Shamrock CRM – Salesforce.com Consulting, Implementations and Web Development

Salesforce Winter ’11 Release

I don’t know about you, but I am ready for Winter. I live in Florida and I am tired of burning alive in the Florida heat. Luckily, Salesforce is bringing Winter ’11 to us soon enough to cool us down. Allow me to detail out some of my favorite features that they will be releasing.

It wouldn’t be fitting to start out a new feature list without Salesforce Chatter – Now, you will be able to search Salesforce Globally for Chatter feeds, people, files, and groups. This won’t help for finding field changes posted in feeds, but it will help for finding posts by other users and relevant topics with #hashtags.

Chatter Files Tab - This will include all files that you upload and other people upload to Chatter. This makes these files easy to find, follow, preview, and search. This is most likely going to generate a lot of confusion as to the difference between Files, Documents, and Content.

Chatter Tab – This brings together all of your People and your Groups and see the recommended People to follow and Groups to join. This will certainly put a lot more focus on Chatter for the users and make it easier to take advantage of.

Chatter Filters – Don’t want to see all of the “spammy” field update posts in Chatter? Now, you can filter your feeds to only see posts from your groups, or posts from people, or posts directed at you. This should cleanup some of the mess.

Chatter Topics – Similar to #Twitter hashtags, you can form relevant topics in Chatter, such as #Invoice, #RFQ, #BigDeal, etc for logical grouping of these posts.

Salesforce for Outlook – This is now available for everybody. This should be helpful to a lot of smaller organizations. This is really a useful tool.

Quote Templates – Released in beta in Summer 2010, this is now Generally Available, allowing you to customize your quoting templates and make them look and feel exactly how you would like. You will need Professional Edition or higher for this. Now, you can preview the templates as you create them, add graphics, add rich text and more. Great functionality.

Attaching Attachments to Activities – This should be useful. Task: “Generate a Quote” Attachment: Customer’s Specifications…although this should probably be placed on the Opportunity, but you get the picture.

New and Improved Service Cloud Console - Now Salesforce requires less clicks and less scrolling. You have to leave the page much less than before and you can jot notes without even leaving the screen. The console allows you to see all related records directly on the screen along with the current record’s information. The console is critical for any organization moving quickly through any sets of records (leads, activities, etc). They have also built in a highlights panel to show the most important fields in an easy to view manner.

Web 2 Case limit increased to 5000 – If you previously stopped using Salesforce, because you hit the 500 Case limit, you are now good to go with 5000.

Global Search – A new and much more powerful search bar for Salesforce.com. No need for the Advanced Search hacks of the past. Now, this bar allows you to be as generic or specific as you would like when searching for your pertinent data. This will now search custom fields, long text areas, notes, comments, and more. Beautiful!

You will need to enable the new User Interface Header to have this new search bar and look and feel.

Real-Time Report Builder!! – This is a good one and I think we have all been waiting a long time for it to come. I love this. This will make training users much easier when it comes to report creation.
-Drag and drop report columns
-Display report type on report
-Simple customizations
-Better sorting
-Easier chart creations

Visual Process Manager and Force.com Flow – Pilot – This will allow you to build your own wizards with point and click operations instead of VisualForce code and APEX. This is actually pretty incredible. Have a scripted sales process for gathering details? Want to walk your users step by step through the process? Here you go.

Profiles in Change Sets – Oh yes. You can now add Profile settings to Change Sets. This will save a lot of time for developers creating large implementation deployment packages.

I am definitely excited about some of the upcoming changes. Force.com Flow is going to be huge and so are the Report creation changes.

What is your favorite?

Take a look at the full release notes here: Salesforce Winter 11 Release Notes

Salesforce.com Summer ’10 Release

Although this is a little behind, it is still worth summarizing some of the best features from the Summer 2010 Release of Salesforce.com.

Salesforce Chatter (obviously) – This is being enabled by default for all new organizations. Existing organizations must enable it. This has all of the typical aspects that I am sure most of you are already used to: Chatter Profiles, Groups, Feeds, etc.

Tips: Try fun things like using the API to force certain types of users to auto follow certain types of data, e.g. Automatically force users from territory A to auto follow all Opportunities selling Product XYZ.

