The following announcement just went out to Dialogue Developers today. Dialogue Script is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that runs on the IronPython Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

As an i-Dialogue Developer working with Dialogue Script, I wanted to share a couple changes in the next release:

• Dialogue Script will be upgraded to run on the newer IronPython v2.6 engine
• JScript will no longer be supported

The upgrade from IronPython from v2.0 to v2.6 will result in a tremendous performance improvement and provide access to a broader set of features and 3rd party libraries.

JScript will no longer be supported in the next release. The Scripting language option (see attached screenshot) will be removed from Advanced settings. All editors will default to using the IronPython engine.

Q: How does this change impact me?

A: If you're not using JScript, then this update should have no impact. You still may want to test any Dialogue Script after the update to ensure there are no adverse effects.

Q: How can I determine if JScript is being used on my site/portal?

A: The attached Dialogue Script will be added to your portal and run prior to the next update. If JScript is found, the portal will not be updated and you'll be notified with recommendations on how to migrate the JScript to Python. If a Cubic Compass Professional Services Developer originally developed the JScript for you, then the migration will happen automatically under your existing support agreement.

Q: What can I expect during the upgrade?

A: The upgrade will only take 5 minutes. Customers with a sandbox portal will have their sandbox updated first for staged deployment and testing. All other portals will have their live production site updated. If test accounts are available, we will login to the portal after the upgrade and conduct high-level testing on dynamic pages.

Q: Will this update impact Salesforce integration?

A: No. Dialogue Script (IronPython) is not used in the core Salesforce integration module.

Q: When will this update happen?

A: We will internally beta test this new IronPython engine for 30 days before making this change publicly available in early December 2009. Sandbox portals will be updated as soon as possible.

Thanks, and happy DScript coding!

The new "Cycle" framework for i-Dialogue is quite addictive. Being 100% AJAX-based, all aspects of Cycle applications are extremely responsive and only update the portions of the screen being updated (as opposed to traditional multi-page websites. That seems so 1999 now )

Also new to Cycle is inline configuration management. It's no longer required to go to separate setting pages to configure an application. Users with administrative permissions will see various links "inline" with application they are using.

Cycle applications have the following administrative and configuration options: Statistics, Permissions, Configuration, Run Tests. Run Tests is currently only available to Admins while in beta, but may remain visible in the future.

• Statistics provides an integrated reporting dashboard into each application. I'm really excited about this feature since it leverages a data warehouse I developed years ago, which has largely gone unused in our Salesforce integrated portals. The data warehouse captures nightly measures for time-series analysis of common Service and Support metrics using the Google charts API.
• Permissions is a simple role-based permissions matrix that requires no coding to grant/deny access to various features based on role.
• Configuration provides global settings applicable to all users, such as fields to display.
• Run Tests just provides simple red/green lights on the health of the application. This is particularly useful during installation since the tests will primarily validate that all dependencies exist, such as AppExchange packages or custom field configurations.

The video below is an inside peak at the event management module.

The following Dialogue Script is handy for taking a snapshot of any Salesforce record and generating a restore script.

An example use case might be testing a portal application experience for a first time Contact visitor. Upon logging in several Contact fields may get updated, requiring a manual restore of certain fields to re-test.

The codegen script below allows for one-click restore of the test Contact record to quickly resume testing.

<h1>Generate Salesforce Record Baseline Script</h1>
Object Type: <dlog:TextBox id="ObjectType" /> 
RecordId: <dlog:TextBox id="RecordID" /> 
<dlog:Button id="SubmitButton" Text="Generate Baseline Script" /><br/>
<dlog:Label id="Output" />
<%
from CubicCompass.Portal.Webparts.Salesforce.sForce import *

def CodeGen():
	objectDescription = SalesforceSettings.Instance.SForceService.describeSObject(ObjectType.Text)
	query = "select "
	for field in objectDescription.fields:
		query += field.name + ", "
	
	query = query.TrimEnd(", ".ToCharArray())
	query += " from " + ObjectType.Text
	
	if RecordID.Text.Length > 0:
		query += " where Id='" + RecordID.Text + "'"
	
	result = SalesforceSettings.Instance.SForceService.query(query)
	if result.size == 0:
		Output.Text = "record not found"
		return
	
	sObject = SalesforceObject(result.records[0])
	
	indent = "    "
	code = "def Reset" + ObjectType.Text + "Defaults():<br/>"
	code += indent + "sforce = SalesforceWebService()<br/>"
	code += indent + "sforce.SalesforceRecordID = \"" + RecordID.Text + "\"<br/>"
	for field in objectDescription.fields:
		if field.updateable == False:
			continue
		code += indent + "sforce.AddField(\"" + field.name + "\", \"" + sObject.GetProperty(field.name) + "\")<br/>"
	
	code += indent + "sforce.UpdateObject(\"" + ObjectType.Text + "\")<br/>"
	Output.Text = code
	
if Page.IsPostBack:
	if ObjectType.Text.Length == 0 or RecordID.Text.Length == 0:
		Output.Text = "missing values"
	else:
		CodeGen()

else:
	ObjectType.Text = "Account"
	RecordID.Text = "testRecordId"
%>

"Cloud computing". You probably couldn't invent a more confusing term. Let's break its meaning down from 3 perspectives.

1) Consumer / Business User:
The value of "the cloud" to consumers and business users is their ability to roam. Today you may be using Outlook on your PC. When you go on vacation you take your laptop with you because your software is installed on that computer. By moving your email to "the cloud", suddenly you're able to access your email from anywhere from any device. Your phone, an Internet cafe... anywhere connected to the Internet.

Do you have a huge collection of MP3s on your personal computer? Then you're probably aware of the overhead to maintain such a collection and the limitations that personal storage imposes (not to mention copyright concerns... shame on you ). Moving to a cloud-based music streaming service lets someone else manage your libraries and enables you to "roam" without constraint.

Pretty much any business software need can be addressed by "the cloud". Just take a look around your office and gradually starting replacing the ball and chain of on-premise apps with Internet based solutions. CRM, email, financials, backups, customer service and support, collaboration software.

Your "Kool-Aid" alert should probably be going off by now. No, not "everything" can be moved into the cloud. But portions of software can be moved to the cloud to give you a roaming experience. Photoshop designers will not find an equivalent Internet based application, but you can host your PSD and graphic assets files on a "cloud storage" service to open up collaboration, provide peace of mind by having off-site backups, and facilitating access to those files from your work/home/netbook computers.

Does "the cloud" seem less confusing now? Sure it does. It's a no brainer. It just makes sense that this trend will continue. Next...

2) Financial Users:
If you bought an ERP/CRM solution in the 90's, it was likely capitalized as an asset to the company and depreciated over time. But "cloud" software is just another operating expense, like electricity or water. You control the throttle of how much of the technology to use and pay a monthly or annual subscription.

Is "the cloud" even less confusing now? Sure. Who wants to own and maintain business software as an asset? Nobody. Next...

3) Technologists:
OK, so here's where the war and source of confusion begins. Hold on to your seat. Older software companies are now recasting themselves in "the cloud". Microsoft is thinking beyond the clouds towards "Azure" blue skies. Software companies that were previously "Software-as-a-Service" are now "Leading Cloud Providers". Amazon (yeah, the folks that sell books online) have an "Elastic Cloud Computing" service. IBM, who is *way* late to the game is suddenly talking about "private clouds" and moving your business into "the cloud". There are multi-tenant, isolated tenancy, and virtual machine architectures.

More money is now being spent on marketing "the cloud" than actual R&D for building "the cloud". The positioning for "what is the cloud?" is reaching a climax as vendors seek to be associated with this new buzzword.

The bottom line? As long as whatever is being called a "cloud" enables consumers and business users to roam and the service is just an expense, then you shouldn't care about "how" a particular cloud is implemented.

We're promoting a contest on 99Designs.com to redesign the logo for our i-Dialogue service and support portal.

Click this link for details. Please forward this to your Graphic Designer friends. Cash prize!

This post isn't actually about the Star Wars movie. But the title somehow seemed fitting.

Efficient Web content managers utilize page templates to rapidly provision new pages. The page cloning feature in i-Dialogue supports the management of page templates and cloning of existing pages in the "New Page" wizard.

Wiki article is here. It's worth noting that *any* page can be cloned. The template creation step is not required.

Video below...

Todd, from Sales and Marketing, took the following pics during last Wednesday's trek down to Cubespace (in Portland, Oregon) where I presented 'The Art of Ware-as-a-Service' to the XP user group.

We unfortunately learned that Cubespace is in dire straits, but an initiative is underway here to help them keep going.

The presentation could not have been more timely given the circumstances. Many gifted Portland entrepreneurs are laying low under the premise that venture capital will somehow rebound; but reality could not be any further from this illusion.

SaaS business models allow software developers to launch companies now with almost no capital. Sure, the economy will rebound, but it's not likely to be in tech. Software is pervasive and is used in all aspects of the economy today and there are literally thousands of opportunities available in the long tail.

If you have a passion for developing software, then platforms like EC2 and Force.com are available to build companies that can quickly scale to $1M-$5M per year. This is markedly less than the $100M VC's are looking for, but those opportunities are few and far between. Better to spend your time pitching to potential customers than VCs.

Maybe the term "start-up" carries too many overly ambitious connotations to be used anymore. Not sure what to call it, but the time is definitely right for lot's of small software companies to emerge in the cloud, and Portland has the talent to be at the forefront of this effort.

Reminder: I'll be presenting at this month's XPDX Users Group meeting. Looks like I may be competing with the American Idol final, so be sure to program your Tivo or just enjoy the presentation slides below

What: The Art of Ware-as-a-Service
Who: Mike Leach Founder/CEO Cubic Compass
Where: Cube Space
622 SE Grand Ave
Portland, OR 97214

http://cubespacepdx.com/directions
When: Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 6:30PM Gathering. Talk starts at 7PM

Description:
The first wave of Agile software development challenged "waterfall" project management methodologies and traditional Quality Assurance. The next wave of Agile challenges on-premise software through what is known as Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS)

Using Sun Tzu's timeless classic "The Art of War" as a framework, Founder/CEO of Cubic Compass, Mike Leach, presents principles and practices for creating and leading an Agile SaaS organization that challenges the status quo of software development and delivery.

Pardon the deconstruction here, but I've had several people ask me "What is Twitter?" and "Why should I care?" (thanks Oprah).

Without getting into the myriad details involved with how an organization can engage in personalized, one-to-one, real-time dialogues in the public domain, I simply tell people to think of Twitter as a stream of news headlines, except everyone in the world is qualified to submit any headline they wish.

Marketers should continue to develop and publish Marketing materials, but should consider including the following steps in their publication process:

• Create an account for your brand on Twitter. Keep the name short (reasoning below)
• When publishing, add an additional step for writing a 100 character headline
• Use a URL shortener, such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly, to create a short link to your marketing material
• Post your headline and URL link to Twitter
  

If further discussion ensues on Twitter, great. If not, well it's another opportunity for people to find your message if they happen to search for keywords used in your headline.

Twitter has a 140 character limit per message. If you want your message to "go viral" or enable others to share your message, then your headlines will need to be less than 140 characters to accommodate some additional information.

There's no hard rule, but people commonly "re-tweet" messages on Twitter by simply adding RT and your account name before the original message.

Here's an example character count breakdown of a re-tweeted message (including spaces):

RT @dlog [headline here] http://tinyurl.com/ajskeu

3  +     6     +          107            +              24            =          140 characters

You can see that the URL and retweet information consume 33 characters on their own, leaving only 107 characters to write a strong and compelling headline. The longer your account name, the less room for headline characters.

There is much more to Twitter than simply writing headlines, but this is a good fundamental skill to practice and master for starters.

Happy Tweeting!

Dialogue Script now supports CAPTCHA. One line of code on any web form will now prevent bots from submitting bogus forms.

Great for Salesforce web to lead forms, event registration, or any other publicly accessible web form.

Wiki article is here. Example video below.

Web development is at an interesting inflection point. Hosting applications in "the cloud" is gaining momentum, but the tools used to develop and customize these applications are still dependent on traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDE), like Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse, Adobe CS4, and Dreamweaver.

So what is cloud development? First, it's important to distinguish between developing "for" the cloud and developing "in" the cloud. When developing "for" the cloud, you are creating easily accessible applications with the intent of letting end users customize the "last mile". When developing "in" the cloud, you have the agility and mobility to modify an application from anywhere in the world, at anytime, using (almost) any device.

There is a "roaming" quality to cloud development. Cloud development tools become just another application, like Google mail/calendar, that are accessible from anywhere.

There is also a disruptive quality to cloud development. Everyone is now a "programmer" in the 21st century. Whether it's programming a DVR, iPhone, or building a MySpace page; everyone has a new found creative capacity and means to develop in the cloud. This is the natural progression of technology (it's important to note that Developers in the 90's opposed "Visual" development tools because they put distance between the programmer and the actual low-level code.)

Cloud programming languages must carry forward traditional traits; such as function, target, construction, and expressive power; but also be accessible by the masses.

Some common characteristics of cloud development include:

• Emphasis on declarative configuration over customization
• Inline browser editing
• Dynamically typed
• Interpretive
• Custom event declarations
• Stream management
• Mobile accessibility
  

April 1, 2009

Cubic Compass today announced today the release of a new ground breaking technology for creating and managing interactive websites. Dubbed "Neural-Interactive Content Creation", or NIC², this patent-pending technology allows content creators to interact with an i-Dialogue Content Management System (CMS) via a neurological interface that instantly converts thought patterns into web content, dialogue script, and workflow rules.

"The pace of change in today's environment is just too fast for simple tactile interaction with a web CMS", said Cubic Compass Founder Mike Leach. "Today's websites and portals must respond at the speed of thought".

Beta test user Samuel Anders (pictured below) successfully utilized NIC² technology to provision, develop, and launch a fully functional website and customer portal in 17 seconds. "I consider myself a 'power user' of technology, so I was eager to plug-in to NIC² and translate my ideas into a working solution. The results were simply amazing."

The following tasks are just a small example of what can be accomplished in milliseconds using NIC²:

• Provision new landing pages
• Change passwords
• Grant permissions to portal users
• Publish a press release
• Add/modify workflow rules
• Update style sheet
  

NIC² is licensed per user and requires a lengthy pre-qualification questionnaire and note from a Doctor before use.

(Actual results may not be identical to those experienced by Mr Anders. NIC² is not FDA approved and is currently not legal in many countries. Please contact sales for more information)

Publishing web forms to your portal or website using Salesforce Page Layouts is definitely in my Top 10 i-Dialogue features list.

And now with the new Page Layout designer made available in Salesforce Winter '09, I find myself regularly encouraging customers to design and manage their i-Dialogue web forms in Salesforce.

Here's a short video (duration 3:50 ) that provides an update on some new features in the Dialogue Script PageLayout control that make Salesforce and i-Dialogue a fantastic combination for managing web applications.

Interested in an online eCommerce solution integrated with Salesforce CRM? If "yes", then there's a lot we'd like to learn about your organization and requirements.

This solution map is a first step towards converting a multi-week information gathering process into a multi-day process with the aid of an online questionnaire and solution configuration utility.

We have a couple new openings (these links will expire after May 2009):

Support and Operations Developer

Web Project Manager

Drop me a line with prospective candidates, or send resumes to jobs@cubiccompass.com

I'll buy you lunch at PCG if we hire your referral

It's ironic how customer portals are deployed on the premise of providing "self-service" and "call deflection", but when poorly implemented, portals actually result in a net increase in administrative responsibility.

Portal administration time wasters:

• Granting access to portal
• Resetting passwords
  

Here are some general rules that ensure customers really are getting self-service to the information they need and reducing the time you spend managing the online relationship.

Rule of Least Privilege
All Leads and Contacts should automatically be members of the portal without any manual intervention. They are granted minimal privileges on the website by default. Granting access to more features requires changing a "role" or "rule" on the profile or account record.



