Next week I celebrate three years with Salesforce. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve travelled the world, met lots of nice people and seen hundreds of great apps.  I’ve taught developers how to succeed on the AppExchange and even let you control my model trains.

But there’s one thing I have never been able to do — until today.

You might remember the awesome Force.com Labs Mug. It’s a classic, and I still see it in use around the office, three years later.  In fact, rumor has it that our very own Dana Le uses hers every single day.

But it was for employees only.

You might remember the Labs shirt. Also a classic. Also employees only.

In fact, I have never been able to give away a Labs themed premium to a non-employee before. But today — today my friend — that all changes.

That’s right. You can win the most unique Labs premium ever. You will be the ONLY non-employee to sport it. And it’s made of such high quality materials, it will last you a lifetime.

Introducing the Salesforce Labs backpack, customized, and specially embroidered by legendary outfitter Tom Bihn. Made at his factory in Seattle.

I have taken mine to Puerto Rico, San Francisco, New York, London, Rio de Janeiro and even the wild ski country of northern Michigan (try not to be jealous, you Lake Tahoe aficionados). It is the best backpack I have ever used in my entire life.  It includes a fantastic laptop section that protects the goods and sports an impressive lack of decorative zippers.  It is no nonsense, practical and cavernous.

And one can be yours — if you earn it.

Here’s how it works.

Between now and 11:59p Pacific time on February 28, 2013, all you have to do is help other users of Labs apps solve their problems. You can do this in reviews on the AppExchange, the Developer Boards, Salesforce Answers or any other place you might find one — even on an external blog or on the Salesforce Stack Exchange.

Spot a Labs related question, solve the problem and then — and this is important — Twitter a link to your solution to @ForceDotComLabs. Whoever solves the most problems AND tells me about it by Twittering a link to @ForceDotComLabs before the deadline will win the backpack.

To make things interesting: any answer posted before 11:59p PT Monday February 18th is worth double.

Note, that I must be able to validate the answers, must agree that you solved the questioner’s problem and must be able to clearly and easily match usernames on the different forums. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you’ll need to sign up in order in order to participate.  Any unsolved problem is fair game.  This is all in good fun, so in the event of some kind of disagreement or a tie, I will resolve it in the most amusing way I can think of.

Help out your fellow fans of Labs and get a sweet backpack.  Winner announced on Friday, March 1, 2013.

Here’s the deal, starting with a little background.

A key requirement for Force.com Labs apps has always been that they are open source. Salesforce.com publishes these apps under the very permissive BSD license, and I’ve heard many examples of companies adapting these to meet their own unique needs. This is what we want and has always been our intention.

However, today, for the first time, Passage Technology, a great partner with substantial expertise in the program and project management field, is offering a commercial, supported, and enhanced version of a very popular Force.com Labs app, Milestones PM.

“Project management is a function that all organizations need to have, and we’re happy to help Salesforce CRM customers achieve success by bringing more visibility to the health of their projects.” – Jerry Reid, Partner, Passage Technology

Fully Supported Portfolio, Program and Project Management

Their new version is appropriately named, Milestones PM+. Visit the new AppExchange listing and be sure to sign up for their webinar.

Milestones PM+ includes everything you’ve come to love about the original app. Simple interface. Detailed project statistics. A Gantt chart. But Passage Technology wanted to offer even more.

For example, they’ve added their expertise around portfolio and program management. They’ve also added detailed support for goal alignment. And they’ve introduced the concept of iterations and backlog management.

“Communication and keeping track of the bigger picture is 90% of the job of project management and it requires more than just task management and scheduling to be effective.” – Brent Gossett, Partner, Passage Technology

Dedicated Support, Detailed Roadmap, Conversion Assistance

The forces behind Passage Technology, Jerry Reid and Brent Gossett, have spent most of their careers helping organizations do a better job managing projects across the enterprise. Milestones PM+ is the result of this work and their experience with another app, Agile PPM.

One of the things that excites me about this release is that Passage Technology is extending their support services to any Milestones PM user. (You’ll want to contact them for details on their offer.)

Passage is also building a detailed roadmap for Milestones PM+, and they are eager to hear your feedback on the new app.

Another exciting fact: Reid and Gossett have already helped existing Milestones PM users migrate to their enhanced solution.

Find Out More

Find out more by visiting the new AppExchange listing and be sure to sign up for their webinar.

