I’ve been busy writing Apex, so no time to post to the blog. One thing I’m learning is that once you have some useful Apex code, like the lead conversion and payment processing tools we’ve created, it is easy to deploy it to multiple organizations — and that is just what we’re doing. However, in every case there are small tweaks to make, and more test methods to write, and more debugging, so it important not to underestimate the time needed to reuse your solutions.

We currently have two open positions in in our growing CRM consulting practice here at NPower Seattle (and many clients ready for help!). If you have Salesforce expertise or other relevant experience and are looking for a opportunity to work with nonprofits on a great team of developers and implementors, please take a look at these.

NPower Seattle serves over 450 nonprofit clients each year by providing technology consulting, education and training. Our clients include arts and environmental groups, human services agencies, food banks and youth-serving organizations.

Find full job descriptions at http://www.npowerseattle.org/get-involved/jobs. Submit resumes and cover letters to Resumes (at) NPowerSeattle.org.

The Salesforce.com Foundation announced last week its latest round of Turn It UP Grants. Turn it up Grants are the Foundation’s way of investing in innovative projects that can be shared and leveraged by other organizations.  In other words, TIU grants raise the floor for the entire sector and our use of the platform.

Here’s their criteria:

• Strength and practicability of the proposed project and implementation plan
• Impact the grant will have on the organization’s efficacy
• Whether the implementation is scalable and replicable for other nonprofit organizations
• Ability and motivation to share best practices with the nonprofit community

Application dealine is May 2, 2008

Salesforce.com announced last night the much anticipated integration with Google Apps.  I haven’t had a lot of time to look at it.  Judi Sohn is already starting to implement.  Definitely watch her blog for a report out. Update: Here’s Judi’s Post

What’s truly amazing, is that from the setup page (click image to expand), it looks like everything is covered: Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar, Documents, Firefox buttons and more.  Its like they went inside my head and implemented my dream integration.  I truly can’t wait to get under the hood and play.

Update: Lee Lefever has made an introductory video on the Google Blog.  Or watch it here:

Techcrunch announced yesterday the integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps that we (or perhaps I should speak for myself) have been anticipating for sometime. There have been rumors and teasers for couple months now, but nothing substantive from either company. While this isn’t an official announcement and there are no details to the extent of the integration, something’s coming down the pipe and I’m psyched. (Please please please integrate Gmail with sf.com!).

What does this mean for nonprofit Salesforce users? As I’ve written before, I believe on-demand applications hold a lot of promise for nonprofits. The integration of these two enterprise class applications provide us yet more opportunities to tighten our workflows, increase collaboration, decrease our data silos, lower our ICT total cost of ownership and ultimately focus on delivering our services, not technology.

One real life scenario where I can see this integration being leveraged is with the grant writing and management lifecycle:

• An organization can collaboratively write a grant and budget using Google Docs and Spreadsheets and have those documents embedded directly in an Opportunity that tracks the grant submission process.
• Both during the selection process and if the grant is won, email conversations with the grants officer can be added to the opportunity directly from Gmail.
• Progress reports to the foundation can be tracked from both systems and related to the opportunity.
• If Gcal is part of the integration, you could possibly map out your grant submission calendar from Opportunities data directly to your organization’s Gcal.
• Additionally, I could see simple Google Spreadsheets surveys being embedded in Salesforce and perhaps even the data from the surveys being pulled into an Outcomes object (I know…pie in the sky talk here).

What are your thoughts about how this could impact your organization? What are ways in which you see this integration being beneficial?

This last week, the Salesforce Foundation announced they are kicking off the much anticipated development of version 2 of the Nonprofit Edition. This is exciting on many fronts:

• It’s happening!
• The brilliant and uber-sharing Steve Andersen will be leading the project.
• The sf.com Foundation is again making this an open and transparent process with the NPSF Community:

-The NPSF community has the domain knowledge necessary to serve nonprofits with Salesforce.com–the Foundation doesn’t have this expansive knowledge
-The Foundation can’t be successful or sustainable without a vibrant ecosystem of integrators and add-on tool providers
-The Foundation puts great importance on it’s ability to listen to the community, and wants this process to reinforce that

Read Steve Andersen’s kickoff email for more information.

This affirms for me again why I develop off of this platform: The vendor is truly committed to the nonprofit sector (do I dare say…committed to social change) and does not assume to have all the domain expertise to prescribe a solution to its customers.

Anand did a write up here on Microsoft CRM a couple weeks ago. Now (via Scott Hemmeter) it looks like both companies have agreed to a Configuration Shootout of sorts. I highly reccomend subscribing to PGreenblog to watch this all unfold…it should be interesting. Furthermore, I personally nominate Anand to be a judge and represent NPSF in this battle of the century. Stay tuned…

Below is the slide show from our session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (or click this link: http://tinyurl.com/2578gp):

I recently spent some time learning more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and I must admit the product looks very interesting! For those of you that are more familiar with Salesforce.Com, I will try and draw out some of the similarities and some of the differences. I haven’t had a chance to do a nonprofit implementation with Dynamics CRM, so this is very much just a first look based on information I have read and some online demos.

The first major difference between the two platforms is how they can be run. Salesforce is locked in to the On-Demand model. Microsoft offers the ability to run Dynamics CRM either as an Internal Application or as an On-Demand offering through their CRM Live service. At first glance, it appears as though Dynamics CRM would be more feature rich when run as an internal server based application. It derives its value from making the assumption that end users are most familiar with MS Office Suite of Products. It has very tight integration with MS Outlook and MS Excel. Below is a screenshot of how CRM Dynamics looks in a familiar MS Outlook Environment:
Read the rest of this entry »

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

All the buzz last week was about Google’s announcement of its new cross-social networking platform Open Social (see ReadWriteWeb for more information). Salesforce is one of the founding partners and promises to create the ability to integrate social networking data (Plaxo and LinkedIn) into the business enterprise domain. For me personally, I was all aflutter by the idea.  That is, until I saw the cheesy Google Campfire video and the sf.com demo (minute 43).  While Theikos demo’d an interesting contact cloud application – which I have little doubt most nonprofits could not afford – it did not show much in the way of how Open Social was going to hook into sf.com.

The more I got to thinking about this, the more all this bugged me.  Sf.com doesn’t natively have the ability to do contact-to-contact relationships (similar to the account-to-account relationships in the Partner utility).  I’ve been told repeatedly by the great folks at sf.com that it’s a B2B application, and so there wasn’t much customer demand for C2C (reciprocal) relationships. So if sf.com has been working with Google on this for the past several months (year?), why is there no native C2C relationship building functionality in this release, or even on the roadmap? 

Vis-a-vis the Theikos demo, I’m left with the question: Will sf.com’s ability to hook into the Open Social platform rely on costly third party vendors to access C2C relationships?  Or is this finally the business case that sf.com has been waiting for to finally offer it as a feature (yet where’s the promoted Idea?)?