ForceCertified.com Blogroll

Update Record From Formula Field

Ankit Arora — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:00:47 PDT

Recently an interesting implementation forced me to write this post, and may be many of you are already aware of this. There is a related list where I need to show a formula field, and on click of that field I need to change the status of that record.

Say case is related to account, and they are displayed in a related list on account. Now I want to change the status of any case which is related to an account. One way is to click on the case "edit", change the status and save it. I don't want to do this as it takes time and more button clicks. Another way is to provide a formula field as a hyperlink, and when that link is clicked status should be changed.

So for this create a formula field on Case ("UpdateStatus" for the reference) which will be a hyperlink and it will execute an visualforce page like this :

HYPERLINK("/apex/UpdateStatus?RecId=" + Id ,"Click To Change Status","_top")

Now add this formula field in case related list on account page layout, like this :

Now it's time to write a Visualforce page, so here is the code :

I know this is not the best approach to go with, and am open for any other solutions or findings.

Get Ready for the Mobile Application Developer Challenge!

Dana Le — Wed, 30 May 2012 13:21:01 PDT

Perhaps you noticed in yesterday’s newsletter the small blurb slipped into the top story about the upcoming developer challenge? Well, we’re making sure you don’t miss the opportunity to participate in next month’s Mobile-themed Developer Challenge. We’ll be officially announcing the parameters around the challenge and competition next week, but I wanted to write a quick bit about it now so you can gird yourself to win the fabulous prizes we’ll be offering up (as always).

Here are a few things you can do to make sure you hit the ground running next week when we launch the challenge:

Watch the webinar on developing Mobile apps.
Download the workbook to get started writing your mobile apps.
Browse through the Saleforce Mobile SDK offering and what you can build with it.

Once you’re launched, an additional resource is the Developer Discussion boards Mobile forum.

That’s it! Keep watching this space to find out next week what the challenge entails.

Easy, Breezy Account Lead Conversion Winners!

Tim Hicks — Wed, 30 May 2012 09:04:51 PDT

Wouldn't it be fantastic if you had an "easy" button that did all of your tedious work for you while you just sit back and enjoy listening to "Call Me Maybe" on repeat all day? Well unfortunately for us all, that fantasy isn't likely to become a reality, but converting multiple, similar leads in salesforce at once... has become a reality! Before all you CloudSpokers out there stepped in,

June is Mobile Month on Developer Force

Steve Bobrowski — Tue, 29 May 2012 11:37:14 PDT

Mobile is certainly all the rage today. If you’re a developer and aren’t building mobile apps today, then you risk falling behind your peers. And if you’re already creating mobile apps, then you need to continually update your skill set to stay current with the latest technology that seems to appear daily. In either case, don’t worry — you’re in luck.

Throughout the month of June, visit Developer Force for fresh content that will help you start or advance your career as a mobile application developer. To supplement our existing library of mobile app development content, we’ll be publishing new articles and blog posts to help you learn about technology such as jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, Sencha Touch, Appcelerator Titanium, and Mobile Components for Visualforce. We’ll also be running a couple of live events online, including a webinar and a CodeTalk to round out mobile month.

Once you learn all this great new stuff, why not put your new skills to the test? Without giving anything away, we’ll be running a couple of contests around mobile application development that you won’t want to miss — great prizes and fun for all. Check back in this blog tomorrow for a more detailed announcement about one of our contests.

Native, HTML5, or Hybrid: Understanding Your Mobile Application Development Options

Ready to get started? To begin the month, we thought it would be a good idea to start off with an overview of three primary options for building mobile apps: native, HTML5, and hybrid. For more information about each approach, including the pros and cons of each technique, read Native, HTML5, or Hybrid: Understanding Your Mobile Application Development Options.

Happy Coding!

Extended: Force.com MVP Nominations

Dana Le — Tue, 29 May 2012 10:39:57 PDT

Hi all, I know you're waiting on the edge of your seats for news of the latest MVP inductees. We've decided to extend the nomination period just to make sure we get the most reach possible, so we'll keep nominations open until May 31st. If you wou

New Declarative Updates for Summer ’12

Josh Birk — Tue, 29 May 2012 08:13:41 PDT

The declarative model for creating applications is one of the key strengths of the Force.com platform, and we're always looking for ways to improve on the experience. With Summer '12 we've got some updates which should make the process of extending

Monday AM Admin: I know it all

Mike Gerholdt — Mon, 28 May 2012 08:00:21 PDT

Ever have a day where you don’t feel challenged? Where you feel like you know it all, because every question that your users have asked you can easily answer in your sleep? I have. Oh, I. Have. Well, time for a gut check. I got news for you- you don’t know it all. You haven’t seen it all, and you can’t answer every question any more. In fact, I want you to start from scratch. This thought hit me like a ton of bricks while I was reading a local news story about our beloved RAGBRAI race moving. I never thought I knew it all, but the arrogance of the organizers of this race really brought me down to earth. What does this RAGBRAI have to do with Salesforce? Every year for the last 40 years there has been a bike ride across Iowa hosted by the Des Moines Register.

