New Build of Mac Data Loader

Last Updated on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 08:39 Written by Steve Tuesday, 22 January 2008 08:39

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.

Feel the groundswell!

Last Updated on Saturday, 19 January 2008 10:27 Written by Steve Saturday, 19 January 2008 10:27

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!

The State of the Salesforce Platform

Last Updated on Friday, 18 January 2008 10:30 Written by Steve Friday, 18 January 2008 10:30

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!