It's finally official. i-Dialogue is now Salesforce Certified .
 
Top 4 Benefits to Being Salesforce Certified
 
* Not having to tell Professional Edition customers "I'm sorry. We should have PE integration anytime now."
* Not having to tell Enterprise/Unlimited Edition customers "We actually are very secure. We just haven't been certified yet".
* More exposure through the AppExchange
* Rapid response and resolution to Salesforce questions

It's been over a month since I signed up for Google's Pay-Per-Action Beta program and still no invitation. Our AdWord budget has been lumpy over the past several months, so I suspect our client ID is not a "stellar" candidate at the moment. Anyone else had a chance to play with this?

If there are any Salesforce customers in the PPA Beta, please contact me. I have some ideas on how to manage the PPA customer experience and reconcile actions with Salesforce Campaigns.

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.

How did I miss this? On the same day that Google announced support for PowerPoint-like functionality, I also noticed an "Add Chart" feature in my Google Spreadsheets.

Very slick...

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

 

Adobe Systems and Salesforce.com have announced the availability of Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex, a new set of programming tools using Adobe Flex to create new business applications for the Salesforce.com Apex platform.

I wrote about another Adobe platform named 'Apollo' several months ago in an article that attempts to identify the trends of "rich vs reach" applications and the desire to strike a balance between the two.

Salesforce users that live in the Salesforce app for more than 3 hours per day (as we often do), will be likely early adopters of Flex-based apps, if they prove to make people more productive. Salesforce envisions developers inserting Flex apps into existing page layouts, but a more grand approach will be to replicate many Salesforce functions in a desktop app that also works offline.

YouTube owes its success, in large part, to their Flash video player specially developed for their videos. When used effectively, the combination of traditional web pages and Adobe Flash/Flex can have tremendous adoption results.

For end customers, Flex apps can deliver rich product catalogs, configurators, online order forms, engines engines, and interactive forums.

It always astonishes me to hear people defend the need to manage corporate information internally, yet they outsource the most sensitive data of all... their paycheck!

For example, here is one persons response to replacing their Exchange email server with a Google solution:

"Rule #1 of corporate America - Proprietary information does not leave the company boundaries unless an NDA is in place. Proprietary information is only given under NDA if strictly necessary.

These decisions are made by upper management and lawyers, not IT. There is no way in hell that my company would EVER move to an externally hosted solution.

In addition, having critical services hosted externally is Just Plain Stupid."

My experience has been 4 out 5 of these companies already outsource their payroll to someone like ADP. Ahhh... the irony.

I'm starting to wonder if Nicholas Carr's assertion that the IT Emperor has no clothes is true. Corporate America is entering an era of operational innovation, not feature innovation, and operational innovation requires managing your IT services as you would your electric and water bills; repeatable, reliable, and managed by specialists.

There is a definite fear of looking incompetent if you suggest outsourcing something as fundamental as Email or CRM to an outside provider, but there is no rational logic for rejecting this option.

Today at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC, Rem Hoffmann of Exponent Partners is unveiling a joint venture between our respective companies to deliver hosted web solutions integrated with Salesforce.com and specially configured for nonprofit organizations.

Key features include:
+ Hosted, On-Demand Content Management System
+ Membership Management
+ Pay Pal Integration for processing donations and memberships
+ Event Management
+ Recruitment
+ Email Marketing and Campaign Management
+ Published Performance and Outcomes

http://www.exponentpartners.org/ is a pre-built site template that demonstrates some of these features.

The "Published Performance and Outcomes" feature is a significant one, in my opinion.

Rem is an expert at helping NPOs define their goals, devise plans to achieve those goals, and measure the outcomes. I know from personal experience that I'm much more comfortable donating money to organizations that have some level of transparency when publishing their operational expenses or achievements.

But quantifying these measures and publishing them to a web site can be difficult, and the costs associated with implementing the technology to support this level of transparency can often exceed the actual benefits received.

That's why I'm really excited about this solution. It enables a free and open dialogue between donors, members, volunteers, employees, and board members using an affordable on-demand platform. The content management system dynamically displays information configured in Salesforce in real-time. Web content, such as press releases and events, is managed directly from Salesforce.

If you're in Washington DC for the NTEN conference, please do stop by the Salesforce booth and ask for Rem. He'd be happy to give you a hands on demonstration.

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Online donations are integrated with Salesforce Pricebooks. Pre-define multiple donation levels or let donors enter their own. Integrated with PayPal, which supports both credit card and PayPal processing. Completed PayPal transactions result in Salesforce Opportunity records.

Support for recurring donations and membership subscriptions.

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Define events in Salesforce for publication in the web site. Manage event attendees, email auto-responders and event alert reminders.