Consistent Online Account
A customers online identity should remain consistent throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Once a lead self-identifies on a website and creates an account, that account/password must never change as a result of some front or back-office change, such a CRM Lead-to-Contact conversion or ERP account creation.

Single Sign On
Similar to being consistent with a single account, single-sign-on (or "SSO") ensures customers have access to "all" online applications and features using a single account.

Password Recovery Options
Most portal related support calls are related to password recovery, or inability to access the portal.

Anytime a password is being requested to access a portal, customers must have immediate access to their password recovery options. The password recovery process should *immediately* send an email to the requested account with instructions on how to reset or recover their password.

A link to online help on the signon page is also a great preventative measure.


As a fallback, a password reset button should be made available in the CRM system. The "reset and email" workflow should be contained in a single dialog box for the portal admin or CSR.

Portal Activation Invitations
When rule of least privilege is automatically granted to all Leads and Contacts in a CRM system, it becomes necessary to allow customers to activate their account and establish their password online.

A "welcome" page template is made available that allows customers to enter their email address and progress through a simple 2 step process to set their password before accessing the portal.

The welcome page should prevent subsequent activation attempts by already activated users.

Implementing the measures above has proven to dramatically reduce the administrative overhead of managing a portal and increasing customer satisfaction when using online portal services.

I see TechCrunch is calling "Web 2.0" dead... but it will never truly disappear.

The spirit of Web 2.0 "apps" will forever live in future applications as "features", just as the answering machine emerged as an add-on application to basic phone services and later became a standard "feature" of the utility, the following aspects of Web 2.0 will become standard "features" in all web applications:

• Responsive pages (More AJAX . Less POSTs)
• Tagging
• Commenting
• Rating
• Bookmarking
• Status Publishing
• Easy Integration (via REST, SOAP, APIs)
  

Web 2.1 is a "back to business" mentality that acknowledges the innovation of recent years and carries forward the best ideas and concepts in pragmatic solutions.

As an example, would you be more likely to apply this shoutbox example to an existing portal solution as a new "feature", or create a new domain and application around the concept of www.ShoutBox-Shizzle.com? (If you answered the latter, let's talk. I'll settle for a reasonable royalty )

Fun little shoutbox application in less than 40 lines of code using the i-Dialogue AJAX API and Controllers.

Let's face it. Every website could use a facelift or some aesthetic diversity every once in awhile.

i-Dialogue Themes allow you to pick a pre-built theme or create your own. If your organization's style guide has very specific RGB color value or font requirements, you'll appreciate i-Dialogue's support for JQuery ThemeRoller created themes.

Our best portal solutions emerge when our interests align with our customers. Such is the case with our Quote to Cash (Q2C) process, which we not only use for our own business, but plan to offer as an AppExchange application. After all, what better demonstration can any company give than how they use their software to run their own business?

At it's most simplest, the Q2C process is as follows:

1. Lead is generated and entered into Salesforce
2. Lead is converted to Opportunity
3. Product Line items are added to Opportunity in response to customer needs
4. A link to an online quote/service order is sent to the customer for review
5. The customer provides feedback on quote
6. Finally, the customer purchases online. Opportunity is updated as Closed-Won


You'll notice that step 4 provides a link to quote "slash" order form. Traditionally, "quotes" and "orders" are two separate entities. For an optimized online Q2C process, these are one and the same (just be sure to add some standard expiration verbiage to the quote template).

So, there are clearly some significant benefits to this process. But what are some drawbacks?

1) Change history. By default, if your Sales rep goes through 2-3 iterations with a customer and generates several quotes, you'll lose the change history. The workaround is to enable history tracking in Salesforce on the Opportunity record. An audit trail will exist, but you'll need to reconcile change events with dates to determine exactly what the customer saw on a particular date. Because this need to audit quote history only happens 1% of the time in our process, this trade-off is acceptable. Sales reps optionally have the ability to PDF print a quote at any time.

2) Contract signature. There is an implicit step 5.5 in the process above for getting the customers signature for certain types of agreements. We use our own i-Dialogue HTML to PDF converter for taking a snapshot of the online quote then send it out for signature via EchoSign. But some opportunities where an agreement is already in place, such as site upgrades, it is sufficient to include legal verbiage in step 6 that says "you agree to the terms and conditions available here". The onus is then on the customer to print the agreement for future reference.

3) Online payment processing. We're happy using our own Pay Pal cloud connector in step 6 for accepting online payments and automatically updating the corresponding Opportunity, but we work with several clients that must use particular payment gateways for compliance reasons. It's not difficult to plug this process into any payment gateway, but extra effort is required.

This process is kept simple by design in order to enable re-purposing the solution as an AppExchange application. We could, for example, use a custom Quote object to address the change history issue, or correlate Quotes with Campaigns for influence reports; but this can quickly lead to dual maintenance of records, plus we can't assume all Salesforce customers will have access to these features.

This Q2C process is nearly identical to the online donation process for non-profits, which I'll describe in upcoming weeks. Stay tuned and "happy quoting"!

Those noticing a decrease in 'Diablogue' blog posts will notice a corresponding increase in Twitter updates.

Follow http://twitter.com/dlog for Dialogue Script updates and other announcements.

Despite the brief outage of Salesforce.com today, the sky is not falling. See my blog post from about 3 years ago for some perspective.

... is to invent it (to borrow from an Alan Kay quote)

Given that my 2007 and 2008 predictions were too dependent on other people or organizations (don't follow those links. It was painful enough for me to re-read them ), I'm taking a different approach this year and simply "predicting" what's going to happen in 2009 based on variables within our control.

"Year of the Cloud"
I like to think small businesses are a leading indicator of the broader economy, and if that's the case, then 2009 will be a strong year for cloud computing as small businesses move to both produce and consume cloud based services. Future Fortune 500 companies will start in 2009 with SaaS and cloud computing baked into their DNA.

"CRM 2.0 = Community Relationship Management"
"Web 2.0" features, such as democratization, user-generated content, tagging, and rating will find their way into B2B portals and websites. "Social networking" will be a feature of web content management systems, instead of a silo application.

Customers will increasingly want go online and manage the relationship with their suppliers/vendors through their portals.

The job title of "Community Manager" will become common. They'll need tools like the Community Graph to gauge customer demands and needs.

"Browser Is the New IDE"
Web development will increasingly be done with lighter weight tools, such as Firefox and FireBug, allowing for a completely browser-based integrated development environment. Developers will have the agility to access and modify their applications from anywhere in the world using netbooks.

Websites will no longer be seen as being discrete deliverable projects. Instead, websites will become fluid entities that morph and adapt to the clients and organization's needs. The browser IDE will enable this agility.

Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse will remain powerful, essential, yet "old school" tools. The inherent conflict of interest between SaaS and traditional IDE's will result in more browser IDE adoption.

"Useful Metrics"
Online solutions will break away from the legacy of "Business Intelligence" and "Marketing Analytics" and provide real-time metrics that are pragmatic, useful, and actionable.

"Gaming As A Metaphor"
CRM and call center workers will adopt line of business applications much more readily if the user experience is aligned with video game design elements. Responsive, real-time, and graphical UI's will be favored over forms-based applications.

Employees will prefer to "interact" with their customers online in much the same way they interact online in PVP games. Learning curves will be reduced and adoption will increase.

Company goals and missions can be more easily visualized and real-time feedback provided through rich game-like interfaces.

"Collaborative Development"
An extension of the IDE will give web developers direct access to an online repository of pre-built scripts and cloud connectors, from Google Charts and Maps, to Salesforce web to lead forms, and StrikeIron tax services.

Principles of open source and Creative Commons will encourage this "remix" and mash-up of web services to produce new and unique solutions.

"Dynamic Languages"
More than half of all new web development projects will choose to use a dynamic languages, such as Python, Ruby, PHP, or Perl. Browser-based IDEs will accelerate this adoption. Javascript and JQuery will become essential tools for building responsive and interactive web applications.

"Domain Specific Languages (DSL)"
New languages will continue to emerge that are suited for specific tasks and domains. Our own language, Dialogue, will enable web developers and business users to think abstractly about their website/portal/community and easily interact with their online constituents.

"Amazon EC2 Will Rock"
The ease of provisioning an operating system and storage through Amazon and paying for resources based on usage will make EC2 the status quo platform for cloud developers.

"3rd Party Google Apps Get Serious"
Google Apps are at the threshold of being adopted by several organizations, large and small. The only obstacle being industry specific configuration, monitoring, and auditing. 3rd party partner apps will start to move in to help verticalize Google Apps and replace existing email/calendar productivity applications.

It's been several years since I last put together a recording studio, but my project for this holiday has been to cobble, re-purpose, and generally upgrade my setup.

The wife has incrementally reclaimed the home office previously used for home recording, so this is an opportunity to move all the gear into a proper environment and re-build from the ground up (I'm using some space at our business office for this project).

I would like this setup to allow spontaneous recording sessions by just having everything wired and ready to go. This will enable the agile composition and recording process I'm hoping to achieve.

What's decidedly different about the new setup is the availability of cloud storage. Digital recording consumes massive amounts of disk storage, and recording engineers tend to be packrats, hanging on to lots of tracks "just in case" they're needed for future re-mixes.

Amazon S3 now frees my mind and allows the audio packrat in me to infinitely scale archive storage without purchasing more external USB drives.

This setup has 3 levels of storage:
Local: Real-time recording and mixing
External: Samples, loops, sound libraries
Cloud: Deep storage and archiving

Adopting SaaS and cloud computing does not have to be such a grievous process, yet I witness so many people going through the stages below that it makes me wonder how applicable the Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief model may be to this process?

Denial

• "Cloud computing is a re-invention of what we've been doing for years on mainframes"
• "SaaS is just a fad"
• "Host our data offsite? No way! That's not secure. We can manage our data better than anyone else"
• "We've done it this way for years. I see no point in changing now"
  

Anger

• "Why are you singling out my project for replacement by SaaS?"
• "I can install/configure a better [software solution] in-house!"
• "Why is my budget being slashed? That's not fair!"
  

Bargaining

• "Just let me add a couple more hard disks to the Exchange server. That will increase everyone's inbox storage to 2GB per person"
• "We purchased this software on a 5 year ROI plan. Let's just ride it out and wait for the next upgrade. Vendor X says our needs will be met in the next release"
• "Let's just outsource the ongoing maintenance of our datacenter to offshore resources and focus on strategic initiatives in-house"
• "There's an open source solution I'd like to try installing and maintaining in-house"
  

Depression

• "What's the point? Business managers will subscribe to any service they find on the Internet"
• "The whole economy is in the tank. If it's bad for me, it must be bad for everyone"
• "The company is going to die. Why doesn't someone just let me go?"
  

Acceptance

• "I suppose SaaS vendor X really can do this job faster, better, cheaper since that is all they focus on"
• "I can retrain and get certified for SaaS solution X"
• "Technology goes obsolete all the time. This is just the next evolutionary cycle"

Am I missing any other common comments?

A core tenet of i-Dialogue 9 is that all website entities inherit the following social interfaces and behaviors:

• Comment
• Rating
• Tag

Objects integrated with other systems, such as Salesforce.com, automatically inherit these social extensions.

Once a community becomes active on a website, how does this information become actionable for a Product or Marketing Manager? How do you visualize a plethora of comments, ratings, and tags on a website? i-Dialogue 9 solves this problem by providing a graphical analytics application for visualizing the online community.

The community graph is interactive and supports high-level visualization of the community and the ability to zoom in on any entity. Graph nodes are color coded to indicate increased activity or negative ratings.

Graph nodes may be modified or removed (for community moderation).

Graph nodes may be ordered by time (most recent at top), rating (highest rated top to bottom), comments (most commented at top) or tags (most tagged at top).

Internal employees may assign a Task to any entity for follow-up.

Default Social Entities:

• Knowledge Base Article
• Trouble Ticket (aka Case or Issue)
• Discussion Forum / Topics / Post
• Document
• Article (Blog or Webpage)
• User
• Chat

Alerts:
Any user may initiate a 'Watch' anywhere within the object graph hierarchy. A watch results in email notification when any child entity is updated.

Product Roadmap Notes
Technology: Silverlight
Anticipated Release Date(s)
Social entity behaviors= Winter 2009
Community Graph=Spring 2009

Salesforce.com announced support for Google Apps Engine (GAE), which is a cloud-based platform for developing websites and portals using Python.

Between GAE, Dialogue Script, and the Salesforce/Plone project, there certainly is a lot of love going around for creating sites with Python.

I'll admit to being somewhat envious when companies announce their positioning in an industry analyst report, but then reality settles in and I get back to focusing on the true objective influencers in todays market; You (the reader), existing customers, Google SEO, and now (even more so) Twitter and Facebook.

I'm not really sure what it takes to get on the radar of some analysts (someone once told me "$10K per millimeter"). Some complex IT procurements are best served by having this information in hand.

But purchasing decisions can get really cloudy if a vendor is mis-categorized, or simply not understood by the analyst. That's why I got a kick out of this suggestion to create a "Magic Quadrant" for Analysts.

Recent articles and events have been making waves about the integration of CRM and social networking. I personally don't see the "sales mining" approach being a very good idea. In fact, it could outright backfire.

So how does an organization effectively leverage social networking? The answer is.... (drum roll please... are you ready?) ... "socialize".

5 things you can do right now

1) Read the ClueTrain Manifesto
It all started with this. "Markets are conversations".

If your corporate culture is not conducive to a majority of the 95 ClueTrain Theses (it's not entirely palatable), then social networking may not be a good fit. But it could also indicate your organization is on a path to extinction.

2) Own your brand
If a company is going to get into social networking, then ideally several employees will belong to that network. However, if it's possible to register your organization's name as a username, go ahead and reserve that account (or someone else will).

3) Be Informative
Break news for your company on social networks. Keep micro-messages informative by always linking to relevant pages and articles.

If people ask questions, point them in the right direction (don't respond if you don't have an answer).

4) Be Personal
You'll very quickly figure out that http://twitter.com/dlog is just me, tweeting on-behalf-of our service. Most days, I'm sharing links relevant to our service or industry. But if my dog dies and I'm having a bad day, I may share that too.

Upload a personal picture, even though you're representing a branded profile.

5) Manage Your Twitter SNR
Potential followers only have your last 20 tweets as a basis for your signal-to-noise ratio (Twitter SNR), so you need a reasonable balance of information-to-socializing.

I find myself intrigued lately with the possibility of using OpenID in B2B marketing campaigns and portals.

The idea is simple. Let your customers/partners use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, or AOL account to login to your website.

For a consumer website, this is a no-brainer. I would not be surprised if I could click on a Yahoo! banner ad and log into a sponsors website using my Yahoo! username.

But does this necessarily apply to a B2B website? I'm sure Marketers managing a complex sales process will continue to want to own the relationship end-to-end and collect as much information as possible upfront. But if a Marketer is willing to collect a minimum amount of information upfront and invest in cultivating the lead to incrementally collect more information over time, then this might work.

Less complex sales cycles might actually have quite a bit to gain by letting leads self-identify with an existing identity, given they're "in the hunt" and scanning 5+ competing site at one time. The site offering the path of least resistance is most likely to win.

RPX has a freemium service that supports OpenID (RPX is also an Oregon-bred company, so it must be good ). I'm going to experiment with the free version of this service and play with integrating it with i-Dialogue membership management (and by proxy, CRM Lead/Contact management). 

So what do you think? Would you support OpenID on your website? Why or why not?

Update: Here are a couple good online resources for learning more about Azure
MSDN Forums for Azure
http://blog.smarx.com/ (this blog is actually built and hosted on Azure)

Thanks to Steve Marx, Microsoft Azure Program Manager, for pointing these out.

---

I recently received this invitation from Microsoft (emphasis mine):

"With the recent unveiling of Windows Azure, we’re very interested in your thoughts about cloud computing. Take this short survey and tell us what you think about cloud computing. Your opinion counts. "

However, about half way through the survey, they apparently decided my opinion doesn't count (see screen shot below).

