Plone Salesforce integration screencasts

Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 02:20 Written by Steve Tuesday, 24 June 2008 02:20

At ONE/Northwest, we’re all about using appropriate tools for the job. Because of that, we’ve done some work building connections between Salesforce.com and Plone. We love Salesforce.com for CRM functions, and Plone is great for externally facing publishing and gathering of information.

Together they can be pretty powerful. My colleague Andrew Burkhalter has produced a couple screen movies of this integration in action.

First, he shows a use case for creating a form that saves data directly to Salesforce.com. This example creates complex, related data from a single form. It’s completely flexible, and very powerful.

In this second video, Andrew walks through our new Plone RSVP product that makes it easy to publish events and take registrations directly to Salesforce.com. Again, we’ve focused on flexibility, allowing you to use any objects you want to represent events and people.

If you want an open-source CMS for managing your website that is integrated with Salesforce.com, you should check out Plone and the connections we’ve created to Salesforce.com.

VisualForce is the real deal

Last Updated on Monday, 23 June 2008 02:20 Written by Steve Monday, 23 June 2008 02:20

Back in February, I wrote that VisualForce was going to be a “game changer.” Now that it has been released into the wild and I’ve started to work with it, I wanted to give an update on my thoughts.

This is perhaps the most impressive technology I have seen from Salesforce.com since I started working with the app almost 4 years ago.

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve seen a lot of amazing things from Salesforce. The Ajax toolkit, Custom Objects and other deep customizations, formula fields and rollups, workflow, the Appexchange, Apex code. I loved every one of these and I know they are amazingly complex.

But VisualForce is amazing. Here are a few reasons why.

1. Separation – UI is separated from logic is separated from data schema. This adds to readability, maintainability, and migration.
2. Inheritance – the simple controller paradigm of using theirs, using your own, or using theirs with a slight tweak is brilliant. I couldn’t ask for a better balance of flexibility and keeping standard functionality.
3. Look and Feel for free – how much of my life has been spent faking the Salesforce.com UI? Not another minute. Want a date picker? You’ve got it. Need a picklist lookup field? No code necessary. Oh, and it’s got the same all, some or none logic as the controllers do, so you don’t have to worry about look and feel until you want to.
4. Browser independence – Salesforce.com has taken on the responsiblity of making VisualForce work in modern browsers. I no longer have to care about why my javascript doesn’t work in Safari.

Apex may be the most difficult technical challenge that Salesforce.com has pulled off to date. Allowing thousands of people to run crappy code in multi-tennancy without burning down the house is a feat. But VisualForce is the most impressive thing I’ve seen, much in the same way the iPhone is impressive–it’s the design that is brilliant, not the brute force technicality of it.

I’ve been amazed during my learning process just how much I don’t have to do to get things to work correctly. I showed a colleague my first real VisualForce page that will replace a complex S-Control for creating multiple payments connected to an Opportunity. He liked what he saw, But he wanted me to make a change. “Add the Paid checkbox to the form where we’re creating multiple Installment records, so that users can create payments and mark them paid on creation if they want.”

To add that simple bit of functionality to the S-Control would have taken me at least 30 minutes. I would have had to change the SOQL statement to include the field. Then I would have changed the HTML table to make room for this new field. Then change the for loop in to add a new checkbox to each row of the display. And then change my update statement to get this new field from the DOM object and insert it into the new objects as they are created.

In VisualForce the change was literally 10 seconds. I told the VisualForce page that I wanted the Paid field in the table. That was it. Once VisualForce knew where I wanted the field in the UI, the rest was taken care of for me.

So congratulations to Doug Chasman who was the inspiration for VisualForce so long ago, and to Andrew Waite who has shepherded it on the difficult road to General Release. And to the myriad folks at Salesforce.com who were involved. This is killer platform technology.

Once again Salesforce.com has shown just how far ahead of other cloud databases they are. We continue to see the future of database development in Salesforce.com, and it comes once again in the form of platform design. So get your tools and your reference manuals and get at it! You have to work hard to stay in front of the wave!

Race Report: Cascade Edge Olympic 2008

Last Updated on Monday, 23 June 2008 07:32 Written by Steve Monday, 23 June 2008 07:32

On Saturday, I did an Olympic distance triathlon. I did the same race a year before and wrote it up here.

I am really happy with my results:

Total Time: 2:27:23
Overall place: 28th
Place in my age group: 5th

Swim split: 0:25:54
Overall Swim place: 38th

Bike split: 1:07:32
Overall bike place: 22nd
Place after the bike: 20th

Run split: 0:49:30
Overall run Place: 58th

The swim went fine. Last time I did the race I breathed every other stroke the whole .9 miles. This time I relaxed a bit and did some breathing every third stroke when things opened up a bit. The new wetsuit was great, and I hardly noticed the frigid water. I knocked almost 4 minutes off my time from last year.

I love my bike! At multiple points during the 28 mile ride I thought or even said aloud how cool a machine this bike is. It’s amazing how little energy is wasted converting muscle contraction to rolling. I hit 39.9 mph on one descent, and the bike was solid as a rock. What a blast! I was shocked to learn after the race that I was only 5 minutes off the best time overall. I’ve been focusing on the bike leg in my training, but I didn’t expect it to pay off this much. I averaged 24.6 mph.

The first mile of the run was painful. It was also painful to be passed by so many runners! In the swim you can’t really tell how well you’re doing because you’re underwater. In the bike, I don’t get passed a lot. But in the run, you hear people coming up behind you, then they pass you, and then you watch them slowly pull away. I ran around 8 minute miles, which was great for me, but I need to get to 7 minute miles to be really competitive, I think. I’m not sure that’s even possible!

I had the pleasure of traveling down and racing with John, a friend of mine from previous work experience. It’s a ton more fun doing an event with friends than going it alone. You get to tell all the race stories to someone who cares!