gokubi.com

Oh man I can’t tell you how excited I am about the upcoming Web of Change conference. It’s a really great annual gathering that exists at the nexus of the two fields I am most passionate about: technology and social change.

It takes place at the amazing Hollyhock Leadership Institute, north of Vancouver, Canada.

This year the agenda has been specifically honed to bring kick ass organizers to the table. Adrienne Maree Brown from Ruckus Society will be there as will be ibrahim abdul-matin from the Movement Strategy Center. See all the confirmed attendees!

I’m participating in a session about software integration and another about using process mapping to increase effectiveness. Kyle Tanner from Central Washington Industrial Areas Foundation will be there with me to talk about our project mapping their organizing work to Salesforce.com. It should be a lot of fun!

If this sounds like your cup of tea, email to request a spot. I’d love to see you there!

Dan over at Jitterbit has a nice post that I found myself saying “Amen” to with each sentence.

SOA’s [service oriented architecture's] been coming on for quite a few years now, but the early promise hasn’t panned out as much as some people have hoped…My question is why has it been so difficult to connect the dots (so to speak) between all of these applications? SOA was supposed to combine the promise of best of breed within an open framework.

That sure is the promise of software as a service (AKA SaaS). Pick software the is really good at a single area, or core competency. Then integrate all those components together for a complete package that supports the way you do business. That’s what I see as the future of software. I think it’s coming sooner than later. Dan makes a great point about why it hasn’t been sooner:

What we’ve underestimated, I think, is the ability and the willingness for SaaS applications to integrate with each other. We want to have our cake (complete suite) and eat it too (best of breed). Of course, there hasn’t been much incentive for SaaS application companies to make the connections to other apps. They’ve got products to improve and customers to satisfy. Integrating with peripheral competitors falls pretty far down on the to-do list.

We’ve seen the same thing. We use Salesforce.com and we use Democracy in Action. We’d love to see them integrated. Salesforce.com has zero incentive to build an integration, and it turns out Democracy in Action doesn’t have much incentive either. They don’t have many clients who use Salesforce.com, and they have plenty on their plates with their current customers and platform.

That’s why we’re starting to see the connections being made by the end-user, at the organizational or departmental level. The end users are the only ones truly motivated to integrate apps because they have the most to gain…Today, it’s starting to feel like the last of the puzzle pieces are falling into place.

I can start building these integrations as I need them. I built a simple one between Salesforce.com and dotproject. When Democracy in Action’s API becomes a bit more documented and stable I could integrate it with Salesforce.com as well. I wouldn’t need the developer time of either company, just access to their APIs and some decent coding ability.

In the nonprofit sector, people like me are the “users” Dan is talking about. We can build these integrations as we need them. Sometimes they’re ugly, sometimes their elegant. Either way they help us get our work done by connecting software systems together.

Dan says “it’s starting to feel like the last of the puzzle pieces are falling into place,” and I have to agree with him.

I’m happy to announce that the second employee in our database program is starting today! Michael Paulsmeyer will be working part-time with me to serve environmental nonprofits with CRM implementations using Salesforce.com. Welcome Michael!

Michael is starting in the Executive Masters program in Information Systems at the University of Washington. It’s a great program run by Mike Crandall who has a long and storied history in the nonprofit technology world. Mike referred Michael over to me and it looks like a really good fit. (The pic is from the last day of his recent cross-country bike ride to Seattle.)

I talked earlier about my desire to expand our capacity in the program and I got lots of good feedback from you all. Thanks again! Michael has a long background in technology consulting. What was the most interesting to me was his work at Tangoe where he helped telecommunications clients model their provisioning processes in Tangoe’s software. Have I mentioned that process mapping is an important part of my job?

I’m really excited to have Michael on board, and even more excited to think how he’ll be cranking out great work in no time flat. I’ll keep this blog posted on how we’re working together, dividing up projects, and any new ideas we come up with.

We’ve got a process we need to model in Salesforce.com. It has to do with tracking of restricted funding. Basically, we do consulting projects with customers at break even or at a loss. We then fill in that loss with generous funding from Foundations and individual donors. While most individual donors don’t put any restrictions on how their donations are spent, most Foundations do. It could be geography, or issue that a group works on, etc.

So, we want to have pools of funding that we can draw down from as projects need the subsidy. We want to be able to easily monitor those pools of funding, how fast we’re drawing down on them, which projects with which customers are being subsidized, when they expire, etc. We don’t want to get in a situation where we look back and we’ve spent more subsidy than we have. That’s a no-no in the nonprofit world.