A few weeks ago, back when American Thanksgiving was just in the planning stage, Salesforce Labs kicked off a really fun project: The Salesforce of Things.  The goal was to create examples of “The Internet of Things” using a Salesforce technology as the backbone.  We had 15 great submissions and it’s my honor today to share the grand prize winner with you.

The Grand Prize went to Doug Merrett and Lawrence Ratcliffe of our UK office for their project, Printer + Salesforce + Arduino = Like. You can see it in action below. It’s super cool. I work from home most of the time, and so I don’t run into this problem very much myself. However, I was in our SF office last week, and it happened. Twice. So I’m sure you’ll be able to relate to the use case.

The code for this app is on Github and the repo includes a rather awesome How To guide that shows hardware, software and a whole lot more. Check it out!  If  you have a question or two on the implementation, you should feel free to ask here in comments.  I’m pretty sure I can cajole Doug and Lawrence into answering them.

You should also check out our Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami’s post that puts this event into a much broader context.

I’ll point out a few more projects over the next few days.  Stay tuned!

Well, wonder no more!

First, let me highlight three recent app fixes you might find interesting.

• EmailMessage Attachment Reattacher — This little app, a classic from 2008, helps you with Email2Case.  When an email message comes in with an attachment, this app moves that attachment from the EmailMessage to the Case.
• Opportunity Primary Contact Role Required — Another classic that helps ensure users are flagging a contact a primary once an opportunity reaches a certain stage.  Decent.  An interesting improvement would be require a primary contact when the probability is above X%.
• Case History — Another small one that queries a bunch of Case child relationships and displays them one on screen.  It was doing a round trip to sort the records, but now uses Tablesorter.

Second, there’s a supercool app now over on the Developerforce Github account called Jetstream.  If you are not into Java, feel free to fast forward. If Java is your thing and you want to use the Force.com Streaming API (and why wouldn’t you?), check out Jetstream.  It helps you tie the Streaming API to your Java app with just a few lines of code.  Looking for a reason to use it?  Do this: create an app that plots newly added leads to Google Map, in real time.  Fun!

Next, we’ve decommissioned a few apps that are now standard features: Chatter Super Follow / Unfollow Buttons, Chatter Email and Chatter Live.

Finally, there’s also a healthy pipeline of new apps, more than a dozen in different stages of development.  Stay tuned!

As a reminder, Force.com Labs apps are open source and available on Github.com/ForceDotComLabs.  There are 47 repositories posted today and we love contributions of any kind. ]]> http://blogs.developerforce.com/labs/2011/10/update-on-labs-updates.html/feed 10 http://blogs.developerforce.com/labs/2011/10/update-on-labs-updates.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/developerforce/opensource/~3/eJwjwxhu_nI/milestones-pm-updated-with-task-and-milestone-dependencies.html http://blogs.developerforce.com/labs/2011/09/milestones-pm-updated-with-task-and-milestone-dependencies.html#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:29:07 +0000 Reid Carlberg http://blogs.developerforce.com/labs/?p=3440 If you attended the Dive In: Join or Start an Open Source Community session at Dreamforce, you are well aware that Milestones PM, one of our most successful Force.com Labs apps to date, is open source. You and your developer friends can head straight over to our GitHub account, ForceDotComLabs, and get the code, check out the issues list and, today, for the first time, check out our fancy new Version History.]]> If you attended the Dive In: Join or Start an Open Source Community session at Dreamforce, you are well aware that Milestones PM, one of our most successful Force.com Labs apps to date, is open source.  You and your developer friends can head straight over to our GitHub account, ForceDotComLabs, and get the code, check out the issues list and, today, for the first time, check out our fancy new Version History.

This particular version, 1.53, is good because it includes a long requested feature, Task and Milestone dependencies.  This feature is very easy to use.  If you want to make a task or milestone dependent on a predecessor, simply complete the field “Predecessor Milestone”.

If you want to see what tasks or milestones are dependent on your current record, simply look at the Successor Tasks (Milestones) related list.

When you make a task or milestone dependent, you tie together deadline and kickoff dates.  For example, in the picture above, where milestone “2. Manual Configuration” is dependent on predecessor milestone “1. Basic App Install”, if you were to change the deadline for #1, the kickoff date for #2 would advance accordingly.  If you want to adjust these from the Gantt chart, you can.  (However, as noted in the release notes, the Gantt chart doesn’t automatically refresh.)

