The Official Salesforce Blog - Developers

• Forced Compliments?

  Dec 18, 2007

  For the first time since I got into this business in 1988, I find myself on the outside of an industry awards process -- instead of being one of the people who decides who gets in. At least the Force.com platform has managed to get within sight of the door, as one of Developer.com's finalists for Product of the Year in the category of Web Service Development Tool or Add-in.

  If it weren't for Force.com, I'd still be writing pithy encomia for annual honorees (or their polar opposites) at eWEEK. Instead, almost a year ago, I left my eWEEK job of giving my opinions for a living -- because, almost four years ago, I found Force.com (not yet known by that name) to be a compelling new model of how applications could be developed in the Web, instead of being built (with a previous generation of tools) for cumbersome deployment to the Web.

  I have insider's knowledge, to say the least, of how difficult a process it can be to come up with a useful short list of potential honorees. Even being a finalist is no small honor, and the list of finalists at Developer.com is a valuable guide to the most game-changing tools available to developers today.

  I encourage you to review that slate -- and while you're there, to consider a click (no later than the deadline of Friday, December 21) to cast your vote for Force.com.

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• AppExchange 101 Webcast: Everything You Need to Extend Your CRM Implementation

  Jun 5, 2006

  Join us for a FREE AppExchange Webinar — Live on June 14, at 11:00 AM PST. AppExchange is the first and only online marketplace for sharing applications. It makes finding and deploying new on-demand apps easy. Many of the apps in the AppExchange are free and all are pre-integrated with Salesforce. There are more than 250 apps to choose from including applications for every department like sales, service, HR, finance —and more. Find everything from project management to recruiting to email marketing and beyond. Learn what you need to know to get started with AppExchange. Plus, get all your questions answered in a live Q&A. Register for our free AppExchange 101 Webcast now.

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• New AppExchange Partner Success Blog

  May 31, 2006

  Allow me to introduce the new AppExchange Partner Success Blog. It's written by Rob lamb, Deanna Kung, Angela Kenniston and you guessed it, Wendy Close. They are involved with helping AppExchange partners become successful, and they're doing a great job. If you are an AppExchange Partner interested in promoting your product, this is a great blog to watch.

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• New Podcasts from the AppForce Conference

  May 30, 2006

  If like me, work, distance or life kept you away from the AppForce conference, here is your chance to catch up with what happened. We have posted 3 sessions from the AppForce conference to our podcast, Salesforce.com on iTunes. The three sessions are (click the title to listen to a session on iTunes):

  1. Adam Gross ( of Salesforce.com):  Introducing AppExchange.
  2. Matt Ho ( of Kieden): Building Great Apps
  3. Ken Norton ( of JotSpot): Building Great Apps

  Technorati Tags: appexchange, salesforce, podcast, appforce, webservices, ondemand

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• Post Your Questions about the Excel Connector on the Discussion Boards

  Apr 28, 2006

  Our earlier post about the Excel Connector has attracted a steady stream of comments about it's usage, so we decided to create a new discussion board just for it:The Excel Connector Discussion.
  
  For all three of you who don't know about it, the Excel Connector is a useful tool to easily import data, insert new records into both standard and custom objects, query data from salesforce and perform mass updates in Excel. It's available for both, Professional and Enterprise Edition cutomers. Though it's not officially supported, several Salesforce.com gurus, including Benji Jasik and Ron Hess (the original author of the connector), frequent the Successforce boards, making it a much better place to discuss it. I've also copied the comments from the earlier post onto the board so that everything is in one place.
  
  Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, excel, open source, integration

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• Add Salesforce to Your Firefox Search Bar

  Aug 4, 2005

  For those of you who haven’t made the switch to Firefox, this is yet another incentive to do so. Paul Constantinides created a very simple plug-in which allows you to run a Salesforce advanced search or a Supportforce solution search, right from the Firefox search bar.
  

  This is also exciting because it demonstrates the extendibility and open nature of both salesforce.com and Firefox. For all the developers reading this post, what other types of Firefox Extensions could you build? Who’s going to be the first to design a salesforce widget?

