You will be charged $100 per year per certification track you maintain.  Maintenance fees start one year (or 3 releases) after your first achieved certification within that track.  There are 2 tracks:

Administrator (entails Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Consultant)

Developer (entails Developer, Advanced Developer)

In short, the maximum amount you will be charged per year is $200 for certification maintenance, although each track may be billed at different periods.

Hope this clarifies for those with any remaining questions.  Cheers,

John

What you need:

FF 3.5+

Greasemonkey

Setup Enhancer Greasmonkey Script

Notes:

Make sure that Greasemonkey is installed and you’ve restarted Firefox before attempting to install the Setup Enhancer script.

You can post enhancement requests to the discussion board of the script.

But I digress.  As great as the above combo is, I still often connect with others using Skype.  This lead me to start collecting their IDs on the contact record.  From there it is pretty simple to create a URL to dial them through Skype directly.

Skype ID is a text field.  Skype URL is a formula field using the following:

IF( LEN(Skype_ID__c) > 0, HYPERLINK("skype:" & Skype_ID__c & "?call", "Skype " & Skype_ID__c ), "No Skype ID")

This can also be implemented as a button using this code:

skype:{!Contact.Skype_ID__c}?call

Happy dialing.  Cheers,

John

I type: pb# and the code is translated automatically.

The configuration is really simple:

So far I have used this mostly for shortening email addresses, company names, and URLs.  But when I fired up a DE tonight for some light code testing it hit me that this could be a huge time/pain saver for you heavy coders out there.

PhraseExpress is Windows only (Mac users can try TextExpander), free for non-commercial use, $49.95 otherwise. 

Note: PhraseExpress v7 was recently released, includes Windows 7 support and new features.

[edit: updated URL]

http://developer.force.com/cheatsheets

[edit: Direct to PDF shortcuts removed by request]

The Ideas platform provides a method to collect feedback from end users, consumers, and other influencers of a product or service.  The goal of ideas is to create a collaboration platform to prioritize requests and highlight delivery of past requests.

Examples of this platform in action:
http://ideas.salesforce.com
http://www.mystarbucksidea.com/

You could use this platform in any number of ways; here are a few examples:

• A suggestion box for your company
• Prioritize software feature requests from your end users
• Use customer/partner portals to collect and prioritize product feedback from outside of your company

Technical Details:

• Ideas
  • Ideas support custom fields.
  • Validation rules can take place on the idea or on idea comments.
  • Ideas does not have a traditional page layout.  The fields layout determines the order in which custom fields are presented under additional information.
    
  • Categories is a standard multi-picklist field.  New categories are added on the fields page; categories are disabled through idea settings.
• Idea Communities
  • Limit of 1 internal idea community for professional orgs.  Max of 50 for EE/UE/DE, can be linked to portals.
  • Determine which picklist values are present.
  • Determine which portals users can access this particular community (can be all portals or a single portal type).
  • Determines the Experts Group.
  • Cannot specify which fields are displayed (this is universal).  Potential work-arounds include using VF or setting field-level security to hidden on a profile-basis.
• Experts Group
  • An experts group denotes a community expert – it gives them a star.
    Expert:
    
    Non-Expert:
    
  • The experts group selection points to a public group.  Each member of that public group will be listed as a community expert.
• Additional Notes
  • Half-Life (in Days) determines how quickly old ideas drop in rankings on the Popular Ideas subtab.
    
  • Delegated Data Administration is not available for Ideas.
  • Ideas does not appear to be available for platform licenses.

Here is a great introduction video to Content.  From here, I want to focus on how to administer Content and address challenges you’ll face in your implementation.

Content is split between a number of different moving pieces:

Content Record (Contribution)

• Each record represents a single document, website, image, or file.
• Supported documents for enhanced online viewing (requires flash; allows preview document without download): Office 97-2003 (2007 not supported), JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PDF.
• Each content record (contribution) can be linked to a single workspace.

Content Type (Record Type, with a twist)

• Content types are record types (with the usual profile options)- they allow you to control the page layout and selectable picklist values for each type.
• However, a content type is selected only when content is published to a shared workspace.
• Different content types can be restricted/granted at each workspace.

Content Pack

• A content pack is a collection of other content records.  This will allow you to deliver multiple pieces of content with a single content delivery link.
• Content packs are listed inline with individual content records (and can be searched, added to other content packs, etc.).
• When you add a content pack to a new content pack, it will copy each content piece into the new pack; it will not reference the other content pack directly.

Content Delivery

• In order to deliver content, a content delivery record is created.  This record contains a unique URL to the shared content.  Downloads are tracked via this URL.
• Additionally, you can set an expiration date for the link, allow the viewer to preview only (no electronic download), disable the preview, allow only a PDF download (of a PDF deck for instance), and be notified of first download.
• You cannot delete content if it has an associated content delivery record.