We’ve been thinking about this problem for years, but haven’t come up with a good solution because the technology thwarted us. Out old database was not fun to customize, and an Excel-based method was going to be too hard to maintain.

Now we’re in Salesforce.com. All our funder records are in Salesforce.com. All our projects are available in Salesforce.com via an integration with our project management system. So we took a look at the problem again and spent an hour talking it through in detail.

How long did it take me to create a database schema in Salesforce.com that allowed us to track restricted funding by Foundation, draw down those funds against specific projects? Wait there’s more, I also created a report that shows each fund and it’s balance. But don’t answer yet, I also created a report of each fund and which projects are pulling money from it, showing how much each is pulling. Oh, and the Foundation record has UI that lists all their funding pools and the project record lists all funding pools that are going toward it.

Now how long do you think it took me?

30 minutes

And it’s essentially ready for production. I want to do a couple cosmetic changes, and I want to add one field to the funding pool schema. And then I’ll let my users loose on it, adding historical data and tracking restricted funding moving forward.

And I didn’t write a single line of code

This is what rapid business process modeling is all about. This is why I’m so excited about Salesforce.com for nonprofits. Identify the work you want to do, spend time thinking about it, and implement it in the technology.

Turns out, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the work processes. Another example of how Salesforce.com helps get the technology out of your way, and lets you do your work.

Malcolm learned something from your visit!

I was looking at the write up describing the developer gathering that will be going on at Dreamforce in October and saw some interesting hints at what’s coming in the next Salesforce release–dubbed Winter ‘07.

Get your hands on a beta of the Winter ‘07 release to try out the latest features and technologies, and see the powerful impact that this new release will have on you and your applications.

Pretty standard marketing speak about how the next release will be super. But then there’s this:

(What’s New) The initial release of AppExchange gave you the ability to package up custom objects, S-controls, and other common customizations. This session will cover all the new capabilities we’ve added to packaging to support both publishing and sharing on the AppExchange Directory.

Awesome. The initial release of the Appexchange was great, but there are a million ways it could improve. Good to see they’re planning on some changes because the Summer ‘07 release had none.

And then check out this gem:

…and optimizing performance using the new functionality in SOQL combined with the new AppExchange AJAX toolkit

Improvements to SOQL would be awesome! All my friends want ORDER BY and joins. And a new AJAX toolkit–that is seriously exciting. AJAX beta 3.3 is an incredibly powerful toolkit I can’t wait to see the new one.

But this line was the biggest news:

This session provides advanced S-control development techniques that include inline or detail page hosted S-controls

I don’t know what they mean by inline S-controls, but S-controls on detail pages would be incredibly powerful. If you could pull up a Contact record and have an S-control fire and display right on the page, you could really do just about anything. What if you could use your own S-control instead of a related list? Or show stock quotes on each Account page? Or display all the relationships that a Contact has in a Flash visualization widget? Heck, you could even embed a wiki page on each Contact and Account record for storing large amounts of loosely structured data. Endless, endless possibilities if this is really coming.

Can’t wait for Dreamforce!

Great tip from Mark late last week: you can embed a Meebo chat window in your Salesforce home page. Can be a nice way to be instantly available to folks with questions.

So why is this interesting? Live chat on the web has been around for a long time. Plus, you already know how to reach me, and I’m not interested in putting myself out there as available for chat in all my customer sites. But the functionality isn’t the point, it’s the architecture of the solution.

The really cool thing about this example is that it is a specific service that can be easily plugged in where I need it with 3 lines of code. It’s a Flash component that works in any web page, not just Salesforce.com. Do 5 minutes of config, grab the 3 lines of code, and put them where you want them. Done.

I’ve been running across more and more of these lately, web apps that are designed to be dropped into another website as a component, providing some functionality in your UI.

This chat widget took me 10 minutes to set up, thanks to the enablers at meebo.com and Salesforce.com. It just reinforces for me that the interconnecting of smaller web apps in service of larger problems is the way to go. Single software products that can do everything are dead. The age of plug and play components is upon us. These components serve relatively circumscribed needs right now (mapping, chat, search, etc.) but will amaze us as they start to become increasingly complex over the next few years.

My friends at NPower New York are hiring a Salesforce.com Implementation Consultant and a Salesforce.com Project Manager on contract. It’s a great organization, and they’re doing really interesting projects for big nonprofits in New York.

If you’re in NYC, drop them a line.

Why do bike messengers have the life span of a mayfly? Check out this evidence:

Sometimes you’re just surfing the web and then you get hit by something so powerful it really affects you. Watch this.

Thanks to Chris Uy for the tip.