Haven’t seen Chatter? Take a look

Out of curiosity, how are all of you handling the training of users on Chatter? I certainly think it requires some kind of “nudge” to truly explain the benefits and how to use it.

Cloud Scheduler – This is a great feature if you would like to schedule meetings out of Salesforce.com. You can propose meeting times and allow your customers to decide which time is best for you. Salesforce will generate a custom web page for them to visit. This can be done for Leads, Contacts, and Person Accounts. Salesforce can even propose the time for you and try to select the best time.

Quotes Template Editor – This is in beta. Instead of having to use Salesforce’s basic quote layout, they are now allowing you to create your own Quote templates, which is very necessary. This functionality is very basic, doesn’t allow you to preview what you are doing, but it is at least worth trying.

New Opportunity Page (Pilot) – I feel like this was originally announced SO long ago. I can’t believe it is now only being piloted. This puts the focus on key Opportunity fields that are used the most in a highlight panel at the top of the screen. It also focuses on Chatter and recommendations. Cool feature.

Salesforce Mobile Enhancements – Chatter in the mobile app is the biggest improvement. Hello Salesforce, where is the Salesforce for Android app?

Email Opt Out Warning – Finally. When sending a mass email, Salesforce will warn you if Email Opt Out is checked for any contacts. About time.

Multiple Email Addresses on Contacts and Leads – Now, you can specify multiple email addresses for these records, e.g. Work and Home email. When emailing them from within Salesforce, it will allow you to choose which email to send to. Nice.

CRM Content Available for all Editions – At no cost.

Salesforce Knowledge Enhancements – There are quite a bit of knowledge enhancements, making it so much easier to populate this database and easily help your customers, such as creating an article while closing a case and using suggested articles while solving a case.

Community Enhancements – Salesforce Answers can now be used in Sites. Great! Questions can be generated into Cases. Replies can be converted into articles. Just imagine the customer support database you can build with a community like this.

Dynamic Dashboards – Use the security settings of the current user to power the dashboards they visit. This is a great way of not having to create 100′s of duplicate dashboards for everyone. Make sure you have your role hierarchy in check! Also, take a look at the drag and drop dashboard builder. This saves a lot of time.

Dependant lookups and lookup filters (beta forever) – Why is this in beta? I feel like we have been waiting on this for years. ex. On an Account lookup on an Opportunity, you can set it up so that it will only show Accounts where Active = TRUE. This shrinks down the mess in the lookup windows quite a bit.

Well, these were my favorite updates. There are a lot of other changes related to Sites, VisualForce, Development as a Service, etc, but I don’t want to bore you with those

Salesforce Chatter – The True Benefits

So, now that Chatter has been enabled for your organization, you might be asking “what is the point?”

Chatter is the Facebook + Twitter for Enterprises. It is the main component of Salesforce’s “Collaboration Cloud.” What does that even mean? Sure, your users will have the fun aspects of mini-blogging about what is currently going on in their lives and jobs and monitoring what their colleagues are doing, but what benefit does this really provide?

Imagine being a sales manager. Your job is not to login to Salesforce.com and create Opportunities. That is the job of your employees. Your job is to monitor their performance, pay attention to the big deals, and ensure nothing bad happens. Previously, in Salesforce.com it was difficult to actually pay attention to the changes in massive amounts of data over time. Sure, you could look at dashboards and reports, but you really had to analyze to determine what happened between each refresh of the page. When looking at a screen of 100 Opportunities, it is very difficult to find which Opportunities have Closed, which were lost, which are now in negotiation, and so on.

Chatter allows you to passively monitor select deals or select accounts and customers. A sales manager could choose to “follow” the Opportunities for their organization’s top 10 accounts. This would automatically update their home page feed about any changes that have occurred for these deals. If the amount has gone up, it will show up. If the stage has been adjusted, this will show up. A manager can basically pick the deals they are interested in, follow them, and sit back and passively monitor. HUGE improvement from the past policy of actively needing to monitor massive amounts of data.

Also, imagine the teamwork required between marketing and sales. Sales comes in to wine and dine the customer and initially reel them in and marketing needs to follow up and create the detailed line item offers. Marketing needs to know where these Opportunities are and when they should come in and do their work. Sales need to know the detailed information to provide back to the customer. This level of collaboration can be done via chatter with the passive following technique.

