Continually blown away…

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 August 2006 12:44 Written by Steve Wednesday, 23 August 2006 11:46

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.

For our Japanese friends

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 August 2006 08:38 Written by Steve Sunday, 20 August 2006 08:38

Malcolm learned something from your visit!

Hints to Winter ’07 release features in Dreamforce posting

Last Updated on Tuesday, 15 August 2006 09:42 Written by Steve Tuesday, 15 August 2006 09:42

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!