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 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"
%>

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...

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.

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.

Graham Hill has a thoughtful blog post on Five Challenges that Keep CMOs Awake at Night with some insightful thoughts on the future of CMS software.

Some bullets:
"Marketing is inexorably becoming more decentralised"

I sometimes have to remind myself that the "web" is a reference to it's intrinsic structure and that applying centralized, hierarchical, and org chart models to the web is often the source of some people's stress.

We, as a CMS vendor, make no promises that we can help manage all web content. It's just not possible or practical today. I am, however, passionate about centrally managing all marketing investments and tracking/correlating their responses. CRM mixed with CMS is a good solution for this.

Customer-responsive model.... A model that biological systems have perfected billions of years ago. In this model, broad rules are developed centrally for universal use at touchpoints with customers, which are then interpreted locally in real-time using all the contextual information available.

This is exactly correct, but how does a CMS address this need? Our response is to create languages at a higher level of abstraction than basic HTML and let marketers seed page templates with rule intentions that allow for specific types of dialogues to emerge.

The CMS of tomorrow will be addictive, much like Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Marketers will actively monitor point solutions and rely on the CMS to spot trends in real-time and allow organizations to respond to comments, ratings, and tags.

The concept of 'reports' will gradually disappear and be replaced with real-time 'trends'.

Web Statistics 2.0 will emerge around social metrics. Legacy metrics like impressions, unique visitors, and browser type by region will have decreasing value.

Customer Co-creation is the next big thing.

When websites are effectively configured to support community input, then marketing's ability to "listen" becomes extremely important.

As CMS‘ have grown larger, more integrated, more unwieldy and more expensive, some organisations have responded by going for simpler, leaner, right-sized CMS tools

In designing i-Dialogue 9.0 I've come to several "forks in the road". Should we make a particular feature simpler or add more advanced functionality? Is there a compromise between the two?

For example, the concept of a "discussion forum" is one that should be as simple as adding a <dlog:Discussion /> tag to a page template that let's a thread ensue. But there will be those that criticize that simplicity. The old way of thinking is that you're 'supposed' to deploy a forum as a separate, and often expensive, solution.

There is such a huge gap between what analysts are telling people they need and what companies really want. In economically challenged times you see purchasing committees emerge that are trying to play it safe and manage all possible risk by purchasing a complex CMS system that has been around for several years.

Graham goes on to use Clayton Christensen's "Disruptive Technology" model as a means of understanding next-gen CMS's. If that is the case, then bottom-up adoption of faster, simpler, cheaper solutions are on the horizon.

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

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?

(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
  

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.

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

Inevitably, some Developers need to apply advanced business and content manipulation rules to web/portal pages that display collections of Salesforce records.

This trick of using Javascript Arrays works very well. The basic components of this pattern are:

• Create a Javascript object that mirrors the Salesforce object and fields to be managed
• Use a Dialogue Script Repeater control to select a collection of records from Salesforce and package them into a client-side Javascript array.
• Render the web page using the Javascript collection of objects.

Very powerful technique. I can foresee the need to extend DScript controls to return results in a format such as JSON, which is already in use in our AJAX library.

You can view a source code example in the Developer Sandbox.

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.

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!

This dynamic hyperlinking tip will save you time and increase your lead conversions.

Anonymous visitors are forced to register and authenticated visitors get direct access to collateral. All managed in a single script!

Go ahead and play with this example in the Developer Sandbox and see for yourself how easy it is.

Happy fishing for Web Leads!

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.

It's amazing how much ROI (definition:return on investment) can be achieved from the skillful placement of a single web page in the funnel of a campaign.

Elena, WebMaster at Configuresoft, shares this experience with using a piece of CampaignResponder script in an event registration campaign (and only 3 weeks after the feature was released!).

"The campaign was a success. Since the Campaign Response script allowed us to provide customers with a one-click registration (without filling out a form), we received twice the number of registrations than usual (over 350) and had to order an additional dial-in line for the webinar (that's a good thing though). And since I didn't have to mark those registrations manually in SalesForce, it saved me 6-7 hours on just one campaign! This feature is the best thing since sliced bread! Thank you so much!"

That really is a remarkable increase in response through a bit of script. Well done Elena!

I'm assuming she created links in an email campaign in the format:
<a href="http://www.domain.com/event-response.aspx?cid={!Campaign.Id}&lead={!Lead.Id}&status=Attending">Yes, I will attend</a>
<a href="http://www.domain.com/event-response.aspx?cid={!Campaign.Id}&lead={!Lead.Id}&status=NotAttending">No, I cannot attend at this time</a>

You can create links like this using any email application on the AppExchange... it's not specific to i-Dialogue.

Assuming the use of i-Dialogue enterprise edition at $1,195 per month, let's look at a more detailed ROI calculation.

Cost Assumptions:
i-Dialogue Subscription: $1,195 per month
Marketing Effort: $50 hr
4 campaigns per month

Savings:
6-7 hours saved per campaign = $300-$350
4 campaigns per month (saving 24-28 hrs month) = $1,200 - $1,400 savings per month

That return on investment alone covers the cost of an i-Dialogue subscription. But Elena doubled the number of webinar attendees by providing a one-click registration.

If you look at ROI as amortizing the i-Dialogue hosting costs over the number of webinar lead registrations, you get the following:

Webinar Cost Per Lead (Before):
175 attendees per weekly webinar
700 attendees per month
Spread the $1,195 cost out over 700 attendees = $1.70 per attendee.

Webinar Cost Per Lead (After):
350 attendees per webinar
4 webinars per month
1,400 attendees per month

Doubling the number of webinar registrations to 1,400 (meanwhile saving ~25 hours per month), results in a cost per lead of $0.85 per lead and increase in productivity.

That extra 25 hours can go towards creating more webinar content, or creating follow-up email cultivation campaigns to attendees.

Add in PPC, email marketing, and other acquisition costs and this scenario is still well below $5 per lead. Would you spend $5 per lead on marketing automation to sell your product or service?

No matter how you calculate ROI, marketing automation can really pay off when utilized correctly.

Configuresoft's website recently underwent a dramatic change using i-Dialogue CMS. Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Management (ECM) solutions help IT professionals to deploy security updates and patches to thousands of PCs from a centralized, intelligent control panel.

Each web page makes effective use of i-Dialogue SEO metatags to ensure a Google search for "Enterprise Configuration Management" correctly displays relevant information as the top search result, while their dynamically generated Google SiteMap keeps Google informed of any changes to the website.

Google custom search and Analytics are tightly integrated into the site.

www.Configuresoft.com serves prospects, new Leads, Customers, and Partners.... all from a single CMS platform integrated with Salesforce CRM.

I really like the use of Flash on the home page with a consistent, easy to use navigation menu. Everything on the website is accessible within one-click.

Probably less obvious is Configuresoft's elaborate use of Dialogue Rules to dynamically present content to end-users based on their role.

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.

This is very much a Beta feature right now, but i-Dialogue now provides an Outbound Message listener for synchronizing Salesforce objects in near real-time.

Outbound Messaging (OM) is an advanced feature and there is potential for circular messaging to occur when this feature is not configured correctly, but following the Wiki article should get most Admins going in the right direction.

The use of outbound messaging vs. periodic ETL polling typically spawns a debate over "real-time vs right-time" integration.

For most organizations, it is often acceptable that a press release, job posting, or new property listing appear on a website within 20-30 minutes of publishing. However, in our 2+ years experience with Salesforce and mid-market B2B customers I have fielded many requests for real-time integration.

Even though Salesforce does not have a formal SLA, the reliability of the web service API lately has allowed us to address many real-time requirements through the use of a "query and cache" design pattern. But there is a noticeable latency for transactional web pages that depend on this design, so we've developed a hybrid approach that involves real-time filter queries that return pre-fetched records as the ideal solution.

Outbound messaging ensures frequently accessed objects are always up to date and are kept synchronized in the background.

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.

The "Milestones" feature in i-Dialogue CMS can really save your bacon if you ever need to rollback a particular web page to a previous version.

Here's a quick walk-through of this feature (click the "Play" button below to view).

What is the future of search engine optimization (SEO) now that consumers and customers can interact with Google like this (click play below)?

Yet another semi-scripted, one-take tutorial on how to use the Dialogue Script PageLayout control to create a simple online survey that is managed in Salesforce.

View the full screen video.

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.

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.

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)

This video was inspired by a Salesforce.com customer asking how to create a search page similar to Salesforce's Partner Finder using Dialogue Script.

(I apologize for the video cropping....Full screen video here)

Check out this new Wiki article if you have a need for publishing RSS feeds from Salesforce-driven data.

The context of the article uses a "Jobs__c" custom object, but I'll leave it to your imagination and creativity to truly leverage the full potential of this feature.

If The Big Switch can be said to represent the centralization of computing resources, then Microsoft's Live Mesh may signal the path towards the big switch back to a decentralized model (albeit with some centrally hosted Microsoft infrastructure).