Brent Mellow

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:34:36 PDT

Brent Mellow is the founder of akaCRM and a Principal of the company and has more than 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, partner management, business finance and infrastructure. Brent completed his initial salesforce.com partner training in 2003 after having been a customer of salesforce.com for the two prior years. Brent is a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator, Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant and Salesforce.com Certified Force.com Developer with nearly a decade of experience with salesforce.com and the Force.com cloud platform.

Prior to akaCRM, Brent was founder of Astadia (and its predecessor MW Advisors), where he helped lead the company's rapid expansion in the U.S., Europe and Asia to achieve standing as the largest system integrator for a number of SaaS-based vendors including salesforce.com, Eloqua and Xactly. While at Astadia, Brent served as its President-US, Chief Marketing Officer and had oversight for the product development, IT and legal functions. Brent remains an Astadia shareholder.

Brent began his career in the financial services industry where he spent over a decade with a variety of commercial and investment banks and had roles including Senior Vice President and Managing Director in Bank of America's Global Corporate and Investment Banking Group. As a banker, Brent was trained in risk management including the practice of treating each loan like it was his own money. This practice developed his keen ability to ask good questions and conduct expert due diligence. Brent participated in the consolidation of the banking industry where he served on numerous merger and acquisition due diligence and integration teams and was an advocate for various customer relationship management (CRM) system deployments. Through his banking career, Brent had the opportunity to interact with senior executives of some of the most well-known companies in America and observe hundreds of businesses of all sizes across a wide variety of industries. Brent's clients benefit from the lessons learned from these many relationships.

Following his banking career, Brent was CEO and co-founder of a web-based market research company where he deployed one of the first analytical engines for the high-end furniture industry. Brent was later hired by CompUSA to spin-off its multi-national Call Center Services outsourcing division. Following this successful engagement, Brent became VP/Chief Administrative Officer of the spin off, The Telvista Company, where he deployed salesforce.com as the company's CRM system and later became its VP of Sales & Marketing. The company grew globally to over $100 million with operations in the U.S. and Latin America.

Brent has been a featured presenter and panelist for UBS, Dreamforce, the Call Center Networking Group, and the Southwest Venture Forum. Brent currently resides in Colorado Springs, is happily married and has three wonderful children. Additional personal information can be found at www.brentmellow.com.

Follow Me:

Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
Salesforce.com Certified Developer

Education

Southern Methodist University, MBA
The University of Texas, BBA

Karen Stock

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:35:00 PDT

Karen Stock is a Principal of akaCRM, a salesforce.com Certified Administrator, a salesforce.com Certified Developer and a salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant. Karen is a results driven CRM professional with over 17 years of consulting and project management experience delivering technology applications to her clients. She has a proven track record of successful project delivery demonstrated through her leadership, knowledge and experience with business process review, requirements definition, development and training. Karen has experience across marketing, sales and service functions and has deployed salesforce.com for clients in the technology, customer service, professional services, financial services, healthcare, real estate, energy, entertainment and non-profit sectors. Karen has extensive training experience and uses her business-focus to create excitement and increase user adoption of new technology.

Prior to joining akaCRM, Karen managed salesforce.com implementations for key clients of Astadia, a leading salesforce.com system integrator (and its predecessor MW Advisors). Karen partnered with her clients and provided consulting expertise and best practices knowledge throughout the business process review and project lifecycles. Karen's deployments included design and management of dozens of custom Force.com applications and salesforce.com integration solutions. Through her many project engagements, Karen has developed an expertise in strategy and implementation surrounding merging multiple salesforce.com instances.

Karen began her career in the human resource industry at Hewitt Associates where she was responsible for managing key client relationships, strategic benefits design, system design/development, communication, training and overall delivery of benefits administration technology services.

Karen currently resides in Dallas, Texas and enjoys spending time with her husband and two children.

