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Because Microsoft is going to launch a planetarium product soon, I heard about an open source package called Stellarium. It’s a cross platform piece of software that shows you the sky and a lets you navigate through it. It’s pretty cool, especially if you have a Mac and kids who expect you to know the names of stars in the sky.

During the lunar eclipse last week, we were outside looking at the stars. I was trying to navigate using a star chart in a book and saw a red star that I couldn’t quite place. After 2 minutes on Stellarium, I realized that we had been looking at Mars, a fact that would have sent Malcolm through the roof had I know it at the time. I can’t wait for the next clear night!

I posted a bookmarklet a while back that helps you create Salesforce Tasks from web research. That’s swell and works with all versions of Salesforce.

But what if you want to do more specialize web research, like tracking media mentions of certain issues? Here’s a short video of a custom Clippings object that I created along with a bookmarklet that makes capturing web content a snap:

As you can see, it makes capturing, storing, and cross-referencing content quite easy. This trick will work with any custom object, just get familiar with how bookmarklets work and how Salesforce constructs URLs and edit forms.

Thanks to Dean for passing this on.

Spring ‘08 contains the ability to schedule automatic refreshing of your dashboards. This is a really great feature and one that I have already started using in my own Salesforce database. Having dashboards auto-refresh is nice–there was always some cognitive dissonance when looking at dashboards. My mind, and the mind of my clients, always tried to make sense of the data before realizing that it was old data. “What’s going on here? Oh, this is data from last month.” Refresh and all is well. Now you can auto refresh, so it’s more likely that when someone looks at a dashboard, it will look right.

Another great side effect of scheduling dashboards is that once they are refreshed, you can automatically email them to people. I just received my first weekly emailed dashboard, which shows me some financial details on our consulting projects. This is a handy dashboard I created, but don’t look at often enough. Now, it will be sitting in my inbox every Monday morning. Love it.

Setting this up is easy, just go to your dashboard. Under the Refresh button you will now see the Schedule Refresh option. From there it’s a piece of cake.

This is by far the best organization I’ve ever worked with. We’re doing great stuff with environmental groups. We’re doing really fun things with Salesforce, Plone, and that amazing uncharted territory between them. We’re excited about integration, web services, open source, and all things modern and interesting.

Want to work with us as a full-time CRM Consultant in the lovely city of Seattle?

Want to ditch that corporate job where you’re chained to your desk cranking out TPS reports?

Are you an experienced CRM consultant? Are you a long-time database developer? Are you an untested, super-smart developer who wants to work with modern platforms? Let’s chat!

Do you want to make a difference in the world? You know you do!

Here’s the job description, and here’s the form that will drop your application info directly into our Salesforce.com instance.

Here’s an interesting feed from the Idea Exchange: Ideas Under Consideration. There are some great ones in there! Vote ‘em up!

Funny…

I’m on an na5 instance that was upgraded over the weekend and about every 5th click gets me this.

trust.salesforce.com is down right now as well.

My wife and I just caucused in our precinct in Washington’s 36th legislative district. Here are the results I know:

• Our caucus location tripled the number of caucus goers over 2004
• My precinct turned out 60 people from 4 city blocks
• We went 4 Obama 1 Clinton
• The precinct next door went 8 Obama, 1 Clinton, 1 Uncommitted

It was fun and easy. Nice to see massive turnout of people looking at throwing the bums out in November!