Some ideas for using Mesh with our CEM platform and Salesforce:

• Real-time notifications when Leads/Contacts enter your website
• Sync and offline access to CRM data and documents across several devices
• Rich development of email campaigns and web page content
• Social networking with employees, partners, and customers

 

Hands on with Live Mesh

• Product catalog management
• Shopping Cart
• Globalization / Multi-currency
• Localized Taxes
• Discounting
• Membership management
• Secure online payment
• PCI compliance
• Product / service fullfillment
• Financial accounting / Back office integration
• Recurring payments

 

Luke Wroblewski has a thoughtful article on why Sign Up Forms Must Die.

His examples of "gradual engagement" are pragmatic, applied customer experiences that reflect concepts outlined by Rogers and Peppers and many others.

We all deal with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms on a daily basis, but it's not often that we think of breaking a Lead form down into several smaller forms and seek to gradually learn more about prospects over time.

Granted, most of the examples in Luke's article are in a B2C context, but B2B sites with more than one case study or several pieces of collateral can apply the same concept.

I just caught wind of the new Google Visualization API, so I opened up a Google Spreadsheet (we have over 10 people using Google Apps in our company now) and all I can say is "wow!"

Just as a quick experiment, I generated a bar chart of response times for one of our hosted solutions and clicked on the newly available "publish" link to generate the image below.

If the spreadsheet is ever updated, I just re-publish the chart and all external channels referring to the image are automatically updated.

I'm extremely impressed with the mashup capabilities enabled by Google Visualization and Google Charts. If the Salesforce / Google integration observations are true, then I'll be in absolute mash-up heaven

Traditional web design and development are rooted in the concept of a Multi-Page Layout, or MPL. Contemporary web design and content management systems have transitioned towards a Single Page Layout, or SPL.

MPL web sites store their content in individual web pages. Adding more content requires adding additional pages. SPL web sites use a single web page template that derive their content from a database. Salesforce.com makes a great database for managing both content and Leads/site members.

Many organizations gradually wade into developing unique landing pages for Google AdWords or publishing products and services. At first, the MPL approach provides the path to least resistance since initial development and deployment costs are fairly low. The cost of change remains fairly linear at first as each new page is cloned from an existing page and modified to suit the campaigns needs. But over time the cost of change begins to increase. It takes longer to provision new pages and development becomes much slower.

A form of "technical debt" is accrued whereby a developer must eventually externalize common UI elements to server side include (SSI) files, such as headers, logos, navigation, and footers. Even with SSI best practices in place, a developer/programmer still remains in the critical path for each new campaign and the skills required for ongoing maintenance remain high.

SPL templates may take 3-5 times longer to initially implement, but successive pages may be easily provisioned by business users, such as Marketing and Support admins. The time to provision a new page remains linear over time as each new page is defined in a database and immediately available for use in PPC campaigns.

SPL page templates are actually very simple to develop. They may look slightly cryptic when opened in a common web page designer because they contain "merge tags" to be replaced by the database when the page is displayed. The URL typically contains some kind of unique ID to give the page context as to which content to display.

i-Dialogue 8 now supports a new scripting language called Dialogue Script that removes the need for a physical page template. The SPL template can be created directly in a web browser and the merge tags can define any Salesforce object or field.

The Professional Services group at Cubic Compass Software has extensive experience with SPL design and hosting. Contact me for more information. I'd be happy to help.

Which Super Bowl ads made an honest attempt at initiating a two-way dialogue? Here's my scorecard.

The Scorecard

Compelling Call To Action: Did the ad provide a memorable URL and call to action?
Continuity: When I go the URL, is the message in the context of the TV ad?
Fulfillment: Does the website answer my questions or deliver on any promises made?

	Time	Company / Product	URL	Compelling Call to Action	Continuity	Fulfillment	Notes and Comments
	4:33:00	Audi	http://www.truthinengineering.com	B+	A+	C	Talk about pressure. The first super bowl ad after kick-off, and this one delivered really well with a take-off on the Godfather. The web site picks up where the commercial leaves of and highlights what is, in my opinion, one slick looking car. Can't actually configure a new Audi online or order one, so not the highest marks on fulfillment.
	4:45:00	SalesGenie.com	http://www.salesgenie.com/tv	B-	B+	A	The first of a couple peculiar animated commercials from SalesGenie.com that appear to have a theme of "If ethnically diverse business owners in America can get free sales leads, so can you." How many people will ever type in "slash TV" after the domain name? I did, which is why they get above average continuity points for keeping the landing page message relevant to the SuperBowl ad. Very fulfilling. I was able to immediately start taking advantage of my 100 free leads and walked through a target demographic wizard that produced 26K prospects (I chose mid-market manufacturers of electronic equipment for the fun of it)
	4:48:00	Under Armour	http://www.underarmour.com/	C	B	C	The TV ad took too long to get the point, but was visually very stunning and entertaining. The Flash web site is actually very nice and loads extremely fast, but really just plays several ads in a loop.
	4:03:00	GoDaddy	http://www.godaddy.com/	C-	B+	B-	No real surprise here. GoDaddy goes straight for the 18-35 Male demographic and this year uses IndyCar racer Danica Patrick as the "bait". Nothing too revealing here. "Exposed" is more of an ironic description of what actually occurs in the video (the Super Bowl is, afterall, a form of family entertainment). GoDaddy uses a cleverly designed image map of Danica such that if you click on certain hot spots, it takes you to a web conversion form instead of directly to the video.
	5:07:00	Tide	http://www.mytalkingstain.com	A	A	A-	I probably spent more time on this site after the SuperBowl than any other. Humorous ad with a memorable domain name / call to action. You can hover over various shirt stains on the web site to hear them "talk". What is that? It's like a mix of Arabic, French, Italian, and.... well.... if you think you can create a better talking stain, Tide provides the platform ala YouTube to "Be the Stain" and upload a picture of yourself and create a voiceover. Crazy.... but if this takes off, it could be entertaining in an amateurish sort of way. For those inclined, Tide even invites you to film your own stain video and upload/share it.
	5:23:00	Sobe Life Water	http://www.thrillicious.com/	C	B	C-	Probably the most over thought TV ad and Flash based website of the whole lot. I seriously thought it was a Geico commercial for the first 26 seconds until the Sobe brand appeared. The domain name is not very memorable, especially for those that are grammatically challenged (I know it took me a couple attempts to enter the domain name). Once I hit the web site I'm faced with a strange "hide and seek" Flash navigation where I need to move the mouse around and "discover" the navigation links. I'm prompted to "disable my popup blocker" (no, are you kidding?) Sadly, the best material is buried in the site under an "Episodes" section that tells the back story behind the dancing lizards as they prepare their Super Bowl ad video shoot. Very clever elements. There clearly is some genius behind this campaign, but it became a horse designed by committee. No fulfillment here. What is life water? Can I read the label? Does it have any sugar (I don't like water drinks with fructose added)? Where can I try or buy it?..... nada.... no answers on the site.
	6:18:00	Chrysler	http://www.chryslerlistens.com	C	C-	C-	The www.chryslerlistens.com  domain looked like it had potential. A community site perhaps? A viral video site about cars? Unfortunately Chrysler is not actually listening. The domain simply redirects to http://www.chryslerllc.com/  which has links for "Community" and "Blog", but they're actually artificial links to contrived pages that give the illusion of an interactive Web 2.0 site, though the blog does appear to have an open comments section. Overall, disappointing.
	7:03:00	Jack In The Box	http://www.makeajacksandwich.com/	A-	A+	A	This microsite was obviously created specifically for the SuperBowl ad, which employed a tongue-in-cheek double entendre about making a Jack sandwich in a hot tub (of course Jack has his mind on literally making a sandwich). If you get tired of manipulating your uploaded picture with an array of Mr Potato Head accessories, you can click on the Location link to find a location near you. Yeah..... how simple is that? That's the way it's done.
	7:05:00	Sunsilk	http://www.lifecantwait.com/	B	A-	C	A nice attempt at associating a unique domain name with a brand. Both the TV and web ads put Marilyn, Madonna, and Shakira in a new light, but as I am not in the ads target demographic of Females 25-55 (it's a broad reaching ad??), I was compelled to follow up just out of curiosity since they setup a unique URL. I was a little puzzled by the "Feature Coming Soon" on the home page. Guess they didn't have the interactive components in place before the SuperBowl.

The Winners

Based on the scores, Tide and Jack in the Box come out on top. As far as most functional campaign, SalesGenie.com is the most likely to get visitors to self-identify and enable an ongoing dialogue.

Interesting that in such a consumer driven B2C Internet world that a B2B site would have such strong positioning in the Super Bowl.

Dialogue Script (or DScript for short) provides a simple scripting language for developing interactive web pages, forms, and applications integrated with Salesforce.com. In this series of articles, I'll cover some basic scripting concepts to address the most common use cases.

Dialogue Script Articles:

1. Master Views and Lists
2. Details View
3. Web Form

What is a Master View?
"Recent News" is an example of a Master View. It is simply a list of items that are dynamically queried from Salesforce.

