Friends are the most common target of April Fool’s pranks; bosses are the least common target. An impressive 40% of people use Facebook as part of the prank.

Any number of pranks can be done in five minutes or less. Below we picked a few quick ones to get you started without the need to go running to the joke shop.

5 minutes:
Post “This Printer Has Been Updated” signs on all the office printers. Replicate the prank described here. Watch as people in your office try to talk to the printer.

3 minutes:
The fake status update. Since Facebook is a common way to execute a prank, why not make up a fake status update? Some options include changing your relationship status, changing your birthday to April 1, putting up a picture of a sewer rat and saying you’re pleased to announce that you got a new pet … the options are endless.

1 minute:
Hijack an iPhone’s text messaging. Phones running on iOS 5 can be modified so that certain words, like ‘hi,’ will automatically generate a different phrase, such as ‘you’re so funny!’ Go to Settings > Keyboard > Shortcut. In ‘Phrase,’ enter the funny term; in ‘Shortcut,’ enter the normal word. Here are some quick instructions from PCWorld.

10 seconds:
Remove your colleague’s desktop icons. Right-click on their desktop, go to ‘View,’ and uncheck ‘show desktop icons. (Courtesy of Mashable.)

And just in case you’re wondering if April Fool’s Day might be worth your time, consider this …

Participation is Good for Your Health

On the average day, a four-year-old laughs 300 times. A 40-year-old laughs four times. Four. If you’re trying to avoid April Fool’s day this year, just know this—it might be bad for your health.

Laughter has been found to reduce stress hormones, increase feel-good hormones like endorphins, and boost antibodies. Moreover, laughter generates an increase in blood flow to the heart. Together, these benefits result in more relaxation, a boosted immune system, and, let’s face it, a better mood.

So enjoy April Fool’s Day and share your jokes with our readers!!

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If you were a Dreamforce attendee, hopefully you had a chance to catch up with us in the Expo, the DevZone, at our party, or at one of our sessions. Petr Olmer, our Chief Evangelist, led a session on how to Embed GoodData Analytics in your Force.com App. This will be useful for completing our App as it allows our target users (Sales and Management) to explore their Chatter+Opportunity analytics from directly within the interface they’re already using everyday. I’ll also cover user provisioning and options for deploying a connector in the cloud.

If you weren’t able to attend, Nick Hamm stopped by GoodData’s DevZone kiosk with his camera and recorded this video where I provide a GoodData for Salesforce overview and discuss the Social Analytics App build I’ve been describing in this blog series. It provides a recap of what we’ve built to date:

Embed GoodData

GoodData reports and dashboards can be embedded directly into Salesforce as Apex controls. We even auto-generate the code for you! Ray describes how easy this is in the Release 57 Notes from July. So we just need to copy the code generated by GoodData…

into a new Visualforce page in Salesforce:

And then create a new Salesforce tab:

Now, we have our GoodData Analytics available from directly within the Salesforce UI, and could offer our App on the AppExchange.

User Provisioning

Managing users through the GoodData UI is simple, just navigate to Manage > Project & Users.

However for an Analytics App, we may want to provision and deactivate our users programmatically. Like everything in GoodData, there is a REST API for that! ZD explains how to use it over on our developer blog, and we can leverage the same CL Tool we used to create our Salesforce Chatter connector in part 2 of the series to manage this.

Cloud Connector

To complete our Analytics App we need to deploy the connector. There are many options available and the ideal choice will vary based upon the requirements of your app. For this app we leveraged the CL tool to directly connect to the Salesforce API’s. Running this on-premise is an option if you already have the infrastructure, however a better approach in most cases would be to deploy the connector to the Cloud using AWS, Heroku, or some other provider. You can also leverage technologies from our integration partners to build and manage a connector as an alternative to working directly with GoodData API’s. Finally for commercial ISV’s interested in our Powered By program, GoodData can deploy your connector directly to our cloud platform infrastructure.

If you need assistance of further explanation on any of these options, we’re here to help! Give us a call at +1 (415) 200-0186, leave a comment below, @gooddata or on our support forums. You can also connect with me directly to discuss @cvanderjagt or cvjpl.us

The post Building an Analytics App (Part 3 of 3) appeared first on GoodData.

We’ve all had that ‘aha’ moment after installing an app on our mobile device, tablet, or browser – that sense of, ‘Yes! It does exactly what I want, simply – and it just works.’ If it doesn’t? We delete the app and move on. That epiphany came for me the first time I tried Evernote on my Android. With one tap of my finger I had access to every task-list, whiteboard session, keynote recording, etc. synced across all of my devices and easily shareable.

