Salesforce Blog
Spontaneous Ecosystems
Jul 12th
Bill Loumpouridis
“Web 2.0 is what happens when the barrier to entry is essentially zero.”
At the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in 2007, a nascent technology wave was building, and this quote was part of my enduring memory of a time when both Web 2.0 and what we know of today as Cloud Computing were beginning to take shape.
The importance of the quote relates to “free” resources provided by Web 2.0 Cloud providers – free online development platforms, free online storage, and even free hosting. Or, resources were so cheap that they were essentially free. This reduces the barrier to entry to essentially zero for tech entrepreneurs, and is how you end up with tens of thousands of free apps for Android, Apple, and (even) Microsoft, virtually overnight. This creates spontaneous ecosystems of programmers, searching for the next big pool of consumers.
Cloud Computing is enabling new ecosystems and new innovations at an extraordinary pace. This is because infrastructures that used to take months to plan and years to execute are ready to enable the next ecosystem right now. Almost no viable business concept can’t be activated via a successful viral campaign. Look at the way Groupon hijacked the local retail ecosystem — and how hundreds of copycats have sprung up virtually overnight.
Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, describing Nokia’s greatest challenge going forward, stated that Nokia “must build, catalyze or join a competitive ecosystem.” My guess is that Bill Clinton would have stated it more succinctly: “It’s the ecosystem, stupid.”
We’re excited to be a part of this rapid transformation of the business landscape, and to help enable it through Cloud Computing. Do you have an ecosystem story you’d like to share? Send it to me at bill.loumpouridis@edlconsulting.com.
Dependent picklists in Salesforce
Mar 23rd
Virtually every site I’ve worked with in recent years has had need for dependent drop downs of some nature.
Usually implementing a dependent drop down consists one of two options: Outputting every option into a JavaScript method, or invoking an Ajax call to get the next set of options. The disadvantage to both of these options is usually a bulky mechanism the developer must write in order to provide a simple UI component.
Salesforce provides a dependent picklist feature, which in keeping with their no-software mantra, eliminates any need for a custom ajax or javascript solution. Define a dependent picklist and reference it in your page layout or Visualforce page. Salesforce takes care of everything else under the covers.
Leads, Campaigns, and Workflow
Mar 4th
Using Salesforce Apex, establishing a relationship between leads and campaigns should be as simple as setting the campaign id on a standard field on the lead. After all, if you take a look at a lead’s detail page, the lead has a lookup to campaigns. Unfortunately, establishing that relationship is a bit convoluted.
The relationship is actually dictated by a campaign member object. The campaign member object is a junction with a many-to-many relationship between leads and campaigns (or contacts and campaigns). Once the lead is created, to add it to a campaign, a campaign member object must be created linking the lead to its campaign. This campaign member then complicates any workflow centered around leads and campaigns.
Gehry vs. Wright Part Two – What Does Architecture Represent?
Feb 23rd
Bill Loumpouridis
Semantics play a powerful and important role in our projects. The terms “portal,” “customer relationship management (CRM)” and even “customer” (versus end-user or channel partner) can have widely divergent meanings. Thus, every new project requires an early level-set on definitions for these and other relativistic terms.
Easy Tool for Generic HTTP Interface Testing
Jan 26th
Working on my first CloudCraze project, I’ve come across the unfortunate fact that SF does not allow callouts in the unit tests, so interface testing is kind of cludgy (see ShippingAndHandlingFedExServiceTest.cls for example of what I mean). I know one solution would be to use the Run Anonymous functionality to test a small chunk of code, but I really wanted a very easy non-SF specific way just to quickly test requests and responses rapidly.
There may exist tools for this as there are for testing SOAP calls, but I couldn’t find any generic ones readily. That in mind, I whipped up a simple HTML applet to do this. It’s nothing fancy; it takes as input an endpoint URL and the request query string, makes an AJAX POST, and returns whatever response was given from the service. More >
Cloud platforms : Force.com v/s Google app engine v/s Amazon
Jan 5th
Whenever I read about the future and current trends in technology, the word “cloud” is always there. Being a cloud computing and SaaS consultant I tried to compare the top three well known platforms on the basis of the top two critical issues which may be considered by an IT manager working to carry out a pilot application project in the “Cloud”. More >
Our heads are in the cloud: Dreamforce 2010
Dec 21st
Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference was held in San Francisco the week of December 6-9, 2010. EDL, a gold sponsor for the second year. The booth included contortionists dressed in cloud morph suits which drew continuous large crowds. At the booth, EDL representatives were discucssing and demonstrating the new CloudCraze 2.0 and Service Cloud 2 integration for prospective customers. We attracted many conference attendees to our booth and had the opportunity to “WOW”them with our eCommerce and customer service offerings.
The energy of the event was immense and intense and the convention center was packed with both current salesforce.com customers and prospects who were eager to learn more about taking full advantage of their CRM system and learning about the power of saleforce.com’s Force.com development platform. The attendees at this conference were truly eager to learn all that there was to know about salesforce.com and cloud computing. While talking to and observing many of the attendees, I found that there were basically two types of attendees at this event:
Group A: This group represents the customers who view saleforce.com solely as a CRM system, with their company utilizing it strictly to communicate and manage their customer information. After speaking with numerous customers in this group, I found that many of them still shared a common need – to have visibility between their leads and their sales and support centers.
Group B: These are the customers who truly want understand all that salesforce.com offers and are excitedly looking for what they can “DO next” in terms of applications and sales force optimization.