Special thanks to the good folks at Axlea, particularly Jeremy and Kevin, who have done some really nice work here.  If their GitHub streams are to be believed, not to mention Jeremy’s presentation during “Dive In” above, we should expect some more really interesting changes from them in the near future.

Curious about whether or not you can contribute to the project?  You can, and there’s no coding required.   Questions?  Feel free to ask here, on @ReidCarlberg or over on http://ReidPl.us.

Note: I’ll send out updates from time to time. Follow @ReidCarlberg on Twitter and Reid Carlberg in the Dreamforce app.

The first is Tuesday from 7p-8p.  I have that time set aside in the Open Source Lab for general Labs app discussion, meeting developers, talking about apps, etc.  Don’t worry: there’s a reception going on in the Dev Zone, too, so there will be plenty to eat and drink, as well as lots of cool devs to talk to.

The second is Friday from 8:30a-9:30a.   It will also be in the Open Source Lab and will be a great time to discuss how all these great Dreamforce announcements will impact the labs.  Yes, 8:30a Friday is a little early but what the heck: it’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it?

Force.com Labs is doing quite a bit this year.  Check out some of these other Force.com Labs ideas.

• There are three sessions on #OpenSource.  One is a discussion panel on PaaS and Open Source, another is Dive In: Join or Start an Open Source Community, and the last one is Build Better Apps with Open Source Components.
• I will be presenting Apps, Apps and More Apps at the Community Conference with some really outstanding leaders — Rhonda Ross, Andy Ognenoff, Hollie Wegman, Kevin Swiggum, and Saurabh Verman.
• Jonathan Hersh, of Group Master and Combo Pack fame, will be in the DevZone showing some of his cool mobile apps.
• The Lightning Theater will have several sessions featuring Force.com Labs apps.  Speakers include
  • Mark Sivill, 0-3-30 Force.com Labs, Tuesday 11:30a (Graphics Pack, Salesforce International Mapping with Google Maps, etc, etc),
  • Bradley Herman, Serendipity in Salesforce.com Chatter, Tuesday 2:00p (Chatter News, Chatter Recall, etc),
  • Guillaume Lenoble, AppExchange Force.com Labs: Cool Free Apps, Tuesday 7:00p (Simple Visit Reports, vCard, etc.)
  • Chris Kemp, Swarming and Gamification in the Enterprise, Wednesday 11:00a (Cloud Swarm, The Chatter Game).
• Several devs are presenting in Meet The Mad Scientists Behind Free Force.com Labs Apps at 8:30a on Friday.

Wow.

And there’s lots more than that.  As you go through the Campground and the dev zone, ask the staffers you meet about what they’ve developed on the platform.  There’s a tremendous amount of dev talent here at Dreamforce and you will hear some great ideas.

See you soon!

Why did I release it?  Because I could.  Because that one bug was important to a user.  There might be other bugs, but this is the one that got reported in sufficient detail for me to go in and fix quickly and easily.

Thank you, Neal Hobert, for creating the issue.

But this process got me wondering: do people know how to participate in a Force.com Labs Open Source project like Milestones PM?  I’m guessing no.  So here’s a quick guide.

I thought I’d create the onramp shown above to illustrate the different ways people can help the project.  Note that helping the project does not require you to code.  In fact, where we could use the most help, identifying and verifying bugs, is a non-code issue.  So is adding ideas.

And all you really need to jump in here is an account on Github which is both surprisingly easy and free to acquire.  Github is easy to use.  And if you want to sign up for an account, and get to know it a little bit, the Github crew will be joining us at Dreamforce in the Open Source Lab Sponsored by Github.

Adding a new issue is simple: just go to the issues section.

And what’s also exciting is this: this same basic pattern holds true for other great Force.com Labs apps.  Maybe you have something to say about Survey Force, Action Plans, Find Nearby, or Lead Scoring.  Note that these are NOT the only #opensource apps on deck — almost all Force.com Labs apps are released under a BSD License so you can use them however you like.  If you have one you’d like to work with that isn’t on Github yet, just let me know.

Edit: Now, if code is your thing, we might have some paperwork for you to process,  but it’s super easy and is really only necessary if you are adding features.  Bug fixes or minor tweaks do not require this.  It’s a simple Contributor License Agreement — as simple an agreement as I’ve read lo these many years. (Note: I added this as an edit because I wanted to make sure the CLA was available but it didn’t think it warranted a new post.)

Questions? Comments? Add here, on http://ReidPl.us or on @ReidCarlberg.