gokubi.com

Tom Tobin has a nice piece on his blog about how we’ll be able to schedule and email refreshed dashboards. I would suggest subscribing to Tom’s feed. He’s the PM for reporting and analytics, an area of the app that’s undergoing amazing changes. He also dives pretty deep on the technical aspects of the changes and the thinking behind them.

I’m very thankful for his articles, they give me a real sense of where the reporting engine is going and where it’s not going. Thanks Tom!

Jon Stahl wrote a nice piece on Leadership Ladders and how we’re doing them in Salesforce.

From the SFDC Curmudgeon:

We just did a partial but still significant data load for a client. About a million accounts, two million contacts, and about eight million custom objects (spread across three types). About 36 hours into sandbox.

11 million records in this Salesforce instance. Wow, that’s a lot. Salesforce announced last year that their largest customer had 60 Million records. I sure am glad I don’t have to worry about scaling to that level.

Matt Stoller has a fascinating article in the Nation about how the massive turnout in this Democratic primary season is aided by new organizing techniques and technologies.

Adam Mordecai, a Dean staffer who helped run the Perfect Storm [Dean's 2004 effort to blanket Iowa with volunteer door knockers], described the problem as follows: “The one major issue that really foiled the perfect storm…was the completely dysfunctional voter-file system. The company we contracted the voter file to was way out of their league. Their system would crash perpetually, field organizers would be lucky if they could ever access the system to download lists and said lists were usually way out-of-date or incorrect because no one could get access to the system to update them. Iowans would get repeated calls from different volunteers within the same hour. It was a disaster. It alienated a lot of Iowans who were simply tired of hearing from Deaniacs over and over again.”

The voter file in political campaigns is really just CRM, if used correctly:

The new crop of campaign software tools sends data back instantly to a centralized database, so effort isn’t wasted on voters who have moved or died. And campaign knowledge is accretive, with voting history, political identification and contact history retained every cycle.

Doesn’t this sound like CRM to you? It’s really great to see Democratic campaigns getting CRM and understanding that to get that right they have to tackle the problem of having many, many volunteers utilizing that CRM in a coherent way. It sure looks like campaigns are doing that very well this cycle.

It doesn’t hurt Democratic turnout to have Mr. 27% still in the White House, but if you don’t actually get people out to the polls, that doesn’t matter. CRM can help in building the relationship and getting people’s support, just like it can in so many other arenas.

We always get caught off guard by these Appexchange listing suspensions:

…there will be a regularly scheduled temporary suspension of AppExchange registration for new applications from February 8th to February 16th, 2008. During this time no new applications can be registered, meaning that the AppExchange will not create private or public listings for any new apps.

Ever since Salesforce started doing rolling upgrades to their servers (shortly after a Winter release that went awry) there’s always been a period of time when the Appexchange isn’t taking new listings. This is because some Salesforce customers are on the old release and some are on the new release.

If you’re in the middle of a rollout, the inability to create new private packages for a full week is a real drag. Make sure to do your development before February 8th or you’ll be copying and pasting like it’s 2005!

Just a heads up that the Appexchange apps we’ve made freely available to date are going away soon. Salesforce.com has changed what they allow on the Appexchange and are requiring some significant hurdles to keep free apps up there. I may do the work necessary to keep our Plone Integration on the Appexchange, but I may also forgo that and just rely on the Wiki page to keep the project information. And if they take that away from us, we’ll just fall back to the plonesf Google Group. If Google shuts us down, I’ll send it to you via carrier pigeon.

These apps will definitely go off the Appexchange in the next few weeks:

• Householding
• Functional Documentation
• Lead Converter

It was fun while it lasted. We got no revenue from these posted apps, but I bet I fielded over 300 email requests from folks interested in using them.

I don’t think it’s a great decision by Saleforce to make it hard for these free offerings to be out there, but it’s their directory so they can do whatever they want with it. As of now, there is no way to easily share free components to other Salesforce.com users. But this URL is still available, so maybe someone will build a way to share uncertified, free apps, since Salesforce.com clearly doesn’t want to.

