives-faster-development/

www.galorath.com/wp/how-galorath-quantified-the-salesforcecom-platform-with-seer-for-software-seer-sem.php

Desirable capabilities such as email approvals, partner data sharing, and audit trails of actions and data edits for compliance and governance will be readily incorporated into applications in (literally) minutes rather than requiring complex development and testing.

New applications can be prototyped, tested at full-strength performance and capacity, and deployed (if well received) or killed (if not) with zero initial capital budget, zero scale-up delay, and zero abandoned investment if an experiment is not carried forward to production use.

Delivery of applications to mobile devices, and to multi-language/multi-currency user communities, will be greatly accelerated.

Skills and organizations will be developed that enable next-generation applications to be cloud-based, greatly reducing capital costs of infrastructure updates and future data-center operations -- rather than continuing on present paths of growing complexity and cost of on-premise software and of growing data center space and energy footprint.

The question is, am I myself mistaken in thinking that any of these things are obvious, even by mathematicians' standards? And if not obvious, how can these truths be made clear?

Offer Management with Campaign Member Custom Fields

2009-08-31T23:30:09Z

Ever wanted to easily manage offers across campaigns and do A/B testing on these campaigns? Now you can! With campaign member custom fields, it's easy to create an offer object & link it to campaign member by creating a lookup field.

A typical campaign involves sending an email or direct mail to drive traffic to a landing page. The landing page shows an offer such as a demo, white paper download, free trial, or product discount. Here's one way I think works well to track different offers:

  -  Create a custom object called Offer
  -  Create a campaign member custom lookup field to track the offer used
  -  Pass a hidden field in your webforms to the campaign member record to track the offer displayed

Let's say you use an email campaign to drive traffic to a white paper download landing page, but you want to do some A/B testing by changing the text from "$5 off" to "10% off". You can simply change the hidden field on your webform, so all new or updated campaign members will reflect the "10% off" offer. This also works great across campaigns if you re-use offers in the future.

How to pass hidden fields to campaign members with Sites

If you're using Sites for your landing pages, it's pretty easy to add hidden fields for campaign members.

1) Include the hidden field in the Sites page:
    <apex:inputHidden id="Offer" value="{!campaignmember.Offer__c}"/>

2) Assign the field value to a javascript variable:
    <script>
   var Offer = document.getElementById("{!$Component.Offer}");
   </script>

3) Below the form, assign that javascript variable the desired value in a function:
    <script>
    function changeHiddenFieldValues(){
    Offer.value="a003000000CEdEI";
    }
    </script>

4) In the form tag (located higher in the page), call this function:
    <apex:form id="theForm" onsubmit="changeHiddenFieldValues()" >



How to pass hidden fields to campaign members with Web to Lead

If you're using Web to Lead for your landing pages, you'll need a trigger to get the pipes connected (see package below).

1) Create custom fields on Lead for all the campaign member fields you'll want to pass as hidden fields

2) Add the hidden fields to your web to lead form, which will auto-populate upon submit to the lead (use the Web to Lead utility in setup to generate the HTML)

3) Create a before Insert trigger on Campaign Member to grab those Lead custom field values and assign to the Campaign Member.

Here's a package you can use (at your own risk) which has a trigger, test code for the trigger, the custom object, and the custom fields to make this work:

https://login.salesforce.com/?startURL=%2Fpackaging%2FinstallPackage.apexp%3Fp0%3D04t30000000UAgD

Should salesforce.com update its logo?

2009-08-31T20:24:28Z

We are considering a more contemporary logo and would like your feedback on the concept below. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

You can also check out the conversations taking place on our Facebook Page and the IdeaExchange.

App of the Week: DashPort by RumbleWare

2009-08-31T02:00:00Z

It's all about the dashboards this month! This week's App of the Week is DashPort by RumbleWare.

DashPort makes use of Visualforce and provides an easy to use drag and drop interface to manage all of your dashboards and reports. You can use this solution to get a quick snapshot of which reports are associated with which dashboards in Salesforce. Additionally, you can easily clone (or delete) a dashboard and all of its underlying reports in one-click! This is a huge time saver for admins or managers who have deployed multiple dashboards to their organization.

Watch this brief demo to get the full scoop! Also, in honor of being featured, they are offering a 10% discount on all subscriptions that are purchased this week.

