Diablogue

Salesforce Switching to Macs Not So Surprising

2008-04-27T15:09:35.579-05:00

I had assumed this "rumor" of Salesforce.com switching 4,000 employees to Macs had in fact occurred several months ago based on following Simon's contributions to the Mac world and attending Dreamforce demos.

I'm not far behind making the switch myself. I've decided rather than running Parallels to maintain a stable Windows XP/Visual Studio machine and a separate Mac/Eclipse environment for general browser-based productivity and Salesforce specific work.

No surprise which one will get used the most. I just love the instant boot of the Mac books.

The all SaaS environment utilized by our company makes employee on-boarding, collaboration, and roaming much easier. It's vexing to see companies with only 12 employees shackled to Exchange. If migration is the only barrier to SaaS, then expect to see more service-oriented integration tools and vendors emerge.

Mobile productivity and multiple device synchronization is the next challenge. Google Phone had better be just around the corner. :-)

Microsoft CRM Online Available

2008-04-24T15:19:31.532-05:00

Just noticed that Microsoft CRM Online is now officially available. Not sure how personally invested I'll get in learning it. I responded to several Beta trial invitations, but never received an invite (and we're a Microsoft partner?!?).

There is a 30 day trial that you can apply for.

Kudos to Microsoft for changing the name from "Live" CRM to simply "CRM Online" (As Simon Cowell might say "The whole Live brand just seems a bit too cabaret-ish for business software applications" ;-) ).

The Big Switch Back

2008-04-23T21:33:46.501-05:00

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

RETS Integration for Salesforce.com

2008-04-20T18:45:52.392-05:00

Keeping Real Estate websites up to date with the latest property listing information is a challenging task. IDX implementations vary across the industry and provide little support for structured CRM integration. Fortunately, several Multiple Listing Service (MLS) vendors in the US have standardized on a transaction standard called RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) for describing real estate properties and listings.

Cubic Compass is excited to announce a RETS/Salesforce integration solution that synchronizes MLS listings with Salesforce in near real-time (AppExchange package). RETS Import Fieldmaps (documentation here) are used to map MLS fields to Salesforce custom objects

The combination of RETS/MLS data and the Force.com platform gives real estate development and sales professionals a single environment to manage the entire real estate sales process, from listing to website publishing, demand generation, scheduled showings, email marketing, contract management, and close.

Lookup relationships to Properties and Listings give Realtors one-click capability to manage a detailed database of Leads/Contacts and their specific interests. Web-to-Lead forms automatically relate Leads to their primary property Listing of interest.

Web Event activity tracking displays which properties and listings customers are viewing on the website. Page views are rolled up on the Listing records for visibility on most viewed listings.

Property history tracking gives Realtors a detailed database of prior listing transactions, long after the MLS hosted listings are gone.

Contact info@cubiccompass.com for more details and a demonstration.

eCommerce for Salesforce

2008-04-17T22:18:54.583-05:00

The ultimate one-to-one online dialogue for any organization is a financial transaction that ackowledges the value of products or services provided by an organization. Most eMarketing campaign activities are designed with the end goal in mind of receiving an online payment or donation.

Cubic Compass has developed a core set of eCommerce services and capabilities integrated with Salesforce.com, and a deployment methodology that addresses the following:

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

I'll be expanding on these areas individually with a series of blog articles and a comprehensive white paper. But for now you can get an inside look through this case study.

Future Trends in PaaS/DaaS

2008-04-16T23:19:47.333-05:00

(Warning: What follows is a technical discussion. We will return to our regularly scheduled blogging on less technical CRM/CEM topics in the near future).

It seems a shame to have all these multi-processor servers and not be able to use them to their fullest extent. You can't even buy a new laptop today that doesn't have, at minimum, something like an Intel Core 2 Duo.

In layman's terms, computer manufacturers realized they could no longer cram more power onto a single processor, so lately they've started welding 2 processors together in an attempt to double their computing power. Unfortunately, today's software rarely knows how to harness this extra parallel power.

There's a certain disharmony between the new concept of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that continue to use old programming language concepts.

Today's languages are very serial. For example, many Apex code examples SELECT a bunch of Leads, Contacts, or Campaigns, then one by one evaluate or process them.

The server could have 2, 4, or 8 processors, but odds are these scripts will only use 1. Within the scope of a single web page request, this is probably fine. Perhaps the other processors are being utilized by other web page requests.