Follow Me:

Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
Salesforce.com Certified Consultant
Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
Salesforce.com Certified Developer

Education

Northwestern University, Bachelor of Arts & Bachelor of Music

Adam Braxton

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:41:53 PST

Adam Braxton is a Principal of akaCRM with more than 14 years of experience working with a wide variety of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Adam has worked with the Salesforce.com and Force.com cloud platform since 2004 and is a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator, Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant and Salesforce.com Certified Service Cloud Consultant. Adam joined akaCRM from Deloitte Consulting, bringing large account management and multi-division business integration management skills to akaCRM clients.

Previously, Adam was employed by Thomson Reuters as a Marketing Manager and Marketing Analytics Manager and used Salesforce.com to monitor and measure campaign effectiveness. While at Thomson Reuters, Adam was also responsible for the successful integration of newly acquired businesses into Thomson’s Salesforce.com deployment as a result of his ability to understand the need to design and customize the solution to meet the unique needs of each business unit.

Education:

University of Georgia, MBA, concentration in Marketing and Entrepreneurship
University of Georgia, BA Philosophy

Credentials

Salesforce.com Certified Administrator
Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant
Salesforce.com Certified Service Cloud Consultant

Leadership

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:08:19 PDT

The akaCRM leadership team is composed of industry veterans with decades of experience in the CRM and salesforce.com space. This team of Principals is backed by a group of equally talented individuals with a wide variety of constituency relationship management skills.

Become a Partner

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:52:51 PDT

akaCRM has learned a great deal about working with partners, including what makes for a successful partnership. We enjoy working with first-class organizations. In fact, about everything we do involves one or more of our partners. The following are the typical questions we will ask when evaluating a new partnership.

Questions

Type of desired partnership (reselling, referral or implementation partner, other)?
Number of existing partners?
Geography and industries served?
Does your company provide professional services? If so, how are they priced?
How long have you been in business?
What do you bring to the partnership?
What are you looking for from akaCRM?

Expectations

If your products/services are applicable to our business, we believe we should use them. This allows us to evaluate your offerings and become an evangelist for them if we find they will help improve our clients' results. We find it difficult to recommend a solution if we are not using it, so we ask our partners to provide us with internal-use licenses for this purposes as well as demonstration tools.
Reciprocity. We believe in bi-directional partnerships and offer a two-way sharing model.
Joint Selling/Marketing. If we establish a partnership, we expect to participate together in selling and marketing activities.
Standing Behind Our Solution. When we work with a shared client, akaCRM will stand behind its services and we expect our partners will do the same. This means doing right by the customer.

If you are interested in establishing a partnership with akaCRM, contact us and tell us a little about your company and your desired partnership. A representative of akaCRM will contact you promptly.

FPX

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:47:17 PDT

FPX, LLC provides Configure-Price-Quote® applications for companies with complex product configuration and pricing issues. Thousands of Perfect Quotes are produced every month in multiple languages and currencies with FPX’s Product Configuration Solution which is one of a few pricing applications to meet Gartners requirements of a true SaaS application. Our most recent innovation—CPaaS® (Configuration Pricing as a Service) which provides a development environment that leverages the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com. FPX provides a unique buy or build option to deliver pricing applications across the enterprise to direct sales, partners and ecommerce users. Both options deliver rapid ROI with improved order accuracy, inventory forecasting and a positive impact to the bottom line.

To learn more, visit http://www.fpx.com.{jcomments off}

Instagram and Facebook: Lessons in the Cloud

Mike Leach — Sun, 27 May 2012 10:26:04 PDT

The announcement that Facebook intended to acquire Instagram made headlines. While the focus of these headlines primarily centered around the $1B valuation and 50 Million user audience, the true story went largely untold.

Instagram's story marks an inflection point in computing history whereby a start-up embracing cloud infrastructure is no longer the exception, but now considered the rule for building a successful company.

Consider the fundamentals of their meteoric rise over 2 years:

2 people start with an idea
Create an iPhone application with hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Distribute the app on Apple's app store
Grow an audience
Evolve and enhance the product
Leverage elastic scalability on AWS

The costs for a v1 product were extraordinarily low and gave them an opportunity to pivot at any point without being grounded by capitalized infrastructure investments (i.e. building their own colo servers and doing their own hosting).

At the time of Instagram's acquisition they had added only 11 more employees, mostly hired in the few months leading up to their acquisition.

