Interesting conversations

Last Updated on Thursday, 29 June 2006 07:11 Written by Steve Thursday, 29 June 2006 07:11

I was hanging out in the Salesforce.com nonprofit developers IRC channel today and ran into Eugene Chan. We talked a bit about some interesting things he thinking about for modeling grant making in Salesforce.com. Mark, Rem, and Eric stopped by–check out the transcript to see if anything of interest to you was chatted about.

Everyone Should Recycle

Last Updated on Thursday, 29 June 2006 08:21 Written by Steve Thursday, 29 June 2006 08:21

I was helping a client of mine deal with a data import error yesterday. He accidentally imported 153 Contacts to the wrong Appeal Campaign, and he wanted help pulling them out. There isn’t an easy way to modify this data in a big batch in Salesforce.com, but the Data Loader is a great tool for the job.

I set up a quick web conference so he could watch me wield the Data Loader to get this job done and I promptly screwed things up. Rather than deleting the Contact’s memberships in the Campaign, I deleted the Contacts. 153 of his major donors were gone, just like that. Yikes.

So we had to go to the last backup and restore and then try to figure out what changes had been made since…oh wait, we would have had to do that with most nonprofit CRM databases, but with Salesforce.com we were back up and running in 2 minutes with no lost data. Because Salesforce.com recycles.

Each user has a Recycle Bin. It stores the last 5000 things they’ve deleted from Salesforce.com in the last 30 days, and allows you to restore them with the click of a button. We put the Contacts back, and all their relationships to Opportunities and Campaigns were put back as well. No sweat.

It sure saved my butt yesterday when I wasn’t paying attention while wielding a powerful tool. It will probably come in handy for you and your users at some point–so remeber to always recycle…

Nonprofit Salesforce.com on IRC

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 June 2006 09:22 Written by Steve Wednesday, 28 June 2006 09:21

Sonny Cloward has set up an IRC channel for discussion of all things relating to developing the Salesforce.com platform for nonprofit use. If you don’t know, an IRC channel is basically a chat room that’s open 24 hours a day.

Here are the details of the channel:

Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #npo-sfdc-dev

Sonny’s thinking that the room will be open for drop-in discussions of Salesforce.com for nonprofits, but will also have scheduled meeting times primarily supporting an idea we’re hatching for periodic conference calls with folks implementing Salesforce.com for nonprofits.

Sonny and I have committed to logging into the channel whenever we’re available, so feel free to drop by. We’ll be logging what goes on in the channel and posting those transcripts on the web.

If you’re new to IRC, GAIM is a great chat client with support for IRC. It will also support AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, etc. You can download GAIM and add an IRC Account pointing to irc.freenode.net. Then Join a Chat, and point that at #npo-sfdc-dev.

I hope to see you there sometime soon!