Here's an example Dialogue script that displays a top 5 list of the most recent press releases:

<dlog:repeater id="LatestNewsRepeater"
SOQL="SELECT TOP 5 * FROM Content__c WHERE Type__c='Press Release' ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC" runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<dlog:HyperLink ID="HeadlineLink" TextFieldName="Headline__c" NavigateURL="~/News.aspx={oid}" runat="Server" /><br/>
</ItemTemplate>
</dlog:repeater>

Example Output: (example links only)
ACME Corp Announces Q1 Financials
Jane Smith Joins ACME as VP of Operations
ABC Sees Record Growth After Using ACME Solution
ACME Announces 2008 Product Roadmap
Wall Street Journal: Inside Look at ACME

This example uses a Repeater control and SOQL Plus to query Salesforce and format the repeating layout of each item in the query result. Dialogue Script supports Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) plus adds support for tokens like "TOP", "ORDER BY", and "IN".

You can query any object in Salesforce. Master Views and Lists are a great way to provide customers with high level information and get them started in a general direction. Adding an ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC clause ensures the web page always stays up to date and displays the latest press releases, meaning you never need to update your web site when a new press release is launched. Query results can be cached to improve performance by adding a CachedDurationMinutes attribute to the Repeater.

In the next article, I'll demonstrate how to use Dialogue Script to format the actual Press release page using Salesforce data, plus some bonus script on creating a dynamic Google AdWords landing page.

Happy scripting!!!

From Entrepreneur.com "The Hottest Marketing Trends for 2008".

1. Engage the customer. The move toward alternative advertising versus some of the more traditional methods coincides with the emergence of technologies that enable a one-on-one dialogue with customers. For example, follow the trend of social media by posting your products on sites that encourage customer or peer reviews. Social media add an element of impartiality and are increasingly looked to as reliable sources of information.

Read the entire article online.

On-Demand software has revolutionized how enterprise software is deployed. Declarative customization provides line of business managers with an unprecedented number of options from which to "declare" how a CRM record is defined or presented in a page layout. But let's face it... at some point, all enterprise software solutions require some level of programmatic customization. Enterprise software vendors simply cannot anticipate each and every business requirement.

Salesforce customers, having reached the limits of declarative customization, now have domain specific programming languages such as Visual Force and Apex to programmatically customize their CRM system.

Content Management Systems (CMS) and Enterprise Portals already have a strong legacy of supporting programmatic customization, but achieved this flexibility through integration with existing development environments and the modification of physical files and templates.

Many CMS's have attempted to offer purely browser-based declarative customization environments, such as Wiki's and Blogs, but failed to meet the demands of creative and marketing professionals, which require detailed control over the presentation and branding of web pages and emails.

It's time for a new scripting language that meets the unique demands of Customer Experience Management (CEM). It's time to offer an optimal balance between declarative and programmatic configuration options. It's time to recognize that there is a new generation of workers entering the workforce that embrace Domain Specific Languages (see Fowler: DSL) and expect programming the web to be as easy as programming their iPod, Tivo, or DVR. It's time for a language like "Dialogue".

"Dialogue" is a new scripting language designed specifically for helping organizations to interact with their customers and partners online using concepts familiar to both the web (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and CRM (Lead, Contact, Opportunity, Case records).

The key tenants of Dialogue include:

Creativity / User Interface: Dialogue is primarily a presentation language that resembles HTML and is used in the creation of dynamic web pages, landing pages, and emails. Graphic designers and web developers have control over each pixel in the presentation of Dialogue scripts.

Business User Support: Business users can easily modify Dialogue scripts to present information most relevant to customers and partners. Changes can be made to Dialogue scripts without the assistance of a web programmer.

Multiple Development Environment Support: Dialogue scripts can be managed using either a web browser or rich client. Todays content management professionals are accustomed to working with tools such as Dreamweaver and Expression. Dialogue plug-Ins for web development environments (starting with Expression) will be developed to enable the remote persistence and management of Dialogue scripts using a locally installed rich client. But the flexibility of storing and managing content entirely on the web will remain the primary focus.

CRM-Driven: Dialogue scripts provide direct access to CRM records and data for maximum personalization.

Agile: Dialogue scripts support an agile methodology that allows organizations to go from concept to deployment within a matter of hours or days. Campaigns can be modified on the fly and no longer suffer from the constraints of "waterfall" project management methodologies where considerable upfront planning is required to reduce the anticipated cost of change.

The Dialogue scripting language will help organizations transition from static, brochureware web designs common in the 90's, to highly interactive and personalized online experiences. It is our goal that all Salesforce customers will unlock the capabilities of their CRM system to delivering these rich online experiences. Dialogue is the final link in enabling this level of interaction.

Yet another great customer experience (CE) faux pas from WorseThanFailure.com. Doubtful many customers would be patient enough to wait until the year 3000 (below) to receive their discount

I can empathize with the Developers of this site. We learned the hard to always check Salesforce managed date/times when using them in CE applications and campaigns after discovering that the absence of a date actually resulted in displaying a default date (something like January 1, 1900).

Steve Andersen has developed a really interesting metric in Salesforce based on actions taken by Activists/Donors in response to nonprofit campaigns. His solution exercises some new features in Winter '08, such as hierarchical campaigns and Apex scripts.

Anyone following my "tweets" on Twitter during the Salesforce.com Dreamforce '07 conference probably saw my references to lead scoring. The presentations and discussions inspired me to revisit this topic and explore how to implement lead scoring in Salesforce using an existing i-Dialogue web event data mart.

My past experiences with lead scoring were based on assigning "A", "B", "C", or "D" scores to leads derived from their online interactions. This prioritization gave sales reps some insight into which leads were supposedly more qualified than others.

A much simpler approach to lead scoring is to simply assign a score to each interaction and let the cumulative score provide a relative indicator. For example, in the illustration below, 2 leads enter a web site and initially appear to be equally qualified. But over time, and with enough data collection, we see that one lead was actually more interested in seeking employment with the organization rather than becoming a customer.

Defining lead score rules in Salesforce is possible through the use of a "Web Event Scoring Rule" custom object (see below), which is a prototypical definition of an existing Web Event object (already included with i-Dialogue).

A periodic evaluation by the i-Dialogue-to-Salesforce integration process evaluates each interaction and checks to see if it matches a lead score rule prototype. A match results in a Lead's score being increased or decreased by a defined amount. Rule prototypes may have any number of evaluation parameters, allowing for simple or complex rule definitions. If it can be captured in i-Dialogue, it can be evaluated.

A custom field on the Lead record named "Lead Score" is updated by the scoring process. Scores in Salesforce are updated in near real-time and are accurate to within 30 minutes.

This score then becomes the basis for Salesforce Reports and Dashboards. Once the technology is in place, an iterative/incremental relationship marketing process is implemented to routinely review and adjust scores and online event collectors. Lead scores will never be perfect, but the balance of online interactions and evaluation rules can achieve an 80% "good enough" state to be widely trusted by Sales Representatives and Marketing Managers.

Our company page seems perpetually outdated as we continue to grow and add new members to our team. Enough procrastinating... I've posted the updates and look forward to making many more.

The set of capabilities and services we can offer to clients have increased considerably in recent months. i-Dialogue web sites integrated with Salesforce are now sporting Flash interfaces, PDF printing, eCommerce support, localized translations, SMS alerts, finance calculators, sophisticated search engines... the list goes on, which only points to another area of procrastination... customer case studies.

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!

Our portal and eMarketing Developers spend a considerable amount of time translating customer requirements into working features, which requires the use of highly abstract tools, languages, and technologies. To this end, we've standardized on the use of Microsoft tools and services, commonly referred to as ".NET".

We were fortunate enough to spend the afternoon with Scott Hanselman, Development Community Liaison for Microsoft. Scott is fairly well known in the .NET development community. In fact, if you've ever Googled any search term remotely related to .NET, chances are you've most likely come across his blog or PodCasts (prompting some to wonder if he ever sleeps ).

I was really impressed with what Scott presented. Not only with the wealth of new features and services in .NET 3.0 and 3.5, but the myriad 3rd party and open source tools available that can be uniquely combined to create an extremely powerful, test-driven development environment.

The development tools space has become very stable and commoditized. Much like the component-based Eclipse development environment used by Salesforce.com, Visual Studio.NET is so extensible and customizable that the only limits are the Developers imagination. Scott maintains a great list of indispensable tools and utilities.

The highlight of the session? Probably LOL CODE. An actual programming language based on the LOL CATS concept. Who knows... maybe next generation CRM applications will be programmed in languages that look like this?

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
VISIBLE "You said " N VAR N " !!"
KTHXBYE

News is out that Microsoft is investing $240 Million in Facebook for 1.6% in equity, putting a $15B valuation on Facebook. What?! You read correctly. A 1.6% stake for $240M.

Hard to justify by any means, but it reminds me of when the Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10 year $252M contract. I was among the many Seattle Mariners fans who paid top dollar to see this new Yankee's star play, which in itself probably justified the valuation because the Yankees were selling out just about every game in every town.

A self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps? I would expect Facebook's 50M user community to easily double within the next year as people tune in to see what the commotion is all about.

Hey... if a survey has only 3-5 questions and can be taken quickly, I'm more than happy to provide feedback. These surveys, however, may make customers think twice.