But for asynchronous processes, such as delivering mass emails or updating records, this approach is wasteful given the availability multi-core processors.

Asynchronous Apex is a step in the right direction, however this feature appears to provide the ability to automatically run a script after hours (but still running through serial loop processing).

I've been thinking a lot lately about how next generation CRM/CEM architectures ~~should~~ must make use of today's server architecture. Several eMarketing and CRM tasks can benefit from parallel execution:

* Mass Email Marketing

* Lead Scoring

* Data Cleansing

* ETL / Data Transfer and Synchronization

* Report Generation

I had dinner a few weeks ago with one of the architects of a programming language named Haskell and he painted a dire picture "Object oriented languages are becoming obsolete. Functional programming is the wave of the future."

Fortunately, because our architecture is based on .NET, if we ever get bored with the limitations of one programming language, we can tap into dozens of alternative languages (some days I get the feeling we're doing more to offer .NET Development-as-a-Service than Microsoft is. Something isn't right... why isn't Microsoft doing this?).

One functional programming language in particular, named F#, is emerging as an ideal language for harnessing the power of today's multi-core servers for use in eMarketing.

While not set in stone, it's beginning to look like our next generation architecture will approach traditional eMarketing processes in a whole new light. Hopefully harnessing faster and cheaper infrastructure will result in more frequent, relevant, and intelligent online customer interactions.

Would we go as far to expose functional programming concepts through Dialogue Script? That's an interesting concept. I suspect BPM or diagram tools will provide the necessary layer of abstraction to make functional programming concepts successful in PaaS/DaaS environments.

Salesforce Google Integration - Here at Last

2008-04-14T01:37:18.69325-05:00

2006: The Potential
2007: The Prototype
2008: The Launch!

I'm in absolute SaaS productivity heaven now that our Google Apps for Enterprise are accessible in Saleforce.

My biggest worry was that the integration might require 30 minutes of configuration, or digging up some arcane Google Apps security token. Boy was I wrong. I just typed in our Google Apps domain name and was up and running within 5 minutes.

Now if only I could access my Google mail from within Salesforce. I tried adding a "Google Mail" web tab to Salesforce in hopes of maximizing my productivity in Salesforce, but Google Mail is a "frame braker".

Here's a screenshot of the default Google Apps now available in Salesforce.

Gradual Engagement Over Signup Forms

2008-04-07T01:41:18.78225-05:00

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.

The Art of Ware(as-a-Service)

2008-04-05T14:12:29.65-05:00

In classic Sun Tzu fashion, Marc Benioff embraces competitor SAP by stating:

"I want to figure out how to get SAP to build on our platform. SAP needs to write its new apps on our platform."

For Microsoft's part, SAP integration came naturally since SAP is used in-house to run the business. The two giants have silently agreed on the mutual win-win opportunity of using Office tools (Excel and Word) to access SAP apps.

Unfortunately, integrated Microsoft-SAP applications have an air of being written for Microsoft by Microsoft.

Is it likely that SAP will develop their new apps on Force.com? Probably not.

Is it likely that SAP customers will (and already do) develop Force.com apps integrated with SAP? Definitely, yes.

In contrast to the "destroy the enemy" strategy employed against Seibel, I think it is a wise path for Salesforce to acknowledge that on-premise enterprise software will be around for years to come and that the "art" of victory against established ERP players will be one that embraces the revenue streams of existing infrastructure and provides a migration path to SaaS/PaaS alternatives.

Salesforce Summer 08 Logos

2008-04-02T13:14:39.4945-05:00

It's that time of season to vote for a Salesforce logo. Vote for your favorite Summer '08 logo here.

Personally, I'm rooting for the shades :-)

April Fools - Google Style

2008-04-01T22:24:09.666-05:00

I awoke to the disappointment of learning that the well of cleverly written April Fools tech articles on Slashdot had gone dry, which I thought was a joke in itself.

Fortunately, I had to look no further than my own Google Apps for a refreshing, humorous departure from the daily grind.

When attempting to create a calendar event, I was prompted with the curiously out of place option of "I'm Feeling Lucky". Taking the bait and clicking on the button results in calendar events, such as "Date With Paris Hilton". You won't see that in Outlook :-)

Google Visualization API

2008-03-21T16:06:51.2925-05:00

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 :-)