With Adoption Max, you can send regular notifications to users and their managers/adoption champions based on certain levels of inactivity. Notify users by email, chatter posts, tasks, reports. Customize when to send messages, to whom, and how they should be sent. All of these notifications are customizable, reportable, and automatic. Turn the app on and forget about it. All notifications will be handled by the app.

View AdoptionMax on the Salesforce.com / Force.com AppExchange here

The best way to obtain user buy in is to establish a level of accountability. Users MUST know what you expect from them and they must be held accountable for their successes/failures. Adoption Max will provide them and their managers will visibility into their system usage or lack thereof.

We suggest establishing "Adoption Champions." These would be power users that are responsible for the adoption success of a certain group of users, such as a region, an office, a product line, etc. These adoption champions would be assigned in Adoption Max and would have their own adoption reports to monitor. They would communicate with users to encourage usage of the system and regularly report to management about the level of adoption progress. e.g. A European Adoption Champion might be based in London and be responsible for all users in Europe. They would encourage usage, provide tips & training, help users when needed, and escalate to user management if there is lack of performance. The user, the user adoption champion, and the managers should all be held accountable for the adoption success. Adoption Max makes this VERY visible.

When Adoption Max sends an inactivity notification, it will also log a record of the inactivity in Salesforce. This will outline who the offender is, who their manager/adoption champions are, how much their inactivity cost the company, etc. It will also allow the user to justify why they were inactive. They can even specify if they no longer need a license. This will help license admins to decide who to deactivate when new users are needed.

In addition to the "stick" method of holding users accountable, user adoption is also achieved by making their lives easier on a day to day basis (the "carrot"). The tool MUST be easy to use and it MUST provide the user with some value.

Adoption Max provides home page quick links to filtered reports. These reports will take the user directly to THEIR data. This will not overwhelm them with all of the messy data from the system. If the user is based in Arkansas, they most likely don't need to see Chinese opportunities. They only want to see their data. They want to know what they need to work on on an operational, day to day basis. Users need to be convinced that this tool is not created simply to produce massive reports for management. This tool is build to help them organize their lives and work. This is a HUGE improvement.

Adoption Max provides dashboards and a ton of reports to report on User Inactivity, Users Not Logging In, Managers/Adoption Champions with the most inactive users, cost of inactivity, Most active users, Most inactive users, Types of Inactivity, Reasons for Inactivity, etc.

In addition, we also provide highly sophisticated reports on the volume of data being entered into the system AND data quality. Are the users logging in? Yes? Great! But, are they actually entering NEW data? Is the data neglected or is it clean? We help with this.

Lack of user adoption in Force.com can be a HUGE waste of money and loss in productivity. Don't just think about how much licenses cost. Also think about the potential increase in sales that a Sales force automation tool should provide. For the small cost of Adoption Max, you will definitely be able to break even quickly.

The notifications engine utilizes out of the box system workflow rules, which allows you to customize notifications in any way possible:
Do you want to send ONLY an email to the user after 15 days of inactivity? Or, do you want to also email the manager? Or just the adoption champion? Or would you also like to create a task for the user to login? What about posting on their Chatter feed to notify them of the problem? What do you want to send at 30 days / 45 days / 60 days / etc? Maybe after 60 days, you just want to email the license owner and ask them to deactivate the account. So many options to choose from.

View AdoptionMax on the Salesforce.com / Force.com AppExchange here