At GoodData, we’re working hard to provide that same ‘aha’ experience for our customers and the customers of our partners and developer community. We’re doing this by delivering analytics apps (Twilio, Zendesk, Salesforce, Google, Facebook, etc.) with data intelligence capabilities far beyond what’s possible using spreadsheets or visualization tools. These apps address pressing business needs, are simple to use and ‘just work’.

The technology that allows GoodData to deliver is our Analytics App Platform. And the purpose of this series is to enable you, the reader, to leverage this powerful open platform and build amazing analytics apps of your own.

First an overview of what makes the GoodData Analytics App Platform unique, and the resulting apps so flexible.

The Analytics App Platform

Architecturally, GoodData is purpose built from the cloud up for analytics. Our distributed file system and workflow engine efficiently manage resources, providing massive scale and reliable performance for a fraction of the cost of traditional data intelligence stacks. Our event store acts as a cloud enterprise data warehouse, and offers order of magnitude performance improvements in terms of both volume and data storage when compared with loading data directly into a data mart.

GoodData data marts can be created programmatically in a matter of minutes without having to provision separate infrastructure (no VM’s, no databases, no software). Our fluid data modeling framework makes it simple to adapt underlying data models with new metrics, aggregations, data sources, and data connections without having to rebuild reports and dashboards. The result is non-destructive change, allowing users and developers to spin analytics projects up and down quickly, as dictated by their business, not their backlog.

The UI is built completely in JavaScript as an AJAX application, so GoodData reports and dashboards are easily embeddable, putting KPI’s where users already work. Dashboards can be embedded into SaaS applications like Salesforce or SugarCRM, Sharepoint portals, Google Sites, or any application that supports widgets or iFrames. Users can stop sending outdated reports and spreadsheets as email attachments.

Another benefit of GoodData’s multi-tenant architecture is rapid innovation. Typically we release new features every two weeks, and since GoodData is offered as a service, all of our customers, partners and developers benefit from these enhancements.

Beyond Dashboards

Remember in part 1 I demonstrated how to replicate the Chatter usage adoption dashboards in GoodData? Now let’s look at some of the concepts and features that allow us to move beyond dashboards…

to an interface more suited for ad hoc analysis and deeper understanding of the impact collaborative activity (Chatter) has on sales…

I’m not going to walk you through step by step how to build the reports and dashboards from the screen-shots above (we did that exercise in part 1), however I will provide an introduction to working directly with our REST API’s to model and load data directly from salesforce.com using the GoodData CL tool. I’m also going to give you a sneak preview (spoiler alert!) at the notification capabilities coming in our next release.

Beyond Flat Files

Last time I showed how easy it is to import CSV flat files (which can be exported from almost every data source) into GoodData through our user interface. This works great for one time analysis, but for ongoing batch loads of data this process is tedious and unnecessary. And after all, the ability to analyze trends over time is one of the core capabilities required of any data intelligence solution. Thanks to GoodData’s wonderfully extensive API’s, there are tons of options for modeling and loading data programmatically. In this post I’ll cover the most popular, and next time we’ll walk through a few other options.

Introducing GoodData CL (on github):

Don’t worry if working with shell scripts and Java API wrappers aren’t your thing. I’m not going into that level of detail on this blog (we have our developer community for that). Just know that our amazing GoodData Customer Success team and partners are always available to assist you. If shell scripts and Java API wrappers ARE your thing, definitely read this recent post to our developer blog by Jiri: Building a Project in GoodData programmatically.

So, for a Chatter+Opps Analytics App like mine shown above, use the GoodData CL tool to create a project (data mart), model the data sets, migrate that model to the cloud, and then transfer the Chatter Opportunity Feed data directly from Salesforce on a regular basis via the API’s.

GoodData Gets (More) Social

We’re now just days away from Dreamforce 11: Welcome to the Social Enterprise. If you’re attending, come find us at the Expo (Booth #1015). We’ll also be in the DevZone and doing some great sessions. For those of you who can’t make it, we don’t want you to feel left out, so here’s a preview of an exciting feature dropping in our next release – notifications!

In this example, sales collaboration activity has fallen below a predefined target threshold, triggering a GoodData notification.

The GoodData notification is posted to Chatter, encouraging sales to update their opportunities and review their feed.