I started reading Edward Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence' (BE) over the weekend. This is the 4th book in a series (he says a quintet is to be expected) dedicated to the craft of information design.

Tufte's books have withstood the test of time with a high level of integrity. His work quite simply reveals "The Truth" of information design as he identifies great works from centuries past (and modern era) that have fought to change mankinds beliefs through the power of the pen and paper on thinking such as "the world is flat" and "the earth is the center of the galaxy".

I personally borrow heavily from Tufte's "let no pixel go to waste" philosophy. There's is most definitely an art to depicting thousands of data points within a single image.

My only complaints with this book are:
a) material from previous books is recycled, such as Joseph Minyard's March of 1812 (to Tufte's credit, he does spend considerably more time on this piece than in previous books)
and
b) the chapter dedicated to PowerPoint bashing takes away from the overall integrity of his work. It would have sufficed to say that PowerPoint templates and charts are the cause for much misinformation, and many people would tend to agree. But just about everyone uses PowerPoint occasionally, so this chapter does little more than to alienate everyone to a degree and denies PowerPoint it's key utility of being a framework for discussion rather than an actual informational artifact.

Those who work with massive datasets in Salesforce.com understand the "If we only knew what know" feeling. But it is the work of Tufte that helps us focus on mining these databases and unearthing hidden information through heat maps, graphs, and other types of multi-variate charts.

A few years ago, when this book was in pre-publication, I wrote a simple sparkline program based on Tufte's latest research, but alas it was abandoned as a solution looking for a problem. I'm inspired to start using VisualForce to implement some of these concepts again.

I recommend catching Edward on one of his many book tours. All of his books are typically included in the registration fee and he explains the concepts in a very entertaining manner. This is a must attend event for anyone in Graphic Design or BI Visualization.

I sometimes wonder if we've forgotten the original purpose for CAPTCHA images, which is to prevent the repeated, automated submission of web forms by non-humans.

This CAPTCHA engine (original here) has apparently become a little lazy. It simply displays the challenge code un-obfuscated and calls the end user a "twit". Wussup with that?!

On the heels of my previous post, I forgot to mention the English/Spanish localization by i-Dialogue customer www.ArcoProperties.com. Perusing their site really makes me want to spend a couple weeks down in Panama

i-Dialogue customer iGrafx recently localized their interactive online resource center with German content.

Salesforce.com CRM is easily configured to capture customers language preference. Just add a custom field to Lead and Contact named something like "Preferred Language" and map the field to i-Dialogue's "Language" field.

Whenever a customer clicks on the language bar at the top of an i-Dialogue page, or submits a localized web form, the customer's language selection is automatically updated in Salesforce.

iGrafx has also localized their email auto-responders to German for a truly relevant and localized dialogue. Future plans are in the works for Italian and Spanish sites too.

Want to do your part and contribute to a greener Internet? Use www.BlackGoogle.com instead of regular www.Google.com to reduce the watts used by your display.

Who knew?

Actually, this topic brings up an interesting point. When designing landing/web pages or emails, do you prefer white backgrounds? Blue? Black? Other colors?

Some research shows that a variety of background colors may be used, as long as there is high contrast. Other research demonstrates that Black on White is the most readable color combination.

Users of Google Docs were welcomed to a new, and in my opinion, much more usable interface today. The concept of Labels (aka Tags) has been replaced with Folders, much like what people are accustomed to on their Windows Explorer desktop.

The folders are unfortunately not hierarchical, but do provide better at-a-glance document categorization via a new left navigation pane.

This change is a significant return to what simply works. In past years we've seen several document management solutions emerge based around the concept of "folksonomy" tagging, whereby users tag documents rather than categorize them in folders.

This has the supposed benefit of making life easier on search engines, but with the downside of poor data quality. For example, I might tag a document as "Television" where you might prefer "TV".

Our own document management system in i-Dialogue has organically evolved to a hybrid, or compromised design. While we have added meta-tagging, customers still express a need to hierarchically categorize documents as a reflection of their own internal structures, such as org charts and sales territories. For example, why "search" for case studies in Canada when I can expand a "North America" folder to reveal a "Canada" folder with marketing materials.

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed after Salesforce.com's acquisition of Koral and announced mission to impose folksonomy tagging in the workplace. As Google's recent move validates, not all consumer web UI metaphors translate well to the business web.

The left navigation includes a filter by document type, indicating a very scalable point of extension. I would not be surprised to see support for PowerPoint and other documents in the very near future.

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.

Just posted this new Quick Start Guide:
Creating Effective Customer Experiences with i-Dialogue for AppExchange.

This guide covers some basic topics, such as

• Creating a Simple Web Page
• Creating a Web-to-Lead Form
• Creating a Landing Page
• Creating a PPC Advertising Campaign

Lately, I've been re-exploring the possibilities with component-based workflow in the development of online marketing and customer portal sites. The concept is simple. You drag components onto web pages that allow interactive web developers to define actions and behaviors in response to web page events.

This is in contrast to the current convention in i-Dialogue, which currently implements workflows through the explorer interface.

As an example, a basic lead nurturing campaign requires the triggering of a long running email auto-response campaign when a web lead form is submitted. Using the i-Dialogue explorer I would have to define a dialogue rule that associates the form with an auto response campaign. But I can also add a smart component, called a "Form Submit Handler", to the landing page that intercepts form submit events and triggers the autoresponder on its own.



Granted, not a significant decrease in developmnt time, but it's much more apparent when looking at the landing page that "Oh... when the web form is submitted these events will be triggered and I have the ability to configure them".

A component-based approach does have it's associated challenges:

1) Atomicity Yields Complexity. Smaller, more granular components yield more flexible solutions and reduce need for programmatic customization. But if 3 different workflow components on a web page are required to process a lead form, trigger an auto-responder, and intelligently redirect the page, then the complexity of the page design is increased. Pre-built page templates are the best way to address this problem.

2) Process Visualization: The i-Dialogue Explorer allows me to see across multiple campaigns, landing pages, and auto-response rules at once. I can see exactly which landing pages have auto-response rules and which ones don't. But if workflow is embedded into pages in the form of active components, I need to drill down to the individual page to learn which workflows are active. The answer is in a new generation of campaign reporting tools (if there were only 26 hours in a day, I would add this and a dozen other features ).

3) Creative-Business Collaboration: Interactive Web Development requires a unique set of skills. Part graphic/web designer and part marketing/business user. It's rare to find these skills in one person, so you often find different individuals taking responsibility for various components. For example, one person provides the HTML, layout, and graphics. Another provides copy writing, workflow and auto-response rules.

The bottom line? We'll need to support both approaches and give campaign designers the freedom to choose which approach works best for them.

Microsoft revealed at the Mix '07 conference that their Silverlight framework will provide cross-browser support for .NET technologies. In layman's terms, this means many web developers will be able to create rich internet applications (RIAs) that are comparable to Adobe Flash and Flex applications using Microsoft tools that they're already familiar with. Silverlight is comparable to the Flex framework that Salesforce recently embraced.

Regardless of which platform becomes more pervasive, the online customer experience will be significantly improved either way.

I don't remember the exact date, but I'd guess it was around Summer of 2005 when we faced the "Enterprise Software Fork In the Road".
 
After years of serving mostly mid-market customers with on-premise customer experience solutions (portals, web sites, eMarketing campaigns), attention abruptly shifted towards open source and on-demand solutions as alternatives.
 
Customers with in-house development resources started asking for source code to customize their CEM apps, others asked if we would host the sites for them and provide ongoing maintenance, partners needed more documentation to develop rich add-on applications, large customers demanded the source code be held in escrow in case we went "Tango-Uniform" and sales cycles got longer... a lot longer.
 
One of my favorite quotes from Yogi Berra is "When you get to fork in the road, take it." (Berra says this is part of driving directions to his house in Montclair, New Jersey. There is a fork in the road, and whichever way you take, you will get to his house). And so, we took both paths and launched an on-demand CEM solution with an open source CMS framework that provides customers and partners with unrestricted access to the source code, to offer an Open Software-as-a-Service, or "Open SaaS" model.

 
The feedback we've received from open sourcing the Salesforce integration module has been tremendous. Some customers have started down the open source path with the intent of building and hosting the solution in-house, only to discover the long term benefits if they outsource the hosting and occasionally exercise their right to upload their customizations and code anytime (in the worse case they know they can always take the solution back in house).
 
Conversely, some customers have started down the on-demand path, recognized how strategic the online customer experience is to their business, and upgraded their SLA to have us co-manage a server provisioned and owned by them.
 
Change management and version control are inevitable problems that will arise when both customer and hosting provider are collaborating on the management of an Open SaaS web site/portal. We've had a few content collisions and merge conflicts, but had sufficient backup and recovery processes in place to remedy them immediately. i-Dialogue 3.0 addresses many problems related to temporal content, such as press releases and events. Typically, just a bit of training on the web page "sandbox" feature and use of Snippet versions are sufficient to resolve these issues.
 
It's also imperative to maintain a common code base across all hosted applications to reduce the risk of "branching". Most content management systems (CMS) today have evolved to a level of maturity that easily supports this requirement through the use of page templates and declarative configuration.
 
