Datascope: creating sf.com queries on the desktop
Upside Outcomes, a nonprofit-friendly development shop in the UK, released their Datascope today on Appexchange. It’s a desktop application that gives you an interface for creating queries against your Salesforce.com data. I got a demo from Gareth early in the week and it looks pretty cool. Simpler than getting all your tables downloaded into Access. You can set up complex queries and the app does all the calls to Salesforce.com to execute them, presenting the results in a data grid. Pretty nice.
It allows you to make queries that are impossible to make in Salesforce. The main drawback that it and other query builders have is that the results of the query aren’t in Salesforce.com, which is where I’d love them to be. But until Salesforce makes these kinds of queries possible, tools like Datascope are our best option.
It might be pretty straightforward for them to take your query results and give you an “Add to Campaign” button if the set is of Contacts and/or Leads. Just a thought for the 2.0 release, Gareth!
May 12th, 2006 at 8:32 am
If you want a more powerful option, look at DBAmp/Pro . You can use a true database (the free SQL Server 2005 Express), you can access live or replicated data, you have the power of a full SQL implementation, and you can combine sf data and non sf data in the same query.
And it’s cheaper to boot ($695 for unlimited users vs. £100 per month per user).
See the AppExchange for more details and reviews :
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000000nsOlAAI
Bill Emerson
Developer
May 12th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Hey Bill. DBAmp is great. I played with it months ago but am not using it in production. Agreed that it’s very powerful.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Hi Bill,
Yes I agree DBAmp is a very powerfull tool. One of my clients uses the free open source version and loves it. Great job.
DBAmp is excellent for back end integration and system administrators familiar with SQL to use, Datascope is an easy, quick install option for use by managers and analysts not familiar with setting up SQL server and writing their own SQL.
I reccomend companies install both - DBAmp for the Sysadmins and DBAs, Datascope for analyts and business managers.
Cheers
Gareth.