Seattle Salesforce.com User Group

Last Updated on Thursday, 17 May 2007 07:33 Written by Steve Thursday, 17 May 2007 07:33

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 Hype

Last Updated on Friday, 4 May 2007 09:18 Written by Steve Friday, 4 May 2007 09:18

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.

Matthew Scholtz on board

Last Updated on Thursday, 3 May 2007 07:42 Written by Steve Thursday, 3 May 2007 07:42

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!