Plug and Play services
Great tip from Mark late last week: you can embed a Meebo chat window in your Salesforce home page. Can be a nice way to be instantly available to folks with questions.
So why is this interesting? Live chat on the web has been around for a long time. Plus, you already know how to reach me, and I’m not interested in putting myself out there as available for chat in all my customer sites. But the functionality isn’t the point, it’s the architecture of the solution.
The really cool thing about this example is that it is a specific service that can be easily plugged in where I need it with 3 lines of code. It’s a Flash component that works in any web page, not just Salesforce.com. Do 5 minutes of config, grab the 3 lines of code, and put them where you want them. Done.
I’ve been running across more and more of these lately, web apps that are designed to be dropped into another website as a component, providing some functionality in your UI.
This chat widget took me 10 minutes to set up, thanks to the enablers at meebo.com and Salesforce.com. It just reinforces for me that the interconnecting of smaller web apps in service of larger problems is the way to go. Single software products that can do everything are dead. The age of plug and play components is upon us. These components serve relatively circumscribed needs right now (mapping, chat, search, etc.) but will amaze us as they start to become increasingly complex over the next few years.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
This is totally cool! Steve, thanks for commenting on my blog so that I found your blog so that I learned about this. YouDaMan!
August 15th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Thanks Mike! Welcome…
August 17th, 2006 at 3:45 am
I tried this in our Salesforce implementation, but ended up having to take it out because IE users were complaining about the security warning (since the code points to http:// and not https://). Did you find a workaround for that?
August 17th, 2006 at 7:10 am
I think having users add that URL as a trusted site in IE would make the error go away…not ideal, I know.
August 17th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
I tried changing the meebo URL to https, and that worked. It looks like their certificate doesn’t match, so you’ll have to see if that error is less obtrusive, or if you now get two errors!
October 2nd, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Tested it and the idea is pretty cool.
Can submit as the accountowner, but the guest cant post anything.
Status message: waiting for guest.meebo.org
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:11 pm
It is a godsend during a rollout when all your users are over 50. Seriously. The only drawback for me is it’s biggest drive – its not desktop installed. during a new user experience, i have to be available – and with firefox’s memory leak(none of the fixes seem to work ?#$%^) i cant be running databases and leaving a firefox window open. And i refuse to go IE ever again. Wish Gaim would do something like that… hmmmm.