Ouch. Talk about a negative customer experience! So exactly how does one participate in this dialogue? Should I just engage with Ray Ozzie directly via email?

(With respect to Aerosmith)

Amazon just announced CloudFront; an Akamai-like service for hosting web resources closer to end-consumers of websites and portals.

How can CloudFront improve my i-Dialogue hosted solution?
i-Dialogue solutions are hosted in Plano, Texas and the Pacific NorthWest. When a visitor to your site in Europe requests a web page or document, that file must travel half-way around the world to the requesters browser (where it is typically cached for future requests).

CloudFront allows commonly accessed files, such as images, cascading style sheets, and javascript libraries, to be hosted and cached at various locations around the world to minimize the distance travelled to serve these resources.

How do I get started?
This service is currently in beta. We will initially pass through Amazon's CloudFront subscription costs directly to subscribers (setup and configuration fees may apply). Contact info@cubiccompass.com to learn more and get started.

How does CloudFront impact the content publishing process?
We are still researching how CloudFront impacts a typical content publishing workflow and what extra steps will be required by content publishers.

The long term goal is to manage CloudFront as a black box and any files/images copied to a specified folder on the i-Dialogue CMS are immediately replicated to CloudFront.

Dynamic pages will still be hosted on i-Dialogue and real-time data will still be retrieved from their content source (such as Salesforce, Google, or Microsoft services).

Where are the edge network locations?
Here's the info from Amazon's website on available network locations:

The Amazon CloudFront Network

To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide. Amazon CloudFront uses the following edge locations:

United States

• Ashburn, VA 
  
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  
• Los Angeles, CA
  
• Miami, FL
  
• Newark, NJ
  
• Palo Alto, CA
  
• Seattle, WA
  
• St. Louis, MO
  

Europe

• Amsterdam
  
• Dublin
  
• Frankfurt
  
• London
  

Asia

• Hong Kong
  
• Tokyo

In times of economic pressure, web developers commonly take one of 2 paths.

Option a) Recede with the recession and fall back on known technologies and solutions (such as open source CMS's, databases, HTML, Javascript). (ie "Play it safe" or "ride it out")
Option b) Make progress, learn new skills, and invest in the next wave of technology.

Unfortunately, the majority of Developers chose option A, not realizing how diluted their skills become by competing with a global marketplace taking the same strategy.

Those investing in new skills during a recession are best positioned to capitalize on the inevitable next wave.

A recent Forrester Research article highlights the oncoming commoditization of Enterprise 2.0 applications and foreshadows the need for developers to leverage services outside their organization. Web developers must start adding value to their organizations by looking beyond the capabilities of a single CMS or portal.  We live in a service oriented world and horizontal integration with other services on the web is often times only a cut-n-paste away.

So what will be the next $100K+ salaried position in Web Development? "Mashup Developer" may be a contrived and temporary term, but it correctly communicates in spirit where the market is going and what skills will be in demand.

Web developers need to work in cross functional teams across all business lines and enable online communication between customers, partners, and employees using a multi-dimensional Internet navigation framework, so to speak (ok... shameless plug for the origin of "Cubic Compass" ).

Cubic Compass developers that are investing in mashups involving "Google/Salesforce/StrikeIron/Amazon/OpenID" will emerge as the next CTO's and CIO's when the economy rebounds by chosing "option B" and investing in new skills.

Some recommended next steps for capitalizing on this opportunity:

• Understand Open ID
• Learn Dialogue Script
• Learn a new language, such as Python
  
• Apply your Python skills at Google Apps Engine
  
• Get a Salesforce Developer account
• Create an Amazon Web Services account
  

Great article here on BMW's 7 year product lifecycle and how they manage their brand. Very innovative and progressive culture. (Detroit... are you taking notes?).

If i-Dialogue were a car, it would be 5 series BMW

Amazon Web Services is one of many cloud computing providers leading the way with a variable payment utility model. Similar to an electric bill, the amount you pay per month varies depending on your usage.

However, several software-as-a-service solutions built on top of this infrastructure are commonly available at a fixed price per month (including our own solution).

These two service models are not in parity with each other.

First off, I understand the benefits of a fixed price model. Marketing and Support professionals often tell me they are seeking budgeting approval from their CEO to use our service.  "You're positive there are no hidden costs. Correct? If I get approval for $X thousand dollars in 2009, will that be sufficient to address my goals?", is a common inquiry.

Fixed pricing offers reassurance that a service will not exceed an agreed upon budget. However, fixed pricing subscriptions usually have a ceiling and associated overage fees.

Variable pricing may have a lower initial cost but spikes in usage are reflected in monthly invoices. A customer may budget $500 per month for a software service. Just like an electricity of phone bill, some months the actual cost will be lower. Other months the cost will be higher.

I'm interested in this topic because we are at an inflection point. By hosting our solutions on Amazon Web Services we now have the ability to offer a variable price subscription service and outsource the billing to Amazon. This means a $595 per month portal subscription could be offered initially at $295 per month with a variable pricing component based on bandwidth and storage used (in excess of some nominal values).

I'm interested in community feedback. Am I making this a more complicated decision than it needs to be? Please let me know:

"Yes. I want lower monthly subscriptions and will pay for variable overage costs"

"No. I want a fixed fee per month"

Well, we're just about 24 hours away from kicking off Dreamforce 08. This will be my 4th Dreamforce (tire kicker/user in '05, presenter/sForce hero in '06, sponsor '07, sponsor '08).

I'm sure the blogosphere and tweets will be on fire throughout the week, but I'll do my best to post the latest here.

Some key areas I'll be focusing on:

• Campaign Influence reports. Making Salesforce Campaigns the primary hub for managing internet campaigns and automatically updating responses from multiple channels
• Advanced reporting. Several of our clients are sitting on tons of web event information and the reporting/mining inquiries are getting increasingly complex. Hoping to learn some new tricks in this area
• MetaData API. Ability to provision i-Dialogue more quickly. Reduce repeated manual configuration of adding custom objects/fields.
• Google API. In particular, exporting our web events to Google Spreadsheets and using Google Charting and Visualization tools

Please come up to booth #211 and introduce yourself. Bryce Hamrick, our Implementation Services Project Manager, and I are looking forward to meeting you!

I applaud Microsoft's foray into cloud computing with the Azure server, but it still leaves me puzzled. Having been a part of the Microsoft culture for so many years, I can see what is going on. There is this perpetual nagging drive to deliver more features and create new waves, when what is needed now is to leverage existing assets and ride the waves of consumer demand.

Microsoft is sitting atop a cloud computing gold mine today with the ultimate software-plus-service "Windows Update".

The old-school mentality is to deliver shrink wrapped software as a one-time transaction for a low price. They then give away monthly security updates, ongoing patches, and lot's of free development tools.

Because of the rate of change in todays networked world, there is now more value in subscribing to an evolving software service than in a one-time "buy and forget" transaction.

Most households would probably think nothing of paying $4.95 per month for Windows update if there were no upfront costs. That may seem like small change, but over 5 years that subscription model yields almost $300.

Plus consider how many bootlegged copies of Windows are running out there (50%+). By minimizing entry costs, demonstrating continual value, and associating key features with genuine installations will encourage more consumers to subscribe.

Businesses, likewise, would find a $10 subscription for Windows and Office much more attractive than a one-time purchase.

But here's the thing that really has got me puzzled. Why is Microsoft building it's own datacenters and talking about becoming a centralized service when it has built an army of loyal and eager partners that will install, deploy, and manage Internet nodes for them?

Google is a fantastic company, but their ability to scale is limited by their ability to raise capital and dedicate internal resources to building datacenters.

If all Microsoft Internet Node Servers (MINS) shared a common API, if all applications written for MINS were portable, and if all existing Microsoft datacenters and partners filled their racks with these servers, Microsoft would not have to spend a dime building datacenters. They could then return to their core competency of writing OS software and applications and leverage the power of their channel partners to scale.

(Alright, so maybe Microsoft Marketing could come up with a better acronym than MINS... but letting partners be their cloud computing 'minions' should be implicit ).

Revenue from Microsoft Internet Node servers would far surpass consumer windows subscriptions within 10 years if this model were deployed.

As an example, I just signed up for Amazon EC2 today to deploy a new email server. I don't know how much of the $0.125 per hour Amazon charges me gets kicked back to Microsoft, but it makes me wonder.... why is Amazon having to develop new Windows OS extensions to make their provisioning model work and why is Microsoft building datacenters like they're going to compete with Amazon?

It's just all backwards. The obvious win-win scenario is for Microsoft to develop a provisionable server OS and partner with the Amazon's and Rackspace's of the world to do the hosting.

 

Congratulations to this years Navigator Award winners! There were so many to choose from and we ended up adding a couple extra categories to showcase some truly magnificant i-Dialogue solutions.

PORTLAND, OR (October 27, 2008)   

Cubic Compass Announces 2008 Navigator Awards

Cubic Compass, a provider of on-demand web content management solutions, today announced the recipients of the 2008 Navigator Awards. Navigator Awards recognize organizations who have made significant contributions to enabling one-to-one online "dialogues" with their customers, partners, or employees through the use of CRM and the i-Dialogue Web Suite.

Best Overall Solution
www.LeftHandNetworks.com

LeftHand Networks (LHN) utilizes the i-Dialogue Web Suite for their main website, partner portal, customer portal, and product discussion forums. The portal staging and high-availability capabilities of i-Dialogue Unlimited Edition are employed to apply a disciplined multi-stage content publishing process that ensures the right information is available to the right person at the right time.

As an early adopter of Salesforce, LHN defined all facets of their business using custom objects in Salesforce and needed a highly customizable CMS to leverage their existing CRM investment. LHN's internal staff used the i-Dialogue API to develop a variety of online web applications, such as event management, license management, product pricelists and quoting, and a site-wide search engine.

LeftHand Networks was acquired by Hewlett Packard in October 2008 for $360M and continues to be recognized as an industry leading provider of iSCSI SAN solutions. 

---

Best Web Design
www.ConfigureSoft.com

ConfigureSoft makes use of rich multimedia and informational collateral to provide an interactive and personalized experience for their Customers and Partners.

Other online features deployed by ConfigureSoft include webinar event registration, discussion forums, partner portal, and customer portal.

---

Best B2B Portal
portal.iGrafx.com

iGrafx manages the entire customer life-cycle using i-Dialogue; from demand generation and lead cultivation to providing an online eStore and customer support forums.

iGrafx automates the lead cultivation process by providing self-service to case studies, user guides, and product downloads then follows up with automated emails using i-Dialogue drip email marketing. All online interactions and downloads are captured in Salesforce and used by Marketing and Sales to gauge customers interest in online resources.

---

Best Partner Portal
Planar

Planar has grown in recent years through the acquisition of new businesses. Planar deployed a partner portal for their digital signage business unit in 2007 and continues to expand their channel marketing efforts in 2008 by deploying partner portals for their home theater and control room business units.

i-Dialogue Premier Edition allows Planar to deploy multiple, uniquely branded partner portals that provide channel partners with 24/7 access to product marketing materials, news, events, software updates, and training resources.

Planar IT staff were early adopters of Dialogue Script and leveraged their in-house web development skills to create a dynamic and well organized online experience.

---

Best Non-Profit Portal
www.RISENetwork.org

RISE - Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators

RISE is a national nonprofit organization that helps K-12 public schools in low-income communities attract and retain experienced, talented teachers so all students can achieve at high levels.  www.RISENetwork.org facilitates online dialogues between Teachers and Schools using i-Dialogue and Salesforce to manage contact identities, applications, and workflow processes.

Online features include application management and screening, Job Search, Application Search, Google maps, Survey response metrics, teacher-school communications, and Job/Teacher interest level tagging.

---

Best Consumer Web Solution
my.ColoradoPlasticSurgery.com

Like most small business and practice managers, Dr. Nick Slenkovich of the Colorado Plastic Surgery Center, was inundated with solicitations from pay per click and referral networks promising new Leads. Most referral partners provided information on how many leads were referred, but Dr Slenkovich required more insight into what kinds of Leads and Opportunities were produced from each referral source.
 
By using Salesforce Pro Edition with Campaigns integrated with i-Dialogue, Dr. Slenkovich deployed an intelligent landing page management solution and created unique tracking codes for all referral partners that resulted in detailed campaign influence reports in Salesforce. Google AdWords, banner ads, and referral partner marketing expenses are all now evaluated by the quality of opportunities they produce instead of the quantity of Leads.

Jakob Nielson posted an interesting article on Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages.

In a Salesforce CRM context, this basically boils down to the subject and message contained within Web-to-Lead and Web-to-Case email auto-responders.

On the Lead side, I recommend a series of informative emails, aka an email drip campaign, that are conversational and informative in nature (even though Jacob advises against message sequences in an order shipping scenario, they are very effective when applied to Lead cultivation).

The email should appear as if it were sent from an actual person and not an automated response.

Example:

Subject: Follow-Up To Your Case Study Download
Hello {!Lead.FirstName},

Thank you for your interest in [product/service/organization]. I thought you may also be interested in the following resources:

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3

Please feel free to reply to this email with any questions.


Regards,

Personalized Signature
With complete contact information

---

For Web-to-Case, the best advice is to simply acknowledge receipt and describe what next steps are being taken to resolve the customer issue.

Subject: Support Ticket Received
Hello {!Contact.FirstName},

We received your trouble ticket. A service representative will review your case and respond within X hours.

The following online resources may be useful in resolving your issue.

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3

---

Notice both emails make use of bullets to break up the monotony of raw text and run-on paragraphs.

For case management, these links should also be published directly next to the web-to-case form to encourage self-service to FAQ'a and solutions prior to submitting a case.

Great news from the Amazon EC2 team. They've dropped the "beta" designation and are now rolling in full production.

They're even hosting Windows instances in the cloud for $0.125 per hour (SQL Server is also available).

That's about $85 per month for a fully managed Windows server instance. Not too bad.

It's rare that Microsoft issues patches outside of their regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday", but apparently a critical vulnerability was recently discovered.

Some hosting services will be temporarily suspended tonight for up to 10 minutes to apply this update.

Update 1: Added link to cloaking definition.

For the past several years the practice of displaying page content to GoogleBot that was inaccessible to actual users could get you in "Google Jail", resulting in a PageRank of 0 and removal from their search index. This is known as "cloaking"... aka "stealthing".

This practice is now encouraged under a new feature named "First Click Free", which allows publishers to serve protected content to GoogleBot, but requires users to register for subsequent page requests. More discussion here.

Now, if Google would just remove the jail sentence for programmatically retrieving PR for each page, then CMS and marketing analytics vendors could comfortably contribute to the virtuous cycle of helping Google organize the worlds information.

Python is here! A couple months ago I mentioned the need for more dynamic language support in SaaS solutions. Last month we announced support for JScript and this month I'm happy to announce support for IronPython in i-Dialogue.

I spent the weekend learning some Python basics and created a simple (and I mean simple) Python demonstration in the i-Dialogue Developers Sandbox. You're welcome to modify this source and experiment on your own.

After years of working with the Salesforce API using statically typed languages; such as C#, Java, and Apex; it is refreshing to re-approach old problems through new eyes. After only a few days of playing with Python, I see now what others have been raving about.

Web developers will really enjoy using Python with Dialogue Script:

• Cleaner code. Easier to read and manage
• No need for thick IDEs. Too often, an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio stands between you and the desired solution. Dialogue Script development is 100% browser-based (yes, it even works in Chrome!)
• Agile business rules management. Work side-by-side with business users and apply business rules directly in web pages
• Dynamic typing

There's been a reshuffling of booths at Dreamforce. We're in the same location, but the booth number is now #211 (was 311).

I'm really looking forward to finally placing names with faces, and meeting lots of new people at this event

Last January I shared some thoughts on keeping hosted services up and running 99.9% of the time. eMarketing Websites and portals often do not have the luxury of going down for 3 hours of maintenance (or even 3 minutes), leaving me to often envy the planned maintenance notices I receive from Salesforce when logging in .

