Good news arrived from Salesforce today...

Dear Michael,

Congratulations! Your application is now provisionally Certified. Thank you for your diligent work and amazing effort in achieving AppExchange Certification.

The Salesforce.com Security Team noted a couple extra precautions we must take to become "fully" certified. We're confident these measures can be implemented within 30 days.

Perhaps I'll blog more on this process in the future to share some lessons learned, but suffice to say we're all extremely pleased to reach this milestone. A lot of eyes from Salesforce and Symantec have been reviewing everything; including source code, hosted applications, and internal security policies. It's very gratifying to be validated by such a smart group of folks.

Kudos to Jerry Merfeld, our Support and Operations guru, who spent several days researching the AppExchange Certification Wiki and made changes to our information security processes to ensure our infrastructure is in compliance.

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

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

The Beagle Research Group notes the success of Salesforce's Idea Exchange but goes on to confuse online communities with portals...

"Any day now, I expect to see any number of new or revived portal companies climbing on board the bandwagon to announce that they can deliver portals or even communities of interest better, faster, and cheaper, to which I say, hold on."

"Communities" and "portals" are 2 wildly different concepts. The majority of B2B companies will not expose themselves to the risk of hosting an online discussion forum or Idea Exchange equivalent, but the majority do see 1-to-1 interactions via portals as a must-have feature.

Salesforce.com has been very bold in creating this community and all publicly traded companies with a global customer base should follow suit, but Salesforce customers are much less likely to follow and offer an IdeaExchange to their own customers.

In fact, community applications have really lost their innovative lustre IMO. They are commodity add-on features that have "crossed the chasm" and now only differentiate through "better, faster, cheaper" (look to mobile for where the real innovation is happening).

Single-Sign-On (SSO) is still the #1 problem with most customer self-service sites today, and adding yet another community application only compounds the problem. Portals solve this problem with integrated support for SSO and integrating with best of breed community applications, rather than re-inventing them.

When I do online banking, I just want to focus on my direct relationship with the bank through their portal and get done quick. It's a "nice to have" option to engage in community applications through the same web site, but I expect the signal-to-noise ratio to be much lower.

Let's face it. Google is search. When we first started developing plug-ins to our content management system, we did what any other software company would do and attempted pre-maturely optimize our solution to support any search engine. But pretty soon that gave way to Google specific reporting, optimizations, and API integration.

Google now has 2 menu items in the i-Dialogue control panel. One for API integration and one for Webmaster reports... and as we start rolling out a new daily email reporting system, Google once again has it's own specific reporting module.

Some reports show that half of all Internet searches were done through Google in 2007, but I suspect it's closer to 60%.

From a relationship marketing software perspective the trend is clear. Generic SEO and PPC tracking features will start giving way to Google and Yahoo specific tools and reports as this becomes a 2 horse race that controls 80% of the search advertising market combined (but that's not to say there won't be plenty of opportunities in the Long Tail).

So as a Microsoft partner, what are my thoughts on MSN and Live? www.live.com market share is truly disappointing and perhaps somewhat undeserved. The image search feature is much better than any other search I've used and I like the fact that Live Maps makes a guess at my Geo location based on my IP address and defaults to my location.

But I still find myself using Google for text, news, and Blog searches, simply because I know Google's algorithms set the industry standard and anything else has a feeling of "also ran" when you use it.

Finally, www.ask.com is another dark horse search engine that probably deserves more market share than it has today. It's quite a comeback story and you can really see the passion that went into reinventing this 90's Internet bubble darling.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes the simplest solutions are right beneath your nose. We recently stumbled upon a way to deploy a simple Partner Portal that offers 20% of the features found in Salesforce PRM, but delivers 80% of the value (as the Pareto principle would probably dictate).

Most Salesforce.com users are already managing their partners using Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce. Our mid-market channel management portal provides these Contacts with self-service access to Salesforce information with full support for escalation rules, alerts, document management, and campaign management.

But often times all small businesses want is the ability for Partners to register Leads online and allow them to monitor/update the status of their Leads and Opportunities through a portal.

Here are the steps to take in Salesforce to deploy a "Lite" Partner Portal:

1. Ensure the Account Type picklist has a value for "Partner".
2. Create a custom Contact Lookup relationship field on the Lead and Opportunity records. Name it something like "Referring Partner Contact".
3. Map the Partner Contact Lookup fields to user defineable fields in the portal.
4. Map the Lead.Referring Contact field to the Opportunity.Referring Contact so it will persist upon conversion.