  
  
  

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• Excel Connector Available for Professional Edition Customers

  Jul 25, 2005

  Update: We've created a new message board for discussing the Excel Connector. Please continue this conversation there.

  Professional Edition customers have asked how to load custom objects. We've made a version of the popular open source Sforce Excel Connector available for Professional Edition Customers.

  

  Click here to download the connector and view the documentation.  Please note that you must download Office Edition first for this tool to work.
  

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• Salesforce to RSS

  Jul 11, 2005

  There was a very interesting post by a 3^rd party consultant who has come up with a simple way to publish salesforce.com data to an RSS Feed.

  
  It’s worth reading the full post, but the logic goes like this. You can create a workflow rule in salesforce which is triggered by an event. That event might be the creation of a new lead, the closing of a deal, or an updated project status. The workflow rule would then merge the event information into an email template which in turn would be sent to an email-to-post address. This is a common feature on most blogging applications including Blogger and Typepad. Now in most cases you’d want to keep this information private, so you’d password protect the blog. From there the blogging application can transform the posts into an RSS feed which can be picked up by any number of readers. All told the author of this post said it took him less than an hour and required no fancy code.

  It’d be interesting to hear what other customers are doing with salesforce data and RSS. If you’ve got an use case or a wish list, please add your comments below.

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• Google Maps Hacking for Sforce: Sample Now Available

  Jun 20, 2005

  This 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----------
  
  
  

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• Inspiration for Your Sforce Project

  Apr 26, 2005

  If you’re considering a sforce or customforce project, this case study might just provide the inspiration you need to kick things off. RiskMetrics is a portfolio risk management company who implemented Salesforce.com in less than three months. A couple of the more technical highlights of their implementation include…

  • Custom objects to support “networked” selling model (Risk Metrics tracks relationships between the customers and their customers’ customers.)
  • Integration with account system (Epicor) for automatic renewal opportunity creation
  • Data warehouse / analytics / DB rep with Microsoft SQL Server
  • Integration written in Java and running on Resin

  

  Download Case Study

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• New Sforce Integration Whitepaper

  Apr 4, 2005

  There is a new sforce integration whitepaper that does a great job of describing how a company might integrate their front-office CRM to their back-office accounting and ERP counterparts. The document explains business process, data model, connectivity, and technology considerations you’ll want to think through. If you’ve been considering an integration project, this might be just what you need to gain clarity and kick things off.

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• A New Approach to Web Applications

  Mar 8, 2005

  Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications
  By Jesse James Garrett

  This is a great article breaking down what Google has done with interactive design for their new Google Suggest and Google Maps web applications.
  
  

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• Automatically Creating Cases from Inbound Emails

  Mar 2, 2005

  Many organizations depend on email communication with their customers for providing initial contact for customer support. While manually reading and managing email-based support requests works for some organizations, many companies prefer to have those inbound requests processed as cases, so that they can be automatically assigned to the appropriate support representative, and tracked. There is an interesting tech note for building inbound Email-to-Case functionality via the sforce platform.

  For a developer familiar with sforce it’d take a couple hours to do a prototype, a week to fully develop. If this is a hot button issue at your organization and you don’t have the development resources to build it, you can also engage salesforce.com’s professional services team to scope out the project. 

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• Dependent Drop Downs

  Feb 11, 2005

  Many companies require dependent drop downs for things like case categorization. There’s a neat trick using that Graham Rowe came up with leveraging scontrols, an enterprise edition feature. Attached are details on how to set it up along with screenshots. Keep in mind this requires some technical knowledge to execute.

  Download dependent_drop_downs.PDF
  Download double_drop_down_example.txt
  Download triple_drop_down_example.txt

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• Security - Social Engineering

  Jan 27, 2005

  Companies of all sizes are susceptible to security breaches via social engineering (exploiting human factors.) This newsletter does a great job of explaining it in laymen terms and explaining how you can protect your organization.
  
  Salesforce.com Quarterly Security Newsletter - January 2005

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