As you can see from the daily report below, our monitoring service loves to occasionally tease us with uptime reports hovering at 99.89% uptime.

Some key things we observe and monitor:

• "Downtime" in the report is measured in blocks of 5 minutes, so what may have actually been a 10 second outage gets reported as a 5 minute outage, skewing the actual results.
• Sub-second response time (< 1000 milliseconds), while not contractually in the SLA, is a key metric in determining site performance and customer experience.
• Customers who deploy changes to a staging server first (available in Unlimited Edition) have a much higher likelihood of sustaining 100% uptime day over day.
• Reliance on a good datacenter partner is critical. Our offices are not the most luxurious, but we spare no expense on our datacenter location and services.

In honor of Google's 10th birthday, they've brought back their earliest search index from January 2001. Bummer.... Cubic Compass was formed in March 2001, just 2 months later.

Truly a Don Adams moment... "Missed it by that much"

As the Financial Institution's fall one-by-one, I'm drawn to the influence that software is having on Wall Street.

I've long been an admirer of James Goodnight, CEO of business intelligence company SAS, and the SAS culture. The SAS value proposition was originally represented to me several years ago as "We help banks identify risk using data warehouse technology".

So I wondered what role SAS may have had in the mortgage crisis. At it's peak, WAMU, and several other banks were advertising "Mortgage approvals in 10 minutes!" The assumption being that they were using massive data warehouses, like those powered by SAS, to quickly determine whether or not a customer was credit worthy.

But apparently these risk management systems were either skewed to accept unnecessary risk, or they were simply ignored. SAS derives the majority of it's $2B in revenue from Financial Services (yes... that's 2 Billion with a "B"... and they're still a private company) so I was somewhat amused to find this article where Mr Goodnight says:

“It doesn’t really matter what Wall Street wants. They’ve proven they don’t know what they are doing. They’ve made a mess of their own companies.”

“I think we need to get to the point where we don’t worry about what Wall Street thinks all the time because it’s clear Wall Street has not performed at all. Bank after bank has been going under with the exception of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase”

The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has an article titled "Is Your Next Language COBOL?", where they report that 70% of Merrill Lynch's business runs on COBOL... a 50 year old programming language. Merrill purchased 5,000 seats of Salesforce back in 2005. They've since been acquired by Bank of America.

Last year, Salesforce was betting big on wealth management and selling into the board rooms of financial instutions. I don't think the latest fallout impacts this strategy negatively. If anything, the re-building process on Wall Street will force a critical review of SaaS and on-demand solutions as they build out next generation infrastructure.

One area worth following closely is algorithmic trading. It's estimated that one-third of all stock trades were driven by automatic programs in 2006. By 2010, that figure will likely reach 50%.

You can draw your own conclusions. Were financial institutions ignoring decision support systems? Were their systems outdated? Is automation moving too fast for humans to reliably intervene and prevent financial disasters?

Thankfully, no one is blaming technology for this mess. If anything, there is a universal concession that "this is the future" and we'll need to deal with it.

The Internet has enabled a globalized economy. Whether or not it makes sense to trust a geographic center of influence for financial services in New York is clearly being called into question.

Good web form design consistently accomplishes:

• End User Convenience
• Data Validation

This web-to-contact form in the i-Dialogue Developer's Sandbox looks pretty simple on the surface, but it implements several subtle best practices that often get overlooked.

How to Make Web Forms Convenient

The "First Name" textbox incorporates use of the "HasFocus" attribute to ensure the user does not have to click on the textbox to begin data entry. They simply start typing.

<dlog:TextBox id='FirstNameTxt' FieldName='FirstName' HasFocus="true" />

Tab orders are logically defined so that the end user can progress through the web form without need for selecting each textbox (while a TabOrder attribute is available, default behavior is to simply progress through the form fields top-to-bottom).

Finally, the DScript button control sets the "IsDefault" attribute to "true" to ensure that if the Enter key is hit, the form will automatically submit the form on behalf of clicking the button.

<dlog:Button id='SubmitBtn' Text='Contact Us' IsDefault="true" />

Data Validation

There's a new Wiki article on Page Validation that describes both client-side and server-side validation techniques using Dialogue Script.

Client-side validation is sufficient for most marketing web forms, but portal applications typically must take extra precaution and also validate data entry on the server.

Dialogue Script supports the full array of ASP.NET Data validation controls. Our demo web to lead form uses the RequiredFieldValidator control to prevent the web form from being submitted with an empty Email value.

<asp:RequiredFieldValidator 
        id="valEmailRequired" 
        ControlToValidate="EmailTxt" 
        Display="dynamic">* Email Required
</asp:RequiredFieldValidator>

The RegularExpressionValidator control may be used to validate that the email address is well formed (such as requiring "@" and "." symbols in the address).

<asp:RegularExpressionValidator
        id="regEmail"
        ControlToValidate="EmailTxt"
        Text="(Invalid email)"
        ValidationExpression="\w+([-+.']\w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*" />    

Another side benefit of applying validation to web forms is the prevention of SPAM, which is caused by automated bots that roam the Internet hoping to share links of various V1@gra sites on unsuspecting Blogs.

An updated version of the Silicon Forest Universe poster is now available.

894 technology companies are showcased on the Silicon Forest Universe 2.0, a joint project of Virginia Tech University and Portland State University’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies.
 
The poster is a result of research conducted last fall by Dr. Heike Mayer of Virginia Tech's National Capital Region Urban Affairs and Planning Program. Dr. Mayer’s research examined and visualized high-tech firms in the Willamette Valley region, using data gathered from an online survey of technology firms.

In contrast to the 2003 version, the new poster shows not only existing firms, but also firms that have ceased operations. It highlights the genealogy of 894 companies, venture capital firms, and other support organizations. The new poster was designed by Stuart Armstrong.

“Portland’s Silicon Forest has grown and matured. Numerous firms emerged as spinoffs from Tektronix and Intel and the poster illustrates the evolution of the Forest. The updated poster shows that there are fewer startups from Tektronix and from Intel. It seems that these firms started the emergence of Portland as a high-tech region but that they are not the economic engines anymore,” said Mayer, who has similar projects focusing on Boise, Phoenix, Kansas City and Washington’s Puget Sound region.

The poster is 24 x 36 and available for $15, including shipping and handling. To order a copy, please click here.

(Note: Cubic Compass is located in quadrant L13; a direct descendant of the Corillian cluster with a gravitational orbit around the Tektronix center of influence)

Microsoft is embracing Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign and just going with the "PC" stereotype. The message? "It's cool to not be cool" (hey... I've been saying that for years!  )

The guy in the opening scene is an actual Microsoft engineer that resembles John Hodgman from the Mac commercials.

We're only 45 days away from Dreamforce and the launch of our new platform, code named "Fibonacci".

Some exciting new features we'll be demonstrating:

• "Get It Now" provisioning
• Python script language integration
• Built-in User Experience best practices
• On-demand script sharing with other i-Dialogue Developers

Why code name "Fibonacci"? Perhaps because the new features enable exponential growth? Because good web design makes consistent use of the Golden Ratio? (I don't know really... our previous release was named "Caprica" and you'd have to be a BSG fan to understand that ).

Stop by booth #311 at Dreamforce to check it out!

• DOS had the Black Screen of Death
• Windows had the Blue Screen of Death
• Vista has a Purple Screen of Death

Office 2.0 and Software-As-a-Service users now have the Google Chrome "Aw, Snap!" screen-of-death.

Marketing campaigns and portal applications are complex. Business rules and workflows can change weekly, sometimes daily.

The ability to adapt to change is the definition of being "agile", and agility provides the competitive edge necessary to compete in the 21st century.

I'm happy to announce the availability of a new Dialogue Script enhancement that allows organizations to program business and workflow rules directly into web and portal pages, without the need for traditional programming tools, such as Eclipse or Visual Studio.NET.

• This Wiki article provides the details
• See Dialogue Script in action in the i-Dialogue Developers Sandbox

The i-Dialogue Developers Sandbox is a new addition that allows you to get hands experience working with Dialogue Script.

• Nothing to download or install
• Unlimited Access (no limited trial access restrictions)
• No fees
• Just close your web browser to restart your sandbox session

I plan to provide links to working examples in the Sandbox for all future articles so you can dig right in and experiment on your own.

Good thing Oregon has a mail-in ballot, because I just realized we'll be attending Dreamforce on election night, November 4th, 2008.

I wonder if Salesforce can provision one of those unlimited seat orgs to open up voting to the masses online?

Congratulations to Cubic Compass customer LeftHand Networks for surpassing 3,000 customers and their continued 110 percent year-over-year growth.

Their iSCSI SAN line of products plug right into any existing IT infrastructure using commercial off-the-shelf disk storage devices and existing IP networks.

LeftHand Networks iSCSI solutions are playing in key role in the evolution of virtualized server environments.

Initially an adopter of our i-Dialogue Channel Management solution, LeftHand Networks recently deployed their 'www' domain on an i-Dialogue web content management system.

Key solution components:

• Online Membership Management (Accounts / Passwords / Roles)
• Single-Sign-On between portal and www domains
• Salesforce.com CRM Integration
• Online discussion forums
• Channel partner deal registration and opportunity management
• Online product price sheets and quoting
• Document management
• Role-based access to documents and product binaries
• Event tracking and reporting of all document downloads
• Training and event management
• License key management (for activating product licenses)

LeftHand Networks internal IT staff developed several of the custom online applications using the i-Dialogue .NET API.

Apple has been quite successfully at using secrecy to their advantage prior to a product launch. They prefer to build suspense around a new product then let loose with a "Big Bang" announcement and (hopefully) a product that surpasses all expectations.

But their recent launch of MobileMe did not go so well using this strategy. Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple should have launched MobileMe in beta to a select group, then evolve the product prior to broader distribution.

This "iterative, incremental" approach to launching web services, websites, and SaaS applications is pretty much a universally accepted practice today.

After all, software is "soft". It can be easily crafted, modified, and evolved over time. Software-as-a-Service is arguably even "softer" than traditional software with concepts such as declarative configuration, multi-tenancy, and single code bases becoming the norm.

My personal experience working on several eMarketing and portal projects over the years is that projects that start out overly ambitious and strive to launch with a "Big "Bang" with lots of new functionality are prone to either a) outright fail and be abandoned or b) re-correct themselves, but proceed demoralized.

It's no surprise that our most successful clients and projects are those that started small and evolved their solution over time. The pattern is quite clear. That is why we've designed our subscription levels and services around iterative, incremental development.

Many people talk in terms of "SMB" or "Enterprise" software and make immediate assumptions based on price. We don't see it that way. It's perfectly acceptable for a Fortune 500 company to start with a $195 per month microsite and evolve that solution over time to several redundant/load-balanced servers.

Maybe it's the ego of legacy IT and marketing organizations that persist this notion of "Big Bang" projects. "My new eMarketing platform is $30K per month with 3 full-time consultants" sounds much more powerful than "I'm upgrading my $595 per month microsite to manage all our campaigns once I've established a consistent cost-per-opportunity metric."

Sounds odd coming from me because I don't make more money giving this advice, but I would rather have a satisfied customer start with our $195 month microsite edition and see immediate ROI rather than risk a dissatisfied customer pursuing an overly ambitious goal.

You can have massive scale aspirations and scope. Just make sure the software you're using is "soft" enough to support iterative, incremental development and plan for many small releases along the way to achieve larger goals.

I recently attended a Salesforce webinar on how to use the Google API toolkit and must admit I was very impressed.

The power of moving data from Salesforce into Google docs, coupled with an increased availability of Google visualizations and add-ons to Google spreadsheets, is starting to make Google an extremely viable option as a service based business intelligence and analytics platform.

There are really no technical barriers to integration. The challenge now is provisioning, configuration, and deployment. It was not quite clear to me on what Salesforce recommends as best practice for retrieving, storing, and managing the various types of authentication tokens. Once this challenge is reduced to a "one-click" experience, I think the mash-ups will fly.

The motion chart (below) really impressed me as a possible solution to viewing key marketing metrics over time. I'm writing a paper on customer acquisition costs and had initially assumed use of Salesforce bar charts for reporting, but the chart below looks promising. It's currently using sample data now, but the Salesforce Google API toolkit provides the ability to update the underlying Google spreadsheet with actual data.

 A new rating control has been added to the Dialogue Script library that supports the rating of Salesforce objects through i-Dialogue hosted web pages and portal applications.

I haven't dug too deep into the details, but apparently this control can be provisioned in a variety contexts, such as a Thumbs Up/Down rating control (it's derived from this open source Rating control, so anything that can be achieved through the documented samples is portable to the DScript control).

Customer ratings are typically captured in a junction object that intersects a Person with an Object and records their rating.

For example, here's what an example DocumentRating object might look like in Salesforce for capturing individual ratings of documents.

DocumentRating__c.LeadId__c Lookup (Lead)
DocumentRating__c.ContentId__c    Lookup (Content__c)
DocumentRating__c.Rating__c     Number (1,0)

Unlike other Dialogue Script controls that can be deployed using minimal attributes, this one needs some extra guidance to define the junction object source and related lookup fields.

Let's face it. Any good Web 2.0 strategy (or web 3.0) needs to have a "dynamic language" story to attract serious web developers. Languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl are seeing tremendous gains in adoption by Web Developers.

No two organizations are alike when it comes to customizing their online presence and Internet Marketing campaigns, and these dynamically typed languages are increasingly becoming the language of choice as API extensions (see Google App Engine's use of Python).

Now that Dialogue Script is generally available and actively used in production, we've started turning our attention towards how to provide Developers with more programmatic control over the display and processing of web forms and portal applications, similar to how Salesforce employs Apex Controllers in Visual Force.

Our open source C# and ASP.NET API is an extremely powerful option for those familiar with Visual Studio.NET and managing strongly typed, compiled languages. But we wanted to evolve our platform and embrace the latest trend in dynamically typed languages and to go one step further by keeping the entire web development experience service-based (ie through a web browser or rich client).

Fortunately, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) will be made available to us very soon and i-Dialogue Developers will have their choice of several dynamic languages to choose from when embedding rich programming logic into their web forms.

The DLR will give Developers the "glue" necessary to mash-up Google, Salesforce, Microsoft Live, Fedex, and any other web service using a familiar programming environment. The feedback from making changes will be instantaneous (no recompiling, moving files, or unit tests), making programming an instantly gratifying experience.

The DLR extensions to Dialogue Script will drive the innovation of new development process lifecycles and quality control processes that enable globally distributed teams to iteratively and incrementally evolve complex websites, portals, and campaigns using nothing more than a $599 laptop and browser.

The entire i-Dialogue object model will be made available, so DLR scripts can programmatically control all facets of a well rounded Internet Marketing Suite, including Profiles, Pages, Email, and Web Forms.

If you've ever written a VB macro to customize an Excel spreadsheet or Word, then you'll feel right at home with this new extension. This is probably #3 in the priority queue right now, with a couple tremendous new features taking priority right now for delivery by Dreamforce, so I'll keep you posted on it's evolution.

Suffice to say, we'll seek to leverage the DLR out of the box as much as possible with very few proprietary additions, so any O'Reilly book or MSDN article on the topic will be 99% applicable, if you want to get a head start.

Some at the office may have wondered why I was leaving work early on Wednesday's in July (and relatively speaking only working 8 hour days instead of 10-12). Truth is, I was rehearsing with an all acoustic group for an informal concert performed last night.

This particular song, "On The Horizon", (video below) was written and recorded for my "West of September" CD project in 1998. Original recording is here. The "unplugged" acoustic version came out pretty well. The Mandolin, in particular, played by Scott McAuliffe, really adds a nice dimension.