Does Open SaaS work with all applications? Absolutely not. It just happens to work in customer experience management because it requires pixel level control over the form of the interactions (aka the "brand" experience). But employee facing productivity SaaS applications are best managed at arms length with declarative customization to achieve their desired function. New languages, such as Salesforce.com's Apex scripting language, will give customers greater freedom to upload their own business logic code.

The upcoming i-Dialogue 3.0 release is going to enable organizations to manage a lot more web content directly in Salesforce. Here's a high level walk-through of some of the new features:

There first thing you'll notice after installing the "i-Dialogue Web CMS" package (CMS = Content Management System) are the primary web tabs for Portals, Content, and Web Events. This is the base package from which all other i-Dialogue web solutions are built on.

An organization can have any number of web sites/portals registered in the CMS.



The new "Content" tab supports a database of press releases, announcements, image links, and just about any other type of content that can be published to the web. Each i-Dialogue web site contains several smart "web parts" that are directly integrated with the Content database.

Content can be configured to automatically expire based on a publication date range and localized to any language.




The Event Management module supports the publication of events directly to a web-based calendar (example here) and allows site visitor to register for events online. Email confirmation and reminders are also included.



Perhaps my favorite feature in i-Dialogue 3.0 is the ability to manage email campaign directly from native Salesforce Campaign record. This allows me to create very targetted lists by creating Campaign Members from Salesforce Reports. We have this feature in i-Dialogue (called "Segments") but it does not allow for complex segmentation utilizing all object types stored in Salesforce.



Clicking on the "Edit Email Template" opens this rich email editor that supports HTML/Text email content, version control (called Milestones), and detailed activity logs.



Other features include:

• Daily reports and analytics emailed directly to web site managers
• Inline segmentation counts in i-Dialogue segment trees so you can see exactly how many people are in each segment.
• Tracking email responses in CampaignMember Records
• A set of pre-built web parts integrated with the Salesforce CMS for display on web site

 

If you have an interest in business intelligence (BI) visualizations or effective dashboard design, I strongly recommend subscribing to Stephen Few's blog and newsletter.

In reading Stephen's blog, I noticed we have a similar skepticism for flashy dashboard gauges. As a student of Tufte, I've come to appreciate the art of multi-variate displays and information design, so it comes as a disappointment to see the industry abuzz with a new generation of reporting tools, dashboard widgets, and components that favor presentation over information.

At last years Dreamforce event, a chorus of "oooohs" and "ahhhhs" filled the room as support for new dashboard visualizations were demonstrated. Some of the new components, such as heat maps and geo maps, were indeed an improvement over what is available today. But there was a fair share of the "flashy" reports too.

The fact is, Salesforce dashboards as they exist today are quite useful and simple. They prevent you from masking true information with needless features like drop shadows and 3D effects.

The gating barrier to implementing useful multi-variate visualizations in Salesforce dashboards is not the UI controls. It's the data itself. Because Salesforce is an OLTP (online transactional processing system) system you cannot simply create a report that summarizes across multiple dimensions in real-time.

Yes, there will always be work-arounds and acceptable compromises, but I suspect that business intelligence in the SaaS world will follow a similar path as enterprise software did in the legacy client-server world, which is to normalize the data into data warehouses that can support ad-hoc queries and pivoting on data.

But SaaS vendors have the benefit of hindsight and are progressively learning to build OLAP and data warehousing support into, or in parallel to production systems; much like our Web Events data mart that gets created in Salesforce, replicating and normalizing all web interactions into the CRM system in near real-time.

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'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.

The goal of every Salesforce implementation should be to achieve what is commonly referred to as Third Normal Form (or 3NF for short). This simply means the LookUp relationships on custom objects are structured in a way that removes duplicate values, does not have unnecessary dependencies, and will scale to meet the future needs of the organization without significant change to the object model.

To achieve 3NF, we must first adhere to 1NF and 2NF rules. Let's look at an example of how to design a 1NF Salesforce object:

Assume Company X sells Tractors and has customized Salesforce to include a "Tractors" web tab and a database of Tractor inventory. To publish images of this tractor on the web, it is possible to create several custom fields named Image1, Image2, Image3 and so on.

Custom Object: Tractor
Custom Fields:
Name
Manufacturer
Make
Model
Serial Number
Build Date
List Price
Image1
Image2
Image3
SalesPerson
SalesPersonHireDate

First Normal Form (1NF) requires that we move these Image custom fields away from the base Tractor object and create a new custom object called Image (AssetImage and Multimedia are other good names). The Image object then simply has a URL for the image location and a Lookup relationship to the Tractor.

Custom Object: Image
Custom Fields:
ImageURL
Tractor (LookUp)

The Image1-ImageN fields can then be replaced with a related list of Images associated with the Tractor. The Tractor can then be said to be in 1NF.

Note: If deleting a Tractor should also delete all associated images, then a Master-Detail lookup relationship is preferred over a basic Lookup relationship.

A 2NF form exercise requires removing the SalesPersonHireDate, since it is not directly associated with the Tractor and must be moved to the User record instead.

Finally, using the Tractor Name as the primary unique key for the Tractor is not a good idea because other Tractors may share the same name. 3NF requires the addition of a TractorID field using the Salesforce auto-numbering convention (In general, I try to avoid use of the Salesforce "Text" option for record IDs. Use the auto-number with formatting option whenever possible).

The Tractor Manufacturer, Make, and Model fields are likely candidates for normalization. But keep in mind that being a database normalization "purest" may also lead to complicating the user interface, requiring the creation or lookup of several smaller objects to create a single new Tractor. If a company only sells 3 Makes of Tractors, then it's more convenient to implement Make as a picklist.

When it comes time to web-enable your Salesforce data model, 3NF will allow you to infinitely scale and provide the flexibility needed to add/remove common information at any time.

We've updated our i-Dialogue Partners page with some new partnerships that I'm really excited about. We absolutely could not deliver our solutions without our partners. In some cases, our partner relationships have spanned more than 5 years.

Some notable new partners include Exponent Partners, Kinetic Shadows, and Agilitas. See the partner page for details.

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.

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.

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.

I've been having a blast playing with the new Web-to-X feature in the latest release of i-Dialogue. Web-to-Contact, Web-to-Solution, and Web-to-Survey are just a few of the forms I've created already.

Web-to-X works with any native or custom object, so the possibilities are limitless. See video below of basic Web-to-Contact form...

i-Dialogue is pleased to announce support for the web site templates available at Template Monster. Both HTML and Flash templates are supported by i-Dialogue.

This gives Salesforce.com customers the ability to chose from thousands of ready-made, high-quality web site designs for hosting their interactive i-Dialogue web and portal solutions.

i-Dialogue branding starts at $495 per template. Flash templates starting from $995.

The recent announcement by Adobe to spend $100 million in venture funding to promote it's next generation Apollo platform is not insignificant, as it relates heavily to the future of business web applications, such as Salesforce.com.

The history of business application development has always pursued a fine balance between application "reach", which is how many users can access the app, and application "rich", which is creating applications that address human factors to improve adoption and usability.

Clearly, the Internet has become the defacto means to "reach" end users, but there is a battle waging to determine how best to deliver "rich" user interfaces.

As you can see from the matrix below, Apollo (or something like it) is poised to fulfill the richness that is lacking in Web applications today, such as disconnected access to local files, keyboard shortcuts, and resident application processes.

Also competing for the Web 3.0 quadrant is Microsoft Vista (and Live) with plans to extend their already rich applications with Internet connectivity and collaboration.

Customer and Partner portals will clearly err on the side of maximum reach and utilize open web standards that are capable of delivering the richest possible user experience to the largest possible audience. Employee facing applications and portals are less constrained by a browser-only requirement.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 web browser was officially launched this week prompting web developers and eMarketers everywhere to download and install it for compatibility testing.

I've been using IE7 Beta for several weeks and noticed the new RSS auto-detect button would only occasionally find a feed on a web page. "Hmmmmm", I thought  "Maybe this is just a Beta thing. I'll wait until the final release to worry about it".


Now, RSS adoption by everyday consumers is probably barely over 1%. However, I've been a firm believer that RSS auto-discovery in browsers will be the key to promoting more adoption (besides calling it anything other than "RSS", like just plain old "News Feed").

All of our web hosting solutions include an RSS feed that aggregates activity across all web applications so that customers and partners can subscribe to a single feed to track discussion forum activity, blog entries, KB article updates, and general news.

So, when I installed the final release and noticed our feeds were still not being auto-discovered, I turned to RSS expert Charlie Wood who pointed me in the right direction to quickly resolve the issue (thanks Charlie!).

The impact of RSS on B2B marketing may take awhile, but features like auto-discover in IE7 will definitely help remove the major barriers to adoption.

Michael Leach, i-Dialogue President, recorded this spontaneous presentation on "Creating Web Sites Integrated with Salesforce" in preparation for Dreamforce 2006.

This presentation is intended for web developers and goes beyond the Portal Explorer to demonstrate how to create custom Web Parts integrated with Salesforce custom objects using the AppExchange Recruiting application as an example.