Update: To be clear (and fair), they aren’t kicking me off the Appexchange. It’s just that all apps now have to be certified on the Appexchange. And all vendors who are selling apps need to pay for each click-through to test drives. In their shift to this focus, I made the plea that free apps should be considered differently, and they agreed. It was just that I got a few too many emails from the system telling me that my apps were going to be delisted if I didn’t fill out the certification questionnaire. After some clarification from Salesforce.com today, I answered 3 questions and my native apps are now certified! Except the Functional Documentation app, which I want to have disappear anyway. The Plone app is a different beast since it’s a client app, so I’ll see where the process takes me there.

Salesforce dean and Mac enthusiast Simon Fell was so kind as to do an updated build of the Salesforce Data Loader for Mac. If you’re on a Mac, download the zip from his blog. If you’re on a PC, get the Data Loader from the Data Management section of Setup inside Salesforce.com.

More than 28 people per state have signed up to draft Michael Bloomberg! Unstoppable grass-roots support! This should be on the front page as a major story affecting the campaign! Almost 1500 people! Awesome!

I spent yesterday at the Saleforce.com Tour de Force event in San Francisco. Here are some thoughts on the state of the platform as I see it:

1. Visual Force will be a game changer. It’s hopefully coming in the Summer (who knows) and will make changing the UI of Saleforce much, much easier than it is today. The demos that are part of the keynotes are always about how you can make Salesforce look completely different. But the demos that are in the breakouts are more mundane, but even more powerful. That’s where they show you how S-Controls will go away and Visual force pages will take their place. It takes very little code to change the Contact page layout so that it also shows fields from the Organization record, or shows rollup of giving history, or a graph of activist actions taken, or really whatever you want. It’s going to be a big deal and will make things easier to build for implementers, easier to maintain over time, and faster for the User. It sounds like it will be included with Enterprise orgs at no extra cost, but I don’t have any inside info there, just speculating. When it gets close to release, ONE/Northwest will definitely rewrite all our S-Controls in Visual Force–it’s too compelling not to.
2. The new meta-data API is huge. The announcement yesterday wasn’t really anything new. There’s a metadata API, the Eclipse toolkit is of course going to have to change to work with it, and you can use Subclipse to connect any Eclipse project to Subversion or CVS. But where things get really interesting is the road map for the metadata API. Rumor has it that you’ll eventually be able to drag and drop from one Salesforce instance to another, objects, custom fields, page layouts, sharing rules, profiles, custom report types, custom tabs, email templates, workflow rules, validation rules, etc. If your jaw isn’t on the floor, let me tell you that mine was when I heard that. What huge functionality that is for consultants. The release of this functionality will (as always) be incremental, with the easy things like custom objects first, and the harder things later. But this addresses one of the big weaknesses in the model–you can’t stamp out a complete config like you can in a client server environment. The meta-data API is how they’ll address that weakness.
3. Apex isn’t perfect. It’s too hard to code in Apex right now. And I say this as a Biology major, so take it for what it is. What Salesforce.com is doing is letting us write code that runs on their servers. Because of the inherent risk in that, they have a lot of rules that they force the developer to follow. I understand why they do this, but the effect is that writing anything in apex that’s more complex than the simplest triggers is tough. Making things bulk-safe, keeping them under the 12 different governor limits, not being able to fully test for weird data scenarios, not being able to modify production code, and not necessarily knowing in which order triggers will fire all add up to a complex undertaking. But, the end result is killer functionality. If Salesforce.com can free me up from some of the constraints I feel now, I think Apex will be amazing. Right now it’s great, but too hard.
4. The developer community has promise. Last year I gave Salesforce some advice. I told them they needed to put Apex in their Enterprise edition if they wanted to expand their developer community. With the Spring ‘08 release they are doing just that, and will be putting Apex into the hands of untold developers. Salesforce.com is really good at listening to their customers, and while I surely don’t think I was the one who gave them the idea of putting Apex in Enterprise edition (I’m sure the whole engineering and developer marketing department was wanting the same thing) they did ask me what I though. At the event yesterday, I was thanked by multiple people for feedback and bug reports I’ve given in the past. This is a really good sign for the future of their developer community. Put your best tools in the hands of the most developers, ask them for feedback, and listen when they give it to you. That’s a recipe for a growing developer community. The next phase will be to invest in open-source-type development efforts on Salesforce, like the one that we nonprofit implementers are undertaking. Foster the folks who are going deep into verticals and are sharing their code. Give them tools and access to Platform knowledge and the community will grow even faster.
5. We made a good call in 2005. In the end, I’m so glad we decided to start consulting on the Salesforce.com platform back almost 3 years ago. It’s a real pleasure working on a platform that is moving so rapidly, and has very few setbacks. Apex was an enormous leap forward. Visual Force will be perhaps an even bigger one. It is really hard to keep up with all the improvements and new opportunities, which is the best situation to be in. Of course nothing is ever perfect, and as my clients point out about my work, there is always something that could be improved. But I really couldn’t have hoped for anything near what we’ve seen out of Salesforce in the last 2 and a half years. Bravo to the folks down in San Francisco. It’s been a hell of a ride!

