Tech Blog

By bridging Plaxo’s secure, hosted address book solution with Salesforce.com, the world’s leading customer relationship management application, Mansa Systems’s Plaxo2Sf lets you effectively manage your contacts and enables you take charge of sales all from in the cloud.

Plaxo2Sf allows seamless synchronization of your Plaxo address book with Salesforce.com to give you a streamlined way to manage contacts at any stage of the sales process. Data can be imported directly into Salesforce.com and can be accessed across computers. Synchronization can be scheduled to meet your specific requirements.

Plaxo2Sf Features

• Import business contacts from your Plaxo address book directly into Salesforce.com
• Scheduled, unidirectional synchronization from Plaxo to Salesforce.com
• Automatic updates

Simple Installation

To begin taking advantage of the benefits of Plaxo2Sf, simply install the app into Salesforce, input your Plaxo credentials in the setup screen, and then schedule the sync operation. Syncing will occur overnight.

Find out more about how Plaxo2Sf can help you leverage the benefits of Plaxo and Salesforce.com.

With Mansa Systems’ DonateNow Widget, nonprofits can easily create a donation form on their website and capture donor and donation information directly in Salesforce.com. The DonateNow Widget can be plugged into any site with the installation of Chargent Charity Pack (free for non-profits)

Using the DonateNow Widget, your nonprofit can display a user-friendly form to obtain donor details, one time & recurring donations, payment type, and other vital data. Once the online donation process is completed, information is instantly updated in Salesforce.com. This real-time data “in the cloud” can provide valuable donor insight to help you more efficiently and effectively achieve your social mission.

DonateNow Widget Features

• Easy to plug into any website
• Donation form displayed in an iframe to capture donations
• Donations can be made in any amount either one-time or recurring
• Donor and donation information stored in Salesforce.com as contact and opportunity
• Requires Chargent Payment Processing Application

Would you like to learn more about how the DonateNow Widget can improve your donation system on your nonprofit’s website? Contact Mansa Systems today.

With Slide2Lead, Mansa Systems has brought together the presentation, document, and video sharing features of SlideShare with the powerful CRM capabilities of Salesforce to create a versatile application that lets you manage leads, track campaigns, and enhance overall customer experience.

Slide2Lead provides complete synchronization of SlideShare documents, campaigns, leads, and document statistics with Salesforce.com – enabling you to maximize the effectiveness of your sales and marketing tools while also giving you the ability to manage campaigns from capture to close. SlideShare’s document statistics are imported directly into Salesforce.com giving you the advantage of real-time visibility. Synchronization can even be scheduled.

Maximize the Exposure of Your Presentations

Slide2Lead also works together with SlideShare’s AdShare and LeadShare programs that help you find and collect customer leads through uploaded presentations and documents . With the addition of Salesforce.com, you can easily track your success and make smart decisions based upon the consolidated information that it provides. It’s an ideal solution for small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike that want to reach potential customers through their keynote presentations, pdfs, webinars, eBooks, and videos. SlideShare offers various plans that work with Slide2Lead that are designed to meet your specific business needs.

Slide2Lead Product Features

• Sync Slideshare documents, campaigns, leads, and document statistics into Salesforce.com
• Create SlideShare campaigns (AdShare and LeadShare) from Salesforce.com
• Scheduled Synchronization

Learn more on how to install and configure Slide2Lead.

Find out more about how Mansa Systems can help take your sales and marketing presentations, documents, and videos to a much higher level of effectiveness using Slide2Lead.

The Summer 10 release was rolled out last month and I’m getting a chance to go through the entire release notes and pick out some of my favorite new features and enhancements. I didn’t hit all of the items in the release notes so make sure you pull up the PDF and check out all of the goodies in detail.

Release Notes Link

http://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_summer10_release_notes.pdf

Custom Cloud Enhancements

- You can new also set up dynamic dashboards which run using the security settings of the logged-in user instead of a static running user.
- Drag-and-drop dashboard builder to simply drag a component type onto a column and then drop a data source onto it. Much easier and more powerful.
- You can show column totals on dashboard tables for up to four columns.
- You can permanently delete records with Data Loader by using the Hard Delete operation. The deleted records are not stored in the Recycle Bin.

