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

Salesforce Winter 2012 Features

Salesforce Winter 2012 features.  I know this is a little (very) late, but it is better than never.

There are a lot of big releases during this upgrade and a lot of new things for everyone to learn, like Siteforce and Visual Workflows.  Take a look below to see my platform overview

See the release notes in PDF form here.

Salesforce Social Contacts – this feature sounds great, but I am not overly enthusiastic.  You can link your contacts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  You can add in their picture and see their posts.  Great!  The problem is that you need to do this contact by contact and social network by social network.  The system does not automatically scour the web and update all of your contacts.  Even worse, Salesforce searches the social networks by the contact’s name.  Have you ever tried searching Facebook for a common name?  You ALWAYS get 100 results. Have fun with that.

Customer Chatter Groups – This is a great feature.  Create your own “customer portal” for collaboration and discussion.  Invite your customers into a Chatter group and chat with them, share documents, and more.  I like it.  Maybe try tying this in with an actual Salesforce customer portal?

Dynamic Dashboard filtering – This is one of those features that should have been there since day 1.  Now, you can filter individual dashboards by criteria, such as region, industry, product line, etc.  For all of the large organizations out there that have SO many dashboards created in a specific (hokey) way, I wonder how difficult it will be for them to migrate 1000 dashboards into this format.

Case flows – Wow, Cases have become beautiful in the Service Cloud.  Everything seems very social.  It is very easy to add comments, send emails, log calls and more.  This is really a great UI makeover.

The Service Console has somewhat of a small overhaul as well and makes it very easy to find data quickly.

Pinned Lists – For the service console, you can now pin vital lists on the left side of the screen to always have the data available.  Very nice.  Time for everyone to invest in wide screen monitors.

Chatter Private Messages – This is another “should have been day 1″ feature.  Very simple.  Send messages to 1 or many people in Chatter.

Chatter Approvals – Integrating approval requests directly into Chatter feeds for the manager that does not like digging through many records to find an action he needs to take.

Chatter Now – Integrating instant messaging directly into Salesforce with Chatter Now.  How many instant messaging clients does everyone have now?  Well, here is one more.

Chatter for Microsoft SharePoint – Allowing for simple integration of Chatter functionality into Microsoft SharePoint.  This seems very useful for making all of your boring internal websites socially enabled.  Great idea.

Admin quick links – This should make it a lot easier for the new SFDC admin.

One-click App Creation – Salesforce is trying to make it a LOT quicker to create a new custom object, app, and tab.  Simply click the “Create App” button, fill in a few fields and you are ready to start.  A little bit easier than before.

Visual workflows – This is where I get excited.  Visual Workflows allow you to use a cloud designer tool to visually create VisualForce wizards.  So, instead of building a lot of VisualForce, it can all be drag and drop, point and click.  This is something everyone needs to spend a couple of hours learning over the next few months.

Siteforce - is generally available in Winter 2012.  It is essentially a web designer tool and content management system all in one, allowing you to utilize Salesforce as a backend database/admin console and build a dynamic front end website with nothing but point and click.

There are also several smaller features available, such as:
-Likes on Chatter comments
-Cloud designer for Visual Workflows
-Sharing Chatter files via email/IM inside and outside of SFDC (awesome!)
-Upload and Share Files at same time
-More Chatter filters
-Chatter Desktop
-Chatter for Android
-New Forecasts generally available
-Salesforce Mobile Beta for Android phones
-Presentations can no longer be assembled
-Enhanced reports tab (here’s to confused users that just got used to managing their reports)
-iPad mobile dashboards app
-Jigsaw is now Data.com
-Permission sets are now available – no longer need to create an infinite number of profiles to solve small needs!
-Just in Time provisioning for SSO portals
-APEX REST API

Salesforce.com User Adoption – New AppExchange Application

I am excited to announce a new product created by Shamrock CRM built specifically for improving user adoption in Salesforce.com and Force.com.  Imagine having 1000 users and only 50% user adoption. @ $1000/license, this is $41,000 WASTED in licenses/month.

Welcome to the solution, AdoptionMax – Salesforce.com User Adoption Management!

