Getting Started with the Salesforce.com AJAX Toolkit

Last Updated on Monday, 24 April 2006 07:42 Written by Steve Monday, 24 April 2006 07:41

I use the Salesforce.com AJAX toolkit. It is an incredible tool for ironing the kinks out of Salesforce.com for use by nonprofits. Need to create a Household when you create a Contact? Use the AJAX toolkit. Need to associate a Gift with a Contact, no just an Account? Use the AJAX toolkit. With the AJAX toolkit, and only with the AJAX toolkit, can you provide a truly customized application to your end users. Without it, you’re stuck with Salesforce.com’s UI and logic.

Want to get started? Check out Dave Carrol’s Getting Started with the AppExchange AJAX Toolkit (interesting choice to publish it on Writely…), and then move on to the description of the Beta 3 product, which I use every day and had no idea some of these features existed!

ONE/Northwest gets grant from Salesforce.com to integrate with Plone

Last Updated on Friday, 21 April 2006 09:47 Written by Steve Friday, 21 April 2006 09:42

The Salesforce.com Foundation announced today that a plucky band of techno-strategists up in Seattle will get a $25,000 grant to build integration between the open source Plone content management system and Salesforce.com.

We’re very thankful to the Foundation for funding this project, and really excited about what this means to the nonprofits we work with (and anyone else using Plone and Salesforce.com!). What does it mean? With Plone and Salesforce.com integrated:

• Someone who signs up for your Plone website will be automatically dropped into your Salesforce.com database
• Any data you collect (interest area, newsletter signup, etc.) on your website will be recorded in Salesforce.com
• You can use all that data, and the constituent’s email address, to drive communication through any number of email marketing services that integrate with Salesforce.com
• If you desire, you can allow your constituents to view and change the data you have in Salesforce.com

We are going to be working with Enfold Systems on this project–they are some of the smartest Plone minds out there. We’re shooting for an October release, with lots of milestones along the way. If you are interested in this project, let me know in the comments. We’re very interested in getting input from a variety of folks along the way.

We now get to integrate the leading hosted CRM solution with the leading enterprise-grade open source CMS. We’re pretty darn excited about it!

My Lead Conversion Application on Appexchange

Last Updated on Wednesday, 19 April 2006 10:13 Written by Steve Wednesday, 19 April 2006 10:08

I just published my applicaiton for Rapid Lead Conversion and Online Payment Importing. Check it out!

What is Lead Conversion? Leads is a holding area in Salesforce.com. You can import people as Leads, and then decide if you want to make them real Contacts. You may have a lot of names from a petition, where many of them won’t turn out to be real Contacts for you organization. You may also drop people from your newsletter sign up page on the web into Salesforce.com with the very cool Web-to-Lead functionality.

If you do any of this, you have used the Lead Conversion functionality in Salesforce.com. It’s great functionality. It checks to see if there are existing Contacts and Accounts that match the Lead you are brining in. But it’s slow, and you have to go through 3 server round trips to convert a Lead. I’ve built a faster interface based on AJAX, so you can convert 100+ leads without having to refresh the page.

In adition to just making things faster, I’ve built a way to import online donations from a service like PayPal. Download your donations in Excel, import them as leads with donation date and amount, and then with a couple clicks, create the Contact or merge to an existing Contact, create an Account or merge to an existing Account, and create the Opportunity. And if you use my Householding setup (to be published to Appexchange this week) it will create the Household, too.

Check it out. If you do lead conversion, it might make your life a whole lot easier. On the Appechange listing there is a presentation and a set up document. It should be all you need to get up and going.