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I was just getting my laptop ready for Dreamforce and noticed changes to the Eclipse Apex plugin. It’s one of those times when I see something and say, “I’m pretty darned sure it didn’t used to be that way.”

You’ll see that S-Controls from packages that are installed from the Appexchange are displayed separately in the “Installed Packages” folder. I’ve got Vertical Response installed.

S-Controls that I’ve written are all under the S-Control folder.

So, I think this is how Salesforce.com is planning on protecting S-Controls that are installed from the Appexchange. Before this release, once you installed an S-Control from the Appexchange you had full access to the source code. You could modify it, even repackage it and share that link with your friends.

Now, I suspect, Appexchange package vendors will be able to flag their code as protected. Then it won’t be modifiable, and may not even be visible. So vendors can write S-Control code without having to worry about it being copied. And as vendors start writing Apex, which will live in your instance, it seems like a requirement for this business model to work.

All speculation, but I know this is a feature they’ve wanted to deliver for a long time, so I think it’s pretty likely.

Update: Simon Fell made the valid point in the comment that it’s pretty much impossible to protect S-Controls because they are text scripts interpreted by the browser. So the break out seen above probably relates only to Apex blocks and triggers.

There is now a public listing for the open-source Plone Integration for Salesforce.com project. Started with funding from Salesforce Foundation in 2006, the project has since taken on a life of it’s own. It’s now a group effort between ONE/Northwest, NPower Seattle, and the Web Collective, with other interested folks starting to join in at the new Google Group for the project.

So what is it? Plone is a great web content management system. With this project, you can have it talk to your Salesforce.com instance in a number of ways. At this point you can:

• Use Salesforce as your website member database, allowing you to give your Contacts access to special content on your site
• Display Salesforce data on your site, like a list of major donors, or a profile page for each nonprofit that you work with
• Easily, and I mean easily, create forms on your website that write data directly to Salesforce

I created a page on the Salesforce Developer Wiki for the project, and you can find all relevant links there, including two demos.

Thanks to everyone at Salesforce, ONE/Northwest, Web Collective, and NPower Seattle who made this project what it has become, with special shout out to Steve Wright who bought in early and got us going. I feel like we’re just at the begining of some really exciting innovation, and I can’t wait to demo some of this functionality at Dreamforce to anyone interested!

I’ve been griping about the Salesforce.com Campaign/Marketing functionality for a while now. But it’s been out of love. I know the potential Campaigns have for engagement, and the rest of the Platform was moving ahead and leaving Campaigns behind.

Well, things are about to change for the better. If you check out items that are flagged for Winter ‘08 release on the Ideas Exchange, you’ll see Campaign sharing, improvements in Campaign reporting, and two-deep Campaigns–all things I’ve wanted to see for a while.

Things I don’t expect to see in Winter ‘08, but would hope to see at some point:

• Customizable Campaign Member table
• We could collect metadata about Campaign Membership–ticket count, meal choice, etc.
• Apex triggers on Campaign Member table
• We then could have arbitrary code fire when folks are added to a Campaign or their status changed. This would enable amazing things.

Thanks, Salesforce, for getting Campaigns back on the Roadmap and bringing them up to par with the rest of the system. We’ll be taking advantage of the new functionality the day it is made available!

There is a developer session at Dreamforce next week titled:

Deep Dive: Breakthrough Platform Technology TBA
Be the first to preview the latest platform innovations. Get your hardest questions answered by the R&D team behind these breakthrough technologies!

Last year all the TBA stuff was Apex. What will it be this year?