Concerts I've attended in recent weeks include Mark Knopfler and The Police (with Elvis Costello). I've recently come to a realization of just how many British guitar players have influenced my style (Page, Clapton, Knopfler, Gilmour, Summers) ... amazing how American Blues needed to go travel over the Atlantic and back again for mass consumption. Music truly is an international language.

My musical alma mater's signature event, The Mt Hood Jazz Festival, is just around the corner to wrap up this Summer's musical activities.

And for Salesforce readers who may think this post is totally OT, check out the announcement that Journey will be playing at this years Dreamforce event (good thing I'm through the denial stage of losing Steve Perry and starting to accept Arnel Pineda, who was discovered by Neil Schon on YouTube  )

Here it is July and I feel like a kid on Christmas knowing that the next release of SmarterStats includes advanced charts and graphs using Silverlight. Very cool!

SmarterStats is one of many applications included with every i-Dialogue subscription.

I found it interesting that Entellium, a CRM software company, is abandoning its browser based CRM application in favor of it's rich client CRM application.

This is one of several recent events that signals (to me) that a larger "Software + Services" (S+S) inflection point is now underway.

Looking at Gen Y office workers as a leading indicator, I'm often amazed at how many actually *prefer* to use rich Windows applications. The browser is just an alternative interface, much like a mobile phone.

eMarketing is a never ending battle and compromise between "reach" vs "rich", with maximum "reach" and lowest common denominator channels winning out, so I don't see this trend significantly impacting the custom interaction front lines. A website and simple HTML emails will always be guaranteed to reach a wide audience.

But I think productivity and development tools will most certainly be revived in a S+S context. Even Salesforce.com, known primarily as a web-based application, has converted me to their S+S development model of using Eclipse (a rich Windows application) to communicate with Salesforce via webservices, and I would expect the deployment of an Adobe Air-based Salesforce application to be announced in the near future to keep them relevant with this trend.

"Multi-client" may become the new buzzword that replaces "multi-tenant" in SaaS circles.

It's been over a year since I took a hard look at offering a hosted i-Dialogue solution for Microsoft CRM. At the time, the Microsoft CRM partner subscription model really wasn't in place (to be fair, the Salesforce Royalty Winter gave partners shivers too ).

But a lot has changed in a year:

• Microsoft launched CRM Online
• Microsoft reached out and gave us a great deal on a MSDN subscription
• Microsoft launched the Service Providers License Program
• The CRM 4.0 API offers a dramatic improvement over previous releases

I continue to be astonished at how many of our Salesforce customers use Microsoft Outlook, and I really see no end in sight for the Exchange beast, so it's worth conceding on this front that any truly effective eMarketing or Sales "dialogue" must integrate well with Outlook... somehow.

More on this later...

Cost of gas getting you down? Virtualize your office with on-demand applications and work from anywhere, with anyone, at anytime.

We've added a few more 'must have' apps to our list of SaaS productivity tools.

www.whenisgood.net - Excellent for coordinating product demos, installations, and meetings.
www.echosign.com - For digital signatures, closing contracts and agreements, signing NDAs.
www.centraldesktop.com - Project and issue management.

All 3 offerings provide great value with their introductory free versions. The paid subscriptions are worthwhile and have immediate ROI at every tier.

For all the talk and buzz around Facebook's social networking and "Web 2.0" features, I think many people forget just how dependent Facebook is on the execution of a successful "Web 1.0" strategy and 1-to-1 targeted advertising.

Like Google, Facebook makes the majority of their revenue from advertising. But unlike Google's pay-per-click (PPC) model, Facebook was largely dependent on a CPM model that guaranteed they got paid for ad impressions... not clicks. Until recently, the relevance of my Facebook Ads were not very relevant at all.

But it appears that Facebook has finally figured it out. Their PPC program is underway and their personalization engine is gaining ground on Google.

For example, the ad below knows I'm in a ".NET Developers" group and has a call to action (CTA) to register for a .NET conference. Other ads use my age or college education in the CTA.

Login and click around Facebook and take a look at the flyers on the left side of the screen and judge for yourself just how relevant they are.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Portland, OR, June 25th, 2008 - Cubic Compass Software announced the promotion of Kaci to the position of "top dog" today. Kaci has held a similar position at a domestic residence in recent years.

"I 0WN UR BIZNES", said Kaci, a 2 year old Leonberger, also adding "It is an honor to serve in the position of Top Dog and follow the lead established by other Leonberger's in the software industry."

Google Charts are the way to go if you want to spice up your i-Dialogue web pages with charts and graphs.

Check out this screencast for a quick demonstration on our new Google Chart integration.

 Somehow, we've managed to utilize Apex without downloading and installing Eclipse for several months. When we needed to compile and upload Apex script, the path of least resistence was to create a simple web-based editor tied into the Salesforce Apex API (not pretty.... but functional).

A couple Developers have downloaded Eclipse and I've peered over their shoulder to check out the Force IDE, but I always assumed that Salesforce was going to continue innovating the web-based IDE and unshackle Developers from Visual Studio and Eclipse (have you seen the slick Intellisense in the Visual Force editor? Couldn't this be applied to the Java-syntax editor?).

But todays announcement of new Apex wrappers for Google API has me drooling and I'm finally forced (pun intended ) to download Eclipse and Force IDE to check it out.

So tomorrow we're buying a pizza and gathering around a projector in a conference room to go through the whole download, install, configure, (curse), re-install, and embrace the change being made available through this IDE.

UPDATE: This was actually a quite painless exercise. I had anticipated an hour of JAR file PATH configuration, JRE version mis-match, HTTPS firewall/connection issues, and allowed for a buffer for who knows what else.

But the total time to install, configure, and bind to a working Salesforce instance was about 15 minutes. It would have been much faster, but it was not clear that we needed to use "File->New Project" to accomplish the final task of attaching to SForce.

I had previously researched and downloaded the JRE and Eclipse versions prior to install (~15 minutes).

Some info worth sharing:
+ Eclipse.org says they'll vouch for JRE5. Force IDE supports JRE5+. We went with 1.6 (JRE6?) and have not experienced any issues with this configuration (yet).
+ Downloaded Eclipse 3.3.2 IDE for Java Developers
+ Originally unzipped the IDE to a temp downloads directory thinking Eclipse.exe was the installer. It's not. I'm now running the IDE directly from something like c:\temp\downloads\eclipse-java-europa-winter-win32. I would advise selecting a more permanent target when unzipping.
+ Using Windows XP. No idea what challenges there may be with Vista.
+ The Force IDE installation screenshots and installation instructions were very helpful. Following them literally is advised. Would be even better if this article linked to a "Hello World" article on how to set up your first project (We just poked around a blank workspace for 5 minutes not knowing what to do next within the empty Force perspective... perhaps spoiled by Eclipse's default greeting window with overly obvious help and tutorial icons).

A couple Cubic Compass customers on the US East Coast are seeking Interactive Web Developers to take their i-Dialogue websites/portals to the next level.

These are full-time, onsite positions located in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and Philadelphia. See details here and here.

Those following my recent video blog entries have probably noticed a pretty concerted effort on our part to improve the user experience (UX) of our CMS.

You can pretty much single-click your way through the most common functions today as we've converted to a 3 tier UI that progressively reveals advanced features and functionality as you descend into the dialog windows.

It's amazing how many experiences we tolerate in Windows on a day to day basis. This Windows UX Ideas site has started a constructive dialogue on the topic.

(No, that's not a Salesforce Ideas site. Even though it looks identical, the author custom developed the site in PHP... very nice)

We're looking for a Web User Interface Specialist and a Web Project Manager (click on links for details).

Please send resumes to jobs@cubiccompass.com.

Kudos to James Shore on the release of his new book "The Art of Agile Development".

Jim and I spent several months together in 2001-2002 developing a Customer Portal framework for a leading on-premise CRM software package with the occasional mentoring from Ward Cunningham (inventor of the original Wiki).

From the few chapters I've read from Jim's book already, it very elegantly articulates many pragmatic principles that are centric (I believe) to delivering successful software projects, as well as tackling difficult topics such as software measurement, risk management, and compensation.

Video interview with Jim here.

Our new Director of Sales and Marketing, Jennifer Clark, has really hit the ground running and deployed a fantastic new website for www.CubicCompass.com.

Brian Rhinehart (of www.KineticShadows.com, a local parther) and Joe Garber, our resident Interactive Web Designer/Developer, played key roles in the transformation of our new image.

Some changes in our web site and overall strategy:

* RSS Feed Subscribers should update their feed to this URL. The old Blog RSS feed will continue to redirect for a few more weeks.

* www.i-dialogue.com now redirects to our main corporate website at www.cubiccompass.com. i-Dialogue continues to be the brand of our hosted suite eMarketing and Customer Experience Management solutions.

* i-Dialogue is now available in 4 editions to serve a variety of CEM needs.

"It's like trying to get a scientist working with a snowboarder"

Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray & Co equities analyst, on the pending merger of Microsoft and Yahoo!

I'm still waiting for the big one. That well coordinated campaign that starts with a 30 second commercial during the super bowl that inspires consumers to continue an online dialogue. A campaign that demonstrates true ROI and actually measures the value of a $3M investment.

Last years super bowl left me wanting, but there were some success stories. Some might say GoDaddy owes it's market position exclusively to Super Bowl advertising with a call to action that brings people online (eventually) to have some presence on the Internet super highway.

SalesGenie.com, voted worst ad of last years Super Bowl, drove 25,000 visitors to their site. They'll be back again this year with 3 more ads. Did anyone else notice the timing of Mark Israelsen's departure from Salesforce.com to head up SalesGenie starting February 1st? Looks like he'll hit the ground running.

Here are some dialogue tactics/strategies I'm hoping to see this year that convert a one-way broadcast into a two-way dialogue:

• Easy to remember domain name. Here's the pitch.... go here to learn more. That's the 30 second objective. www.GetItNow.com wants "mid 6 figures" to purchase this domain (Let me know if I can help negotiate this ). What is the value of a short, easy to remember domain if your current URL will result in higher abandonment?
• Relevant Landing Page. You just paid $3M for a 30 second ad. Please make the next step in the dialogue relevant to the upstream message. Don't just drop me on your home page.
• Immediate Gratification. The super bowl is all about entertainment. Keep the online dialogue rolling. Keep it entertaining. An interactive Flash game or video perhaps.
• Keep the First Date Simple. Need to know something about me before fulfilling an offer (such as free 30 day demo)? That's fine. But keep it simple. Why do you need more than an email address and name on our "first date"? I'm not applying for a home loan. Keep the conversion forms short and incrementally ask for more information over time.
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Keep me engaged. Continue and evolve the story. The Super Bowl ad is only the beginning. I need to go online to learn the middle..... keep the dialogue going and engage me in the ending.
• Cross Channel Boundaries. I have a mobile phone. Let me subscribe to SMS alerts as part of the dialogue. Coordinate Television, Internet, and Mobile to facilitate a dialogue.

NetSuite is filing for an IPO with plans to trade under the ticker symbol "N". This article provides the details and also puts to rest any speculation around Larry Ellison's control over the company's direction.

The $99M raised by the IPO will give NetSuite some additional fuel to compete in the on-demand CRM/Financials market. I know I'll be watching "N" closely. Our Accountants have tried the product, love it, and it's on our radar to license in '08 or '09... unless a killer Financials app shows up on the AppExchange first

Do you want a career in the Internet-based delivery of on-demand software?

Is your definition of "team building" playing WoW with Guild members? (Horde preferred. Alliance players accepted )

Do you enjoy the challenge of working with a diverse set of web development technologies, such as Flash, ASP.NET, C#, JavaScript, CSS?

Would you like to use next-generation technologies, such as Silverlight, AIR, VisualForce, and Apex?

Do you have an appreciation for test-driven design and development?

Then send your cover letter and resume to jobs@i-dialogue.com. We'd love to talk with you!

... as if there is such a thing.  Humorous video from Microsoft digital advertising group.

Paul Graham has a great article on the future of web startups that is relevant to Salesforce.com's recent partnership with Bay Partners to help fund startups on the AppExchange.

The article asks the fundamental question "Is venture capital needed to start a web company?" and Paul (A VC himself) provides an honest answer that if history is any indication, then increasingly the answer will be "no".

I've struggled with this question for several years. During the peak of the dot-com bubble I pitched ideas and working prototypes to several investors, which was really a drain of time and resources. I knew the cost of entry was low enough that qualified companies should be demonstrating real customers.... not just technology.

The beauty of today's environment is that 1-2 people can quickly implement an idea on a platform like Salesforce.com (ahem... I mean force.com), engage with real customers, deliver immediate value, and grow with little upfront capital expense (meanwhile passing this efficiency of scale onto customers at the same time).

Fortunately, our advisors and management team do not believe VC is necessary at this point. We're growing at 100%+ annually with a backlog of work and opportunities that traditional financial institutions would eagerly support via debt, but still I wonder.... why would a web startup need $5M or even $500,000 to get started today?

Of course any entrepreneur could find a use for any amount of capital, but would it be the most appropriate use and provide the greatest return to investors?

A notable point from Paul's article:

"When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage."

Lot's of new faces at i-Dialogue. See our company page for details.

People recently joining i-Dialogue include
Michael Palmer: Interactive Web Development
Mitchell Hanson: Marketing
Joseph Tjaarda: Interactive Web Development

Fake Steve Jobs has been outed by the New York Times. Bummer... let's hope the writing style doesn't change after moving to Forbes.com.

Looking for a way to enjoy the beautiful Oregon Summer evenings? Check out http://www.lunchtime.us/ (I'm hoping to start attending the Monday evening league games). Other disc golf courses in Oregon.

All the buzz around Apple Safari Web Browser for Windows got the best of me, so I ventured on a "safari" to take this Beta release for a quick test drive.

The download was only 7.97 MB. I did not opt for any add-ons or plug-ins. The install went fairly fast.

Of course, my immediate curiosity was how our web site appeared in Safari for Windows. I had no immediate complaints. All the Flash and dynamic/interactive features appeared to work with no problems. There were just a couple layout and formatting issues I noticed.


The use of gel buttons on the page slider and web forms are a nice (and I guess expected) touch. The marketing emphasis on performance is not overblown. While I did not conduct any measurable tests, I did notice a difference in page load time compared to IE7 on several sites.

But things started to turn sour when I actually tried to use Safari for productivity tasks, like Google Premier Apps and Salesforce.com CRM.



The amount of memory consumed started to increase during my Salesforce session, even with only one tab open. IE7 seems to stabilize around 30MB for many of my routine web tasks. Safari quickly shot up to 90MB for similar tasks.

My productivity is very dependent on the ability to toggle between tabs using CTRL+TAB in IE. The equivalent in Safari CTRL+{ and CTRL+} was not only a stumbling block to learn, but didn't even work.

Bottom line? This *is* a beta release and I had beta expectations. But I was pleasantly surprised and will plan on making Safari a standard component of our web hosting and validation test framework. I may even make Safari my "daily driver" once the memory and tab toggling issues are resolved.

Perhaps it's time for me to start seriously considering a Mac. Every objection I've ever had to purchasing a Mac seems to have vanished in the past 2 days as Steve Jobs has announced several new features that will be in Mac OS X Leopard.

 Safari Web Browser for Windows. Wow. Apple plans to use iTunes downloads as a trojan horse for installing Safari on Windows, and with 1 Million downloads of iTunes per day I think they have a good chance of increasing market share.

Did Steve also point out that Safari is faster than IE and Firefox? Watchout!

 Parallels and VMWare will both support virtualization for running Windows apps on Mac.

 One product. One price. (Here's a subtle parody at Vista's multiple versions).

 But the real deal closer? Electronic Arts will launch Tiger Woods PGA Tour '08 for Mac. I'm sold...

It's official. The old "ball and chain" of hosting on-premise applications is now over. We converted the last of our in-house applications to on-demand and can now access 100% of our applications anytime, on-demand, from anywhere in the world. Absolutely no servers running in-house.