Salesforce's Web-to-Lead feature allows you to integrate web forms with CRM, giving Sales and Marketing immediate visibility into prospects inquiries.

Here are some tips to get the most out of Web-to-Lead using i-Dialogue:

Keep Web-to-Lead forms Relevant
Referring web sites and links set the expectation for a Web-to-Lead form has to offer.
Notice the AdWord in this Google Search for "Widget 9000 Attenuator" sets a "Free White Paper" expectation. The landing page on click-through continues the dialogue with a relevant landing page containing the web-to-lead download form.

Convenient
Make web forms VERY CONVENIENT to complete and submit and keep the number of fields to a bare minimum.
Some web usability best practices include:

• Auto-focus on the first form field so the customer can begin typing immediately
• Pre-populate fields if a relationship already exists
• Set the tab index orders so the form can be easily traversed top to bottom
• Hitting the Enter key should automatically submit the form.
• Validate forms on the client-side (such as "Email missing")

When implemented correctly, the prospect should never need to take their hands off the keyboard and use a mouse.

Fulfilling
Keeping inline with the expectation set in the referring links and relevance of the web-to-lead landing page, the next step is to fulfill the promise of the web-to-lead form.

Web-to-Lead fulfillment activities may include:

• Redirecting to a download page for white paper/case study
• Sending an email auto-response with directions to download some marketing collateral

DO NOT Promise to fulfill a web form submission immediately (such as "Download White Paper Now") and then make the prospect wait for a Sales call Follow-Up. If you cannot fulfill a marketing collateral request immediately, then make it clear BEFORE the form is submitted, such as "A Sales Rep will call within 24 hours to setup a demo".

Actionable
Sales Representatives want to trust web leads, but often don't because of poor data quality (who is going to follow-up on qwerty@asdf.com?) or there isn't an expressed need for a service or product.

The keys to making web-to-lead forms actionable include:

• Validate form fields so that empty fields don't get submitted
• De-duplicate Leads
• Associate Leads with Campaigns so Sales and Marketing know the source
• Pre-Qualify Leads with 1-2 questions (Product Interest, Timeline)
• Auto create follow-up Tasks when Leads come back to the site

Mike Leach, i-Dialogue Principal, will be demonstrating these best practices on October 11th, 2006 at 10:15 at the Salesforce User Conference. Stop by the session "Portals and Web Sites Powered by AppExchange" for a first hand presentation.

Open Source Portal Toolkit for Salesforce Released

September 25 2006, Portland OR - Cubic Compass Software (CCS), a provider of enterprise portal software, today announced the availability of an open source portal toolkit for salesforce.com's suite of on-demand CRM applications. The portal is tightly integrated with Salesforce to give Sales, Marketing, and Support professionals a view of all customer interactions online within Salesforce and provides their customers with self-service access to account information.

"Our goal was to take a top-down approach to implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA ) by addressing several key business challenges that every salesforce.com customer faces when integrating their web site with Salesforce, such as how to process web leads, make decisions based on web interactions, offer customer self-service applications, and make it easy to search and find information on a web site," said Mike Leach, CEO of Cubic Compass Software.

The portal toolkit is based on Microsoft's .NET 2.0 technology. A report from Forrester (1) shows that 56% of enterprises have adopted .NET as their primary development platform.

"Cubic Compass Software incorporates several security, performance, and integration best practices into this portal toolkit," said Adam Gross, vice president, developer marketing, salesforce.com . "This allows organizations to spend more time delivering business value through their Web site and less time on integration and deployment."

Programming skills are not required to customize the portal since most content management and Salesforce integration features are managed through a web-based Portal Explorer. Portal implementations that publish Salesforce custom objects or integrate with add-on modules do require Visual Basic .NET or C# programming skills. CCS offers additional tools and consulting to help organizations publishing custom objects.

The portal toolkit is released under the open source BSD license and may be downloaded at http://www.cubiccompass.com/salesforce-portal.aspx . The open source license gives developers the ability to download and customize the portal source code to their organization's specific needs and requirements. AppExchange partners may use the portal toolkit as a platform for delivering hosted services integrated with Salesforce.
 
Cubic Compass offers annual software support subscriptions, technical support, training, and consulting services in support of the portal software. Software and support subscriptions start at $599 per year.

Michael Leach, Cubic Compass CEO, will be demonstrating the portal at Salesforce's User conference in the session entitled "Portals and Web Sites Powered by the AppExchange" on October 11, 2006 at 10:15am.

Hosted portal solutions are offered by CCS at www.i-dialogue.com.
 

References: 
(1) "The State of Technology Adoption",  Nicholas Wilkoff, Forester Research, May 5, 2004
http://www.cubiccompass.com/docs/Forrester_State_of_Technology_Adoption.pdf  

About Cubic Compass Software (CCS)

Cubic Compass Software, located in Portland, OR, provides open source portal software and services that help organizations interact with their customers online and integrate their customer and partner facing web applications with CRM, ERP, and legacy systems. CCS is the primary developer of the .NET Portal  Toolkit for Salesforce.com and the suite of hosted i-Dialogue for AppExchange applications found at www.i-dialogue.com.

CCS has been developing award winning portal solutions since 2001. For more information, please visit http://www.cubiccompass.com, email info@cubiccompass.com or call 503-245-7654.   


For More Information
http://www.cubiccompass.com/salesforce-portal.aspx

Web designers will often debate whether a B2B web site should be aethestically pleasing with rich graphics and clever copy or simply a bunch of well organized text with links to more information.

At i-Dialogue we strive to find a happy medium between the two schools of thought. But in the end, B2B sites with text-heavy copy and links tend to perform better.

In fact, this recent Marketing Sherpa case study showed that there was a 7% increase in sales and 13% less time spent on pages before clicking using a text-heavy design.

From the article:

... "He decided to test three significant changes:"

#1. Text-format with textual hotlinks instead of colorful graphics with click buttons.

#2. Main options listed in a vertical column instead of a horizontal row.

#3. Moving the user sign-in form to a small corner in the upper right of the screen, rather than allowing it more valuable real estate.

DeHaven ran the test for a week, splitting traffic to discover which page converted more visitors into sales. He also examined back-end data to see if sales reps were having better luck converting leads that had been to the test version of the site.

Then, DeHaven used results to create one more test panel. This time he tweaked all the hotlink wording on the page to see if longer, wordier hotlinks that search engines love would be better for human beings as well. (Link to sample below.)

The design team didn't think much of this test. "Everybody who saw it internally said version C was way too crowded and there wasn't enough white space. We worried people would see it and feel overwhelmed with links."

RESULTS
Turns out everyone was wrong. The heavy-text version that got thumbs down internally won more customer accounts than the cleaner, more graphical design.

It seems that business executives prefer to look at fairly plain textual content online rather than cheerful graphical interfaces. Plus, they prefer vertical to horizontal groupings of options and longer, wordier textual click links.

Read the complete article...

As was alluded to in a previous post, we've been studying the ins and outs of open source to offer web developers maximum control over their interactive web portal implementations.

Our parent company, Cubic Compass Software, recently made the transition to open source and we have BIG plans for the Salesforce .NET Developers community.

A .NET Portal Toolkit for Salesforce.com is in the works and should be available soon (definitely before ADN), complete with ASP.NET and C# source code examples on how to integrate your web site with Salesforce.com. Watch for a new Developers section on this web site.

With the Internet being so ubiquitous, it seems like everyone is a web designer these days. So how do you make your portal standout above the rest with a timeless and enduring design?

Here are a few tried and true tips for achieving web design perfection.

Begin With The End in Mind
Before designing a web site, take a step back and objectively ask "What are we trying to accomplish with this web site?".

Is the portal a revenue generator? If so, how much? Is it strictly informational? Interactive? All of the above?

Get consensus from everyone involved in the project early on so that they understand the end goal. When the inevitable questions, concerns, and "analysis paralysis" sets in, the end goal has the final say whether a decision is in or out.

Form Follows Function
Today's web sites are far more interactive than traditional marketing and media, yet many web designers have an entrenched background in print and television marketing, which emphasizes one-way broadcasts to customers instead of two-way interactive dialogues.

If the end goal defines "what" you want to accomplish, then the function of the web site should shape "how". It is rarely the case that form is the means to a web sites end, unless you're creating brochure-ware.

Is the function of your portal to help customers find exactly what they're looking for? If so, then a search centric design would follow some common conventions, such as placing a search text box towards the top of the page with room for at least 30 characters.

"But the search button should be Red to match our corporate logo" someone might say. "No, the next step is to make sure the search engine actually works and returns relevant results!" the web designer should reply.

Only after the functional requirements are met should the aesthetic form be addressed.

Less Is More
I have 2 pictures of myself from 1977. In one of them, I'm wearing bell bottom pants and a wide collar disco shirt (ala John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever) and in the other picture I'm wearing good old Levi's jeans and a T-Shirt.

Which picture do you think is more timeless? Which one do you think makes me cringe when I look at it?

The point is, there is a price to pay for being "fashionable". You should not follow cool web design trends that will later look dated (and perhaps comical). The most bare boned, functional portals may not win any graphic arts awards, but you can bet they will be still be serving their purpose in 3-5 years with little need for aesthetic changes.