Some tips and lessons learned for other start-ups considering embracing the cloud as their development and hosting platform:

Choose a platform and master it: Instagram selected Amazon Web Services, but there are many options available. Don't hedge your bets by designing for platform portability. Dig deep into the capabilities of your chosen platform and exploit them.

Think Ephemeral: Your cloud web servers and storage can disappear at any point. Anticipate and design for this fact. If you have a client server background, then take a step back and grasp the concepts of ephemeral storage and computing before applying old world concepts to the cloud.

Share Knowledge: This is still a new frontier and we're all constantly learning new tips and tricks about how to best utilize cloud computing. Many people at Facebook (including myself) were fans of the Instagram Engineering blog long before the acquisition. Share what you've learned and others will reciprocate.

Build for the long term: The Instagram team did not build a company to be sold. They built a company that could have continued to grow indefinitely, and perhaps even overtaken competing services. There are so many legacy business processes and consumer applications whose growth is restricted by their architecture. Embrace the cloud with the intent to build something enduring and everlasting.

AppExtremes

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:19:24 PDT

{jcomments off}

AppExtremes, Inc. is the leading developer of software-as-a-service solutions that complement salesforce.com through the generation of complex documents, spreadsheets and associated process automation. Founded in 20 06 and headqu artered in Broomfield, Colorado, AppExtremes support hundreds of customers ranging from small businesses to the Fortune 500, including Andersen Windows, CNN, Kaiser Permanente, Procter & Gamble and Salesforce.com. AppExtremes solutions are widely deployed by many of the leading salesforce.com consulting partners including akaCRM. Since the release of its first solution in 2007, AppExtremes has been an avid supporter of nonprofit organizations through deep discounts and technical support for organizations including American Red Cross, Council on Foreign Relations, Heart and Stroke Foundation Of Ontario, Make-A-Wish, Stop Hunger Now and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The company also has a strong commitment to support of the environment through the purchase of alternative-energy credits to offset its energy use.

Conga Merge - Bring out the best in salesforce.com with Conga Merge by AppExteremes, the most popular document generation and reporting solution on the AppExchange. Create quotes, proposals, account plans and more from custom objects, related lists and images! Conga Merge easily retrieves and merges fields from one or many related objects or lists into Word, Excel or PDF form templates – without programming. From a simple quote or proposal to complex account plans and activity reports, one click generates and delivers output to the desktop, email, attachment, or electronic signature systems. Template options include dynamic repeating tables, conditional hide/display tools and on-the-fly currency formatting. New template storage secures sensitive templates, allows pre-defined template selections and Template Groups for specific subsets. Beyond merging, a rich array of process-management features include saving copies of merge output, activity-logging and updating fields in source records.

For more information, visit www.appextremes.com or contact akaCRM to being improving your results.

CRMFusion

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:15:39 PDT

CRMfusion Inc. develops software that assists thousands of worldwide organizations in reaching their data quality goals. Company data quality software integrates with the world leading hosted and on premise database solutions. Based from our Toronto, Canada headquarters, we work with the major database providers in the hosted world (Salesforce.com, Oracle, RightNow) as well as the traditional on premise database markets.

For more information visit www.crmfusion.com.{jcomments off}

EchoSign

brent@mellowventures.com (Brent Mellow) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:15:23 PDT

EchoSign is the leader in electronic signature solutions specifically designed for sales organizations. EchoSign’s unique blend of extremely easy-to-use electronic signatures, virtual fax and document management provide sales professionals an a utomated way to track, sign and store any sales contract. EchoSign delivers a secure web-based tool for document management.

To learn more, visit www.echosign.com.{jcomments off}

Tweets of the Week (5/25/12)

@ktopenn — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:11:16 PDT

We had a good time at Cloudstock London this week and enjoyed all the tweets from the community. Here our some of our favorite tweets of the past few weeks from the world of Force.com. Follow @forcedotcom to keep up with these characters! More de

Glue 2012 is a wrap!

Jeff Douglas — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:59:49 PDT

Gluecon finished up yesterday and Rob, Kyle and myself were in attendance. If you are a developer who is passionate about mobile, APIs, Big Data or the cloud in general then Gluecon is definitely the conference for you to attend. Not only were there great start-ups showing off their wares and fantastically entertaining and thought-provoking talks, but the people you meet are incredible! Where

3 Easy Ways to Make Your Salesforce Org More User Friendly

noreply@blogger.com (Brent Downey) — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:26:00 PDT