My first iPhone app for Salesforce
Today I took a couple hours and wrote my first iPhone app. It lets you search your Salesforce.com Contacts and returns a list with email addresses and phone number. When you click on an email address, your email client pops a new message. When you click on a phone number, you can make a call.
It was super easy to do. Formating a site for the iPhone is no more difficult than web design in general. There are a couple tricks to letting safari know the size of the iphone screen, and Apple’s developer guidelines make that a piece of cake.
The hardest part of the process was learning the Salesforce.com search syntax (SOSL) as I’d never used it before and I couldn’t find an example in AJAX until after I floundered a bit. But in only a couple hours I was able to create something that isn’t ugly and will be useful to us here at ONE/Northwest. Ok, useful to me, as I’m the only one here with an iPhone.
The app is just an S-Control, so to access it I hit the URL, which makes me log in at the normal sf.com login screen and then I get redirected there. The right way to bulid this app is to do it in PHP or .NET and have a nice login screen. But this works fine for me.
If you have an iPhone and Salesforce and want to see more, let me know. Thanks again to everyone who chipped in to get me the iPhone–your investment is starting to pay off!
August 16th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Salesforce on the iPhone…
gokubi.com’s Steve Andersen has just posted about work he’s done on creating an iPhone version of Salesforce.com. Cleverly, he’s using an S-Control to handle the entire thing. He’s started with a simple search for contacts, which returns their phon…
August 17th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Just embed your credentials in the URL and you won’t have to deal with the login screen:
https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp?pw=PASSWORD&un=NAME%40COMPANY.COM
Note that the %40 is used to replace the @ sign in your username.
August 17th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Yes, I use that method all the time–it’s really handy. It doesn’t solve our problem, though. If you’re going to hit an scontrol with an iPhone there are two options, I think. First, you could create a bookmark with your password in it like your example and store it on your phone. Then you could have a link on your sf.com Home page for the iPhone scontrol. But if you have the login link you suggest, you can’t redirect to the final page, I don’t think.
The other option is to go directly to the iPhone scontrol from a bookmark, and then get interrupted by the login screen before you are automatically redirected to the scontrol. I like this method, and have made an easily remembered short URL that redirects to the long, hairy, scontrol URL, so I can just go to http://snipurl.com/sfiphone for example.
August 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I just found the fix for having one link that takes you directly to the SControl:
https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp?pw=PASSWORD&un=NAME%40COMPANY.COM&startURL=/yourURLhere
The startURL parameter should be the URL of the SControl.
September 9th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Hi,
I’m a salesforce user with an iphone who would love to see more developments. I think my dream app would be something that lets me create a quote by doing a mailmerge or conga mailmerge of products into a word doc template and finally convert that into a pdf and attach it to an email in the mail client (or in salesforce using one of my email templates).
I’m psyched that someone is starting to work on sf apps for the iphone. Great work.
January 25th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Gokubi–
I am desperately looking for a solution for easily getting my salesforce contacts to be accessable from the iphone. Is your app one that I could download and use on an iphone. If so where can I get it? Do I have to have a wifi access to use it?
many thanks.
February 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
@James Young - I just set up a Plaxo account, which syncs with my Outlook address book. If you use the Salesforce dashboard for Outlook, then all of your Salesforce contacts’ info has been syncing into your Outlook address book, and they can be imported and maintained through Plaxo.
Accessing Plaxo from your iPhone makes all the contact info “touchable” i.e. you can hover and select the email, phone or address and it will access it through your default mail account, phone feature or Map feature.
Nifty, no?
February 13th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hi Steve, can you give me access to the iphone URL to access SFDC. I would love to try accessing my SFDC account from my iphone.
Thanks,
February 16th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Hi,
I’d love to access SF with my iPhone…can you tell me how?
thanks,
Ehren
February 29th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I too would love to try your SFDC with my iphone
March 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Hey - I would love to see how this works - I have an iPhone and Sf.com
Thanks,
Justin
March 18th, 2008 at 3:38 am
[...] nieuwe trend in CRM lijkt de integratie van Web 2.0 in CRM oplossingen. Het hier eerder besproken Salesforce is een goed voorbeeld. Maar ook Sage komt met een Web 2.0 oplossing voor haar CRM pakket. Een [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 9:40 am
Can you send me the details on how to access SF via my iPhone too please? Thanks, Bill.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I know this is an blog post, but this post comes up in the first page when searching for “salesforce iphone” so I wanted to leave a message for anyone looking for the full-blown app: http://MintFly.com
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Hi!
I’m an iPhone 3G user, and am looking for a great way to manage the contacts of SalesForce on my iPhone.
I’m also looking for an easy solution to integrate with my MacBook Pro (hopefully w/out paying the additional fees SalesForces wants for these features!).
Let me know if you have any ideas, and I’d love to try your APP!
Thanks,
Max.
August 20th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Nice work! You’re right, developing web apps can be straightfoward. I’ve found the larger challenge is to adapt the UI to the smaller screen — it forces you to rethink usability & what’s important, especially when “mobilizing” existing web sites. You may want to check out iUI as a framework … we’ve had good success with using it for various web apps.
December 9th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Yes, but let it be known. The salesforce application at mintfly.com and through the iphone app store are free to download but not free to use. These require the professional and ultimate editions which can run $600 a year per user (professional).
There is no solution other than this app, that allows a personal or group user to access their salesforce information.
….and viewing a unsupported salesforce.com webpage on safari is not a replacement or supplement.
Eric