Chatter

If you didn’t hear that Chatter went GA then you are probably dead. Stop reading this and roll over in your grave. They also released the functionality to setup public or private groups to collaborate with specific people and you can use it with Content and Knowledge. Chatter must be enabled and setup for your org. For more info on Chatter check out this page – http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/

Force.com Sites Enhancements

- Rewriting URLs for Sites is now available so that you can make pretty URLs and links for Sites visitors. So instead of seeing a link like http://mysite.force.com/contact?id=0000000000001234567 you can generate a link like http://mysite.force.com/mycontact/Mansaysys.
- Troubleshoot errors in Sites easier with the administrator preview option. When accessing a Site in administrator preview mode extra debug info displays at the bottom of the page. FYI: you have to add an extra Visualforce tag to your Sites pages to make this debug info appear outside of standard error pages. – Sites Single Sign-On – now your identity provider can use SAML with Sites to do single sign-on. Used in conjunction with either a customer or a partner portal.
- New Cookie Class for Force.com Sites – The cookie class lets you access cookies for your Force.com Site using Apex. Use this in conjunction with the new getCookies and setCookies Methods for PageReference to create and store cookies in Apex.

Apex & Visualforce Enhancements

- Declarative dependent picklists in Visualforce
- Use Sets with both Primitives and sObjects now!
- Only available for Apex saved with API v19.0 or later, the sObject Clone method now uses the user running the Apex code for the CreateBy value, and the current date and time for CreatedDate.
- New encryption, decryption and key generating methods for the Crypto class.
- No more Batch Apex limit for execute method. Used to be able to call the execute method 250,000 times in a 24 hour period per organization. Not any more!
- The total heap size has been increased probably in response to the Spring 10 change that collections can hold as many items as the heap allows. Trigger size is now 300,000; an anonymous block, Visualforce controller, or WSDL method, heap size is now 3,000,000; and test method, heap size is now 1,500,000.
- SOQL subqueries no longer return records that are marked as IsDeleted unless IsDeleted = true is explicitly stated as part of the query.
- Visualforce pages and components created using Salesforce.com API version 19.0 or higher must be written as well-formed XML or they will not save.

Web Services API Enhancements

The following new objects have been added in API version 19.0:
- The Article__DataCategorySelection object associates an article with data categories from a data category group.
- The QuestionDataCategorySelection object associates a question with a data category from a data category group.
- The KnowledgeArticle object provides read–only access to an article independent of its version.
- The ApexLog object represents a debug log.
- The SlaProcess object represents an entitlement process associated with an entitlement.
- A ton of new chatter objects (actually from v18 as part of limited release).

Bulk API Enhancements

- Improved retry handling for batch timeout and lock errors so that the Bulk API places the remainder of the failed batch back in the queue for later processing up to 10 times when processing.
- Support for relationship fields and polymorphic relationship fields in XML batches.
- BatchInfo stateMessage field enhancement so that the stateMessage field now contains all the reasons associated with a Failed batch state.
- Permanent deletion of records with the support of a hardDelete option. When this value is specified, deleted records are not kept in the Recycle Bin.

Community Enhancements

- Answers community now publically available to Force.com Sites users.
- Administrators and trusted community members (with create case permissions) can escalate an unanswered or problematic question to a new case.
- Community members (with create Knowledge permissions) can choose to convert a particularly helpful reply into a new article in the knowledge base.
- Workflow is now available for questions to help monitor Answers communities.
- You can designate certain data categories visible to all users while still restricting access as needed for each role. This was a problem because users without roles (i.e., high-volume Customer Portal users) could only see could only see uncategorized questions.
- Members of an answers community can delete their questions and replies now.

Sales Cloud Enhancements

- You can now create alerts to lead and contact owners when the leads and contacts are added to a campaign.
- Now you can display lead and contact custom field information on campaign member page layouts with the formula field enhancements.
- Salesforce.com displays a warning message if the contact or lead you are sending email to has Email Opt Out equal to true.
- If contacts or leads have multiple email addresses, you can new choose which address to use when clicking Send an Email.
- You can create personalized footers or disclaimers that appear at the bottom of all outgoing email messages sent from Salesforce.com or the API.

