Google Maps Hacking for Sforce: Sample Now Available
Jun 20, 2005This was
posted by Adam Gross on the Sforce Blog this afternoon.
I thought it was worth republishing an excerpt because it demonstrates some of the
exciting things that are going on in the developer community. I’d also like to
get people talking about potential use cases for this type of technology. In the example
below Adam is demonstrating how it might be used to plot accounts, but there are
all kinds of applications. Feel free to add your comments below.
--------Full Post on Sforce.blogs.com----------
There are many
reasons why Google Maps is such a beautiful thing; its a very useful
app, has a brilliant UI, an innovative implementation, and reinvents
what was thought to be a "solved" problem. But the part has got us
(and many others!) excited to the ability to remix (or hack) the
service and reuse the maps widget in all sorts of interesting new
contexts. (The popular housingmaps.com, for example, turns Google Maps into a browser for apartment listings.)
Combine
Google Maps and our Sforce Web service API, and you'll quickly see how
useful the maps widget is in real worlds business contexts, such as
mapping customers, leads or other CRM data. Add in the new Multiforce
deployment options of Summer 05 and a pinch of Java code, and you've
got an on demand mapping application that rivals 6-figure alternatives.
To read
the full post and get more technical direction on how this was done, visit
sforce.blogs.com.
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This Google Maps is awesome... Unfortunately, I'm not a developer so I have no idea how to implement this in my Professional Edition, or if I even can. But that's for another day.
My question is - Are there other instances of Google being used in SFDC? My Users are complaining that they can't Search for Content within the Documents I've stored out in the Documents Tab. Any way that we can use something similar to a Google Desktop Search function in SFDC?
Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Posted by: Benny | June 22, 2005 at 02:32 PM
I had made a post on the Sforce forums about this. (http://forums.sforce.com/sforce/board/message?board.id=general_development&message.id=4084) First, to use the integration as shown you need the Enterprise Edition because of the API calls it makes. There might be a way to get it to work in Professional Edition -- but it's non-trivial at best.
Posted by: Daroz | June 23, 2005 at 04:10 PM
Yes Benny, would be a great feature. Like Google Desktop search but in available documents on SFDC for users. Or how Yahoo Mail allows you to view and search in attachments now.
Posted by: David | September 03, 2005 at 10:33 PM
Can anyone that has actually got this to work point me in the right direction? I was able to create a Custom Web tab and a custom S-Control but the data will not display. Google Maps display correctly but no records are found during the filters or search. Any help would be appreciated.
Posted by: Kevin | April 27, 2006 at 08:00 PM