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There are two annoying reporting problems that aren’t getting fixed with the Summer ‘07 release. OK, there are a ton more than two, but these two seem particularly annoying. They’re a drag mostly because they’re denying you access to data that’s already in the system, and by all logic should be available to you.

You can’t run reports on old communications history

If you have multi-year relationships with your constituents, you may want to go back and run reports on Activities that are more than a year old. The problem is that Salesforce.com limits you to running reports on Activities less than a year old. So you can’t effectively use that data that you’ve been entering in all these years. It’s a very hard limitation to explain to a nonprofit user, as it really makes no sense. It’s an example of where the On Demand model can limit you. Salesforce.com has made a decision based on the performance limits of their servers that has nothing to do with how you effectively use your CRM. Please vote to get this limitation removed!

You can’t run member reports on inactive Campaigns

All Campaigns can be Active or Inactive. If a Campaign is Active, Contacts and Leads can be added to it. If a Campaign is Inactive, they can’t, but you also can’t run reports on who was connected to the Campaign. A Campaign may be over, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to run reports on who attended.

The work around is to leave all Campaigns Active, but then Contacts and Leads could be added to old Campaigns. I vote to separate these two things, making the Active/Inactive distinction relate just to adding people to a Campaign, while letting us report on campaigns no matter their status. You can vote for that too!

If we all vote for these changes, maybe they will happen, and we’ll get better access to our data.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.