Knowledge Enhancements

- When closing a case, users can now more quickly create a new draft article that can be reviewed and published automatically to the case and available via knowledge base.
- Ability for support reps to quickly send knowledge base articles to contacts via email templates. The template automatically converts articles associated with the case into PDF attachments on an email.
- As soon as a new case is saved, if autosuggestion is enabled, a list of potentially relevant articles displays.
- Follow Articles in your Chatter feed.
- Two new custom report types for the knowledge base are available: Cases with Articles and Knowledge Keyword Search.
- Send email to an Article reviewer notifying them that you assign one or more articles to them.

Salesforce CRM Content

The Salesforce CRM Content feature license is included in all organizations at no additional cost but you do have to enable this feature.

Cloud Scheduler

The new Cloud Scheduler allows you to schedule meeting with customers and internal resources. Meeting requests send attnedees to a web page where they can select times that are best for them and then respond with multiple options. Salesforce.com tracks all the responses so you can pick the best time to meet when you confirm the meeting.

Click here to see the demo – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4FLMWqcfi4

Enabling High Volume Customer Portal Users

You can now enable contacts as High Volume Customer Portal users so they can log in to a Customer Portal without affecting its performance. High-volume Customer Portal users include both the High Volume Customer Portal User and Authenticated Website User license types. The High Volume Customer Portal User user license is currently available through a pilot program, while the Authenticated Website User user license is GA.

Mobile Enhancements

Blackberry
-Improved related list search.
-Report tab is no longer hard-coded on Blackberries and is now configurable by administrators.

iPhone
- Support for both local and remote search for records.
- Performance improvements for large data sets and synchronizing.

Windows Mobile
- Peripheral support to provide integration with the bar code scanners and magnetic stripe card readers in select Motorola Windows Mobile devices.
- Support for viewing attachments in related list and attaching images to records.

Push Patch Updates (Developer Edition only)
You can develop a new package type called a patch version, which enables a developer to change the functionality of existing components in a managed package, while ensuring that subscribers experience no visible changes to the package. Patch versions can only be created for major release packages. Subscribers can receive patch upgrades just like any other package version. However, you can also distribute a patch by using push upgrades to automatically upgrade all eligible customers running the same major release.

Betas Programs

Dependent Lookups and Other Lookup Filters Enhancements

Lookup filters are administrator settings that restrict the valid values and lookup dialog results for lookup, master-detail, and hierarchical relationship fields. Administrators specify the restrictions by configuring filter criteria that compare fields and values on the source record; target object; the user’s record, profile, and role and the target object’s records.

Dependent Lookups – A dependent lookup is a relationship field with a lookup filter that references fields on the source object. Similar to dependent picklists, the valid values in the dependent lookup change according to other values the user enters on the record.

Related Lookup Filters Lists for Target Objects – You can quickly see a list of the lookup filters that restrict the values of each target object. This is useful when creating similar filters for a target object. Also, lookup filters that reference fields on related objects count against the cross-object reference limit, which is the number of unique relationships allowed for a target object. The Related Lookup Filters list lets you see which lookup filters might impact that limit.

Quotes Template Editor

The quote template editor looks and functions a lot like the enhanced page layout editor with drag ‘n drop functionality. Sales reps can choose either a standard quote template or a custom template and send out quote PDFs to customers.

Pilot Programs

Chatter for Mobile
Access Chatter from your BlackBerry or iPhone. The mobile application only consists of the Chatter, Profile, and People tabs. Android support “promised” by the end of the year.

New Opportunity Page
Customize how your Opportunity page looks with the New Opportunity Page pilot. Drag ‘n drop side tabs let you quickly and easily navigate and personalize your page to highlight information that is the most valuable to you.

Improved System Log Console (Apex CSI)
A new context-sensitive execution viewer, showing the source of an operation in a transaction, what triggered that operation, and what occurred afterward. You can use it for tracking code execution, workflow, validation rules, and other operations that were executed during the transaction.

Visualforce View State Inspector
The View State Inspector lets you view which Visualforce elements are contributing to the size of your view state. You can use this to monitor the performance of Visualforce pages where users submit data using forms. By minimizing your view state size, you can reduce load times.

