Posted by Cathy Boudreau on Tue, Jul 13, 2010
Salesforce recently introduced Salesforce Chatter -- real-time enterprise collaboration. With the launch of Chatter comes Chatter Exchange -- a world where enterprise apps are as easy to use as Facebook. You can stay on top of what's happening in your company with real-time updates on people, groups, documents, and your application data. Chatter Apps include profiles, status updates, and real-time feeds, which make it easy to stay on top of what’s important to you and collaborate quickly across your organization. All of it fueling smarter-and faster-business decisions.
Top Chatter Apps include:
- ServiceMax Suite - Field Service On Demand: Control, monitor, and track all field service activities to increase service revenue, control costs, and turn post-sales service into a competitive advantage.
- Google Alerts to Chatter: This application requests Google Alerts for your accounts, then turns those Alert emails into posts on that account's chatter feed.
- ChatMetrix + Chatter: ChatMetrix answers the question "What's Hot In My Chatter Network Lately?" with such tools as a tag cloud, a dynamic graph, and a bar chart showing how frequently words are appearing in your Chatter feed.
- FinancialForce Accounting: Sales and Finance collaboration - Chatter integration moves Finance into the heart of the business, to avoid problems and improve customer service.
- Appirio Professional Services Enterprise: Manage your people, customers, projects and transactions with an end-to-end services management application. Chatter-enabled to bring real-time collaboration to your services teams.
To review and demo more Chatter Apps, please visit: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/results?type=Apps&filter=a0L30000002WuiyEAC&sort=6
Have questions or comments? Post them below!
Posted by Jay Rivard on Fri, Jun 11, 2010
Using My Domain, your organization can select a custom Salesforce.com domain name that highlights your brand, or a different term that represents your business. Using a custom domain name provides other important advantages, such as increased security and better support for single sign-on.
Your domain name will use the standard URL format, including:
- The protocol: https://
- The subdomain prefix: your brand or term
- The domain: my.salesforce.com
For example, the login URL for a company called Universal Containers would be: https://universalcontainers.my.salesforce.com/. You can use up to 40 characters.
It's a snap to set up a custom domain name. After you decide on the name or term you want to use, My Domain checks to make sure your subdomain is available. Then it registers the domain name and publishes it to the internet. After a brief period, you'll receive an email to let you know your new domain name is ready for testing. Log in using the new URL and test the URLs for other pages in the application.
Please note: My Domain is currently available through a limited release program. All customers can select and register a domain name, but some customers will be required to wait for permission from salesforce.com before they can roll it out to users.
For questions and more information, please feel free to post below.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Wed, May 19, 2010
Salesforce has acquired JigSaw. Jigsaw Data Fusion provides automated data hygiene and management with unlimited access to millions of business contacts. And now that Jigsaw is a salesforce.com company, Jigsaw Data Fusion's power to keep your data clean and provide new leads will only get better!
Jigsaw has a reputation for having the most accurate and complete company data available. This is a perfect fit for most of us. I suspect that there will be a much tighter integration between Salesforce and Jigsaw and possibly some reduction in cost as well.
Here are some comments from Salesforce web site:
- "Salesforce.com is excited to bring the data services industry into the era of Cloud 2," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With Jigsaw, we'll make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes."
- "Companies are utilizing crowd-sourced data services in the cloud more than ever because it offers the best quality information," said Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw. "This is an exciting opportunity for all of us at Jigsaw, and will help us accelerate our ability to bring cloud-based data services to a wider audience."
With Jigsaw Data Fusion you can:
- Turn previously unusable records into new leads.
- Stay on top of the changes to your business contact data by automatically synchronizing updates to individual or company records.
- Keep your pipeline full with unlimited access to fresh, accurate business leads.
Questions or comments on this acquisition? Post them below!
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Apr 22, 2010
Recently salesforce.com did a follow-up to the Chatter announcement at the last DreamForce. I have to admit that I did not really understand the value of the Chatter product at the time. This is in part due to the fact that I am not a heavy Facebook user. To be honest I never have the time or the interest to spend my free time in front of a computer.
The April event, however, has opened my eyes to the possibilities that this product offers. It truly is a game changer for most of our customers in the way that they use Salesforce. The following is a list of reasons why I believe this to be true.
- A large majority of our customers are Facebook users and are used to social networking. They understand the terminology, it's navigation, and its benefits. Adoption of Chatter will be easy for them.
- In almost every single engagement that I am involved with management is looking for the ability to see what's going on within the enterprise and to be notified of any changes that may be considered mission-critical. They wanted to be quickly streamed in and they also want to be able to opt in or out of discussions that they deem important. Chatter does this like no other product I've ever seen.
- This social networking environment would be available on the desktop and on Salesforce Mobile as well. You will be able to stay in touch regardless of your location.
- Companies are always looking to find one application to bring the whole enterprise in to work collaboratively. Whether you're in sales, customer service, finance, engineering, or any other business unit your ability to be part of this social net will positively affect customer satisfaction, profitability, product or service delivery etc.
If you are interested in learning more about Chatter please feel free to post a comment below. Now is the time to start planning for the next major shift in the way that you do business -- I do not believe that I'm understating its importance. You will see more about this in my future blogs.