With these customizations in place, we then add the "Lite" partner portal "My Leads" and "My Opportunities" web parts to the portal "My Account" page and restrict access to these web parts to those in the "Partner" role.

Finally, a standard Web-to-Lead form is used to pre-populate the referring partners Contact ID when registering a Lead. Internally, you can simply approve/deny these Lead registrations by removing the "Referring Partner Contact" field value. Upon Lead conversion, the referring partner ID will automatically carry over to the new Opportunity.

WebEx announced their intentions long ago to re-invent themselves as a platform, much like the Salesforce AppExchange. Now that Cisco has acquired WebEx, how much will this strategy change? Can WebEx truly expand beyond the web conferencing market? With Cisco's help, it certainly seems likely they will enter the inter-VOIP conferencing market. And judging from their Connect Platform, they seem very focused on enabling complex processes and CRM-like workflows.

Any WebEx user will tell you their WebEx Address Book is a key contact management repository that is just waiting to be unlocked (it's actually quite shocking how little reporting there is in WebEx for a 10 year old system).

And what will become of the Salesforce-Cisco-WebEx relationship? WebEx has effectively put Salesforce in their crosshairs and has no shame in demonstrating their SugarCRM integration in the Connect demos. But Cisco is Salesforce.com's #2 customer. Now that really stirs the pot.

And finally, just the fact that Cisco is entering the SaaS market is quite an interesting topic in itself. The WebEx brand is obviously too entrenched to be intermingled with Cisco. Cisco has mastered the art of growing via acquisition in the networking space, but nobody would have guessed that this model could be replicated in SaaS. Given that SaaS is just the next layer above Cisco's networking infrastructure, the new strategy doesn't seem that unusual at all.

 We just announced our support for Microsoft CRM Live (details here). Microsoft CRM 4.0 will be available in 3 different deployment configurations.

1) Hosted by Microsoft
2) Hosted by Microsoft Partners
3) On-premise (you install and host in-house)

The current plan is to support all 3 options. We'll likely embrace option #2 as an opportunity to have hands-on ownership of the base CRM solution and pre-configuring it for various industries, such as Real-Estate, Financial Services, Technology, and Manufacturing.

A key component of this solution will be an integrated workflow engine to enable rich "dialogues" between employees, customers, and partners. i-Dialogue for Microsoft CRM will take advantage of the .NET 3.0 windows workflow foundation, which provides a visual flow charting designer for creating workflows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's great to see Salesforce go green, but how much weight should the software industry bear given natural influences on the environment. Oregon, where I live, is an extremely environmentally conscious state, yet we maintain a degree of pragmatism to ensure the advancement of technology and sciences.

Google recently built a datacenter a few miles down the road from us, which elegantly uses the nearby Columbia River for power and cooling. This datacenter will also create 200+ technology jobs in a town that was overly dependent on a declining timber industry (but a growing wind surfing industry).

My position is simply this: Let's leave politics aside and use critical thinking when it comes to global warming. Change is clearly taking place, but correlation is not causality. Start local then think global.

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.

There is finally sufficient web infrastructure in place to enable the rapid design, customization, and deployment of industry focused CRM solutions. Unfortunately, most Salesforce.com CRM and i-Dialogue implementations all start with a common template and evolve in myriad directions to meet industry needs.

The concept of CRM templates has been around for awhile and exists to varying degrees. In 2007, my focus is primarily on pre-built industry solutions that leverage the flexibility of both i-Dialogue and Salesforce to enable rich online interactions between Customers, Partners, and Employees.

But first, we need to help educate people on the power of Salesforce beyond the functional areas of just Sales and Support. The AppExchange and Apex give companies the ability to manage their HR, Finance, Legal, and Operations processes as well; and provide web self-service to the various constituents of each relationship through i-Dialogue.

This requires expanding use of "C"RM systems to a "RM" systems. You'll recall that the 6 Markets Approach to Relationship Marketing takes a holistic view of all relationships your organization is engaged in. Not just your customers.



I look forward to 2007 as the year of bringing all available web tools and technologies together into powerful, vertically aligned solutions that add game-changing value to their respective industries.