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Scott over at Arrowpointe just launched a cool new mapping service for Salesforce.com called Arrowpointe Maps. I was in on a beta test of Scott’s app and I have to say it was pretty cool. It lets an admin create dynamic maps based on the Mapquest service that users can then modify. It’s highly customizeable–something I haven’t seen in other sf.com mapping add-ons.

The interface is really well done, and I was very impressed during the beta period. Check it out!

I’m in the middle of a data migration from ebase 2.0, and I haven’t spent this much time using Access since 1997. I cut my teeth on Access 2.0 and am pretty comfortable in the app–it has proven invaluable in the data migration process. In this case I’ve built a system that steps through a process for transforming data out of the ebase 2.0 schema and into the Salesforce.com schema.

There are a couple steps in the process…

We’ve made the switch here at ONE/Northwest to using Safari on Windows when we’re doing Salesforce.com Setup tasks. It’s just way to fast not to use. The Admin side of the app is great, but pretty slow. Turns out that slowness is almost entirely in the rendering engine of the browser, as Safari is insanely fast! You have to see it to believe it. Safari proves Salesforce.com is serving up pages as quickly as they say they are on trust.salesforce.com. Who knew!

If you’re ever doing multiple tasks on the Admin side of Salesforce.com, it’s totally worth using Safari. I still use Firefox as my primary browser–can’t live without the extensions, and not all my s-controls are Safari compliant.

Update: Turns out the page layout editor doesn’t work well in Safari. Vote for my idea to fix that incompatibility.

The online office suite developers over at Zoho have launched their web meeting software into free public beta. I was part of the private beta and the service worked pretty darn well. There were some kinks that appear to have been worked out, and now it seems to be a very solid competitor to the other services out there.

In the public beta period Zoho Meeting is free, so if you want to try it out, now is the time. Meetings can be hosted/attended in just about any browser. The meeting client is available in ActiveX, Java, and Flash, so plenty of options for all potential setups.

One note, the “big three” meeting service we use here at work went away for about a week becuase of a bureaucratic issue on their end, and I was left to find a way to host client meetings on very short notice. I was able to use Zoho Meeting for these customer meetings and it worked great. Install for the customer was a breeze and we got the meetings done.

I don’t know what their pricing scheme will be when they go live, but I suspect it will be one of the lower cost solutions out there. I’m definitely keeping my eye out for their pricing chart as the functionality is just what I need.

I survived my second Olympic distance triathlon today. And I knocked 27 minutes off my previous time, so I’m pretty pleased.

The race was down in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, and the weather sure felt that way. It was 50 and raining as I set up for the race. I did a warm up run, but didn’t pull the bike out at all ahead of the start. I was planning on doing a full warm up, but bailed because of the weather–I couldn’t face the water before the start!

We ended up having to stand in our wetsuits at the water for 20 minutes as the race director gave instructions, and then launched 3 waves before mine. My wave looked like about 100 guys. What I didn’t realize was that this race was an official qualifier for USAT National championships, so the field was a bit stacked. The start showed the level of competition and it was a bit of a madhouse. I hung back from the initial rush, but there wasn’t any avoiding it. I’m a middle of the pack swimmer, so I ended up in the middle of the pack. Each time we came to a buoy the field pinched down and I was reminded of my basketball days, boxing out underneath.

The water was cold, but I didn’t really notice in the heat of it all. It was almost half a mile before I really got into a groove, and then the swim was half over. I faded a bit at the end, but made it out of the water in 29 minutes, which was about what I had hoped for.

The transition to bike was good. I didn’t have the wobbliness I had last tri and got onto my Felt in just a couple minutes. Then things got cold. It was drizzling, and turns out going 20 miles per hour in cold wet conditions causes your hands to stop working very well. I had trouble eating and drinking on the bike because of it. But, because it was so cold, dehydration wasn’t really an issue.

The bike was awesome! As I predicted, my new wheels subtracted greatly from my time. There were a few points with a headwind where I could tell it would have stopped me dead on my old bike. The bike was perfect–it was a bit hard to shift, but that was because my hand’s didn’t work, not because the bike didn’t!

The transition to run was smooth as well. I tried to put on my running socks, but bailed due to dexterity problems, and headed out for four laps around the lake. It was a bit muddy on the trail, but running through the woods on soft needles was nice. It was strange passing the finish 3 times, but the fourth was sweet, and I had a nice 250 meter kick that made me feel like I had something left.

