My first iPhone app for Salesforce

Last Updated on Thursday, 16 August 2007 04:08 Written by Steve Thursday, 16 August 2007 03:52

Today I took a couple hours and wrote my first iPhone app. It lets you search your Salesforce.com Contacts and returns a list with email addresses and phone number. When you click on an email address, your email client pops a new message. When you click on a phone number, you can make a call.

It was super easy to do. Formating a site for the iPhone is no more difficult than web design in general. There are a couple tricks to letting safari know the size of the iphone screen, and Apple’s developer guidelines make that a piece of cake.

The hardest part of the process was learning the Salesforce.com search syntax (SOSL) as I’d never used it before and I couldn’t find an example in AJAX until after I floundered a bit. But in only a couple hours I was able to create something that isn’t ugly and will be useful to us here at ONE/Northwest. Ok, useful to me, as I’m the only one here with an iPhone.

The app is just an S-Control, so to access it I hit the URL, which makes me log in at the normal sf.com login screen and then I get redirected there. The right way to bulid this app is to do it in PHP or .NET and have a nice login screen. But this works fine for me.

If you have an iPhone and Salesforce and want to see more, let me know. Thanks again to everyone who chipped in to get me the iPhone–your investment is starting to pay off!

Active Campaigns

Last Updated on Tuesday, 14 August 2007 03:10 Written by Steve Tuesday, 14 August 2007 03:10

One annoyance with Campaigns in Salesforce.com is that if you don’t mark them as Active, they don’t show up as you would expect them to. So one of the hurdles to using Campaigns is that the first few you create are screwed up from the start. Even experienced users forget to hit the Active checkbox sometimes.

I was just telling a customer that yes, this is annoying, but there isn’t anything we can do about setting a default value on a standard field like Active when it came to me. Use a Workflow rule to mark every new Campaign as Active. Then, if a user really wants to make it inactive, they can, but out of the box all Campaigns will be set up correctly.

This package contains a workflow rule that fires only on new Campaigns that have the Active checkbox unchecked. It then calls a field update and changes the Active checkbox to true.

Simple. Just install the package and active the workflow rule.

Plone forms that create Salesforce data

Last Updated on Thursday, 9 August 2007 03:26 Written by Steve Thursday, 9 August 2007 03:26

Andrew writes again about his Plone<->Salesforce work his merry band of Seattle Plonistas.

In this installment, Andrew shows how to create Plone web forms that can create multiple Salesforce data objects. He creates one form that takes user-generated content and creates two data objects in Salesforce. There are a few rough edges, but darn this is cool stuff.

If you’re interested in Plone and Salesforce working together, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Andrew–we’d love some help on this open source project!