Previews for Microsoft Office 2007 Files
The new document viewer allows users to view Microsoft Office 2007 files, including PowerPoint, Word, and Excel without downloading, whether the document is a content delivery sent to a lead, prospect, or colleague, or a document viewed internally in Salesforce CRM Content.

Developer Previews

Report Builder Enhancements

A new Developer Preview sports a more powerful report builder. Now you can create and edit summary reports, manage custom and advanced filters, and edit row count limits for tabular reports. Use the drag-and-drop interface to reorder columns, add and rearrange groupings, and change date granularities. For Developer Preview, report builder only works with tabular and summary reports, and functionality is limited. You can’t use it for matrix reports or charts.

Every CEO and CTO speaks of the reliability before going for Cloud Computing. From a users’ point of view, downtime is downtime, but for a provider/vendor/web site manager, downtime is divided into planned and unplanned. Cloud computing can offer some benefits for planned downtime, but the place that it can have the largest effect on a business is in reducing unplanned downtime.


Planned downtime is usually the result of having to do some sort of software maintenance or release process, which is usually outside the domain of the cloud vendor, unless that vendor also offers IT operations services. Other sources of planned downtime are upgrades or scheduled equipment repairs. Most cloud vendors have some planned downtime, but because their business is based on providing high uptime, scheduled downtimes are kept to a minimum.


Unplanned downtime is where cloud vendors have the most to offer, and also the most to lose. Recent large outages at Amazon and Google have shown that even the largest cloud vendors can still have glitches that take considerable time to repair and give potential cloud customers a scare (perhaps it is because they didn’t take some planned downtime??) On the other hand, cloud vendors have the experienced staff and proven processes that should produce overall hardware and network reliability that meets or exceeds that of the average corporate data center, and far exceeds anything you can achieve with co-located or self-managed servers.


However, despite claims of reliability, few cloud vendors have tight SLAs (service level agreements) that promise controlled downtime or offer rebates for excess downtime like Salesforce.com. Amazon goes the opposite direction and doesn’t offer any uptime guarantees, even cautioning users that their instance (or server) can disappear at any time and that they should plan accordingly. AppLogic-based clouds, provided by companies such as ENKI, are capable of offering better guarantees of uptime because of its inherent self-healing capabilities that can enable 3-4 nines of uptime. (The exact number depends on how the AppLogic system is set up and administered, which affects the time needed for the system to heal itself.) However, any cloud computing system, even even those based on AppLogic or similar technologies, can experience unplanned downtime for a variety of reasons, including the common culprit of human error. While I believe it is possible to produce a cloud computing service that exceeds 4-9s of uptime, the costs would be so high that few would buy it when they compared the price to the average cloud offering.


When you’re purchasing cloud computing, it makes sense to look at the SLA of the vendor as well as the reliability of the underlying technology. But if your needs for uptime exceed that which the vendors and their technology can offer, there are time-honored techniques for improving it, most of which involve doubling the amount of computing nodes in your application. There’s an old adage that each additional “9″ of uptime you get doubles your cost, and that’s because you need backup systems that are in place to take over if the primaries fail. This involves creating a system architecture for your application that allows for either active/passive fail-over (meaning that the backup nodes are running but not doing anything) or active/active fail-over (meaning that the backup nodes are normally providing application computing capability). That’s the reason I always prefer to use Salesforce.com and one can always check there outage on http://trust.salesforce.com


These solutions can be implemented in any cloud technology but they always require extra design and configuration effort for your application, and they should be tested rigorously to make sure they will work when the chips are down. Fail-over solutions are generally less expensive to implement in the Cloud because of the on-demand or pay-as-you go nature of cloud services, which means that you can easily size the backup server nodes to meet your needs and save on computing resources.


