I’ve had several clients “voice concerns” about Salesforce.com’s lookup functionality relative to user acceptance. Well, if you’re dealing with a relatively simple lookup table, you can override an object’s new/edit page with a Visualforce page and display the lookup field to the user as a picklist.

In the [live Visualforce] example below, the user is creating a new “Some_Object__c” record. The Some_Object__c object is very simple: it’s comprised of a standard name field and a custom lookup to another table called “Location__c”. Location__c is comprised of name, city, and state fields and there are only 8 rows in the table. Rather than having the user click the magnifying glass icon to lookup to the Location__c table, one can quite easily display a list of possible values to the user along with any other pertinent information (in this case, I’m displaying Location__c’s City__c and State__c fields as well).

public class SomeObjectExtension {
	private final ApexPages.standardController controller;

	private final Some_Object__c obj;

	public SomeObjectExtension(ApexPages.StandardController stdController) {
		this.controller = stdController;
		this.obj = (Some_Object__c)stdController.getRecord();
	}

	public SelectOption[] getLocationOptions() {
		SelectOption[] locations = new SelectOption[]{};
		locations.add(new SelectOption('','--None--'));
		for (Location__c l : [select id, name, city__c, state__c from location__c where isdeleted = false order by name]) {
			locations.add(new SelectOption(l.id, l.name + ' (' + l.city__c + ', ' + l.state__c + ')'));
		}

		return locations;
	}
}

<apex:page standardController="Some_Object__c" extensions="SomeObjectExtension" showHeader="false" >
	<apex:sectionHeader title="Some Object Edit" subtitle="New Some Object" />
	<apex:form id="someObjectForm">
		<apex:pageBlock title="Some Object Edit" mode="edit">
			<apex:pageBlockButtons >
				<apex:commandButton action="{!save}" value="Save"/>
			</apex:pageBlockButtons>
			<apex:pageBlockSection title="Some Object Information" columns="1">
				<apex:inputField value="{!Some_Object__c.Name}" required="true"/>
				<apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
					<apex:outputLabel value="{!$ObjectType.Some_Object__c.fields.Location__c.label}" for="pLabel"/>
					<apex:outputPanel styleClass="requiredInput" layout="block">
						<apex:outputPanel styleClass="requiredBlock" layout="block"/>
						<apex:actionRegion >
							<apex:selectList id="locationLookupPicklist" value="{!Some_Object__c.Location__c}" size="1" rendered="true">
								<apex:selectOptions value="{!locationOptions}"/>
							</apex:selectList>
						</apex:actionRegion>
					</apex:outputPanel>
				</apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
			</apex:pageBlockSection>
		</apex:pageBlock>
	</apex:form>
</apex:page>

ERM or Enterprise Release Management is needed now more than ever for salesforce.com implementations.  With the growth and sophistication of the force.com platform, more and more enterprise customers will look to sfdc for their business solutions.  With that, comes more complex projects, more custom force.com development and integration, and better change management and code migration processes.  Use of sfdc sandboxes for development and testing will be more crucial than ever and migrating these configurations and customizations from sandbox to sandbox and ultimately to a production org will require more precision and accuracy than ever before.

Having worked on a large enterprise sfdc customer with more than 15 sandboxes – I know all the pains of having to migrate config and code from environment to environment.  There is no 100% perfect tool or solution;  instead a mix of automation tools and business process is required,

Look for ERM and migration/deployment to be a key area of the product roadmap from both salesforce.com and AppExchange partners.  Additionally, factor in resources and time for deployment activities in any complex salesforce.com implementations.