gokubi.com

Watch this short video and see if you can answer the question at the end.

And then tell me you won’t hit me on my commute…

Thanks Brooks!

We crank through projects here at ONE/Northwest. We’ve done about 20 Salesforce implementations. I tell each client to get a donation of DemandTools from CRM Fusion as it’s a must-have tool for post migration and for long-term maintenance of data quality.

A couple of my clients haven’t gotten their donations in a timely fashion because they forgot to submit the request, or lost some communications along the way. I was surprised how much anxiety this gave me–no DemandTools? What will I do? My clients are now getting access to the software, so my heart rate is returning to normal, but I thought that my reaction was indicative of my reliance on this software as a core piece of the Salesforce.com technology puzzle.

I really don’t know what I would do without DemandTools, and I suspect any implementer or Administrator out there who has used it will agree. It is a phenomenal tool, and on top of that, the CRMFusion folks are great people. Hence their donation of DemandTools to nonprofits who qualify. Bravo!

If you haven’t used DemandTools, go check out some of their videos. Also check out PeopleImport and DupeBlocker, the soon to be released real-time dupe catcher.

I wanted to give props to Andrew, David, Kelley and the team that produced Sightline Daily, a great source for daily environmental news. Behind the scenes, it’s a very complex news collection and publishing site built on Plone. Andrew has a nice post talking about what went into the site, and definitely check out his short video of his news collection bookmarklet. It’s similar to what I talked about the other day for collecting news clippings into Salesforce.com.

I was looking for availability of tickets to Frog and Toad on the Moore Theater website and I got this captcha:

Dangerously close to “lousy President”, no? Almost makes me want to pay the obscene $6 per ticket “service charge” for buying online. OK, not almost.

Surprise, surprise, the Developer marketing folks over at Salesforce.com built an iphone app for the launch of the iphone SDK. I built a simple app as an SControl, but I don’t use it as I get just about all I need from just syncing Contacts from Salesforce to Outlook to my iphone. Can’t wait to get the new app!

My intrepid co-worker Matthew noticed this standard button on the Activity Related list. The button doesn’t show on the UI when checked, but appears to indicate a way to compose a Gmail to the Contact in question. Nice.

Update: Google Contacts API was launched yesterday. It would allow Salesforce to google sync for Contacts. Google also released a Google Calendar to Outlook sync product. Openness is a virtue–the best CRM and the best online productivity suite are lined up for a deep integration. Can’t wait to see what gets built!

I, like many other consultants, base my livelihood on the Salesforce.com platform. It’s an interesting relationship–I can suggest where the platform goes, but I surely don’t have much influence. Salesforce.com is now a Billion dollar company with 1 Million users. My voice is a small one.

Because of this relationship, I gleefully devour any crumbs of insight that dribble out of the Company. And Tom Tobin is my favorite conveyor of those crumbs. As he demonstrated again today in this post about reporting features, he gives us the story on where Reporting and Analytics are right now, and more importantly, where it likely is and isn’t going. The “isn’t going” info is often more valuable than the “going” info, by the way.

I think the trick that Tom has mastered is how to talk about the road map without promising features. He does this by honestly telling you what is potentially easy and what is hard. Also, he shares with you what requests are the most interesting to him. He doesn’t promise this feature or that, but knowing what he’s thinking about helps me to know where he’s thinking of taking the platform.

As SaaS becomes more prevalent, this is a seemingly important skill set to build. Especially in an organization that listens to it’s Users and also is trying to foster a community of developers. I would suggest that this ability of subtly pointing the direction a platform is going in public, without requiring an NDA, is one that modern Product Managers should get good at.