A quick update on our "i-Dialogue for AppExchange" customer portal solution:

Testing of the beta release in February revealed that our Salesforce Lead and Contact integration just was not deep enough. Many test customers immediately wanted to extrapolate our integration across *all* Salesforce objects, to include Accounts, Solutions, Products, and Campaigns.

After all, we have a rich knowledge base. Why isn't that integrated with Salesforce Solutions? Salesforce has rich reporting and dashboards. Why can't the customer portal reports show up in there?

Also, some customers preferred to extend their existing objects rather than learn new, but similar, custom objects. So rather than create a new Web Lead or KB Article object, they wanted their end users to simply see some new custom fields in existing objects that related to the customer portal.

And finally, after getting everything configured, they wanted the ongoing integration to be seamless and happen in the background without any manual intervention.

So, we looked at some off the shelf integration tools, scoured the sForce Developers Guides, and ultimately went back to the drawing board to design the "Salesforce Object Mapper".

This is a Marketing friendly web application that allows anyone to map Salesforce fields to i-Dialogue fields for use in emails, personalized web pages, knowledge base articles, campaigns, and accounts.

In fact, there is no limit to the number and types of custom objects and fields that can be mapped to the customer portal. If you've created your own custom objects and would like to utilize them in the customer self-service portal, there is now support to do that.