Posted by Cathy Boudreau on Wed, Apr 14, 2010
The salesforce.com Summer '10 release is quickly approaching and soon you'll be able to take advantage of great new features! As a Force.com Sandbox customer, you have the opportunity to get early access to Summer '10 in your sandbox and test new customizations and features before your production organization is upgraded. We want to make you aware of the options available to you during this time.
The Sandbox Preview Window for Summer ‘10 is scheduled for May 14, 2010 through June 12, 2010.
You may need to take action to ensure your Sandbox will either participate in the Summer '10 Preview or opt out and remain on Spring '10 during the window. The specific server instance on which your Sandbox resides determines when it will upgrade to Summer ‘10.
To determine which server instance your Sandbox is on, log into your Sandbox and examine the URL in your browser address bar.
Once you have located your instance, use the chart below to determine what action you want to take.
Have questions regarding the Summer '10 Sandbox? Post them here!
Posted by Cathy Boudreau on Tue, Mar 23, 2010
Did you know that you have the ability to upload a custom logo that displays in the Salesforce CRM meeting request emails and on meeting response pages that invitees see when you invite them to a group event? To add your logo, go to Setup | Customize | Activities | Activity Settings. Select the "Show Custom Logo in Meeting Requests" checkbox (see image below).
When adding your logo, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- The image must be in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format and be less than 20 KB.
- For best results, use an image that is no more than 130 pixels wide by 100 pixels high at 72 pixels per inch. Images that are larger than these dimensions may not display correctly in some email clients due to automatic resizing.
- You must first upload your logo to the Documents tab and make it externally available. Documents marked Internal Use Only can't be used as a logo.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Mar 18, 2010
The vast majority of our clients use Salesforce CRM in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. The Outlook Connector Client is very robust and has proven itself to be reliable. That is not to say that there are not minor bugs that show up from time to time. In response to this, salesforce.com updates it quite frequently. In the "Desktop Integration" section under "Setup" you will notice an option to check for updates. We recommend that you do this once every month. If there is an update you will see the release notes associated with it. If the changes are significant you should upgrade to that new release.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 25, 2010
As you may know salesforce.com upgrades their application at least three times a year. While they are not always major upgrades, it is an impressive feat compared to the traditional on-premise applications which may get upgraded once every 2 to 3 years.
Salesforce.com goes to great lengths to minimize the impact of these upgrades and does a tremendous job in notifying their install base of things that may need some client preparation. For example, in the Spring 2010 edition they are discontinuing support for Microsoft Internet Explorer V6. Salesforce.com has made many attempts to get everybody prepared for this eventuality.
Salesforce system administrators should take a little time to address these issues well in advance of the scheduled upgrade. We also recommend that you test out the upgrade in the salesforce.com sandbox. This is especially true if you are planning to enable new features that may impact some existing functionality.
If you do not have this level of technical expertise within your organization you may want to consider contacting us.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Salesforce Content is a useful feature of Salesforce CRM and often over-looked. Content is an on-demand content management system that is handy for both Sales and Marketing folks.
- FOR SALES
How many times have you spent looking for a presentation, fact sheet or other sales document and then found out it was an old version? Or have you ever wished that you could see what presentations other sales reps at your company are using successfully?
With Salesforce Content, you can search for a relevant sales document much like doing a Google search. It will pull up matching documents, show you how people within your company rated the document, any comments that were made and how often it was downloaded. And outdated documents? You can subscribe to the document and be notified when a newer version is uploaded.
- FOR MARKETING
What's more annoying than spending weeks developing what you think is terrific content only to find out that the content doesn't exactly hit on what the marketplace is demanding.
With Content, marketers can see the comments that reps make on a sales document it and how they rate it and make the appropriate changes in a timely fashion rather than weeks or worse -- never.
Recently, we started using Salesforce.com Content which quickly turned into a question of how we will use it. In addition to the traditional use of Content, what value will it lend to our organization and will users adopt it? Like most organizations we create a lot of documents and send them out the typical way -- attached to an e-mail. Proposals in particular fly out of here on a daily basis. We decided to try content for proposal delivery which has worked quite well. It is solved two issues for us: (1) it circumvents file size limitations on mail servers and (2) it tells us if they've read the proposal and downloaded it.
Although setup of the product is fairly straightforward, we do recommend that you read the documentation or take the pre-recorded training sessions. There are settings in several areas within the application of which you should be aware.
We continue to look for new ways to take advantage of Content and would welcome any feedback you might have and how you use it.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
One advantage to working with an application hosted in the cloud is that there are few limitations imposed on it by hardware and software. However, there is one area in particular that you DO need to pay attention -- your browser.
Salesforce works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari but not all editions are supported. For example, Internet Explorer V5 is not supported by Salesforce. In fact Google Docs will not support IE V6 shortly. In lieu of this, here are some best practices:
- Standardize on one browser. Support will be much easier especially if you have a large number of users.
- Inventory all the applications that are browser dependent. For example, in our organization, our time and billing application only runs on Internet Explorer.
- Benchmark the browser for performance. We have found that Firefox 3.5 runs significantly faster than IE 7 or 8. This may be in part due to our antivirus application.
- If you standardize on a new browser make sure you train the users on the new browser. Its functions may perform very differently than the previous product. For example, downloading using Internet Exlplorer is significantly different than in Firefox.
For additional information please download the browser cheat sheet@salesforce.com. He can be located at:
http://www.salesforce.com/community/crm-best-practices/administrators/implementation-resources/browser-settings.jsp