This includes:

• Email and Calendar Scheduling (Google Premier Apps)
• Financials (Quickbooks Online)
• CRM (Salesforce)
• Source Code Management (CVS Dude)
• Issue and Project Management (Trac and Gemini)

I guess we'll find out on Tuesday just how integrated our Salesforce CRM and Google Apps will be.

Great exchange here between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at a Wall Street Journal event. Even with the inherent competition, manifested in the "I'm a PC... I'm a Mac" commercials, you can still sense the mutual respect between these two.

(Off Topic) Somehow I never envisioned this CD I recorded several years ago would be described as a "Rare - Out of Print - Mint CD" on eBay.

I'd like to thank all 5 of my fans for hanging on to their copies for so long. I have 750 more copies in my attic if anyone is interested 

 

It always astonishes me to hear people defend the need to manage corporate information internally, yet they outsource the most sensitive data of all... their paycheck!

For example, here is one persons response to replacing their Exchange email server with a Google solution:

"Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.

These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT. There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution.

In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid."

My experience has been 4 out 5 of these companies already outsource their payroll to someone like ADP. Ahhh... the irony.

I'm starting to wonder if Nicholas Carr's assertion that the IT Emperor has no clothes is true. Corporate America is entering an era of operational innovation, not feature innovation, and operational innovation requires managing your IT services as you would your electric and water bills; repeatable, reliable, and managed by specialists.

There is a definite fear of looking incompetent if you suggest outsourcing something as fundamental as Email or CRM to an outside provider, but there is no rational logic for rejecting this option.

Shai has announced he is leaving SAP. Shai's story is an inspiring one.. Entrepreneur builds portal software start-up company, company is acquired by large established software company, entrepreneur stays at large company and changes the company culture to embrace the web and web services.

Does Shai's departure signal that SAP is just too entrenched in annual maintenance fees and on-premise software solutions for any one person to turn the ship? Shai's post-SAP ambition to change the climate may prove relatively easier than changing SAP

Salesforce.com recently announced AppSpace, an extension to Salesforce CRM that allows Salesforce users to collaborate with customers through a Salesforce hosted portal. It appears to be the existing Customer Self-Service portal, but with some additional features.

AppSpace exposes a powerful feature that we've been exploiting for awhile, which is the ability to publish custom objects through the web.

AppSpace is probably comparable to a small subset of features found in i-Dialogue (namely the My Account page) and I'm sure many Enterprise and Ultimate Edition customers will take SForce up on the $995 per month offer. Once our certification is complete, we should be able to provide similar functionality to Professional Edition customers at an SMB rate.

I was a little disappointed that the base offering is limited to 200 users, which limits its ability to be a distribution platform for our Lead centric applications, such as Event Management, or HR job posting/application modules. Also, I'm not making the MySpace connection. Isn't MySpace a place where people create their own pages and personalize them for the anonymous community to consume and reference (aka social networking)? Or am I just showing my ignorance of MySpace? I have to admit I'm not too hip on this.

What will the actual domain name (URL) be for these App Spaces? Can customers create a sub-domain, such as portal.domain.com that refers to their Salesforce hosted portal? Or will it be a Salesforce.com URL? The ability to customize the colors for header, body, and footer may be a limitation for many Marketing departments seeking to offer an integrated, fully branded web experience using their own domain name.

I'm guessing the Discussion Forums functionality are being provided by Jive Software (another local Portland software company), which isn't a bad deal considering their forum server alone starts around $10K (which maybe explains the $995 per 200 customer seat license model?).

Finally, the "End of the Portal" touch by SF Marketing in the press release seemed a little over the top. I think the real value and long-term potential of AppSpace was largely buried in the PR.

I would of course be remiss not to point out that a $995 per month budget on i-Dialogue would get you "the works" for unlimited Leads and Contacts; including Content Management, Email Marketing, Forums, Knowledge Base, 3-5 live support licenses; all on a 99.99% uptime dedicated virtual server. But I digress... Salesforce customers are an intelligent bunch that will ultimately figure out the right solutions to their problems.

Jitendra Gupta has a thoughtful perspective over at Read/Write web on "How to Build a Profitable Startup By Knowing Your Users Better" (based on a NY Times article). He challenges the age old notion of the CPM (Cost Per Thousand) advertising model and suggests that simply logging the number of unique visitors to a site is not enough. You need to know who they are and present more relevant ads.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I would raise the stakes even higher and encourage ad-based startups to differentiate themselves from the pack by only charging for qualified Leads and closed-won Opportunities, aka Cost-Per-Action (CPA) or Performance-Based Compensation (PBC) models.

Update: Check-out Googles Pay-Per-Action Beta as an example of CPA.

Many marketers would shy away from PBC, but when I see the number of qualified leads our customers process through their i-Dialogue sites, I often wonder if I'm in the wrong business.

A PBC ad startup would essentially build their site on top of a CRM system and provide their advertisers with real-time Lead and Opportunity management features and reports. Rather than paying $20 CPM, an advertiser would pay $5 per qualified Lead and $10 per Closed-Won Opportunity (or whatever monetary value you want to associate with these measurements).

The definition of "qualified lead" certainly varies across industries, but the most basic definition typically involves:

+ Legitimate Email Address or Phone Number
+ Has a need for product or service within the next 12 months

The web is a 2 way communication channel and should not be subject to the old 1-way broadcast models of television and radio. Yes, more risk is assumed by site operators who adopt a PBC model, but the upside is greater too. Make sites easier to use and display relevant calls-to-action and the result will be more self-identified web visitors and won opportunities.

I noticed one of my Windows laptops did not auto update its time per the new Daylight Saving Time (DST) policy in the US, so I deferred to Microsoft's time.microsoft.com server to update my clock.

But interestingly enough, it did not update the hour. Only the minutes and seconds. Very weird.

Not exactly a DST crisis. I just had to manually reset the clock.

I'm having a Sharpen the Saw weekend, mostly installing and configuring an array of Microsoft 2007 products, such as Office, Project, and Visio. OneNote 2007 is one application I never gave much thought about, until now. I decided to install and give this application a try, and to my surprise, found it very useful. The best way to describe OneNote is "Word on Steroids", except it's not for publishing. There's no Save button. You can click anywhere in a workspace and just start typing or pasting images as notes.

Need to know how much 500 units cost at $95 per product? Just type in 500*95= and OneNote fills in the rest. You can embed task and TODO checkboxes on any page, which are then visible at global scope. Search is pretty powerful too. I'm still working my way through the features, but I've added a password protected page for all my personal passwords (3DES encrypted), created tabs for all functional areas of business, and sub-pages for individual projects, clients, employees, and partners. If you use matrices as an organizational or management model, then you'll feel at home with the layout. As I got further down the path of actually using OneNote, I paused with concern wondering how much memory this application was using (I quit using Outlook and Adobe Acrobat months ago because they had become too bloated). A quick review of my running processes showed that OneNote was only using 42MB. Cool. It can stay. Finally, I wanted to use my OneNote files from home and work so started reviewing the sharing options. Here's where OneNote, and Microsoft Office products in general, start to show their weakness. Sharing and collaborating on OneNote notebooks using an internal file network works like a breeze, but my home/office scenario requires sharing these files over the Internet, such as WebDAV or HTTPS connection, neither of which OneNote supports conveniently. Here's where OneNote could have really delivered a hybrid SaaS experience by offering to host the OneNote files for me on a Microsoft server in the cloud (without assuming I could, or wanted to install SharePoint and manage the server internally). I ended up solving the file sharing issue using one of our public file servers (SVN), but that's my only real gripe. Overall this is a very powerful application that I suspect will make it's way into my daily array of productivity tools.

I've updated our white paper on portal security with a new section on securing AJAX gateways to account for what I perceive to be a growing concern with interactive web and portal applications.

In layman's terms, Web 2.0 web applications achieve new levels of interactivity by employing a programming technique that dynamically updates web pages without actually having to re-render the whole page. But these applications use a "back door" to communicate with web servers that, when left insecure, can expose data.

Not to be unnecessarily alarming, be the next major wave of compromises will likely occur as a result of AJAX exploits; as traditional attack vectors, such as buffer overflows and SQL injection, become less common.

I'm really excited to announce that Jim Allen has joined the i-Dialogue team as our Technical Director. Jim brings a diverse set of skills to i-Dialogue in multimedia design, eCRM, web portal development, C#, ASP.NET, and mobile application design and development. Jim is heading up a new Test Driven Development environment that will help i-Dialogue mature into a world class, high quality relationship marketing platform.

Finally, I'm not the only golfer in the office. Now we just need some weather over 60F

The rumors are over. Google Apps are here and I'm very happy to be moving my consumer Google Docs & Spreadsheets over to this new service and sharing calendars with our employees and extended network. I experienced 99.9%+ uptime during the beta period, so I'm comfortable using Google Apps Pro for company-wide communication and collaboration.

The open API is just icing on the cake. Time to rethink my Google Docs for AppExchange app and take it to the next level.

A few days ago I commented on how i-Dialogue form validation may help to prevent Web-to-Lead Spam. Well, that exercise led to experimenting with other validation rules that may be of interest to eMarketing power users.

Note: i-Dialogue forms use an age old syntax for validating form fields called Regular Expressions. It's alright if the following validation rules look cryptic or bizarre (they look that way to me too ). But these expressions pack a lot of punch and can be very powerful.

To use these expressions, simply enter Edit mode on any Text or TextArea type question and paste the expression into the Validation Expression textbox.

Basic Email Validation:
[\w\.-]+(\+[\w-]*)?@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+
Ensures email address conforms to basic name@domain.com format.

Consumer Email Exclusion:
[\w\.-]+(\+[\w-]*)?@(?!gmail|yahoo|msn|hotmail|googlemail|freenet|rediffmail|aol)([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+
Ensures email addresses are not from any consumer (free) email ISPs. Great for B2B marketing campaigns.

Positive Decimal:
^[0-9][0-9]*(\.[0-9]*)?$
Ensures entered value is a positive decimal.

URL:
(?\w+):\/\/(?<Domain>[\w.]+\/?)\S*
Ensures web address is the proper format.

Date (DD/MM/YYYY):
((0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01]))[/|-](0[1-9]|1[0-2])[/|-]((?:\d{4}|\d{2}))
Ensures date is in DD/MM/YYYY format.

Checkfree has acquired Corillian, my previous employer, for $245M. When I joined Corillian in the late 90's, the Founder had just purchased the company back from Checkfree after a previous acquisition in the mid 90's. There were about 25 employees and annual revenue of $300,000 (and lots of Angel/Venture Capital).

The earlier buy out terms are probably buried somewhere in Edgar, but I recall the earn out called for a ~6% royalty paid to Checkfree for a few years, which weighed on the EPS for awhile.

Very interesting (and surprising) news. I wish all the folks at Corillian the best.

Here were my Super Bowl favorites:

Nationwide: Life Comes at You Fast (Federline)
Bud Light: Hitchhiker
Sprint: Connectile Disfunction

TV and Radio marketing are traditionally all about one-way messaging, but there were some creative attempts to give the consumer a voice and interact via the Internet.

Several commercials had an internet URL in the closing of each ad, but failed to continue the dialogue and close the loop on the marketing message with a relevant follow-up message or call to action.

For example, www.afterthekiss.com, a tagline URL at the end of a Snickers commercial just redirected to www.snickers.com leaving a cryptic cookie on my desktop to (presumably) track my campaign source. But there was nothing relevant or interesting on the landing page, nor was there any call-to-action or offer, so I simply abandoned the session.

I guess a single page view was a sufficient response for Snickers B2C campaign. For a $2.6 Million 30 second ad, I would think there would be more aggressive attempts at 1:1 marketing and truly closing the loop.

CRM and Relationship Marketing platforms have lots of features, but their implementation should not be made complicated for complexities sake.

Occam's Razor says "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one". Simple solutions in a complex world. That is the real challenge.

Reference: http://www.uoregon.edu/~ftepfer/SchlFacilities/TireSwingTable.html

Found this one out the hard way by opening up a Word document, only to be greeted with the message "Beta Period Has Expired. Content is Locked".

I'm sure there was something in the Office 2007 Beta EULA fine print that warned me about this before I clicked on "I Agree".

Anyway, off I go to upgrade (ASAP!). The new ribbon user interface really does make me more productive and I've grown fond of the many new Word templates.

If you're a Web Office suite advocate using web-based mail, calendars, and CRM, you may just want to get the bare essentials of Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) in what they now call the Office 2007 Home and Student Edition for about $125 USD. (Note: this is not the same as Office Academic pricing. The fact that 70% of consumers suddenly become 'Academics' when purchasing Office is a whole different story ) I really don't need Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, or the myriad other Office apps available in the business oriented Office 2007 Editions.

The one big downside to using Office 2007 is the new document extensions and formats are not backwards compatible with other versions of Office, so my productivity is actually slightly decreased by having to "Save As..." previous versions of Excel/Word everytime I publish or intend to collaborate on a document.

Update: It turns out Office Home and Student 2007 is "not for use in any commercial, nonprofit, or revenue-generating business activity". So businesses will need to go with Office Standard or Small Business at minimum. I can't even begin to imagine the number of hours Microsoft Marketing put into designing these SKUs and feature matrices.

Google Spreadsheets are great, but SmartSheets are better for project management. I'm in the process of moving my projects over now.

Have you ever wondered where key Onyx CRM employees went after the M2M acquisition? Check out www.SmartSheet.com.

Congratulations to Server Intellect, our server hosting partner, for attaining Microsoft Gold Partner status.

It's reassuring to know all our hosted web solutions are monitored 24x7 by a competent team of server and database professionals.

I can't help but wonder how much of Vista could actually have been installed via the Internet in a true "Software-as-a-Service" (SaaS) fashion via Microsoft's auto-update mechanism.

Microsoft's Windows releases have historically been built around the big bang event, but there are signs this model no longer works. Future windows releases will almost certainly be "dripped" onto PCs as the base PC infrastructure has become an un-differentiated commodity.

Consumers no longer see value in a new operating system. They want applications and features. Not like in 1995 when I eagerly waited for stellar new Windows 95 features like "Preemptive Multi-tasking!!" and "386 Protected Mode!!".

In my mind, high-quality automatic updates are a "service" that I would be willing to pay for on a monthly basis. It's funny that I would take pause to purchase Vista at $299, but would probably gladly pay $10 per month to incrementally receive new features, patches, and updates over the Internet (assuming OneCare Live was bundled).

The Windows auto-update capability should not be underestimated. It is a very strategic asset in an Internet enabled world. Microsoft is already using it as leverage to convert pirated PCs to genuine licenses ("Don't like that virus on your machine? Redeem yourself for only $49 and we'll wash away the pain!").

The bottom line? I'll get Vista with my new PCs when I buy them from Dell, but it's doubtful I'll upgrade any existing PCs.

When it comes to managing eMarketing and portal projects, I've always been conflicted about which tools to use for the job.

Traditional "Waterfall" projects involve up front planning using Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Gantt charts, and involve resource leveling; whereas Agile web development practices use CRC cards, white boards, Wiki's, PostIt Notes, and are keen on lot's of direct customer-developer interaction.

I prefer to use both styles and recently discovered a way to strike a balance between traditional and agile project management using Google Spreadsheets as a project management tool.

Google Spreadsheets (let's call them "GS" for short) are basically a web version of Microsoft Excel built right into the Google platform. I can create spreadsheets using a web browser and send links to other people to view or edit the same spreadsheet.

My GS project template has 5 sheets named "Requirements", "Tasks", "Issues", "Metrics", and "Tests" that closely relate to Agile best practices and principles.

"Requirements" are customer generated "stories" of how the software should behave.

"Tasks" are the individual supporting tasks involved to deliver the requirements. I have a column for estimated hours and a calculated costs column based on a fixed hourly rate.

"Issues" are the inevitable bugs and clean-up items involved with implementing a project. The customer is encouraged to provide feedback on this sheet.

"Metrics" are used to log measurements, typically on a temporal scale such as 2 week iterations. Traditional measurements like "Resource utilization", "Estimate vs Actual" or Agile "Velocity" metrics may be collected.