Thanks to our friends @twilio we’ll also support notifications via text (sms) message in this release – with support for Jive, Yammer, Twitter, and more soon to follow.

Conclusion

We’re now well on our way to finishing our first GoodData Analytics App! We have a useful interface, data model and connector. In the final installment we’ll finish our app and explore providing more ad hoc analysis capabilities, user provisioning, embedding our app in other applications, and hosting our connector.

If you have questions or comments about anything I’ve demonstrated here today, or need help building your own Analytics App on GoodData – leave a comment below, @gooddata or on our support forums. You can also connect with me directly to discuss @cvanderjagt or cvjpl.us

The post Building an Analytics App (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on GoodData.

1. Stop by our booth #1015:  Meet the team, mingle with our customers and partners, pick up GoodData collateral and see demos of business analytics in action. Time: Expo Hours Location: #1015
2. Get a personalized tour:  Schedule a time to meet with our team and we will give you a personalized tour of the GoodData app.  Time: Expo Hours Location: Meeting Room A8
3. Meet a GoodData customer:  During this 15 minute presentation hear how The Chef’s Warehouse uses GoodData’s reports and dashboards to help make better information business decisions. Day: Wednesday, August 31st Time: 6:00pm Location: EXPO
4. Build analytics apps with GoodData: Join GoodData’s technical folks, Petr Olmer and Cory Vander Jagt in the DevZone. Learn how to enhance your Force.com, Database.com, Chatter, and Heroku Apps with Analytics!
   Location: Kiosk #17
5. Hear from our team:  To learn a bit more about the GoodData platform, we encourage you to participate in our speaking sessions.  View the list HERE
6. Out and about with Astadia #1021:  We’ll be showing off our iPad apps within the Astadia booth.  Stop by and give us a test drive. Time: Expo Hours Location: #1021
7. Have a drink with us:  GoodData will be co-sponsoring the best party at Dreamforce, Astadia Cloud Connection Party.  Come have a drink and socialize with the GoodData folks.  Pick up your free ticket at our booth #1015. Day: Thursday, Sept 1st Time: 9:00pm – 1:00am Location: CityView at Metreon (4th floor of the Metreon)

Dreamforce is the industry’s leading global cloud computing event. The event is focused on inspiring customer, partner and developer success with social, mobile and open cloud computing. Attendees will learn how to maximize their current investments and explore new offerings across Salesforce Chatter, Database.com, Force.com, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and more.

The post 7 Ways to Interact With GoodData at Dreamforce appeared first on GoodData.

Meanwhile, 3 of us are heading to Scottsdale to the SiriusDecisions 2011 Summit to hang out with a bunch of VPs of sales and marketing, talking about best practices in measuring marketing, sales and revenue performance. We attended this show last year, and were very impressed with the level of discourse on marketing funnel, sales effectiveness, and the need to measure everything.

As a SaaS BI vendor, we straddle the line between business user and technical enabler. It will be interesting to see which event feels more “like home” for us, and which proves to be a better place for us to meet customers and partners.

Any guesses which will be better?

The post Business Intelligence and the Tale of 2 Summits appeared first on GoodData.

Sales Analytics That Yield Success

Have you tried our new app, GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce? We have been shouting from the rooftops about how easy it is to use, how it fills the gaps of traditional Salesforce reporting and how in seconds, you can view your sales pipeline in a whole new light. Here are 3 facts about how our app will help boost your sales performance:

The post GoodNews: GoodData Newsletter April 2011 appeared first on GoodData.

Introduction to GoodData PaaS & Developer tools

During this presentation, we will focus on the resources available at GoodData’s Developer Network (http://www.developer.gooddata.com) and how to utilize those resources to create a custom BI project on the GoodData platform.

• Click Here to Register: Wednesday, April 20th at 10:00am (PDT)

Getting Started with GoodData – Reports, Dashboards, Collaboration

Join   members of the GoodData team for a 30-minute introduction session   intended to give new users a quick tour of GoodData to get started fast.

• Click Here to Register: Thursday, April 21st at 10:00am (PDT)

GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce

Join GoodData’s Product Manager, Hubert Palan and Product Marketing Manager,  Michelle Urban as they give you a detailed tour our new (and free!)  app, GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce. By the end of this live 1 hour webinar, you will have a full understanding of what’s happening in your sales pipeline, why it’s happening, where the revenue is and which sales reps are the driving force.

• Click Here to Register: Thursday, April 28th at 10:00am (PDT)

View our Recorded Webinar Library HERE

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