Examples of excess in web design today include:
Flash Intros (with the obligatory "skip intro" buttons)
Graphical or Iconic menus that only reveal their true purpose on hover
Anything animated

If you sense that a web design is excessive, walkthrough a deconstruction exercise asking the team to remove as many elements as possible and still meet the end goal and functional requirements. You'd be amazed at how much "fluff" can be removed from portal designs.

Color is Better Than Black and White
Ahhhh.... you've made it! Congratulations! Your portal meets the stated end goal and serves it's functional purpose to the best of it's abilities.... but.... well.... it does look a little bland.

Because color and function are intertwined, you may want to revisit the functional aspects of the design. For example, can you color code data grids with red or green rows if they deserve any emphasis? Can you call attention to particular elements using bold fonts? Always seek to make color part of the information whenever possible.

When you do start splashing the design with some color to spice it up, keep the following rules and facts in mind:
The contrast of dark fonts on a white background is preferred.
The human eye objectively interprets earth tone colors as being naturally timeless. Anything else is subjective.
8% of males and 0.5% of females are red/green color blind.

Use the Golden Ratio
Web sites like hot or not appeal to human's innate (and often superficial) ability to identify a ratio known as the Golden Ratio, or Phi.

"What is beauty?" is an oft asked question pursued by many artists for centuries, and the answer is (drum roll please) .... 1:1.618.

Because web design is fundamentally the composition of several rectangular elements, this golden ratio can be applied to almost every design decision.

When critics say something doesn't "feel" right in a web layout, it may be because the Phi ratio is well implied in one area but grossly defied in another.

This style guide and toolkit provides all the information necessary to create i-Dialogue page templates that match the look-and-feel of an existing web site.

i-Dialogue uses open web development technologies, such as HTML and CSS, for displaying web pages.

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?

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.

If you have an interest in web usability then you should check out Jacob Nielson's AlertBox newsletter.

This weeks topic on Business-to-Business usability is particularly relevant to i-Dialogue Customer Portal (there's also a 282 page PDF report you can purchase). Jacob's approach is more quantifiable and scientific than most other web usability specialists, but I tend to agree with many of his principles and conclusions.

In fact, Jacob's Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2005 challenged us to revisit i-Dialogue's design and add a few new features (namely dynamic fonts, "Best Bet" search results, and auto-focus on form fields).

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!

They're taking over the Internet... slowly but surely.

Look out! Here's another one   

But what are they? Well... clicking on one may not reveal much, but the "little orange buttons" are our friends and they're here to stay.

They go by a lot of "techy" names, like RSS, ATOM and "Attention", but basically they give your customers a web address that can be integrated into their desktop, or other applications.

In the case of i-Dialogue Customer Portal, they keep your customers attention by streaming your portals activities right into their applications, like Microsoft Outlook, Google News Reader, or Internet Explorer.

Imagine your customers seeing headlines from your web site like "New Product Release from XYZ Corp Hits the Market" right next to their Inbox?

Blog entries, message boards, knowledge base articles (from Salesforce.com Solutions), and new web pages.... they're all combined into one feed.

So go ahead...click on one . They won't bite

But before you do, check out a few of these fine RSS readers. In fact, you may consider bundling the announcement of your portals RSS feed with the ability to download any of these readers:

Attensa: Great for organizing feeds in Outlook.
Bloglines : The leading online, hosted RSS feed aggregator.
Newsgater: Offers both installed and online readers.
Feed rinse: Clever web site that filters feeds before they get to your reader.

The convergence of email, content management, web forms, and CRM in a single solution like i-Dialogue can provide great power, but "with great power comes great responsibility", and one of those responsibilities is CAN-SPAM compliance.

You'll notice that every email sent from an i-Dialogue portal includes an opt out link and your organizations address in the footer by default. This is to ensure that your customers always have the option to "opt-out" of future email communications and even contact your physical address in writing or by phone to make this request (you have to honor any channel).

Great thought has gone into making it convenient for your customers to opt out... but there are controls in place to ensure this feature does not get abused.

For example, when viral marketing activity occurs, customers are usually forwarding their emails to their friends and family. What happens if one of these people click on the opt out link?

Not to worry. i-Dialogue has some basic protective measures to ensure only the original email recipient can opt out.

The final key to CAN-SPAM compliance is data integrity. When a lead or customer opts-in or out via the portal, this bit of information (and it is quite literally a "bit" ) makes it back to Salesforce.com and updates the related "Email Opt Out" field within the hour.

Most, if not all, email marketing vendors on the AppExchange will respect and adhere to the setting of this field, further validating the tremendous value of making Salesforce.com data the master record for all your Leads and Contacts.

The broad scope of relationship marketing

Challenge:
Your web site must support multiple relationships. Not just customers.

Solution:
Use the 6 markets model to identify key relationships and design information architecture around them.

The 6 markets model is useful for visualizing the key markets and relationships that every organization is engaged in. Relationship Marketing takes a holistic view of all of these relationships and promotes cross-functional collaboration between internal groups to address the needs of each of these relationships in a methodical way.



Action Items:

 Low Hanging Fruit

Use CRM to Manage All Relationships
Expand the responsibility of your CRM database to manage all relationships. Create a Role field for Contacts.
In Salesforce.com CRM this is best implemented as a multi-value picklist.

Mirror Roles in Web Site
Make sure the web site is synchronized with the CRM database so that the relationship context is known at all times.

Relationship Oriented Navigation
Create navigation menu for the 6 markets.
For example, direct access links for "Customers", "Partners", "Investors", "Media/Press", or "Employees".

 Mid Hanging Fruit

Delegated Publishing Authority
Assign Marketing, Public-Relations, Support, and Human Resource representatives to specific relationships and delegate authority to manage Internet dialogues via web content and emails.

Relevant Front Doors
Remove the concept of a single home page and ensure each type of relationship has a clearly marked and accessible "front door" on the web site.

 High Hanging Fruit

Sub-Segment
Sub-segment the primary 6 markets into sub-markets using the segmentation capabilities of the CRM system. Create an iterative/incremental web publishing process that ensures targeted content exists for sub-segments.

Measure and Optimize
Create KPI dashboard indicators that monitor relationships in the 6 key markets and provide realistic feedback on relationship marketing activities.


References:
Adrian Payne (1991), Cranfield University

1. An easily deployed, personalized customer portal with appropriate branding.
   OK... I'd go along with that.
2. A customer-driven web-to-case management system for opening and tracking cases
   My usability studies show that a customer opening a case online is an unhappy customer. If the customer portal is properly designed, then customers will successfully "self-serve" themselves to needed information. Web-to-Case forms are a "request to be served" last resort that generally result in higher support costs. Besides, email and web initiated support response times are actually getting worse, not better.
3. A comprehensive knowledge base
   Definitely. This should actually be the #2 key element.
4. Embedded natural language search
   I think this myth get perpetuated from the 'Ask Jeeves' days, but customers actually just enter 1-3 keywords into search boxes.... not natural language sentences. And besides, once a customer is using your customer portal, you should be able to anticipate 80% of the keywords and rely on human edited search results to maximize the relevance of search results. Depending on engineered search solutions for your customer portal is really casting your fate into the wind.
5. An application programming interface (API) for integrating to other systems such as ERP and contact center telephony solutions.
   I suppose it depends on the company size. A small to medium business that is already buying into the concept of on-demand CRM might be best served avoiding APIs and exploring other on-demand customer self-service solutions (shameless plug for i-Dialogue ). But closed-loop integration and a thorough understanding of your customers can ultimately only be achieved using a service oriented architecture. This, unfortunately, does not really improve the customer experience, but does improve the employee experience.

Problem: Web publishers cannot anticipate customers preferred font size.

Solution: Provide a dynamic font resizer on all web pages.

Would you prefer all web page fonts to be this size? Or how about this?

Today's Internet allows customers to choose their preferred font size and dynamically reformat web pages. One example is the Masters golf tournament web site that allows visitors to view the leader board scores in 3 different font sizes.

Unfortunately, most customer web sites are designed using a "one size fits all" approach that leaves customers squinting at small fonts and generally having a negative customer experience.

I jokingly refer to web developers that use a single font size as "carrot eaters" (but it turns out that eating carrots to improve your vision is an urban myth ).

Some tips to consider when designing customer facing web pages:

• Design copy to be viewed in at least 3 sizes (Small-Medium-Large).
• Provide a dynamic font resizer on each page and remember each customers preferred setting.
• Not all text needs to be resizeable. Usually just the main body is required. Navigation menus, headers, and
• footers provide a better frame for the main body if their size remains static.

This online demonstration shows an i-Dialogue web page template with various sizes of resizable text.

Here's a guick tip to help customers find what they're looking on your web site.


Problem: Customers searching your web site may misspell search terms, use outdated product names or variations on keywords.

Solution: Create "Best Bet" search results that intercept search terms and direct customers in the right direction.

How To Create a "Best Bet" in i-Dialogue.

1. Login as a site Administrator
2. Navigate to the Search/Best Bets tree menu.
3. Enter the search term keywords that you want to evaluate.
4. Create a relevant search result for the keyword with headline, abstract, and web link.