I’m in San Fran right now at the Salesforce.com TdF event. Benioff and Adam gross are all mic’d up and ready to go on…

I spent some time before the keynote with Steve, Meghan, Brian, and Suzanne at the Foundation table. Nice to reconnect with the Foundation team.

Benioff on stage. They are live streaming the event on the web.

Salesforce.com is trying to move the industry from client-server to cloud computing. Again makes the consumer web connection.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is multi-tenant. That allows fast innovation. Economies of scale. automatic upgrades. Other key piece of the model is subscription buying.

Customer breakdown is from small to some of the largest in the world.

24 releases over the last 8 years.

Winter ‘08
Has 150 new features
Props to Parker Harris for delivery of the release

Innovation also happens in Philanthropic world. Encouraging other companies to match their model of:
1% time
1% equity
1% product
1% for the earth (greening the business)

FY2008 will be over $1Billion revenue year.

38,000+ customers
1M subscribers

CitiBank was largest CRM sale in 2007–won by Salesforce.com.

Japan Post has 60,000 users.

Avaya (9000), AIG (2600), and Comcast (1200) are new subscribers this year.

130M transactions a day in their two mirrored data centers

24 Billion APIs in their history

1.6 Billion API calls a month

79,000 workflow rules have been created

1.6 million lines of code have been written

Visualforce, in preview right now, has had 6,800 pages created

On the platform, 6,100 custom applications have been built.

Appirio giving talk about how sf.com has changed their lives…
The intro was boring, but the app is very cool. It’s a VisualForce app where they’ve completely changed the UI with VF. Very nice looking. Getting a Flex like look from just HTML and CSS. Supposedly just a couple hundred lines of code.

Can’t wait to get VF in general release! When???

Risk Connect with demo of their risk management visualization app, entirely on sf.com.

A group of VC’s is offering to fund a startup to the tune of $1M. Upload your application to teh
Appexchange and join the contest…

On to cloud computing…

Leveling of developer community globally–don’t need infrastructure to develop and run apps. Ed Note:Just reliable internet

Price per login pricing:
$5/login (max 5 logins per month) – great for board members?
$50/user/month (unlimited logins)

$0.99 per login for 2008 to get the ball rolling

Steve Fisher, Senior VP Platform

Platform as a Services is about changing the industry.

Development as a Service has 4 peices

1. Metadata API – data model, code, workflow, VF pages, now exposed as XML files

From text files you’ll be able to create/change objects, custom fields, sharing model, profiles, workflow, custom report types

2. Force.com IDE
Eclipse plugin to deal with metadata API. Get it!

Ed. Note Microfinance template creator Jon Plax is new IDE product manager

3. Sandbox dev environment
instant envrionments with no infrastructure

4. Code Share
Eclipse and Subversion working together to develop and deploy your apps. Ed. Note: I wrote about doing this 3 months ago.

Adam Gross, head of Developer Marketing

Live demo of a recruiting application

Creating an Eclipse Force.com project for his dev environment: brave man

New tag coloring, code completing.

Demo of Google Code open source project hosting.

Adding code to subversion repository: brave man

Steve demoing how to pull a project from google code

checked it out, pointed at his new developer account, saved to server, and voila the custom objects are there.

Really slick when you see it done.

I went and created a new developer account and there is a big difference in the sign up process. You can get more than one developer account for a single email address. It’s now like how production user accounts work–give any valid email address, then a unique username and you’re good to go.

Marc Andreesen

That’s it for the keynote!