My Householding app on Appexchange

Last Updated on Thursday, 27 April 2006 08:22 Written by Steve Thursday, 27 April 2006 08:19

My app for Householding joins my Rapid Lead Converter and Online Donation Importer and my Functional Documentation Embedded in Salesforce.com as publicly available on Appexchange. While Housedholing is a continual work in progress, it’s exciting to make it publicly available to people who might find it valuable.

What is Householding?

• It is the grouping of multiple people together based on a shared physical address
• It facilitates direct mail, allowing you to send one piece of mail per physical address, even if the family has multiple Contacts in your database

What does my Appexchange setup do?

• Gives you the Household custom object
• Gives you a form that creates up to two Contacts, a Household, and relates them together all at once
• Gives you some helpful ways to keep Contact and Household addresses in sync

If you want to implement Householding, it’s actually fairly complex. It’s a way of thinking about your Contacts, how they relate to each other, how you track Opportunities, and what all your reports look like. Getting this app set up is fairly straightforward, but doing Householding, as anyone who has done it will tell you, is kind of a pain. But if you need to do it, you need to do it!

As always, I love feedback! Take a look. Check out the test drive!

Initiating Actions from Reports

Last Updated on Thursday, 27 April 2006 08:05 Written by Steve Wednesday, 26 April 2006 01:33

Reports in Salesforce.com are great because you can query Contacts. And then you can drill down to a Contact’s record to do things like edit them, or add an Opportunity, etc.

But “drilling down” is really just a euphamism for “you have to click again.” And I think the goal of a web app is to remove as many clicks as possible. So I drive events from reports where it makes sense.

On this report, I can edit or delete any Opportunity that is listed. This is a pipeline report that shows all my CRM projects. I can easily move them from one stage to another without having to drill down.

This report is a list of Contacts. With one click I can start the process for adding each one to a Campaign. Again, no drill down. No extra clicks necessary.

I created two custom fields that can now be included on any Report or View that I have. Salesforce.com lets me add action links all over the place, which is freakin’ cool.

Edit Delete Link

In this example I created this field on the Opportunity object, but the same notation should work on any object.
Field Data Type: Formula
Field Label: Edit Delete
Formula Return Type: Text
Formula:
HYPERLINK("/" & {!Id} & "/e", "Edit") & " | " & HYPERLINK("/setup/own/deleteredirect.jsp?delID=" & {!Id}, "Del")

Add to Campaign Link

This only works on the Contact object
Field Data Type: Formula
Field Label: Add To Campaign
Formula Return Type: Text
Formula:
HYPERLINK("/00v/e?retURL=%2F" & {!Id} & "&parent_id=" & {!Id} , "Add to Campaign")

CRM is about looking up information, but it’s more importantly about action. Enable your users to act in as many places as possible.

Update: We had some earlier problems with copying and pasting the hyperlink fields causing syntax errors in Salesforce.com. Kingsley pointed me to the fix, and all is well now. If you ever want to post formula fields on the web, wrap them in CODE tags!

Databases and Web Services

Last Updated on Tuesday, 25 April 2006 07:40 Written by Steve Tuesday, 25 April 2006 07:36

Tim O’Reilly has started a series on what’s up with databases in the web2.0 world. One quote from Cory Ondrejka struck me. He’s moving all the internal communications of the online role playing game Second Life to web services.

I don’t think anyone really groks what’s going to happen when we fully connect to the web this way…

And I think when he says anyone, he means anyone–himself included. We’re all delving into web services and integration and delighting at what we find is possible, but does anyone get this stuff fully? We’re trying to grok this new world where apps are Internet aware and can integrate any many levels. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t even feel right to call them apps anymore–they’re like data platforms on which we can build apps, but not in the historical sense of the word.

As you can tell from my thoughts, we haven’t figured it out yet! Anyway, I look forward to being enlightened further–keep your eye on the series!