Test the keyword by clicking on the "Test" link and then review the results.

There's a fantastic article on Wired called "Web 2.0: A Pattern Library" written by Tim Ziegler. The article provides a great summary of best practices and principles that are floating around; and covers everything from content management and information architecture to human filtering and "folksonomies".

Especially important is the notion of iterative development of web campaigns. Todays tools provide an unprecedented level of flexibility and agility that allow marketers to make frequent changes and receive feedback in near real-time.

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.

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.

While writing my previous post on SEO Fundamentals, it occurred to the me that it wouldn't take too much effort to automate an analysis of these best practices in i-Dialogue Customer Portal. About 2 hours later I came up with the following report, which is available in 6.01.

There are a number of other heuristics I'd like to add to this report, such as checking for the existence of <H1> and <H2> tags, and duplicate HTML content.

But for now, this is a great tool for quickly determining which best practices are not being enforced with convenient hyperlinks directly to the pages for on the spot correction.

I stumbled upon this great product configurator (PC) at http://vtx.honda.com, which helps prospective motorcycle buyers visualize the various models and configurations of the Honda VTX motorcycle.

This is a great example because it provides a self-service interface that helps consumers experiment with various configurations and immediately answers key questions, such as "How much will this cost if I add this feature?", "What does it look like in Blue?" and "Where can I get it?".

I'm still hoping for the day when these product configurators are tightly integrated with ERP Bill of Materials (BOM) systems so that Marketers and Engineers can collaborate and quickly make product configuration and part changes (price, source, look) and then immediately publish the changes live to their web site.

But the low-hanging fruit for most relationship marketers is simply to get some basic customization capabilities and images available on their web site.

I recall reading a case study where the conversion rate of customers who actually used the online PC and requested a quote was phenomenally high (> 30%). It may cost anywhere from $10K-$200K for a really good configurator (depending on product complexity) but with 30%+ conversion rates that can be easily be measured in closed-loop reporting environment, who can afford not to consider that investment?

Of course, an organization must be MTO capable (Made-To-Order) to truly recognize the benefits of a PC.

Search Engine Optimization is really just good copywriting. That's all there is to it. Sure, some technical skills are useful, but 80%+ of effective SEO is about writing good copy.

For example, if a customer is interested in purchasing a "widget offset attenuator" (fictional bizarre example here) they are very likely to enter this term into a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!

Now, if you sell "widget offset attenuators" how do you ensure your web site gets listed towards the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Simple, you write structured copy in a language that search engine bots understand. Bots are constantly crawling the web, visiting your web site, and recording the information they find on your site.

But having "widget offset attenuator" simply in the HTML of a web page is not enough. If the bot also sees that the name of the page URL is widgetOffsetAttenuators.aspx, the Title of the page is "Widget Offset Attenuators", and page description and keywords support this, then most bots are designed to conclude "Yep.... these folks are more serious about 'widget offset attenuators' than any other page I've visited. Let's rank them higher".

Here's a simple SEO page template that we use for all i-Dialogue marketing campaigns:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

And a completed template might look something like this:

URL Name:
Title:
Description:	Provides attentuation and precise adjustment for Widget offset frequencies.
Keywords:
Heading 1:
Heading 2:

Each of these fields in an i-Dialogue web site is mapped to a structured tag in a page template that is guaranteed to be requested by each search engine bot and used in their evaluation of the web site.

So, you can see that the actual technical aspect of SEO, once the template is done and out of the way, is quite easy. i-Dialogue uses a database to store these values, but you can just as easily add them to your own HTML page template (See more on META Tags here).

The really difficult part of SEO is having the discipline to complete this template for every single public page in the web site, and writing effective, clear and concise copy. This is the only way to achieve organic and enduring search results and is fundamental to every successful web marketing campaign.

An SEO copywriter must have the ability, in this example, to think like the prospective customer and know several other alternative keywords and phrases the customer may be looking for. Instead of "widget offset attenuator", some customers might try "widget adjuster" or "widget attenuator".

Customers will search on both singular and plural variations of your products and services. They will often misspell them (and yes.... you should create pages dedicated to misspelled variations if you think the occurrence frequency is high enough).

Internet customers, as a whole, will tend to enter simpler keywords and phrases than more complex ones. Monitoring your own web sites search engine is a continuous, iterative activity that good SEO copywriters engage in to understand what customers are actually looking for.


Things not to do:
Some SE optimizers might think "If a few well placed keywords and META tags are good, then repeating the keywords several times must be very good!". No... this is actually very wrong and most bots will penalize your web site if they discover hidden text (white font color on white background or commented text) or duplicate keywords.

Duplicate copy on multiple pages is another thing to avoid. Bots believe that when this pattern occurs, that they are being lured into a "link farm", which is a common tactic to artificially create the illusion that a particular page or keyword is more popular than it actually is.

Your organization name should not appear in any of the template fields, except for the home page, about us, or contact us pages.


So remember... it all starts with good copywriting. In a future article, I'll discuss how to build on these SEO fundamentals and pursue some more advanced SEO activities.

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.

Many businesses are in a dilemma when it comes to upgrading or migrating their web site. On one hand, several existing web pages may have a high Google Page Rank (or other search engine ranking) as a result of several in-bound links from several other sites.

On the other hand, this high ranking is useless because the web page is outdated (either the technology or the content) and does not contribute towards lead conversion or initiating a web dialogue.

There are basically 2 techniques that I use to help businesses migrate all or part of their web site to a new i-Dialogue customer portal. Note:

301 Redirects. This involves mapping existing web content to a new location and crafting some 301 status messages that instruct search engine crawlers and web browsers to visit the new site or page. These 301 redirectors may be maintained indefinitely, but usually 3-6 months is recommended.

Extension Mapping. Web pages developed in the 90's likely have file extensions that end in ".htm" or ".html". Newer web sites may use extensions like ".jsp", ".cf", ".asp", or ".aspx". While the ".aspx" is the default used for i-Dialogue portals, it is possible to map page extensions to any number of characters.

So instead of redirecting your existing productName.html page to productName.aspx, we simply map all requests for the ".html" extension to the newer ".aspx" extension and the page requester doesn't notice the difference.

Note that Google and other search engines use a wide variety of algorithms to rank pages, and a complete overhaul of a web site, regardless if the URLs are kept in tact, often leads to temporary reduction in page rank; but with (hopefully) a long term gain since the entire portal has been optimized for the search engine.

When discussing customer self-service portals with other people, inevitably the subject of online case management comes up. "The knowledge base and discussion forums are fine", they say, "but we really need a web form to help customers initiate a support request".

Often, these requirements are coupled with complex work flows, auto-responders with ticket numbers, dynamic routing, and escalation rules. It's as if some people are eager to have their work day interrupted with support requests from the web portal!

But customers often do not perceive the ability to enter a support request via the web as a benefit. In fact, of all the multiple self-service resources available via the customer portal, a support request form has the longest time to resolution (see graph below).

In the customers mind, having to fill out a support request form is anticlimactic and an inconvenience. They entered the web portal session with hopes of immediate gratification and then leave feeling that it may take days or hours until someone gets back to them.

While many support cases can be attributed to "human error", customers still expect suppliers to anticipate common problems and strategically invest in publishing FAQs, KB articles, and other online resources.

Now, I wouldn't recommend removing support request forms altogether, but I would suggest that Marketing and Support Executives view this as simply a tactical option that reinforces "reactive support" over a more strategic approach that promotes preventative support with an investment in self-service materials and content.

The astute observer may notice that "publishing documents" appear in the "preventative but tactical" quadrant in the above matrix. The reason for this is that web pages are documents and customers consider it an inconvenience when new browser windows and applications suddenly pop-up and take several seconds to load (my Adobe Acrobat plug-in still takes about 10 seconds to load! Forcing me to install Foxit Reader instead).

When the web became fairly ubiquitous, organizations already had several Word and PDF documents on hand and the tactical approach to self-service was to simply make these documents available online. Today this is largely unacceptable, except in rare cases when an alternative to HTML must be provided for printing.

Some Canadian researchers have determined that it takes people 1/20th of a second to make an aesthetic judgement about a web site (news.com article here).

The researchers didn't identify the reasons for liking or disliking a web site, nor why they conditioned the subjects for such a test in the first place, but it does reinforce the fact that first impressions do matter on the web.

I would recommend the following to get past the first blink with customers:

• 5 W's: Make sure to focus on the Who, What, Where, When, and Why on the home page.
  The W's can have multiple meanings and contexts.
  "Who" you are and "What" you do are important. But who your customers are and what you can do for them is even more important.
• No animation or blinking. These are often perceived as advertisements and distract the eyes search for content.
• Familiar "L" navigation. Do not get creative with navigation, such as employing hover-overs to reveal the navigation item.
• High density information links on home page. The customer should feel like "this is the place" to start looking if there are several well categorized links. A high density home page also acts as a true "home" so that is customers ever get lost, they know they can also get back to where they started in just one click.
• Reduced or no images. This is to improve download speed and allow for higher density of links.