Do yourselves the favor of educating your Salesforce users as to the true benefits of Chatter!

Donor Management Software

For all of the nonprofits out there looking for Donor Management Software, Salesforce.com is an excellent option to consider and very cost effective (free).

I know that the term “Salesforce” does not necessarily relate to the goals and actions of a nonprofit organization, but try to push this idea to the side and think of it as only a term. This was the name of the company when they were initially created an geared towards for-profit organizations. A lot has since changed and the tool is highly customizable for ANY organization.

Salesforce does an excellent job with Constituent Relationship Management and Donation Management.

A nonprofit can easily utilize the tool to track/perform:
-Organizations that your constituents are affiliated with or employed by (track board members, employees, relationships, etc)
-Households that your contacts live in
-Individual donors, how much they have donated, their memberships
-Volunteers, their participation, their interests, etc
-In kind donations
-Fundraising events, the attendance, the revenue generated
-Group calendar events throughout your organization
-All emails/phone calls/meetings with your contacts
-Donations/grants/other forms of revenue per person/organization/date given/source/etc
-Mass emailings/mailings to various segments of contituents based off of any criteria that you can think of

You really can not beat this offering. Top notch donor management software provided free to nonprofit organizations.

Signup now for a free trial and contact me to learn more about how this can be configured for your organization.
Salesforce Foundation

Spring 2010 Salesforce.com Release is Here

The Salesforce.com Spring 2010 release is finally upon us and you are probably wondering what you can enable / setup within Salesforce.com to better streamline your business. I will briefly go through many of the top features (IMO) and let you know what to expect.

Real Time Quotes – This is a new feature that should have been around a long time ago, because most companies have already created their own quoting process by now and it will be difficult to convert to this new Salesforce functionality. Multiple quotes can be associated to one Opportunity, data can be synchronized between the Opportunity and Quotes, and PDF’s can be easily generated. I am really not too impressed by this, because there really are some excellent AppExchange products out there that already do this.

New Opportunity UI (User Interface) – This is actually pretty cool, but it is currently in Pilot mode and must be enabled. The idea behind this is that there are certain fields on an Opportunity, no matter what business you are in, that are vitally important, such as Stage and Amount. This UI places these fields directly on the top of the page and makes them highly visible and accessible. I like it.

Salesforce Mobile Lite for ALL Organizations, including Group – Congrats everyone! If you haven’t been able to access Salesforce Mobile before, you can now. Go to the BlackBerry and Iphone stores now and download and customize this app for your organization!

Rich Text Area fields – Once again, Pilot, but long needed in Salesforce.com. Contact your Salesforce reps for this.

Branded Event Invitiations – Salesforce has always neglected email marketing / email templates in Salesforce.com. You can now place your logos on outgoing calendar events, therefore branding them.

Entitlement Management (Service) – Salesforce is now making a BIG push for the service aspects of its product, ie. the Service Cloud. Entitlement management is a newly released feature, which will be highly beneficial for support companies that are actively managing Service Level Agreements (SLA’s). You can quickly identify if customers have support agreements, what level they are subscribed to, and the KPI’s that your customer support reps must adhere to. Workflows can be built to enforce these KPI’s and everything can be tracked with reports. There are additional components related to Entitlement Management to facilitate additional aspects, such as service contracts and milestones. This is a really big feature and is something that needed to be custom built and highly customized before. Let me know if you need assistance with setting this up.

Salesforce Answers – Just like Yahoo Answers, but built into the Salesforce platform. This will be built directly into your Salesforce community and will allow users to ask questions, answer questions, and vote on answers.

New Salesforce.com User Interface Design – Salesforce has been a little behind the times with their design when comparing their website to other SAAS / Web 2.0 sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. They have decided to upgrade their overall design. This will not be available immediately and will need to be enabled. It won’t be enabled by default. I hope this new design is faster. It seems that Chrome is not supported.

New Report Builder!!!!! Developer Only – This is going to be revolutionary. Instead of tons of steps in a report wizard, this will be one, all encompassing report builder that is easy to use for everyone, with an excellent preview mode. Developer mode only, which is saddening.