"Tests" are like Requirements, except they are used to document quantifiable software outcomes, such as "If a customer is from the U.K., the purchase price should include a VAT tax of X%". Example product prices and expected results are defined in the sheet. I envision integrating FIT with this sheet for integrated testing.

To be truly agile, I need to be able to quickly re-prioritize requirements, tasks, and issues based on day-to-day project changes. To do this, each sheet has a Priority column that can be used for sorting rows up or down.

What makes this solution really rock is the ability to publish this spreadsheet online and share it with others. For example, I can easily publish a link to the Project Template you see in the screenshot above.

If I've shared the spreadsheet with a co-worker or customer and they login, I get a pop-up telling me they are online and we can use Google's web-based instant messenger to chat about the project.

Changes are reflected in near real-time and Google does a great job of warning you about potential conflicts if 2 people are updating the same cells.

What if I'm managing 15 concurrent projects and don't have the time to poll each spreadsheet for a status? No problem. GS has a built-in RSS feed that let's me subscribe to spreadsheet activity and let's me quickly see which projects have been updated.



Google's ubiquitous global presence allows our distributed project teams to stay in sync on a master record. This kind of dependence requires the occasional export to CSV or Excel XLS as a back-up measure.

This approach is not a silver-bullet for all the pains of project management, and it does have some down-sides.

Users have all or nothing permission to view or edit the spreadsheet. This means all the project costs (rolled up based on estimates) are visible to internal resources and Customers. This is not a problem in our environment because we have an open, fixed-bid project approach where the customers know what the cost is upfront and Developers are required to provide the estimates (and understand the project costs).

Another security issue is the fact that Google is still largely regarded as a consumer platform in the eyes of many, even though they've made great strides in delivering business quality services. Again, back it up frequently. There is no service level agreement.
 
You'll need a Gmail account to create spreadsheets and so will the people you're collaborating with. This is a free service. Google only requires you to help them with their viral marketing and identity management model.
 
No graphical charting. Not a requirement for agile anyway, but would be nice in the Metrics sheet for time-series analysis.

I took a template approach to creating the initial spreadsheet, but there is no "copy" or "clone" feature (at least that I can see). It takes some finagling to start a new project using a previously exported XLS template.

The "Labeling" concept takes some getting used to. The spreadsheets aren't stored in hierarchical folders. Google encourages you to create as many documents as you want and use customized Labels to tag or archive your docs.

Search does not appear to be supported in the current version (not that I was accustomed to it in Excel). But while you're working in Google it just seems natural to want to use search.

I suspect there will be some Salesforce integration in the near future, which will give me the ability to relate spreadsheets to Opportunities or Accounts. This would be a welcome addition to replace the gap created when the guys at iRows moved to Google.

Pattern languages provide a great structure for defining solutions to complex problems, and there is probably no greater complex management task than customer relationships.

Customer Interaction Patterns is an interesting perspective on customer interactions from a deconstructionist / technologist point of view.


Figure 1. Relationships Among Customer Interaction Patterns

Copyright © 1998 AG Communication Systems Corporation
Permission is granted to copy for the PLoP98 Conference

As I write this, OSCON is going on here in Portland, Oregon and the list of speakers and sessions gets better every year.

Open Source is going mainstream and is rapidly becoming a viable and sustainable business model, therefore the average attendee no longer looks like the stereotypical Birkenstock wearing, pony-tailed developer (ok... so I still occasionally wear my Birks  ).

Sure, development still dominates the discussion, but there is a very necessary and welcome balance of legal, business, sales, and operational discussions.

It's quite clear to me that Open Source and SaaS will be the dominant growth markets in software for the next 10 years. Maybe not so much in desktop and consumer apps, but definitely in Enterprise software and infrastructure.

The growth in open source is actually in the 'product halo' and not so much from the actual software. Support, consulting, documentation, hosting, testing.... the list goes on.

I wouldn't be surprised if hosting costs got so cheap that the 2 models converged to become "Free and Open Source Software Services" (FOSSS) with the premise being a vendor will host the software for you (for free) and only charge for training, implementation, and consulting (perhaps via remote desktop or through channel partners).

The downside to the programmable web and web service APIs is that the switching costs will continue to get lower. Switching your Email account, calendar apps, and even ERP/CRM systems will be as simple as switching your phone carrier today. FOSSS vendors will gladly help you move your data around for free in exchange for potential long-term services revenue.

Business software will always be complex simply because the compliance, accounting, and tax rules will not change significantly. Therefore, the services will always have more value over the software, especially if the software can be commodified.

Could your customer support portal use some flowcharts and diagrams to help customers trouble shoot problems? If you're in the Hi-Tech or manufacturing sectors, the answer is probably yes.

Visio has been my tool of choice for several years, but today I stumbled on a web-based flow chart designer called Gliffy that really impressed me.

I evaluated Gliffy by recreating the channel lead registration workflow I published a few days ago, and as you can see from the image below, the result isn't too shabby for 10 minutes of effort.



Gliffy can host the JPEG images for you. I can easily envision using Gliffy in customer portal knowledge base articles to help with trouble shooting.

I also use Visio when chatting with customers on the phone to help remind me of a customers business process requirements or campaign workflows. With Gliffy, I can simply email customers a link to these flow chart sketches to get some quick feedback.

The site says it's in Beta, but you would have to have some pretty high expectations to even notice. The workspace behaves and reacts just like a desktop application. Even the CTRL-Z undo key combination works! Although, I did find it more useful to rely on frequent saves and versioning as a wiser recovery option.

Gliffy definitely follows the Pareto Principle of determining which 20% of desktop features provide 80% of the value.

Very cool.... I give Gliffy a big thumbs up.

For those who are interested; the i-Dialogue change log can be found here.

Jennifer makes an observation that she'd like to see a collaborative online scheduling service that supports a customers ability to make appointments online with the business owners ability to publish available dates, times, and resources.

Funny you should mention this Jennifer, as I was just contemplating this service myself. In addition, I think the service should send automated appointment reminders. I know my Dentist and Accountant could use such a service as "no shows" cost them money.

All of the basic components are available to do this (we did something similar a couple years ago for a Healthcare Patient Self-Service Portal). Maybe it's time to seriously revisit this solution within a Salesforce.com context?

I was working with a Salesforce account hosted on their new NA3 instance (NA=North America) when it suddenly stopped working. No.... I'm not blogging to complain about the brief outage, but it did give me a moment to reflect on various technology inflection points over the past several years and their likely quarks that were dutifully suffered, knowing that things could only improve.

Inflection Points and their related detracting comments:

1) "Use the public utilities for electricity? No way. What happens when they go down or the power is not clean?" (OK. Maybe a little before my time)
2) "Personal computers? Those are just toys."
3) "Graphical User Interfaces? I can type faster than I mouse. Real programmers don't use GUIs."
4) "Windows in business? Rebooting from the 'blue screen of death' 10 times a day will actually make you less productive."
5) "The Internet is too slow and limited to just web forms. Client-server business apps are much better."
6) "Don't the frequent Salesforce.com outages bring your business to a halt? I wouldn't run a business on hosted software."

Of course, the detractor making the final comment is viewing their latest pay stub online from a Windows business laptop that is plugged into the public power grid.

A quote from this article caught my eye:

"If SAP sells a system today for $1 million, they recognize the million dollars on the day they sell it and it goes into the revenue for that quarter," he said. "If they were to sell that same system as a software as a service, they may get $20,000 per month for the next 10 years."

Hmmmm... my experience with $1 million+ ERP solutions is that a significant portion of that revenue is in Professional Services, which must be recognized incrementally anyway.

Also, the larger ERP vendors are deriving the majority of their revenue from annual maintenance contracts, not new license sales. So they essentially have to resell their solution to the customer every year, creating a volatile environment for forecasting future revenue.

Yes... a month-to-month SaaS model means that a customer can leave at their convenience anytime. Is this what vendors are concerned about? The benefit of this model is that it drives innovation, higher quality of service, and forces vendors to deliver a dollar of value for every dollar billed.

Having spent the past 12-18 months working with Salesforce.com and other web services, I can't help but wonder if i-Dialogue's core competency is drifting away from Software Development and gravitating more towards Systems Integration (SI). Or is it a combination of both?

Designing and developing solutions using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) requires a certain external locus of control that SIs are more accustomed to, whereas traditional Software Development is more about internal control.

Does SOA inherently force a balance of these two skill sets, or is it just the "portal hub" nature of our solutions that require these skills?

I must admit that having the resources of thousands of other Developers and solutions at my disposal is a much more attractive option than attempting to re-invent everything myself. I love "looking out" to the solutions available and leveraging our core portal integration platform to bring multiple applications and services together.

It's all about the "whole solution" concept. It's irresponsible, in my opinion, for SMB business software vendors, to require clients to take their solutions across the finish line. The IT staff at many companies are already over worked. I believe the entire deployment process of an on-demand solution should be easily managed at the business decision makers level within an organization.

The art in SOA systems integration, I believe, is in writing code that completely hides the seams. Perhaps I'll itemize the lessons learned later in this blog, such as my conformance criteria for single-sign-on, data types, ETL, IDS monitoring, user interface, SOAP interface, and database persistence.

OK.... I think I get it now... I've fielded 3 calls in the past week asking about i-Dialogue Live Chat. What is the integration with Salesforce? How much is it? How does it integrate with our current site?

The original intent was to include chat as an add-on to i-Dialogue Suite, but clearly people would like to see this as an independent solution.

So, here's the roadmap for the next release:

• i-Dialogue Live Chat will become an independent solution and published on the AppExchange
• You can add a "Chat Now" image or link to your own web site
• Chat visitors automatically become Leads in Salesforce (assuming Email is collected)
• Chat transcripts are associated with Lead records.
• Administrators can grant Salesforce users with Live Chat Operator privileges
• Chat will be independently priced with a per user monthly subscription

For .NET Developers, I recommend checking out Absolute Live Support (ALS). Our chat solution is based on ALS... we're providing the systems integration to Salesforce and on-demand hosting through an agreement with ALS's Developers.

Bill Gates announced today that he will step down from a full-time role at Microsoft over the next 2 years. So what is the impact?

I believe the subsequent promotion of Ray Ozzie to Chief Software Architect signals that Microsoft is sincerely focused on web services. Had Gates successor been someone too tied to the Windows OS or Office, I would have been concerned that they weren't aligned for the upcoming "Web 3.0".

So kudos to Bill.... I agree with Steve Ballmer when he says Bill Gates will probably become the greatest Philanthropist in recorded history.

Best of luck Bill!

That might be what "The Dalles" Oregon is renamed to once these Google data centers go online and start reving up the local economy. The datacenters, each of which are about the size of a football field, are about 90 minutes away from our office in Portland, OR.

Some "pros" about this location:
+ Plenty of hydropower. No chance of brown outs
+ Direct access to Columbia river for cooling servers
+ Sits on a dark fiber loop that has gone unused for years
+ Low year round avg temperature relative to California
+ Within an hour (or so) of major airport
+ Within a couple hours of Intel fabrication plants

Some "cons" about this location:
- The local hiring pool knows a lot more about windsurfing than computers
- Gets isolated during Winter ice storms (salting the roads to Portland is not allowed)
- Windy!
- No gourmet chefs
- You won't find any O'Reilly books in the local bookstore
- Really really close to Mount St. Helens

I've run the gamut on net neutrality, sympathizing (and even empathizing) with every view point, but I'm now of the opinion that everyone's best interests can be served without any legislative regulation.

Why? Because I think an open and free market will simply take care of telco's that create Internet "slow lanes".

I can just imagine the marketing campaign now with a Tortoise and Hare making their way down an information super highway:

"Is your Internet access provider moving you into the slow lane?
Signup for XYZ Internet access today. No slow lanes!"


Now, there is one catch. What happens if there isn't a competitive market? A telco owning a majority stake in the Internet backbone infrastructure could effectively monopolize the network and successfully create a multi-tiered Internet.

In this case, existing monopoly and fair competition laws would address this issue, as was done in 1984 with the Baby Bells.

Google Spreadsheets appears to be carefully crafted at both the Marketing and Engineering levels.

First off, you need a Gmail account to use spreadsheets (correct me if I'm wrong on this), which feeds well into Google's identity management strategy.

Secondly, you can only share Google spreadsheets with other Gmail users, forcing you to invite others into the inner circle to view and edit the spreadsheets.

Third, Google obviously has the future option of publishing AdWords in spreadsheets, calendars, and writely, leading to more PPC revenue and growth.

It's a viral and virtuous cycle, but the privacy and security questions still remain.... how much are you willing to trust your spreadsheets on Google?

I might be tempted to email quotes to customers, but probably wouldn't pull the trigger at this early stage.

I signed up for Google Spreadsheets beta launch this morning and received an invite to test it this afternoon.

All I can say is "Holy Cow" .... simply amazing.

Service Level Agreements (or SLAs) for Software-as-a-Service models (SaaS), as it turns out, can be quite tricky. On one hand you need to address the customers right to "get what they paid for" and on the other hand you need to limit the businesses exposure to risk so that it stays operational through good times and bad.

There's really no precedent in the industry for these types of SLAs. Salesforce.com does not have a SLA, while others guarantee 99.9% uptime and credit claims. With such extremes and lack of precedent, where does one begin to craft a SLA?

Firstly, i-Dialogue is a software-only company. We've outsourced the network and server infrastructure to a secure datacenter operation that lives, breathes, and sleeps with details that software developers don't need to worry about (like which RAID level configuration to use on database server disk drives).

This infrastructure provider takes great pride in their 99.9% uptime guarantee and offers a SLA with credit claims, so it's only fair to pass this on to our customers, albeit in a pro-rated form.

Secondly, i-Dialogue portals integrate with other 3rd party services, such as Salesforce.com and Google.com. Our services will continue to work just fine if these 3rd parties go down for planned/unplanned maintenance, but service oriented SLAs must be crafted in a way to reflect this.

Finally, there are lots of layers to SaaS applications and traditional Internet key performance indicators (KPIs), such as Page Response time, can't be tied to just one layer of responsibility. For example, a 10 second page response time with 1,000 concurrent users is a clear indication that the network or hardware service layer needs to be upgraded. But with only 10 concurrent users, this would very clearly be an application layer problem.

Our current SLA is a step in the right direction. I believe it conveys the right message to both customers and employees that we're vigilant in maintaining quality services and solutions.

But there is room for improvement and more balance; not only in our SLA, but the industry as a whole. Do you have any thoughts on fair KPIs for SLAs? Let me know.

Here's an internal marketing campaign that didn't make the final cut... but I thought it was pretty clever.
The idea was to differentiate interactive customer portals from traditional "brochureware" sites.

bro-chure-ware (br-shr-wâr) noun Brochureware refers to Web sites or pages that are produced by taking an organization's printed brochure and translating it directly to the Web without regard for the possibilities of the new medium. In extreme cases, all the copy in the brochure will be used as-is and visual images will be copied as well. The result will almost always be static and uninteresting. While a Web site can be thought of as an "online brochure," most designers suggest taking advantage of the Web's interactive and dynamic capabilities, including hypertext, built-in programming, and streaming video. Reference: Whatis.com definition for "brochureware" Need to upgrade your web site? Try i-dialogue.com!

Check out our latest open positions:
Systems Administrator
Inside Sales Representative

No particular location (yes... this means you can work from home, or even Starbucks, if you have the self-management skills). Ideal candidates will have excellent online communication and collaboration skills.

Inside Sales Rep should be able to shift their 40 hours around various customers working hours and requirements.

Sys Admin requires a more regular 9am-6pm Pacific schedule.

I've been looking around for a slick 'Web 2.0' type of To-Do list for jotting down ad-hoc thoughts and ideas and stumbled across a couple useful utilities.

www.tadalist.com is a nice online To Do list from the folks at www.backpack.com . Adding a shortcut link to my browsers toolbar made this about a 90% solution for what I was looking for.

