Timelines in Salesforce

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 October 2006 08:54 Written by Steve Wednesday, 11 October 2006 02:57

I’ve been holding off on a post about the Timeline mashup I did using some of the Winter ’07 features. I wanted to write up a nice post with an embeded scrollable timeline so you could really see how cool this thing is. But one thing I’ve learned in blogging is that sometimes you should just get the post out the door.

So, I built a mashup between Salesforce and the SIMILE Timeline. Whe SIMILE released their timeline, I was trying to find a cool use for it. When I saw that Scontrols could be embedded in the detail page in Salesforce’s Winter ’07 release, I decided to mash it up.

Here’s a picture of what the timeline in Salesforce.com looks like. Note the Salesforce look and feel:

timeline.png

You’ll see that all the standard Salesforce objects that are related to a Contact are shown on the timeline. Task and Events are shown on the date they occurred or are due, Opportunities are shown with their close dates, same with Cases, Campaign memberships show the date last modified. Check out the SIMILE site for the real thing. They have lots of examples so you can see all the amazing functionality they’ve built into it.

I’ve built a Timeline on the Contact detail page, as well as ones for Camapaign, Case, Opportunity, and Account. When Winter ’07 gets released, I try to make them available. If you’d be interested in that, let me know.

Thanks again to Nick Tran and Adam Gross who made this all possible and got me shown in the Day 1 keynote at Dreamforce!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 2:57 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Comments

  1. Chris   |  Thursday, 12 October 2006 at 7:24 am

    Cool stuff – can’t wait to see it in production!

  2. Aiden   |  Thursday, 12 October 2006 at 9:37 am

    sweet. might be a nice incentive to get the users to enter their activity history.

  3. Joe   |  Monday, 15 January 2007 at 6:22 am

    Any sample code available for this yet?

    Thanks in advance

  4. gokubi.com » Blog Archive » Install Timelines today!   |  Wednesday, 31 January 2007 at 6:59 am

    [...] Salesforce.com employee Ron Hess took the Timeline S-Control that I built last year and rewrote it. It’s a thing of beauty now and it’s free for the installing. Just put it on the detail page for Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases and see all the relevant info in a left to right, scrollable Timeline. [...]

  5. Will   |  Wednesday, 15 October 2008 at 2:13 pm

    Hey, i was wondering just how you managed to reference the object fields? Basically, is there dynamic XML being created?

  6. Steve   |  Friday, 17 October 2008 at 9:48 am

    Exactly. I query salesforce and spit out XML to the timeline.

  7. Michael   |  Thursday, 22 January 2009 at 3:56 pm

    Very nice! I was playing around with the campaign timeline and now found the timeline mashup in Appexchange. Very handy – I will bringt it to our production system.

    But, is there a way to insert highlight areas (e.g. for vacation periods and similar)? Just adding
    bandInfos[0].decorators = [
    new Timeline.SpanHighlightDecorator({
    startDate: “Fri Nov 21 2008 12:30:00 GMT-0600″,
    endDate: “Fri Jan 23 2009 13:00:00 GMT-0600″,
    color: “#FFC080″,
    opacity: 50,
    startLabel: “shot”,
    endLabel: “t.o.d.”,
    theme: theme
    }),
    like on (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/) only leads to messing up the whole thing…

    Any hints are welcome!

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