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About a month ago I started to get time out errors when I was using Eclipse to sync my S-Controls and when logging in to the Data Loader.

Increasing the timeout period does the trick, but I wonder why the timeouts have started happening more. I can’t help but think it’s tied to Apex going pre-release. Could be they’re being more sophisticated in how they’re prioritizing API traffic, favoring existing sessions over new ones.

Whatever the case may be, I recommend increasing your timeouts in Eclipse so you don’t get these annoying messages.

I’d like to thank all the folks that support ONE/Northwest in our use of CRM.

First and foremost, thanks to the Salesforce.com Foundation for donating Enterprise Edition so that we can use it to manage our fund raising, as well as our consulting work. Use of Salesforce.com has transformed the way we think about constituents, and we’ve created a much richer picture of our interactions than I think we ever thought possible.

And thanks to the Foundation for donating Salesforce.com to all the nonprofits we work with. I’ve worked with about 15 nonprofits in the last two years, and they are all using Salesforce.com actively in support of a better environment. It’s been fun to watch what folks do with such a powerful and accessible system! Thanks Steve, Meghan, Tucker, Chris, Brian, and Mike!

I’d like to thank the great folks at CRMFusion for graciously donating DemandTools and PeopleImport. I recommend to every group I work with that they use DemandTools. It’s really a fabulous tool for data cleanliness, but oh so much more as well. Thanks Glenn and Mark!

Also a thank you to Clicktools, who make their seriously powerful survey tool available to ONE/Northwest. I’ve already did a little movie about how we’re using it in our consulting practice, and I can’t wait to find a customer use case where we can implement it. Thanks Andrew!

We’re using What Counts as the email marketing system integrated with Salesforce.com. What Counts offers their service to our nonprofit customers at a discount, and they throw in the Salesforce.com integration as well. It’s been working really well, and greatly simplifies the data picture for the six groups currently using the integration. Thanks to David, Odysseus, Wilson, and all the folks at What Counts!

Conga is a new tool we just started using. Conga makes their mail merge tool available to nonprofits at a discounted rate, and we’re working on our first implementation. Thanks Mark for the discount!

And thanks to the donors who have given to support ONE/Northwest in our CRM work. Here’s a recent donation that came in to our Support Us page:

OneNW is a great organization and I have supported it in years past. I have been receiving great support from Steve Andersen who provides a wonderful community service through his ability and willingness to help people with their nonprofit technology work.

If you’d like to support our work helping environmental groups use CRM to save the world, and help make my blogging about it possible, please consider making a donation to ONE/Northwest. We love the work and love talking about it. Help us keep it up!

Or at least possible:

Integration: Integration to other applications is a key design point in Coghead and one that takes several forms. One capability that will be surfacing soon is what we call “Linked Applications”. A “Linked Application” is basically a facade on an external application service (e.g. a Salesforce.com application or on an on-premise application with exposed interfaces). Linked applications look very similar to the native applications built in Coghead - they show up on the list of applications, their actions can be invoked inside of other action definitions, forms can be used to view/add/modify data, etc. Other Coghead applications in the same account, then, are able to invoke the external APIs of the remote service associated with the Linked Application using standard Coghead application building blocks. For example, someone could build an “Issue tracking application” in Coghead that automatically attaches a Note to a Lead record in a remote Salesforce.com account whenever certain conditions are met. Linked Applications should surface as a ‘beta feature’* in early July.

I’m very excited to see what they come up with. Coghead looks really cool, but I haven’t carved out time to run it through it’s paces. If they release a way to build web apps that front end Salesforce.com, I’ll definitely make the time to check it out!

Salesforce.com made some changes in API around session management when it revamped the Ajax toolkit. If you’re creating hyperlink fields that call Salesforce S-Controls, they will fail with an invalid session Id error if you upgrade the S-Controls to the new Ajax toolkit.

To comply with their new way of doing things, you need to add &ic=1 to the end of your hyperlink to get the code to fire. Here’s a thread where Doug Chasman describes the problem.

I recently upgraded some old code to the new Ajax toolkit to take advantage of the speed improvements and relationship queries. A user reported a problem yesterday and it turned out to be that they were using the hyperlink button approach and it was failing.

The real answer to this is to call S-Controls from real buttons, and stop using fake hyperlink buttons.

