I can't stand IT people talking or writing about private clouds. I don't get them, what they are, why anyone would care. I have a suspicion that they are simply trying to confuse all the business people out there. Lots of jargon, lots of technical terms, advanced sounding language, and hope that maybe some business people might think there is something to it. "They" bring up scary sounding (but really baseless) objections to public clouds that might scare some business people about putting their data in the cloud. They say - 1) Its insecure. This is total bullshit. The real... Continue reading

Chatter is going to replace the way you collaborate with your colleagues. Today, it’s highly likely that you use email to communicate facts. Facts about deals, contracts, projects, requirements, personnel, hiring, etc. You probably also have a lot of status meetings. If you’re like most people, you have more meetings than you care for. You probably have a lot of memorandums, conference calls floating around. All the business communication tools you have at your disposal serve to relay important information. Although I think it’s too radical to say it’s the end of Email, Status Reports, and Meetings, but, I would... Continue reading

IBM acquires Cast Iron http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700501 This is certainly an endorsement for the cloud. Continue reading

The iPad is truly a remarkable, amazing, game changing device. It will forever change the hand held market for CRM. I just don't see sales people ever running around anymore in the field without one. Salesforce.com works beautifully in the Safari browser. I've been testing various orgs, and it is a no brainer decision for mobile CRM. I'm just going to ditch the quirky little iPhone and Blackberry apps and go with the iPad's browser. Moreover, if you get scheduled reports emailed to you, you will LOVE the formatting on the iPad mail browser. Scheduled reports was near useless on... Continue reading

"What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equilavent of a bicycle for our minds." - Steve Jobs This visionary statement still holds more true today than ever. Think about that. It is not that people can't walk from one point to the other. Its that they can do it a lot faster if they ride a bike and cover a lot more ground. Note that unlike a car, the bike uses human creativity and energy to make it work as remarkable as it does. Consider CRM... Continue reading

Every project, irregardless of size or formal methodology being used has it - The traditionalists call it requirements gathering, the more elegant amongst us call it requirements elicitation, the agile camp calls it story boarding. Seth Godin calls it Thrashing in his new book Linchpin. I like the word Thrashing, because I think it more accurately describes the often chaotic, mostly random, usually unstructured, free-form nature of collecting and documenting requirements. It typically involves a wide group of people that crosses geography, functional departments, and lines of business. Its an inclusive process with lots of opinions. All really comes down... Continue reading

"What exactly is CRM anyway?" "What's it supposed to do for me", sales people often ask. Getting sales people to use the CRM everyday is a challenge for most organizations. Sure, the executive sponsors can dictate its use, you can have live sales management meetings using data from the CRM system. Commissions can be tied to sales data inside the CRM system. But if you really want to get user adoption soaring, think in terms of Sprezzatura, “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost... Continue reading

OK, well, not quite true, its in the SFDC enterprise lifecyle development guide. However, I'm always hunting and pecking for this information and tend to forget where to find it. So here is a list of Metadata components as of Winter 10 that CAN NOT be auto migrated and needs manual migration between orgs. This is important when planning on a production release and you need to create a checklist of items for your team to migrate manually post deployment but pre launch. From the salesforce.com development life cycle guide: The following components cannot be retrieved or deployed in the... Continue reading

Well, not yet. But they will in 2010 when Salesforce Chatter comes out. And so will any other object - you'll be able to turn Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, custom objects, etc into chatterboxes. There is a lot of mixed reviews about the recently announced Salesforce Chatter. Some are wondering why would you need Chatter in the world of twitter and facebook. I got a chance to talk to the a developer on the Chatter team at Dreamforce and walked through the application. The way I make sense of it is that each record in salesforce can have its own "wall"... Continue reading

If you are an admin or Salesforce.com developer, no doubt you have multiple logins to manage multiple production, developer, and sandbox orgs, all of which must be unique. In addition, if you use the same email address for your different orgs, it is often difficult to know the sending sfdc org origin of an auto-email that you have received. For example, check out this Apex governance warning: So I know that it came from org 005700000012eDf/00D700000008qtn. Now, there are probably people that I don't know, and probably don't want to know, that remember their org ids. I'm not one of... Continue reading

I work mainly in implementing salesforce for large companies, so corporate security concerns always seems to be a barrier in convincing IT folks that their app will be just fine in the cloud. I covered SOX Compliance concerns on security in a white paper on SOX Complianceand salesforce.com, but this blog post by Peter Coffee points out more detail on why you should worry about your authorized users more than cloud hackers. Most security threats are internal. Thats not only intuitive, but its proven in studies. An excerpt from the Dark Reading article: Databases' Most Serious Vulnerability: Authorized Users. "There... Continue reading

Social CRM is all the rage these days. There is a lot of noise on the topic and I'm often asked how companies can leverage Social CRM in their own marketing organizations. I think people are over complicating it. First, understand the new world and what constitutes a marketing asset. Second, figure out what that asset looks like in the target medium and how to build that asset using the tools available. Important point is that each dollar you spend should grow a specific Social CRM marketing asset. Lets take Facebook for example. Your goal in Facebook should be to... Continue reading

Salesforce.com Winter 10 is around the corner, and I've already picked my favorite feature - Scheduled Apex. We've been using time based workflows, field updates, and Apex triggers to simulate scheduled apex, but it will be nice having the feature straight out of the box. You should be able to combine it with Batch Apex and run jobs asynchronously to accomplish just about any data processing task you need. Continue reading

The #1 reason why I encourage embracing the Agile Manifesto in software development is that it helps ensure that we are solving the right problem. Agile encourages prototyping and revisiting to ensure that the project team is working on delivering something that is actually wanted. Since the configurablity of the salesforce.com platform makes prototyping very easy and effective, there really is no excuse not to deliver a prototype. The #2 reason I prefer Agile is that it allows you to fail faster. Meaning, if the project is going to blow up, you'll find out about it a lot faster. Agile... Continue reading

I get asked frequently if Salesforce.com is "Sarbanes-Oxley Compliant". If you read the text of SarbOx, you'll see that there really is no such thing. SarbOx is about processes, not technology per se. So a better question would be: "Does salesforce.com provide the capability to implement controls dictated by my processes?". The answer is "yes, it sure does". This comes up often enough to a point where I've written a white paper on this issue. Continue reading

Kyle's new parser is a vast improvement over what comes with the platform Continue reading

Cloud computing - aka SaaS (Software as a Service) - is relatively new to the enterprise business applications customer. Since I evangelize force.com as a new and better development platform for a living, I spend a lot of time introducing people for the first time to Software as a Service (SaaS) in general. Most of my initial interactions with cloud new-comers involve dispelling the same few myths surrounding alleged limitations around physical security, hosting reliability, performance, access, etc. For those that have been in the industry a while, they will often recall hosted environments of the prior decade and wonder... Continue reading

Batch Apex is by far my favorite release feature in Summer '09. Reason? I can't stand solutions that require writing clients that live OUTSIDE of the salesforce.com platform. Even prior to Batch Apex, I have always insisted that my team exhaust all possibilities of creating a solution that works without having to write external code. Batch Apex Now, with 50M records able to be batch processed, that will eliminate the need to go running to a java client solution every time governance limits are reached. Continue reading

Leverage Cascading Deletes in Force.com to prevent orphans Continue reading

My prediction: The Long Tail in cloud migrants is 4 years. Continue reading

Leverage Salesforce.com's drip capability to setup time sensitive nurturing campaigns Continue reading