Custom Dashboard Tables – Outstanding! The table dashboard component now allows you to display 4 columns instead of 2. Previously, you could only display an Account Name and a Dollar value for an example. Now you could also display the Country field and Account #. This is a nice improvement.

SOQL Enhancements – This is huge. Now, advanced SOQL functions can be used, such as GROUP BY, HAVING, AVG, MAX, MIN, SUM, COUNT_DISTINCT, etc. There are also many additional Date filters. Why was this not there before? Do you know how much time this would have saved all developers if this previously existed? I am very pleased with this. There are also ANTI JOINS and SEMI JOINS.

Debug Log Improvements – Debug logs have drastically improved, which is a small, but very nice improvement if you are working with APEX code.

Change Sets and Cloud Deployment (beta) – Great idea, but needs a lot of work. I have rarely been able to use this feature successfully, because of minor errors. It will allow you to deploy sets of code, reports, fields, layouts, etc from the Sandbox to Production and vice versa from directly within the user interface, instead of Eclipse’s IDE or the awful ANT migration tool. This is similar to SAP transports.

Multilevel Master Detail Relationships – You can now create multiple levels deep. ex. Project, Requests for Bids, Actual Bid Submitted, Review of Bid could be multiple master detail relationships.

My Domain – Receive your own subdomain name directly on the Salesforce.com servers. Limited release only.

Take a detailed look through the Spring 2010 Release Notes.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the new features or if you need any information about how they might apply to you or how you could enable them.

Free Online Donation Processing for Nonprofits from Google

I did not know that Google did this until Today when I saw their blog post about free Google Checkout for Nonprofits.

It seems that Google will allow nonprofits to utilize their Google Checkout payment processing system for free. I use Google Checkout and I love it. The rates for payment processing are already competitive, but you can’t beat free! This system will allow you to accept online donations for your nonprofit very easily.

Also, Google Grants will allow nonprofits to advertise their organizations and service for free on Google AdWords if you qualify. That is great free advertising!

I know that this is not Salesforce related, but I deal with a lot of nonprofits and I feel that this is great!

Salesforce.com for Nonprofits Announcement

It seems that the Salesforce.com Foundation will now be “legally responsible for the product donation and discount programs” for nonprofits utilizing their Foundation grant. Here is their service announcement that they released Today by email:

Salesforce.com, inc. has undergone a corporate reorganization whereby it has transferred Salesforce service subscriptions with charitable organizations, charitable units within for-profit companies, and non-profit and public higher education institutions, to salesforce.org. Salesforce.org is a nonprofit public benefit corporation and an authorized reseller of salesforce.com, inc. Pursuant to the “Assignment” section of the Master Subscription Agreement between salesforce.com, inc. and your organization (the “MSA”), salesforce.com, inc. is assigning all of its rights and obligations under the MSA to salesforce.org, effective December 9, 2009. Beginning on that date, your MSA will no longer be with salesforce.com, inc. and will instead be with salesforce.org. Salesforce.org will continue, as salesforce.com, inc.’s authorized reseller, to provide the Salesforce online service to you in accordance with the MSA and your current subscription terms.

New Shamrock CRM Design

Hello all,

I was wanting to get your opinion of the new look and feel for http://www.shamrockcrm.com . It was recently redesigned and I am looking for any input you might have. Thoughts? Comments?

I have not redesigned the blog yet, only the main pages.

Dreamforce 2010

The dates are December 6-9. I wonder why it is so late.

Small Business Tips from Dreamforce

During the Dreamforce Breakout Sessions I luckily was able to catch a few notes. The presentations moved so fast I could barely keep up with the slides. However, here’s what I did catch from a session called “A Conversation with Small Business Leaders.”

Matt Williamson of Bronto‘s tips:

1. Tips for Sales Meetings
– Together, take 30 minutes of quiet time to allow everyone to update their current opportunities and hot leads
– Go over opportunities together and update them together to spread information across employees and managers
– Hit submit on forecast reports together, this will give the forecasts a consistent time stamp and make the reports clearer

2. Zero dashboard – create a “zero dashboard” of neglected opportunities that need action.

3. Create automated reminder messages, such as “Don’t forget to call back this contact person for this opportunity”

4. Make good use of the Appexchange
– Take advantage of integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and much more