After a few months of on-again / off-again programming, I just received approval to publish my 1st AppExchange App for Salesforce.com. The Event Management app had been orphaned a few years ago. I dusted it off and added many improvements. EventForce manages the creation of events, inclusive of tracks and session, vendors and venues.
The app is open source and available for free to all Salesforce.com customers.
The good folks at Solar Trading Post have published an updated solar energy cost calculator. This calculator is intended for residential customers. Just plug-in your state, current average monthly bill and select how much energy you want to derive from the sun and the calculator will crunch the numbers for you.
Shalini Gupta and John Kucera from Salesforce.com discuss Customer Groups in Chatter. Customer Groups extends the functionality of Chatter by allowing you to collaborate with your customers, prospects and partners, in a private and secure environment.
Chatter Customer Groups accomidates "real" collaboration with files, message and embedded videos. This functionality enhances the customer experience and allows you to share large files without clogging up your email box.
Chatter Bookmarks - Yeah! We now have the ability to keep track of important Chatter posts with Bookmarks. Access your saved bookmarks from your profile page. Any time that anyone else "likes" or responds to a book marked Chatter post you also receive an email notification.
Chatter File Enhancements - You can now post documents or any other files as part of a Chatter Comment. File size limits now increased from 100 MB to 2 GB, wow! Increased ability to share or limit file access to specific people or groups
Recommendations - Chatter now suggests files to follow in addition to people, groups and records. Enhanced UI for recommendations and better suggestions are also added in this release.
Chatter Search improvements - Search now keep track of what you search for and moves common search results up to the top of the list. YouTube Video posts are now included in search results.
Sharing Chatter Posts (Very Cool) You now have the ability to share your posts with multiple people and groups, as opposed to reposting the same thing multiple times. Basically this is an enhanced "retweet" function.
Native Chatter client for Android phones and tablets
Improvements to the @Mention function. In the past Chatter listed people you follow first, then presented a drop-down to get to people that you do not follow. In Spring '12 you now get a consolidated, best match, search result
Chatter Influence now displayed in everyone Chatter Profile
Chatter invitations increased from 5 domains to 200!
SalesCloud Enhancements
User-selectable forecast date ranges and Updated Links in Forecasts
Salesforce for Outlook (SFO) ability to filter-out private items from Outlook by adding them to the Outlook category "Don't Sync with Salesforce"
Create a Saleforce Case from an Outlook email
For emails shared from Outlook to Saleforce, in the event that the recipient's email address is not found, the "My Unresolved Items" has been enhanced greatly.
In addition to Social Contacts, Salesforce also added the concept of Social Accounts. In addition to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, YouTube and Klout have been added ... unfortunately no Google+ as of yet.
ServiceCloud Enhancements
Chatter Answers integrates Cases, Answers, Force.com Sites, Customer Portal, and Salesforce Knowledge to provide you with a Web community for your customers. Post, browse, and reply to questions, flag questions containing questionable posts and comments, voting, etc.
Case Feed adds a new way of creating, reviewing, and updating cases.
Salesforce Console push notifications (pilot only feature)
Enhancements to Salesforce Knowledge - Knowledge Article validation, Knowledge Actions (Pilot), Article versioning, Spelling corrections for Knowledge search (Beta), Enhanced HTML editor
Analytics Edition
New reporting tool integrated into Salesforce.com featuring Bucketing, Cross filters and Joined reports
Mobile
The Salesforce Mobile SDK is an open source suite of developer technologies that simplify the development of mobile applications.
Allows you to create both Native and HTML5 apps
Force.com/Appforce
Cloud Flow Designer - Now GA
Global search enhancements -
global search keeps track of which objects you use and how often you use them, and arranges the search results accordingly
Visualforce Components for Chatter Answers
Visualforce Components for Live Agent
Visualforce Component for Chatter
Visualforce Component for Social Accounts and Contacts
Dynamic Visualforce Components - Now GA
Permission Sets Enhancements: Updated for Single Sign-On, New password complexity options, etc.
Klout.com aims to help you understand your social influence. Currently the site analyzes data from your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. Personally I use LinkedIn to manage my career and keep in touch with business contacts whereas I use Facebook strictly to keep up with friends and family.
While I used Twitter for a while, other then letting people what I am up to on Blogger, I find it pretty useless.
Currently my Klout reach is 11 of 100, I wonder how they calculate the score?
Just ordered up a new Kindle Touch from Amazon for our upcoming vacation. Excited about taking my library on the road once again. I had been using Kindle on the iPad, however I never found it particularly useful for reading outdoors.
For starters, I will be catching up on the life and times of Steve jobs.
On June 22, Salesforce.com Chatter made it’s public debut. After a lengthy private beta, consisting of over 100 customers, Chatter was officially launched to all of SFDC’s over 6000 customers.
Having participated in the beta, both from an internal perspective as well as part of Dell’s internal trial, I must say that this application is nothing short of revolutionary.
I have worked in the CRM software and consulting business for over a decade, in all that time we always talked about how CRM fosters collaboration among your sales and service teams. However, when you put that statement into context with Chatter, we were truly just giving CRM lip service.
Chatter is in many ways like a mash-up of both Facebook and Twitter, with a dash of Yammer round things out. Like Facebook you can define a personal profile and “friend” other people and send short messages to their “wall”. Like Twitter, you can post regular status updates to your followers, as well as follow your friends. Finally, like Yammer you can define and follow groups of people.
However, where Chatter differs from other social media tools is where it really shines.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, Chatter is private to your organization and leverages the security of the force.com platform to keep things private.
Functionally, in addition to following people, you can also follow, and post to, objects in your CRM system. Objects being any “table” defined in your database, such as Account, Opportunities and Service Incidents. To me this is the single biggest differentiator, it gives your posts context, thus fostering collaboration.
Both public and private groups can be defined to link together birds-of-a-feather.
Salesforce has alos provided an API, this will allow third party developers to create add-ons for Chatter as well as allowing your IT team to build integration with Chatter
Finally, Salesforce has build the system, not as an overlay, but to leverage existing content management functionality. By posting a document in your feed, you are actually creating a piece of collateral in Salesforce Content. The document can therefore be shared, tagged and revised as appropriate.
More on leveraging Chatter’s integration capabilities tomorrow.
from Amazon for our upcoming vacation. Excited about taking my library on the road once again. I had been using Kindle on the iPad, however I never found it particularly useful for reading outdoors.
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