As I said, my time of 2:33:00 was 27 minutes faster than my last Olympic distance. The courses were different, but I feel like they were pretty comparable, so I’m really stoked. I finished 18th in my age group, but like I said it was a stacked field…

Can’t wait for the next one!

Update: Official results are in.

I finished 87th out of 182 finishers with a total time of 2:35:32.

Rank in age group: 18 out of 25
Swim split: 0:29:40, place of 97th, 1.5K
T1: 3:15
Bike Split: 1:15:32 (19.8 mph), place of 89th, 40K
T2: 2:36
Place after Bike: 94th
Run Split: 0:44:28 (8 min mi), place of 79th, I think this leg was shortened to 9K because of weather…

I’ll be racing the Cascades Edge Triathlon on Sunday in lovely Enumclaw, Washington. My first tri this year and my first race on the new wheels. I’m doing the Olympic distance: 1.5k Swim - 40k Bike - 10k Run.

I just do triathlons to have an excuse to step away from the computer…

New features for Summer ‘07 revealed on the Idea Exchange.

I just spent three days at the Salesforce Nonprofit Roadmap Summit, and it was a great event. By all accounts, this was a great get together hosted by the Salesforce Foundation. The people who attended were really high caliber–I am really lucky to be able to have so much of my work deeply connected with these great people.

First let me say that I am continually impressed with the Salesforce.com Foundation and their commitment to nonprofit success on their platform. The Foundation staffers I’ve spent time with–Steve Wright, Meghan Nesbitt, Tucker MacLean, Mike Dannenfeldt are all people I really like and respect. And I’m not just saying that so they’ll continue to give me all sorts of free stuff. This team is top-notch, and a joy to work with. So much of the success of their donation program to date has come because of the great decisions they’ve made along the way, their compelling vision, and tons of hard work.

I know that everyone who was able to attend the gathering left with that impression, if they didn’t already feel that way. Just the fact that the Foundation put on a gathering with the explicit goal of asking us how they can serve nonprofits better is very telling. And the good news is we stepped up to the challenge and let them know. I’m pretty sure we set Mike Dannenfeldt’s calendar for the next 12 months. And that’s saying a lot–Mike is really a heavy hitter. The goal when you hire someone on to a team should always be to make the team stronger–there is no doubt Mike raises the bar at the Foundation.

We also got to talk to a number of Salesforce.com corporate staff. We chatted platform with the folks that build it. I learned a ton, and gave feedback to the folks who could actually make the changes I want made. It showed that the commitment to nonprofits doesn’t reside just at the Foundation, but in the Company as well–a really encouraging thing to see. Thanks to Ron, Ron, Tom, Kaveh, Mark, Bryan, and Amy for coming down.

The bulk of attendees were people like me–users/consultants on the Salesforce.com platform. It was great to reconnect with lots of old friends and meet new people who all brought interesting things to the table. I learned a bunch, and got to share some of what I know with folks. Why do I always have my best conversations with fellow Seattleite Evan Callahan when we’re miles from Seattle?

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in 2 years. The first day we had 40 people in the room talking about Salesforce.com for nonprofits. When I started working at ONE/Northwest 2 years ago, there were only a few people outside the foundation thinking about how to systematically improve the Salesforce.com experience for nonprofits. I agree with Steve Wright that we are the single most visionary cohort of Salesforce.com customers thinking about how a whole “vertical” of organizations can best use the platform.

I also think we’re the most collaborative set of implementers/developers in the Salesforce.com arena. If Salesforce.com wants to figure out how to catalyze collaborative development on their platform, they should work with us. We’re ready and willing.

So now it’s back to pressing project work for customers who want onto the Salesforce.com platform. It’s refreshing to talk vision for a few days, but it’s today’s implementations where the rubber hits the road, and one nonprofit is better able to do the great work they do day in and day out.

It’s like flying very low to the ground. Nothing like buying 15 minutes off your bike split time…

Scott Hemmeter shows again just how smart he is.

I decided to try and see if I could incorporate Akismet into the web to lead process and I was successful in doing so! I created a set of scripts for you to download if you’d like to leverage Akismet with your web to lead forms.

Brilliant!