An important component of reliability is a good backup strategy. With cloud computing systems like AppLogic offering highly reliable storage as part of the package, many customers are tempted to skip backup. But data loss and the resulting unplanned downtime can result not just from failures in the cloud platform, but also software bugs, human error, or malfeasance such as hacking. If you don’t have a backup, you’ll be down a long time – and this applies equally to cloud and non-cloud solutions. The advantages of cloud solutions is that there is usually an inexpensive and large storage facility coupled with the cloud computing offering which gives you a convenient place to store your backups.
For the truly fanatical, backing up your data from one cloud vendor to another provides that extra measure of security. It pays to think through your backup strategy because most of today’s backup software packages or remote backup services were designed for physical servers and not virtual environments having many virtual servers such as you might find in the cloud. This can mean very high software costs for doing backup if your backup software charges on a “per server” basis and your application is spread across many instances. If your cloud vendor has a backup offering, usually they have found a way to make backup affordable even if your application consists of many compute instances.
Another aspect of reliability that often escapes cloud computing customers new to the world of computing services is monitoring. It’s very hard to react to unplanned downtime if you don’t know your system is down. It’s also hard to avoid unplanned downtime if you don’t know you’re about to run out of disk space or memory, or perhaps your application is complaining about data corruption. A remote monitoring service can scan your servers in the cloud on a regular basis for faults, application problems, or even measure the performance of your application (like how long it takes to buy a widget in your web store) and report to you if anything is out of the ordinary. I say “service” because if you were to install your own monitoring server into your cloud and the cloud went down, so would your monitoring! At ENKI, we solve this problem by having our monitoring service hosted in a separate data center and under a different software environment than our primary cloud hosting service.


The last aspect of reliability is security. However, that would require another entire article to cover, since security in the cloud is a complex and relatively new topic.


To sum up, the Cloud offers some enticing advantages with respect to reliability, perhaps the largest of which is that you can give your data center operations responsibility to someone who theoretically can do a much better job at a lower cost than you can. However, to get very good reliability, you must still apply traditional approaches of redundancy and observability that have been used in physical data centers for decades – or, you have to find a cloud computing services provider that can implement them for you.

Though we can get data in .csv format from Maximizer, but we cannot get all the Notes attached with respective Contacts/Accounts. In order to get the latest notes for respective Contacts/Accounts from Maximizer , we have to export data into single xml file. Then we have to convert this XML file into .csv file first and then import data from these files into the salesforce.com using Data Loader.

You can convert xml data into .csv files using software named as ‘Exult XML convertor’. It can convert the data into Ms Access , SQL Server tables, .csv files etc formats. This software converts single xml file into multiple .csv files if your xml file contain nested tags. These .csv files are connected to each other using Primary and Foreign key relationship. We can use the columns Primary key and Foreign key as an external key to upsert data into salesforce.com

For eg: If you xml file contains:

<Contact>

<Notes>

</Notes>

</Contact>

Exult XML converter will create two .csv files with columns

Contact.csv- columns- ContactP key, FirstName, LastName etc

Notes.csv – columns - NotesP Key, ContactF key, title, body etc

We can relate notes with contacts (ParentId) using Salesforce Id of contacts. Add a column in Notes.csv and using VLOOKUP formula in Excel we can relate two .csv files and hence can upsert /insert data into salesforce.

Note: you need to export all the contact data from salesforce first to assign ParentIds to the Notes. In Notes.csv VLOOKUP will assign the Ids using values from column’ ContactP Key’ from one .csv and column ‘ContactF key’ from another.csv file.

If your Organization currency is set to any other currency other than USD and you want to display value of currency on a Visual Force Page or PDF, then use <apex:outputField value=”{<Currency Field>}” /> instead of <apex:outputText >.

For example, there is a custom field on Contact ‘Price__c’ and its value is 1.400,00 (German Euro format) on Contact record detail page. So, the difference in the output would be:

<apex: outputText value=”{Contact.Price__c} “></apex:outputText>

Output: 1,400.00

<apex: outputField value=”{Contact.Price__c} “></apex:outputField>

Output: 1.400,00

The difference lies because <apex:outputText> displays the value as it is stored in the Salesforce database but <apex: outputField> displays the value as it is on the detail Page of the record.

Salesforce.com has many portal versions which makes it difficult to understand the features that are available in each version. Here is the complete list which makes it easy in making the right decision to choose which portal license you need to meet your requirements.


Note that CRUD Stands for: C – Create, R – Read, U – Update, D – Delete at object level permissions.