NPSF Roundup - March 14
For the past month, I’ve been collecting random tidbits to share via this blog. Multiple projects in full force tend to keep tripping up my best intentions. My fellow nonprofitcrm bloggers Evan and Anand - who are both far busier then me - have essentially shamed me into getting my act together. My intent is to do a weekly monthly roundup of salesforce.com news relevant to nonprofit practitioners and users. An aside: I’ll continue to add interesting articles I come across to the Google Notebook above if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed.
NTC
The big news coming up this week for NPSFers is NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans March 19-21. As usual there are several Salesforce happenings at the conference:
- Salesforce.com User Group(s)
- Salesforce Foundation at the Science Fair (I’ll be there, come visit me)
- NTC Salesforce After-Party on Thursday night at Tipitina’s (Really, this party transformed NTC into a truly fun event)
- Using Salesforce for Good not Evil - An intro to using sf.com for nonprofit functions. Brought to you by the good folks at NPowerNY (yeah yeah, I’m one of them).
Please come find me, email me, Twitter me, whateves - I’m always looking for a good sf.com geek out.
NPSF Group
There’s been some raucous discussions on the NPSF Google Group this past week on the direction of the NP Template and a benchmark sf.com data model for nonprofits in general. In my opinion, this discussion is a long time coming and is essential for the long term sustainability of nonprofits using sf.com. On the next NPSF conference call on March 27, we will begin to hammer out issues.
Bloggers and Developers
Buzz
There’s been all sorts of buzz about sf.com being bought out by Oracle or even Microsoft (I have to admit, this scares me a bit when thinking about the sf.com Foundation’s donation to nonprofits). There was even some speculation about CEO Marc Benioff looking to buy Zoho because of of the competitive threat they pose (if you’ve ever seen the Zoho CRM offering, its an amazing rip off of sf.com). Techcrunch went further to wonder if Zoho’s new HR product People upped the ante in threatening sf.com dominance of the business SaaS market.
Google Apps Integration
Well perhaps this is sf.com’s answer. Steve noticed a couple weeks ago some interesting new things popping up in sf.com that suggested integration with Google Apps may be on its way (I saw this too and thought one of my co-workers had added a new app at first). It looks like there is proof on the Google App side that integration is on its way: http://tinyurl.com/2269zz
Fundraising
As always, Steve Andersen is kicking ass developing killer functions in sf.com. Checkout his latest Jing Screencast of how he’s using Apex to roll-up donation summary info onto the Contact and a formula field to qualify their donor level based on their giving history. Kudos my friend.
Reporting and Dashboards
The sf.com Reporting and Dashboard Blog is invaluable. R&Ds can be trying components of sf.com, but these guys really help understand what’s possible (and more importantly, what’s not).
Sf.com goes all mobile
For both Blackberries and iPhones
