JP Rangaswami on social objects

Last Updated on Sunday, 27 February 2011 09:57 Written by Steve Sunday, 27 February 2011 09:57

I’ve been really enjoying JP Ranagaswami’s latest series on social objects in the enterprise. His series so far is here, here, and here.

I’m finding his tale of the merging of internal systems of record with external systems of engagement, and the socialization and consumerization of these objects to be really compelling. The corporation is changing, and his take resonates with me. It’s worth a read.

Segmenting Campaigns

Last Updated on Friday, 15 October 2010 08:24 Written by Steve Friday, 15 October 2010 06:32

In the run up to the amazing Web of Change conference this year, I was asked to write a think-piece. I ended up writing about being scientific in the design, implementation, and analysis of our work. I called it We Must Be Scientists for Change, and it seemed to resonate with a number of the attendees.

In that article I talked about doing some simple A/B testing. A/B testing is best described as doing some effort while changing one variable in the hopes of learning something about how to affect the outcome of effort. It’s been perfected by the direct mail industry–mailings are run as experiments and each mailing adds to the base of knowledge of how to increase response rats.

As I was writing the article I became dismayed that what I was proposing wasn’t actually very easy to do in Salesforce.com, the system I champion on a daily basis. We use Campaigns for outreach efforts, and while Campaigns are incredibly powerful and easy to work with, randomly breaking them into segments for A/B testing wasn’t easy.

I say “wasn’t” because I have released a tool for A/B testing that is free to users of Salesforce.com, which is listed on the Appexchange under the name Campaign Segmentation Wizard.

Build your list of people to whom you want to reach out, then use the wizard to randomly break them into segments of the exact size you desire. Those segments are Campaigns of their own, and can be used in any way you see fit–mass email, phone banking, etc.

Here’s a short video showing how it works.

If you install it and use it, please rate the app on the Appexchange so others will get a sense if it’s helpful or not.

Textexpander snippets for Apex

Last Updated on Saturday, 14 August 2010 07:19 Written by Steve Saturday, 14 August 2010 07:19

I just upgraded my work computer to Snow Leopard and one of the benefits I was most excited about was being able to update Textexpander, the incredibly handy snippet tool. You create short codes and when you type them they are replaced with pre-recorded text. They’re much better at describing what it does. It’s really handy for email signatures, canned content for technical support–really anything you ever type more than once.

With the new features Textexpander got really interesting for use in coding on the Force.com platform. The Force.com IDE doesn’t have code completion like the in-line code editor does, and it’s something I look forward to Salesforce.com providing. But in the meantime Textexpander is a great solution for helping you with code you write over and over again.

Textexpander now allows you to put variables in your snippets and allows you to fill those variables as you are expanding the snippet. So, for example, when you’re declaring a List of Accounts, you don’t have to type List twice, and Account twice. It’s really slick.

I’ve created a Snippet Group for common Apex syntax. To use the file, install Textexpander. Right click on the link to the Snippet Group and save to your computer. It’s an XML file, but you need to maintain the .textexpander extension on it. Then open up Textexpander and ‘Add Group from File.’ The group will show up in Textexpander.

Right now this Snippet Group includes:

• declaration of lists, sets, and maps
• declaration of an sObject
• for loops, both kinds
• if statements
• select statements
• test methods
• try catch block
• system.assert statements
• describe result for an sObject
• describe result for a field

It’s just a start, but if you take it and like it, add to it. Let me know and we’ll expand this Snippet Group to be comprehensive. Clearly there should be a VisualForce Sinppet Group as well. If you create one, please let me know!