The Official Salesforce Blog - Mashups

• 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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• Partner Recruitment Mash Up with Google Maps

  Mar 7, 2006

  One of Salesforce's Partner Management subject matter experts, Todd Janzen, has created a day in the life for a channel manager trying to recruit more partners. (Thanks Todd!) This demonstration is available for you to review.  Click here to access the demonstration. Besides the business value of being able to more effectively and efficiently recruit more partners using Salesforce, Todd has creatively enabled a real cool feature. He's created a channel map showing the number of partners that have submitted an application to become a partner. How many of you have wished you could easily create a channel map or white space analysis? He created the channel map using Google Maps. Here is an example of how new partner prospect registrations show up on a Google Map.  Visit the Partner Management feature page for full details on Salesforce.com's Partner Management and Partner Portal solution.

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• Salesforce.com Search Widget

  Feb 22, 2006

  Yahoo! Widgets are tools that live on your desktop and allow you to get to information quickly.

  Recently one was posted by an independent developer for searching inside salesforce. Just type in what you’re looking for and it automatically logs you into salesforce, returning the result set.

  
  

  This free tool has been downloaded 395 times and has gotten good reviews. Give it a try and if it seems useful, forward it onto your team. 

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• SkypeForce - Skype integrated with Salesforce.com

  Aug 22, 2005

  One of our amazing Sales Engineers has built an incredible integration from Salesforce to Skype

  What can it do for you?

  • Automatic search and navigation for inbound and outbound calls from Skype
  • Clean popup handling and close when dialing out from Salesforce to Skype
  • SSO web links. A link on the home page can share a users session with SkypeForce, saving the need for double login.
  • May be hidden in the Windows system tray

  

  You can download it here: http://sforce.sourceforge.net/skypeforce.html

  We hope you enjoy it!

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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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• Spell Check Anywhere in Salesforce

  Aug 1, 2005

  Many customers have asked about spell check tools for long text fields such as call notes or descriptions.  

  Ed Tcheleshev, a Customer Success Manager in New York came up with a great solution utilizing the new google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com.)

  It’s free to install and will provide spell checking anywhere you edit text in salesforce. Give it a try.

  

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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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• Integrate Skype's IP-based phone solution with Salesforce for one click dialing

  Jul 13, 2005

  Some companies are turning to IP-based phone solutions like Skype and Vonage to save money. Skype is a peer-to-peer telecommunications company that has attracted over 40 million users in the past few years. Their plug-in allows PC-based calls through a USB headset or a PC's microphone and speakers. They offer free calls to any other Skype user and very low cost calls to regular phone numbers (2 cents per minute for the US, Western Europe, and Australia.

  The example below shows how you might add pop-up dialing functionality to salesforce.com such that a user can click on a web link from a contact record and automatically launches the Skype client.

  

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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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• Add a Web Integration Link for Aerial Photos

  Apr 7, 2005

  

  About a month ago there was a post on how to create a Web Link for Google Maps.
  
  If you haven't set this up already, Google just provided one more compelling reason to do so. Earlier this week, they quietly introduced a new satellite feature that allows you to get an aerial photo snapshot for any address in the United States.
  

  Obviously if you’re in the commercial real-estate business this is an extremely valuable tool, but even if you’re stuck in an office doing telesales, it provides great context when talking with prospects. Using a web integration link in Salesforce it’s just one click to bring up the satellite photo like the one above.
  

  Here's a WIL that works on contacts:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?q={!Contact_MailingAddress}%20{!Contact_MailingCity}%20{!Contact_MailingState}%20{!Contact_MailingPostalCode}
  
  Here's one from Matt Browning that gives directions from the user’s address to the contact’s address.
  
  http://maps.google.com/maps?q=from%20{!User_Address}%20{!User_City}%20{!User_State}%20{!User_PostalCode}%20to%20{!Contact_MailingAddress}%20{!Contact_MailingCity}%20{!Contact_MailingState}%20{!Contact_MailingPostalCode}

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• Create a Web Link for Google News Alerts

  Mar 11, 2005

  Many salesforce.com users have started creating Google Alerts to get news on companies they are prospecting or accounts they manage. The web link below allows your team to set up an alert from saleforce.com with a single click. You can choose to get a weekly digest or news as it happens.

  Create a web link on the account entity:  Setup Google News Alert set the window parameters as open in a separate window width 800 height 600 use the URL:

  http://www.google.com/alerts?e={!User_Email}&f=0&t=4&hl=en&q={!Account_Name}

  and set the f and t values as follows depending on requirement...

  f=0 as it happens
  f=1 once a day
  f=6 once a week

  t=2 Web
  t=3 News & Web
  t=4 News

  
  

  Graham – Salesforce.com Sales Engineer

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• Integrating Google Maps with Salesforce.com

  Feb 11, 2005

  From: Benji Jasik

  For those of you who haven't seen google maps yet, it's really amazing. 

  Here's a WIL that works on contacts:

   

  http://maps.google.com/maps?q={!Contact_MailingAddress}%20{!Contact_MailingCity}%20{!Contact_MailingState}%20{!Contact_MailingPostalCode}

  Here's one from Matt Browning that gives directions from the user’s address to the contact’s address.
  
  http://maps.google.com/maps?q=from%20{!User_Address}%20{!User_City}%20{!User_State}%20{!User_PostalCode}%20to%20{!Contact_MailingAddress}%20{!Contact_MailingCity}%20{!Contact_MailingState}%20{!Contact_MailingPostalCode}

  Doing a search on a custom homepage might also be useful.

  How about using maps to do data cleansing? If you don't have the zip, it figures it out, then somehow we write it back? They have an XML interface where maybe we could consume that info with an scontrol? 

  I'm sure you could also build a web link that would take the user's home address, and immediately route the directions from the user's address to the contact address.

  Other ideas for how this could be used? -B

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