Then I found Google Notebook at http://www.google.com/notebook/ . It's an active plug-in control that let's you right click on any text and select "Note this" which adds the text to your private or public notebook.

Granted, it's not a list organizer, but it was a serendipitous little discovery that also meets about 90% of my ad-hoc note and list making needs. The ability to move notes up and down relative to each other would be a nice improvement.

I typically don't go out of my way to endorse software products and tools, but in this case I think MindJet MindManager deserves special mention. As the name implies, MindJet's core competency is in helping people to manage brainstorming sessions, but goes way beyond that.

Most brainstorming sessions are done on white boards and represent a discrete point in time. Maybe a recorder jots down the ideas before all is washed away. But the momentum of the brainstorming keeps going, yet the white board no longer exists to reflect the evolved ideas.

Surely there must be a software solution to this... and there is.

MindJet preserves your mind maps and provides an easy to use interface for repeatedly evolving and refining your maps.

Tools like Visio and Project are great, but they tend to impose more linear thinking. MindJet "nodes" dynamically readjust their positions as new ideas are entered so that you're free to pursue thinking in any direction without the overhead of reformatting or rearranging existing work.

And when you're ready to publish your MindMap there are export utilities to all Office applications. There's even a free MindJet Map reader that is similar to Adobe's business model where you pay to publish, but it's free to view.

I really love the ability to insert little task complete checkboxes that increment 25% every time you click on them (except towards the end where they realistically increment about 10%-15%).

I also find the priority icons extremely useful for figuring out how to "do first things first".

There's an interesting phenomenon going on in Marketing these days. The accessibility of the Internet and the creativity of consumers have created an environment where customers are in control of several brands, and the smart marketers are just "rolling with it".

General Motors, Sony, MasterCard, and Home Depot have all empowered consumers to create their own commercials for re-broadcasting. Sometimes with unflattering results.

But GMs willingness to host these commercials and not delete them (at least the ones in good taste) actually is a net gain in terms of creating a dialogue with consumers. Afterall, these consumers were already venting their frustrations outside the realm of GMs control. At least GM is given a chance to show they acknowledge consumer concerns, even if they aren't addressing them.

I think it does disarm an activist consumers position considerably if their opinion can be freely expressed as a comment in a companies blog or discussion forum. Again, it's better to be the first to know instead of hearing through the grapevine on a consumers blog that they had a bad customer service experience and would not recommend the service to anyone else.

Dan Weiden touched on this topic briefly during a keynote he delivered recently here in Oregon. As the Architect behind the Nike brand, he's had an interesting evolutionary perspective on this topic. His reaction was more facially expressed than articulated.... but I could tell it was creating quite a creative challenge in the larger B2C space.

The principles behind i-Dialogue ("Internet Dialogues") embrace this trend, but it's interesting to see the relatively slower adoption of online customer empowerment in the B2B market. True, the customers tend to be a bit more professional, but still.... wouldn't you rather provide 4-6 dialogue options through your own web site and resolve customer issues one-on-one instead of waiting for consumers to communicate with you via their own public blogs and other discussion forums?

It's worth noting at least once in this blog the difference between a "360 view of the customer" and the "i-Dialogue 360" methodology.

I'll use both terms occasionally and they do share a common term.

A "360 view of the customer" refers to a holistic view of a singular customer, while "i-Dialogue 360" refers to a holistic view of all your customers within the context of your customer lifecyle.

A "360 view of the customer" typically implies integrating front and back office systems, whereas "i-Dialogue 360" is usually a front-office process for managing customer relationships.

Three things keep me up at night since transitioning to a "Software as a Service" (SaaS) model.

#1 Data Security
#2 Reliability
#3 Data Quality

Since I prefer to regularly get 6-8 hours of sleep per night, these risks must be addressed head on. Here are some strategies that I've found useful to address these issues:

Security

I've written extensively on the subject of securing enterprise portals, and all of these best practices and checkpoints are considered in every solution we deploy.

Even if you manage to secure the entire solution, you still have new threats emerging every day. That's why we've decided to focus exclusively on the web application layer of the SaaS stack and have partnered with the security experts in hardware, network, OS, web server, and browsers to manage their own their respective areas.

Passwords, SSL, encryption, session timeouts, audit logging, blacklists, temporary lock-outs, and system alerts are just a few of the security measures in place in a customer portal application.


Reliability

Hardware malfunctions and Internet connectivity outages are a reality, but I feel comfortable knowing our data center partner is pulling the "late shift" and available to swap out SCSI drives and restore files at a moments notice, if needed.

We obviously pay a price for this infrastructure reliability, but as Nicholas Carr points out, this stratification of infrastructure and application providers makes sense since they really are 2 completely different business models.

When Salesforce.com goes down or is not available, employees are typically the only ones to notice. But when the web site or customer portal goes down, everyone notices. That's why I believe in offering multiple hosting options and configurations for our solutions.

Small and medium businesses will probably find the reliability of a shared, multi-tenant customer portal to be sufficient for their needs, while a fortune 500 company deploying a micro-site for high traffic eMarketing campaigns or sending 1,000,000 personalized emails may need the full power of 3 dedicated web servers and an isolated database to ensure 100% uptime during the campaign.

That's why our solution has been designed to be scalable and configurable for a variety of environments.


Data Quality

CRM data quality is hard enough to keep clean without outside interference from external systems. My nagging fear when initially learning the ins-and-outs of a CRM system is that the customer portal may introduce "dirty records" or overwrite more authoritative changes made by employees.

That's why we rely very heavily upon test automation tools that simulate hundreds of conditions and transactions that may occur between the customer portal and CRM system, and we validate expected results.

Unit tests (see screenshot below) are created to simulate scenarios like "What happens when a customer, via the portal, and salesperson both update a Contact record at the same time?" or "What happens if the customer portal is forced to operate autonomously for several days before re-synchronizing with Salesforce.com?".

The AppExchange has provided an order-of-magnitude increase in data quality and allows for composite solutions where speculative leads from the portal may be analyzed by data quality plug-ins from specialized vendors.

So, I no longer feel the need to invest in developing extensive de-duplication algorithms or PRIZM code lookups for our solution, because I can now find these tools on the AppExchange. And with closed-loop integration, the master customer records on Salesforce can be cleaned, updated, and available for use in eMarketing campaigns within the hour.

[Screenshot of unit testing i-Dialogue integration with Salesforce.com]

I hope my transparency has not unnecessarily alarmed you, but these are the cold hard facts that every CIO or VP of Marketing will increasingly encounter as SaaS solutions become more of a viable option for managing customer relationships.

As always, please feel free to contact me directly if you'd like more details on how security, reliability, and data quality are addressed.

With 6 customer lifecycle phases and over a dozen i-Dialogue eMarketing tools at your disposal, it can be overwhelming to know how to effectively apply the right tools and when.

The Solution Worksheet (below) simplifies this problem by providing a matrix for mapping eMarketing tools to customer needs by lifecycle phase.

When working with clients, I find it useful to sketch specific requirements and notes into the matrix. Over time the matrix will reveal some patterns; the most common of which I would refer to as "offensive" and "defensive" marketing.

Offensive marketing solutions are typical in B2C environments where the objective is to constantly make consumers aware of your product and persuade a purchase. But these campaigns treat every dialogue as if it's a first encounter with the customer.

Defensive marketing seeks to retain existing customers by segmenting the customer base and providing more personalized self-service to information. This is common in B2B environments where the sales cycle is longer, the customers are self-identifying, and there are formal support and service level agreements in place.

The solution worksheet will quickly reveal any gaps in your overall relationship marketing strategy and help guide the discussion towards these gaps.

You can click on the image below, download, and print on legal size paper to help design your own solutions.

The i-Dialogue 360° solution is premised on helping businesses manage the entire customer lifecycle. The 'cycle' term simply refers to a businesses objective to create repeat customers.

Effective relationship marketing views customers as progressing through various stages in a lifecycle. Below is the cycle we use in i-Dialogue 360°.

Prospective customers enter the cycle as they become aware of an organizations products or services. They may then subscribe to a newsletter, drip-campaign, or do some other research to educate themselves about your solution.

Many customers prefer to take a test drive and evaluate a product before purchase. Service oriented businesses might offer a free consultation visit.

A prospect becomes a customer once their business is acquired, and from there the customer immediately enters a service and support relationship.

Persuading customers to upgrade or try new products is common in growth or expansion campaigns, where you're simply trying to make customers aware of a new solution, educate them, and encourage the cycle to repeat.

Here's a tip to help email designers visualize what different groups of people will see once a personalized email campaign is launched.

Problem: You've created an elegant email template with some Dialogue merge fields that will be replaced at launch time with targeted content (either based on CRM contact properties, segment rules, role, or whatever). But that nagging feeling persists in the back of your mind saying "I wonder what existing customers will see when they receive this personalized email? Will the call to action be relevant? What will our top client's Executives see?".

Solution: Create several mock user profiles, called personas, then launch a test campaign (the emails will be individually created and personalized but not actually sent) then review the email content rendered for each persona.

Here's a screenshot (below) of an email campaign whose template has already been defined. Several personas have already been created for Executive, Existing Customer, Technical Decision Maker, and so on.

Click on 'Launch Test Campaign' and the email service will immediately process the emails (and again.... will not actually send them).


Once the test rendering is complete, you'll receive an email. You can now click each Persona's View link (I've prefixed my personas with 'aa_' to ensure they always appear at the top) to see how the segmentation rules populated the merge fields for each individual user.



You can also drill down and view emails that would be sent to individual users. This enables an iterative process whereby an email template is updated, a test launch is executed, and the resulting content is reviewed and refined.

Once you're happy with the results, simply launch the actual campaign. The production launch will execute with exactly the same behavior as the test launch.

I mostly focus on B2B marketing, but the recent Origami campaign by Microsoft caught my eye as it was technology related.

There was a lot of hype and viral marketing leading up to the announcement, and even I got caught up in visiting the origami project web site in the weeks leading up to the products formal announcement.

My only bit of constructive criticism here is that these teaser microsites could really benefit from engaging the customer in more dialogue. How many consumers would have subscribed to a simple email alert like "Contact me when new Origami updates are available [email address here]". I know I would have.

Regardless of whether the final Origami announcement does or does not meet consumer expectations, at least Microsoft would (and should) have the opportunity to engage in follow-up dialogues with curious subscribers. It may take 5-7 intelligent follow-up 'drips' for the marketing message to really resonate.

Update: Dustin Hubbard, Group Manager for the Mobile PC team at Microsoft, gives some genuine follow-up and history on the Origami campaign.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO, has posted a great demonstration of a new technology called Live Clipboard. The value to relationship marketing would be tremendous if prospects and customers could simply cut and paste a marketing event from an email or your web site, directly into their calendar.

A Live Clipboard would also make your 'Contact Us' web page (which is a standard in all our marketing campaign templates) truly live, and allow customers to quickly and correctly synchronize their Contacts list with your web site information.

This kind of smart web browsing has long been the holy grail of what is referred to as the Semantic Web, which are basically just smarter web pages and browsers that can infer the meaning of a web page, and occasionally a users intentions.

This will be an interesting technology for me to follow, as it would require a certain amount of critical mass distribution and adoption before it truly makes sense to provide this functionality in i-Dialogue sites.

 I was recently optimizing an email template that contained an "Email a Friend" link that was catching my eye as clutter. After removing the link and improving the layout I was then faced with the thought of "OK.... what have I really sacrificed here? Have I removed any possibility of viral marketing by removing the 'Email a Friend' link?"

The metrics clearly showed me that about 1 hundredth of 1 percent (0.01%) of all email recipients actually click through on "Refer a Friend, "Refer a Buddy", and "Email a Friend" links. But without the "Refer a Friend" link, wouldn't customers simply use the 'Forward' buttons in the email reader anyway? Afterall, that's how 99.99% of all Internet viral marketing happens anyway.

I believe that most marketers today have to assume that customers will hit their "Forward" button long before they'll utilize an inline forward feature. Forwarding email is a sub-conscious activity with reliable results that requires no learning curve for most consumers, whereas the "Refer a Friend" found inline behaves differently from one email marketing engine to another, and privacy conscious consumers will not be comfortable using your email marketing engine for exchanging messages between friends.

Maybe it's time to re-think this feature and propose some new and innovative approaches to viral marketing. In a B2C environment, maybe there would be more success by taking a Hallmark card approach where the sender gets to email a card to a recipient (birthday, anniversary, whatever) and incorporate the marketing message into the email?

In other words, "Refer a Friend" links are competing directly against email forwarding, and must therefore provide more utility and value to win.

Marketing and Support executives have a tough challenge in the information age as the number of customer touchpoints and speed at which information flows continues to increase.

The holy grail of CRM is to integrate all channels in real-time and ensure your customer dialogues are always relevant.

Achieving integration of the whole requires businesses to first begin with integration of each individual channel.

 

In the Internet channel alone, there are several services that customers are increasingly demanding from their suppliers and vendors.

Many solutions have emerged to offer these services individually and businesses may often defer integrating any particular self-service solution until there is significant demand or ROI to justify the integration costs.

Over time, the accumulation of disparate Internet marketing solutions leads to a fragmented solution that de-personalizes the relationship with the customer and leaves the businesses incapable of effectively integrating the Internet channel with the broader CRM strategy.




A unified Internet Marketing solution integrates the commonly used Internet services into a single, cohesive solution that keeps all interactions relevant and provides a single integration point back into the larger CRM solution.





These integrated customer portals may be outsourced to a service provider or hosted in-house, depending on the architectural system constraints.

By taking these steps, it becomes for each customer interaction to be highly relevant and personalized, regardless of channel source.

The grand goal of achieving a 360 degree view of the customer may be challenging, but it can only be achieved by taking several smaller steps towards an integrated solution.

Definition of acronyms and terms used on this blog:

B2B = Business to Business
B2C = Business to Consumer
CRM = Customer Relationship Management
iCRM = Internet CRM
RSS = Really Simple Syndication
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
PPC = Pay Per Click
SERP = Search Engine Results Page
CPM = Cost Per Thousand (from Roman numeral "M")
WSS = Web Self-Service

Just passing along some info from Marketing Sherpa. Their San Francisco summit is coming up soon.

If you don't already subscribe to Marketing Sherpa, I highly recommend you add your name to their email list and check out their case studies and library of Marketing materials.

Very insightful stuff.

The Salesforce.com user conference (Dreamforce) is coming up next week. Will you be there? Email me if so. I'll be attending the Marketing and Developer tracks and would be happy to meet with you for lunch/dinner to discuss your Internet Marketing needs and how i-Dialogue can step up and execute your strategy.

The i-Dialogue adapter for Salesforce.com will be available in Q4 2005.

I'm happy to announce the launch of this web log for i-Dialogue.com (or i-Dia"blog"ue ). This blog picks up with where my previous blog left off discussing customer facing Internet technologies, CRM, and customer portals; but focuses exclusively on the B2B and occassionaly B2C Marketing aspects of the Internet.

"So who are you?" you're probably asking. By formal introduction, my name is Michael Leach and I'm the Founder/CEO of i-Dialogue.com. But since blogs are a space for keeping things loose and informal, you can just call me "Mike"; and please feel free to post any comments you like. I'll do my best to review and comment on most of them.

Your next question must be "So what is i-Dialogue?". Every entreprenuer, by virtue of their role, is required to be able to provide the answer to this question in at least 3 different ways:

1) A 3 word description
2) The 15 second elevator pitch
3) The business plan

So, here it goes:
1) Precision Internet Marketing
2) A hosted internet marketing solution that automates several common interactions between businesses and their customers via personalized emails, auto-responders, and personalized customer portals.
3) Don't ask. Not enough space on this page

I hope you'll subscribe to this RSS feed and check back often as I delve into topics such as search engine optimization, email marketing, one-to-one marketing, customer self-service, and effective email marketing.

Until L8R!