Workspace

• A workspace represents an area to collaborate on content.
• Each workspace can be shared with other users.  Access to each workspace is determined on a per-user basis via the selected “Workspace Permission”.  Workspace Permissions can be created/modified (similar to a profile) and include the following checkboxes:
  

  Manage Workspace	Users can edit workspace details and workspace membership
  Add Content	Users can publish new content in the workspace and replace existing content with new versions
  Add Content on Behalf of Others	Users can choose an author when publishing content in the workspace
  Archive Content	Users can archive content in the workspace
  Delete Content	Users can delete content from the workspace
  Feature Content	Users can mark content in the workspace as Featured
  View Comment	Users can view comments on content in the workspace
  Add Comment	Users can add comments to content and rate content in the workspace
  Modify Comments	Users can change comments made by any user in the workspace
  Tag Content	Users can add tags to content in the workspace
  Deliver Content	Users can deliver content from this workspace

• Custom fields can be added to the content object (e.g. Content Status).  Page layout and picklist values are determined by Content Type (addressed above).
• The Workspace Administrator permission set only includes the ‘Manage Workspace’ permission by default; a user of this assignment cannot deliver content within the workspace until the ‘Deliver Content’ permission is ticked.

Subscriptions

• You can subscribe to content by:
  • Content record
  • Tags
  • Author
  • Workspace
• Salesforce will email you when content changes take place when any of your subscribed items.
• Two options for emails (setting in My Personal Information –> Personal Information)
  • Receive Salesforce CRM Content Email Alerts
  • Receive Salesforce CRM Content Alerts as Daily Digest

Presentation Builder

• Will allow you to create a presentation by bringing in slides from different existing content presentations.
• Presentation assembly can be disabled, thus disabling the presentation builder.
• Does not allow you to edit the content of any slides (e.g. change text or graphics).

Notes:

Once you create a content delivery there is no method to link that delivery directly into an email.  You need to copy the link and then paste it into an email.  Vote here to make this happen.
 

Content delivery records can be linked to many different objects.  In order for these to appear on the target object, the ‘Content Deliveries’ related list to the page layout for that object.  The ‘Related Content’ related list will allow you to attach content to the object.

Workflow does not appear to be supported on any Content objects.  API access is now possible; see “Uploading Content with the Data Loader”.

It is possible to publish docs from Google Apps (not covered in this outline).

Each user has a set of personal content that only they can access.  This personal content is independent of any workspace.  Content can be published from here to a Workspace and then will no longer be listed as personal content.

A ‘Content Only’ license exists, talk to your rep for details.

Rumor has it that next release, Content will be released to all users of all editions for free!  If you can verify please drop me a comment.

Magic.  Pure and simple.  That, and formulas.  Lots of formulas.  We’ll call it Formula Magic.

This works by assigning each entry within the picklist to a range of digits, using a roll-up summary formula to compile the totals, and then using remainder calculations to determine type.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Create a master/detail relationship between two objects.
2. Create a picklist field on the detail object for calculation.
3. Create a numeric field on the detail object for use in calculations (e.g. Offer_Code__c).
4. Create a workflow rule that updates the above field with a numeric code the represents type.

   Example:

Employee:     1
Key Contact: 100
Menu:           10000
Poster:          100000

Since a numeric field has a maximum of 18 digits, you have several options:
a. Count up to 99 records of 9 different types (99=max of 2 digits, 9 types x 2 digits =18), as in my example
b. Count up to 9 of 18 different types (1 digit per type)
You could also use 999×6 or 9999×4, etc. You could use a different numerical base for even more options.  The other limit you face is the maximum compile size for formulas (3900 characters in the formula field, or 5000 compiled characters).

5. Create a roll-up summary field SUM of the above numeric field on the master object (e.g. Offer_Codes__c).
6. Create a text formula on the object that spits out the appropriate text for each type.

   Example:

"| " &
IF(MOD(Offer_Codes__c,100)>0,"Employee | ","") &
IF(MOD(ROUND(Offer_Codes__c/100,0),100)>0,"Key Contact Offer | ","") &
IF(MOD(ROUND(Offer_Codes__c/10000,0),100)>0,"Menu | ","") &
IF(MOD(ROUND(Offer_Codes__c/1000000,0),100)>0,"Poster | ","") &
IF(MOD(ROUND(Offer_Codes__c/100000000,0),100)>0,"Disclaimer | ","")

You could also use the remainder to tell you how many of each type are listed.

That’s it!  Now if only we could roll up text out of the box…

The simple work-around is to simply not include a required field and then perform an upsert.

In my example, I was updating accounts via the external ID “OWNER ID”.  By leaving out the “Name” field (required to create a new account record), I will get an error message instead of creating new accounts:

You could set a different field to required (checkbox on the field itself, not the page layout) in order to get the same functionality with the name field included.  As always- if you are playing with data in a production org, test with a small batch before you load up the big guns!