I host a lot of web meetings as part of my Salesforce.com consulting. Since my customers are all over the Northwest US and Canada, we don’t do many face-to-face meetings. Here’s a tip for making invitations to web meetings really easy to manage.

Most web meeting systems have URLs that are super long and ugly. They often look something like this:

http://meetingservice.com/meetingid=Ju84kdj32y&role=Attendee&Setting47=Kij3452kd

Because they are long, I’ve found they get broken by email clients into non clickable links more than I would like. I’d like the link to be shorter.

Even if the links are short, they have the meeting Id embedded in them. What happens when I need to change the meeting id at the last minute? The meeting URL is then invalid, and I have to communicate the change. I want flexibility to change the hard details of the meeting up to the last minute, without having to tell anyone.

So I use SnipURL to create a generic URL that I can then point to the long meeting URL. SnipURL is a free service that lets you create a short url for any other URL. The cool thing is that you can change the underlying URL at any time.

So for a user training I’ll set up a web meeting, get the huge ugly URL and go create a SnipURL like http://snipurl.com/sftraining. When the user clicks on this URL, they get redirected to the huge, ugly URL automatically. If something isn’t right and I have to change the meeting Id, all they have to do is click on the SnipURL again to get the new meeting URL.

Really simple technique, but I get tons of benefit from it.

In light of all the Google talk flying around today, you’ve got to love the new Appexchange offering released today. That Benioff is quite the messager…no comment indeed!

I attended the Seattle Salesforce.com User Group today for the first time. They used to have their meetings in Kirkland (not convenient) but this last meeting was at F5, just a mile from our offices so I stopped by.

It was fun. ExactTarget was the sponsor of the event and did a walk through of their email marketing tool which looks quite powerful. One off sends, batch sends to Campaigns, differential unsubscribes, and built in ability for mail recipients to update their Salesforce.com record. Cool. I’ve got clients who need this kind of functionality and connection to Salesforce.com. I’m going to look into it more to see if it’s a fit, and what admin and template creation looks like, and of course cost.

I had the opportunity to plug DemandTools. Not many in the group had heard of them, so I was happy to sing praises of my favorite Salesforce.com partner.

Another take away from the meeting–there are lots of companies looking for Salesforce.com consultants to help them with custom code. If you’re into Salesforce.com and near Seattle you could definitely make a living on this work. After the meeting I was approached by two different folks about helping them customize their Salesforce.com instances. There’s work out there if you want it!

Silverlight may be the next great thing, but here is my experience with it over the last couple days:

• It crashed Firefox when I was trying to install it on my work PC
• At home, I got it to install for Firefox on my mac
• I watched some sample movie trailers–the audio was out of sync with the video on all of them
• I checked out a demo of a navigation scheme–it didn’t work
• Then Firefox crashed

So let’s all settle down on the hype–as far as I’m concerned, it’s not real yet.

Long-time nonprofit database consultant Matthew Scholtz has joined the ONE/Northwest team! Matthew is now working part time with Michael and I implementing Salesforce.com databases for environmental nonprofits. We just spent two whole days doing bidirectional brain dumping and it was really great. The picture (Matthew is on the left) below is from an all-staff, all-day meeting last week where we dove into some strategic issues we’re currently addressing. It was a nice intro for Matthew.

Matthew has been working with nonprofits and their data for longer than I have. He’s proficient in Access, Filemaker, and Salesforce.com. He is also a key contributor to the nonprofit CRM Metrix.

We’re very happy to have Matthew on the team here. Because of his skills and experience he’ll be up and running at full speed very quickly, helping us get more projects done and positively impact environmental protection!

Welcome Matthew!

I recently had a nice conversation with the executive director of an environmental nonprofit about a possible Salesforce.com database implementation. She told me a lot about her organization, and their needs, and at the end she thanked me for the conversation.

But she never thanked me for making a donation to her organization only 2 months ago, because she didn’t know I was one of her constituents.

A key to building up your supporter base is making current constituents feel connected. This means doing your homework when you’re talking to folks. Your database can be an important resource for you. Do quick research on people you’re interacting with–Have they given before? Do you know people who know them? What can you glean that will make your interaction more personal?

I would have had a much warmer and fuzzier feeling if she had started out with, “Before we get started I want to thank you for supporting the work we do with your donation in March–what drew you to our organization?”

That’s supporter-centric behavior that will grow your base, and will add resources to your mission work. A good database can help that, but it really comes down to just doing your homework.