Embedded Help in your Web App using Grazr

Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 September 2006 12:34 Written by Steve Tuesday, 19 September 2006 09:52

Thanks to TechCrunch, I just stumbled across Grazr, another entrant in the “drop the r” Web 2.0 product category. It’s an HTML widget (my newest obsession) that displays XML data in a hierarchical format. It reminds me of my gopher days…

Here’s a very simple Grazer example. I created an XML file (OPML format), pointed Grazr at it, and generated the HTML to embed it on this post. You can nest folders, list out multiple text entries, and put in URL lnks, links to RSS, OPML, etc.

As you can tell by the Grazr content in my example, I’m thinking about creating a Help resource for my Salesforce.com customers. As Mark showed a while back using Meebo widgets, Salesforce.com lets you easily drop components like this into their app. So I can create a help file in OPML, and put my Grazr help component in the left nav area of the Home Page.

Voila, simple help now in Salesforce.com. And it’s easily updated because the data lives in an external XML file, which I could generate from a database of some sort as necessary. You could even put the help data in Salesforce objects and use the API to generate the XML file…

I’ve been struggling with a good way to hand off simple documentation to my customers. The Salesforce help is very deep on general issues, but I want to document the business processes that I’m supporting. Grazr gives me a simple display of my structured help, and lets me put it where people will use it, right in the Salesforce UI.

Just yesterday I wrote about how I think these kinds of UI widgets are going to explode and redefine what it means to create web applications. Salesforce.com is way ahead of the curve on letting us crank on their UI, remaking it as we see fit, for our specific needs. I hope the ability to insert S-Controls in dashboards that they’ve been talking about for the Winter ’07 release is a sign that they’ll be opening up the plugability of their UI even more.

Integration: best of breed UI?

Last Updated on Monday, 18 September 2006 07:06 Written by Steve Sunday, 17 September 2006 08:36

I’m co-facilitating a session on software integration at the Web of Change conference this week with Michael Silberman of Echo Ditto. I’ve been thinking about where integration is right now. I mean, integration was possible as soon as the second application was written.

Building custom integrations has been a business model for decades. So what’s new and interesting? A couple things come to mind:

1. It’s easier
2. It can happen at a distance
3. We can now use UI components like we used to use software libraries

First, it’s definitely easier. As software has matured over the last 50 years, the levels of abstraction have built up to dizzying heights. Abstraction means the levers to move software are much more graspable, and more powerful.

Second, it used to be that applications had to be on the same machine, then in the same data center, and now they just have to be on the Internet for us to be able to integrate them. Since everything is on the Internet, place no longer matters. Distance, as measured by bandwidth, can still matter, as Gareth pointed out yesterday.

Third, while we can still pick best of breed applications and integrate them together (i.e. CRM with accounting) we can now choose best of breed UI components and use them when and where we want. Notice how any place you find a listing of street addresses you now find an embedded google map. Google maps is the best of breed UI widget for displaying geographic data in your app. These components can be plugged into our apps where we see fit with very little work or expertise needed. More and more of these widgets are coming into existence, and I think we’ll find that our best of breed apps become amalgams of core functionality and welded in widgets, where you can’t easily tell which parts are from the core app and which are from the widget.

I’m working on an integration with a killer widget that I think will change the way we look at CRM data. Seriously, it’s really cool. I’m integrating a widget with a full-fledged application, and a novice would have no idea it wasn’t core functionality.

So will our job descriptions start to look like Igor’s in Young Frankenstien? Will we be scouring the morgues, looking for good body parts to graft to our monsters? Probably. And they’ll probably come after us bearing torches…

Keith Olberman comes into his own

Last Updated on Monday, 25 September 2006 03:53 Written by Steve Tuesday, 12 September 2006 12:48

Keith Olberman is distinguishing himself as one of the more articulate and pointed critic of the President in the mainstream media. Starting with a special comment on the President’s grisly failures in reponse to Katrina, and increasing in velocity and amplitude with recent lambastings of Donald Rumsfeld and the President, he’s been finding his voice. I now consider him at the vanguard of a long-overdue, Murrow-like stand against those who use the language of freedom and democracy to support efforts to destroy those very things. I hope this movement will grow in size and volume, and that Olberman is joined by other mainstream journalists in voicing outrage.

In his comment last night about the President’s failures post 9/11, he was eloquent, insightful, and unflinchingly critical of the President. This is not a rant, this is not venting, this is not partisan rancor. This is the media doing it’s job in the face of overwhelming evidence of mendacity, incompetence, and political thuggery by this administration. But Keith can say it so much better than I can…