When people from Group B approached the booth and I would demonstrate CloudCraze 2.0 or Service Cloud 2 integration for them, they were in awe. They truly understood the benefit of having one “repository” for all pertinent aspects for their company from lead generation to order fulfillment and then onto the service center, with the Service Cloud 2 offering. The enterprise-class customers were shocked with the short time required to build, having experienced how long it took to build solutions this robust with an on-premise solution.
As I dive deeper into solution architecture, it is easy to understand why one would want a single portal to control all of a company’s information since the integration of information is often difficult and trying. It is also problematic to maintain so many moving parts, which must all be working together toward a common end goal. It becomes apparent that it is also quite costly and inefficient to train employees on so many different platforms.
Another common theme that I noticed as I began to truly ponder CloudCraze, EDL Consulting’s eCommerce solution built natively on Force.com, was that many companies which are product companies by nature, were beginning to develop “light” versions of their own product on Force.com as well. However, they were not prepared to take the plunge and holistically develop their product on the platform in its entirety, but instead were developing smaller versions for the AppExchange. What this suggests is customer interest in native Force.com applications. Each company that I spoke with who had developed this lighter version of their product, discussed the road map for their AppExchange product and in essence, how it would/could become as robust as an enterprise-class product.
It seems most logical to me that a consulting company with ten years of deep eCommerce experience be the ones to develop a product to derive the benefits in both development and implementation. The need for natively built applications is continuing to grow and as other eCommerce solutions begin to develop their “shopping carts” into more robust solutions, CloudCraze will continue to develop strategically, remaining ahead of the curve.
Dreamforce session: Using Code Share Projects in Force.com
Nov 26th
Richard Vanhook
If you’re planning on attending Dreamforce, I’ll be presenting features from apex-lang during the session “Using Code Share Projects in Force.com” and would love for you to be there. The session is during the last time slot (save the best for last right?) on Thursday, Dec 6 from 11am-12pm in the Force.com Theater.
Thankful for EDL Consulting
And while I’m on the subject of apex-lang, I’d like to thank Bill Loumpouridis and Craig Traxler at EDL for giving me the freedom and support to create apex-lang. I’ve used many open source projects and apex-lang is my way of giving back to the community. I recognize that other companies might not grant me that freedom and support and for that, I’m certainly thankful EDL Consulting. If you’re looking for a great place to work, look no further.
Template for Global Configuration Variables in Apex
Nov 26th
Richard Vanhook
Summary: This article discusses a pattern or template for enabling and customizing features in an application developed upon the Force.com platform.
Force.com and “configurability”: new expecations for developers
A great thing about developing on the Force.com platform is how configurable the product is out of the box. Need a new field on a screen? Easy, find the right page layout and modify it. Want a field to be required? Go find the field and make it required. It’s crazy easy. So easy in fact, that more and more folks can contribute to the solution of a system. Even folks without an IT background that 5-10 years ago would never make these types of configuration changes are doing it. Can you imagine Joe the BA adding an Oracle constraint to make a field required? Of course not.
The downside to this amazing “configurability” of the Force.com platform however, is it creates a disconnect between developers who are not used to including this level of configurability, and salesforce users who have grown to love this type of configuration and now expect it in anything associated with salesforce. Below I discuss a “global configuration variable” pattern that makes adding configurability to your solution simple, clean and reliable.
What’s the “Big Idea”?
Nov 2nd
Last week, as many people in our ecosystem are aware, was the BigIdeas Conference at the Swissotel in downtown Chicago. BigIdeas has become one of the nation’s largest SaaS innovation conferences where attendees are invited to attend workshops and to hear outstanding and renowned speakers on the SaaS solutions and best practices.
Godard Abel, one of the co-founders of Big Machines, delivered the opening keynote speech and spoke of the industry’s past and where it is going from here. He made a similar analogy to that of Marc Benioff of salesforce.com at a conference that I recently attended in San Jose. In summary, the two agreed that our industry has long ago moved from the days of time-consuming, expensive solutions and on to the days of rapidly deployed, cost-effective, and easily up-gradable and highly adaptable SaaS solutions.
Godard also spoke of BigMachines’ efforts to be visionary and move with the changing times and in so doing, he introduced their latest product, Big Machines ‘11. This new product has the capacity to enable B2B sales to cross multiple channels for virtually any vertical market and in so doing, will permit companies to certainly “Sell more. Sell faster.”
At the conference, I attended several of the Big Machines ‘11 training courses which permitted an in-depth look into the latest features, UI changes, and a look at the newest configurator. This permitted some hands-on training for me on my own laptop along with some excellent customer interaction where customers were assessing when to upgrade and prospective customers were able to more thoroughly research the product. In so doing, this permitted me to better define my role as a project manager within Big Machines along with EDL’s strategic partnership with Big Machines. There were numerous and valuable networking opportunities at this event for everyone!
Craig Traxler, along with Leslie Kleitman from BigMachines and Mike Milburn from salesforce.com, led a session on using the Service Cloud 2 which is the latest offering on the Salesforce.com platform enabling world class service and support. The discussion in this session affirmed how important the on-demand customer support has become and will continue to be in satisfying and retaining customers and all the while, continuing to develop a very professional and successful image. Craig Traxler was able to demonstrate many of the unique capabilities of Service Cloud 2 and how it can be closely integrated with a product configurator, CRM, and even social networks. BigMachines utilizes salesforce.com’s support platform and as evidenced in this successful union, was awarded a Gartner Award in 2008 for its customer service.
The conference was very worthwhile in offering learning experiences concerning the latest trends in SaaS innovations with a forward and future look as to where and how our industry is moving. As the BigMachines/salesforce.com relationship continues to grow and strengthen, EDL will also growth with it and will continue to be the “go-to” consultants and all the while, continue to grow our expertise in eCommerce, systems integration and SaaS implementation.