gokubi.com

It’s an hour long…

Check out the new stuff with Jing, an interesting quick and dirty screen cast product that just got awesome. Share directly to Flickr and an FTP location. Wow.

My boss returns to the blogging world with a newly launched blog in our Plone site. He has some interesting thoughts on engagement and how all this can tie back to where we live.

Welcome back Gideon!

I didn’t think I’d do it, but I have ditched Bloglines for Reader. Ditched is a little strong–I can go back at any time with very little trouble.

We all have our own individual preferences when it comes to feed readers. I have been using Bloglines for years, and have found it to be a mostly enjoyable experience. I loved the iPhone support that they came out with right away.

Then Reader just kept getting better. And the recently released iPhone support is better than Bloglines. The interface is much better and I can get 20 stories on one iPhone page, which leads to much faster browsing through my list.

Thanks for the years of service, Bloglines! Who knows, I may be back to using you at some point…

There has been a ton of buzz about Google’s coup to get all social networking development to use their API set. And for good reason. The social graph is really interesting information, and likely to be the next frontier for the Internet to capitalize on. While Facebook won’t change the world, having social relationships in computer readable form has amazing potential along a lot of fronts. Marketers are drooling over it so they can sell to your friends, activists want to know what powerful people you know, and fund raisers want you to bring your friends with checkbook in hand.

We’ve been thinking about how to leverage the social graph in Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is interested as well–if the platform can’t roll with the latest ideas in marketing and outreach, users will scratch that itch in some other way. And you can see Adam Gross at the Open Social launch party introducing a demo of Friends pulled from Salesforce.com.

But wait a minute, what are friends in Salesforce.com? And that brings up a glaring weakness in Salesforce.com when you think about the social graph:

In Salesforce.com today there is no standard way to connect people as friends.

Sure, you can create a custom object to track person-to-person relationships. But yours will be different from everyone else’s, because they had to invent their own, too. And they have

When Salesforce.com users want to play in the Open Social space, one hurdle they’ll have to clear is writing their definition of “friendship” into their Open Social implementation. Bummer.

But what if Salesforce.com added a Person-to-Person relationship object? They have ways to to Organization-to-Organization relationships, and Organization-to-Contact relationships. Why not a new one? Adding things to the code base is a heck of a lot easier than changing what’s already there.

I would love to see this new standard object (you can vote for it on Ideas). Relate two People together with a description of the relationship, and a start and end date. Allow me to create custom fields on the relationship so I can be as detailed as I want. Then write an Open Social reference implementation that leverages that object.

Salesforce.com, I’d be happy to do any kind of beta testing of such an object. You’ve got my number!

The Help Text feature for custom fields is incredibly helpful for the overall usability of Salesforce. CRM has a lot going on, and the ability to present information about the use of a field directly in the interface is great.

But, some of the most critical fields are standard fields, and we can’t create Help Text for those fields. Opportunity fields like Stage are complex and need explaining to insure uniform use. Vote for Help Text on standard fields!

ONE/Northwest is a small business. Sure we’re a nonprofit, but we’re also a consulting shop with salaries, customers, and revenue streams. A big challenge for my boss Gideon Rosenblatt is to keep us running so we can continue to help the Pacific Northwest move toward living in harmony with our environment.

To be able to run our business well, we need to forecast and budget. It’s been hard to do over the years, as we depend on three revenue streams that are each hard to project in their own ways: consulting project demand, grant funding, and individual donations.

Gideon has been cranking lately on working out the business questions to ask so that he can forecast each of those streams of revenue better. in short, he starts with projections based on past experience, and then as we get closer to today, those projections increasingly start to take into account actual data–projects in the queue, grants we’re waiting to hear on, donations that have been promised.

That real data that we have about our business is all in our Salesforce.com instance. If we want to use that in Excel why recreate that data in the spreadsheet? Why not just feed the real data into his calculations, making his projections account for our reality? And why not have his projections automatically change when our reality changes?

Well, that’s what we’ve done. We’re using the Excel integration that comes with Salesforce.com to pull 25 different data sets into Gideon’s forecasting spreadsheet. This raw data then feeds his complex calculations, giving him robust forecasts that change as the real data changes.

So here’s the kicker: I didn’t do any programming to make this happen. Gideon did all the work, none of which was programming. All he had to do was create the Salesforce.com reports he wanted and then pull them into Excel using the nice wizard in the Excel integration. I spent all of 10 minutes showing him how the tools worked, and next thing I knew he had 25 data sources dynamically embedded in his forecasting spreadsheet.

Now, Gideon isn’t your average boss. He’s the best boss I’ve had and really smart about our business and our mission (I’m not fishing for a raise…) He’s been in and around technology for a long time, and is very comfortable with it. But he’s not superman either. He’s not a coder, and he’s not a database expert. He’s a Business User, and business users are good at thinking about business questions, and they’re good at using Excel to model solutions.

The hard part to solving this problem of forecasting is what the hard part should always be: asking and answering the business questions. Technology shouldn’t be the hard part, even if we’ve become accustomed to that being the case. Gideon shouldn’t have to come to me, explain the business question he’s trying to solve, and have me write some custom code to make it happen. Coming back to me when he realizes that he needs different/more data.

And with Salesforce.com and the Excel integration he doesn’t have to. Excel is within his grasp. Writing Salesforce.com reports is within his grasp. Everything he needs to get this work done is now there for him. This system returns the power to solve business questions to where it belongs, the business user. And that makes me very happy…