Tips for Creating Your First Image Field
Jan 11, 2006
Over the past couple of days we’ve all been
digesting the exciting new features in the Winter ’06 release. So far I’d
have to say my favorite has been the image fields. It’s amazing how
dramatically you can change your users experience with this simple trick.
For those of you who have watched my Dreamforce Presentation you know that I use Salesforce.com in an unconventional manner but I think that this use case for image fields can be extended to all sorts of situations.
With image
fields I’m now able to get a quick visual representation of what's being published out to the website. I have a field on this page for “image url” and another for “asset url.” With these two data points I was able to create a formula
field to displays the thumbnail image
for each piece of content and it's even clickable so you can quickly launching the underlying
presentation or document.
HYPERLINK({!Asset_URL_c},
IMAGE({!Image_URL_c},"Image Not Available"))
Another great thing about the image fields is that they can be reported on. The second screenshot is an example of how I’m now able to get a visual representation of my entire content catalog.
The next question people have is how do I capture
these images and where are they stored? For most of the images on the Successforce.com
site, I use a tool called SnagIt to grab my image. It’s a product that I
absolutely love and as I’ve told many of my friends it’s like having a good
pair of scissors at your desk. If you use a Mac there's another very good program called Screenshot Plus which is a free widget you can download. Once I have the image I size it down to a
thumbnail size and save it to my desktop. From there I upload it to our
Document Library, check the checkbox to make it externally available, and copy
the url for the image. It seems like a lot but it’s a pretty quick process.
As I’ve been playing around with this feature I’ve
been thinking through all the use cases for this. Aside from a content
repository, it’s great for product catalogs, employee 
directories, and customer
photos. Another thing which might take off is grabbing company logos for the accounts page. On most websites you can right click on their company logo and copy and
paste the image url field. It’d be pretty neat to run
an opportunity report or a customer reference report and see a list of logos.
In any event, I’m sure there are many more exciting use cases for image fields. I can’t wait to hear what people come up with.
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I've been waiting on this feature for a while and it is wonderful for product photos. There are 2 "bugs" I have found so far.
1. If you have a large quantity or size images you would like to store on a web server, you will get the "secure and non-secure" pop-up in Internet Explorer when viewing a page with the image in it. I don't have this problem because I use Mozilla but other users are forced to use IE.
2. I used the image field to show the status of RMAs so it visually pops out a little better. Problem, if you have reports with these fields in a graph, the entire link shows up in the graph. It would be nice to just show the alternate text in the graph.
Posted by: Scott Moody | January 12, 2006 at 05:36 AM
Regarding the 2 "bugs" reported by Scott Moody:
1) I'm not aware of any silver bullets for this problem. The choices are to host the images on a web server that has SSL enabled, disable the mixed content warnings in IE, or use Firefox.
2) Seems like a good idea. I will enter an enhancement request for this one.
Posted by: Eric Bezar | January 12, 2006 at 08:12 PM