Salesforce.com Partners: You Can Now Resell Force.com!

2009-08-27T22:32:50Z

There's been a lot of talk about over the past year on how cloud computing may make the channel irrelevant.

This is simply not the case.

The channel represents a vital piece of the IT value chain, represented by everyone from the 1-man local IT guru to the world's largest systems integrators. These channel partners have built up the technical skills and domain expertise to advise companies large and small which results in trusted customer relationships, that sometimes span decades.

The activity of delivering custom technology solutions does not fundamentally change with cloud computing. What does change is how these solutions get delivered and cloud computing is forcing the channel to elevate the value they deliver to end customers. No longer can channel partners guarantee a tidy profit by reselling IT hardware and client-server operating systems. The challenge is for the channel to evolve with the changing economics that cloud computing brings to the IT industry. Channel partners that aren't able to shift their business model and up-level the value they deliver will likely lose revenue streams to the cloud that may have been coming from hardware and traditional software sales.

So what's been holding back the channel partner community from really participating the cloud?

When it comes to cloud computing platforms, there hasn't been a leading vendor that's given the reseller channel a clear path to profitability in the cloud; most cloud platforms are priced for the end user/developer and don't allow the channel to share in revenue generation. Until now.

With the newly announced Force.com VAR (value-added reseller) Program, the channel now has a way to generate recurring revenue in the cloud. By allowing partners to markup our Force.com licenses based on the value of the custom apps they deliver to end customers and also own the renewal process, salesforce.com is unlocking the market opporunity of cloud computing for the channel. We're already seening enthusiastic response from the partner community - in fact, there were 14 partners signed up to be VARs when we launched this past week.

There's never been a better time to bring the cloud to your customers (and it doesn't hurt to make some money doing it either!) - better yet, we'll equip you with all the tools to build and sell cloud computing solutions, plus it's free to join our ecosystem....so get started today!

Case Hierarchy: Divide A Complex Case Into Simpler, Smaller Child Cases

2009-08-27T15:00:00Z

In last week's blog post I described how to set up a case hierarchy. As I discussed in that post, a case hierarchy can be a very powerful tool to manage sets of related cases.

In last week's post I gave the example of a case hierarchy that represents a new hire coming on board, where we create child cases for each of the items required to onboard that employee:

In this type of hierarchy, the parent case is really just a shell -- no one is specifically working the parent case, but individuals will be working the children cases. A useful automation here, then, would be a trigger which synchronizes the parent case's status to the statuses of its children; that is, the parent will be closed only when all its children are closed; and as long as any child cases are open, the parent will remain open as well.

In fact it is fairly trivial to write such a trigger. I have posted some sample code for a trigger like this, complete with a test method, on this page at the Developing With Service & Support Quick Start Wiki.

While you're over there, if you haven't seen it, take a look at the broader Developing With Service & Support Quick Start Wiki page. It's chock-full of great sample code for Service Cloud users, and we keep adding more to it.

As usual, please direct any questions or comments about this sample code to the General Development discussion board.

Case Hierarchy: Divide A Complex Case Into Simpler, Smaller Child Cases

2009-08-27T15:00:00Z

In last week's blog post I described how to set up a case hierarchy. As I discussed in that post, a case hierarchy can be a very powerful tool to manage sets of related cases.

In last week's post I gave the example of a case hierarchy that represents a new hire coming on board, where we create child cases for each of the items required to onboard that employee:

As usual, please direct any questions or comments about this sample code to the General Development discussion board.

Get On Board The Winter '10 Train

2009-08-26T20:30:04Z

Winter '10 promises to bring some amazing new features to the Salesforce Cloud apps and Force.com platform. Join us in September for a back-to-back presentation of exciting new Winter '10 enhancements. The first presentation will highlight some of the upcoming innovation in Force.com. Immediately following will be the second presentation showcasing what's new in Salesforce CRM.

Visit the IdeaExchange to see a list of what's coming in Winter '10. Some of the top features you'll love are:

Batch Apex
Bulk API
Quoting
Packaging More Components
Dynamic Campaign Viewing
And Much More...

The show starts at 10:00 AM PDT on Tuesday, September 15th. Register now to attend one or both presentations.

(cross posted from the Force.com Blog)