Try AdoptionMax on the AppExchange Here (Click View Screenshots to see More)

Take a look at my overview of AdoptionMax Here

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.

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.

Read more about AdoptionMax and how it will improve your User Adoption here

Try out AdoptionMax on the Salesforce AppExchange

Let me know if you would like to try it out for FREE or if you would like more information.

Thanks for reading.  We have just found that SO many companies, big and small, have huge problems with user adoption management.  We want to help!

Dreamforce 2011 Site is Live

Hey everybody, the Dreamforce 2011 website is now live with a listing of sessions and activities.

Take a look here for Dreamforce 2011

The dates are August 30 – September 2, 2011. This leads nicely into a holiday for most people.

Early bird price of $699 is supposedly available until April 14th.

Chatter Knowledge Portals

Chatter Chatter Chatter. All of the news lately is pretty much revolving around Chatter. There are multiple benefits, such as closer teams, better collaboration, passive tracking of data and now, Knowledge Portals.

Chatter Groups are a great way to segment your Salesforce users into different groups based on region, function, department, teams and more. This also allows you to have a communication platform specifically for them. For example, imagine you would like to rollout a new pilot group of users for customer complaint tracking, not sales like your existing users. What is the best way to form a community within Salesforce.com amongst them for change notifications, training information, useful documents and more? Chatter Groups of course!

When rolling out a new set of users, I like to setup a Chatter group specifically for them. I create the group, add all of the users, and pick and assign a “champion” for the group. The champion will be the person on the team responsible for motivating user participation in the group and posting announcements.

Once all of the users are assigned to the group, they can ask questions directly within the group and have them answered by people in their same team as opposed to mass posting questions that would essentially not be important to the other sets of users (e.g. customer support rep process issues broadcasted to all sales and marketing people).

Once the group is setup, I also post all training documents and useful material directly in the group. I make all announcements and “useful tips” in this group. Any time anything is posted, it will show up directly on their home page.

What a great way to communicate to one subset of users without bugging everyone else! This is a very simple, easy way to form a knowledge portal directly in Salesforce.com. You can create as many of these groups as you need.

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

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

Watch the Dreamforce Keynote Video

Here’s the link to check out the Dreamforce 2009 Keynote made by Marc Benioff: Watch the Keynote Now

Service Cloud 2 Detailed Feature Descriptions

Here are the fully detailed product descriptions for Service Cloud 2 from the Salesforce.com Press Release.

-Salesforce Knowledge: Salesforce.com offers the world’s first multi-tenant knowledge base (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/knowledge-base-system/) that is fully integrated with CRM and designed for cloud computing. Salesforce Knowledge delivers one multi-channel knowledge base for agents, customers and partners. The core Service Cloud 2 knowledge base delivers the same benefits available to any application built on the Force.com platform, including rapid deployment, immediate results, simple customizations, automatic upgrades and more.

-Salesforce Answers: For years, customer service centers have been limited to knowledge articles produced by company employees and have not benefited from the explosion of consumer wisdom that exists across the Web. Utilizing Service Cloud 2, Salesforce Answers will deliver a unique online experience that helps companies leverage the expertise in the cloud for their customers. Salesforce Answers will enable companies to start the conversation with a unique online customer community, crowd-source knowledge and leverage Facebook.

-Salesforce for Twitter: In today’s Web-driven world where there is an expectation of real-time interaction, Salesforce for Twitter and Service Cloud 2 give companies an easy way to join the real-time customer service conversations happening on Twitter by enabling them to search Twitter in real-time, monitor service issues on Twitter, join Twitter conversations, establish a Twitter support channel and deliver real-time knowledge.

-Five-Minute Upgrades: Salesforce.com is unveiling another revolution for the cloud computing industry with the new five-minute upgrade. The five-minute upgrade represents an incredible technology achievement demonstrating the power of the Force.com platform and infrastructure. Never before have companies been able to take advantage of the latest technology innovations and evolve their customer service at the rate they are able to with Service Cloud 2. Salesforce.com is the only company able to provide its customers with five-minute upgrade technology because of salesforce.com’s real-time, mirrored data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure.

-Cisco and Salesforce.com: Salesforce.com and Cisco have come together to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision of moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.