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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

#1 Data Security
#2 Reliability
#3 Data Quality

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

Security

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

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

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


Reliability

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

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

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

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

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


Data Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I just noticed an explosion in available Salesforce.com pod casts on iTunes. I'll have to check these out. The first one I downloaded several months ago was an open discussion of mostly venture capitalists discussing the future of on-demand computing.

The latest pod casts appear to be more focused on AppExchange Best Practices.

Ouch... Just one day after announcing near 100% uptime for the month of March (which I looked into around mid-month ), Salesforce.com has another outage.

I didn't notice anything at the web service/data integration level, but apparently the browser interface had some issues.