I’ve been working on a project that involves the use of CMSForce and since that’s a fairly new offering from Force.com Labs, thought I’d share my experiences so far.  The install itself is easy enough, but there are a few post-install instructions that need to be followed for it to work, so be sure to download the documentation available on the AppExchange and read through it.

To use CMSForce, you’ll either need to use one of the Page Templates that comes with the application, or create your own, which involves Visualforce.  The idea behind CMSForce, as with any CMS application, is that those templates can be created by someone more technical, and then anyone can go in and create new pages or adjust existing pages without needing a background in Visualforce, HTML, or style sheets.  CMSForce definitely accomplishes this, and anyone willing to spend half an hour to an hour getting up to speed on it should quickly be able to start making use of the Sites functionality now native in the Enterprise version of Salesforce.

For the graphic design of the Site I did, my client already had a non-Salesforce web portal whose style they wanted to mimic, so all I had to do was create a Zip file of the CSS and image files (maintaining the folder structure on the web server), upload that as a Static Resource and then refer to the style sheets in the Visualforce Template.  And the voila, standard HTML tags like <h1> (heading 1) now display with my client’s branding.

The Page Template is what it sounds like, it provides the styles and the frame for the page, which can include header, footer, menus, etc.  In the Visualforce for the Template, you can insert Content Block components which are the placeholders for the content that users will be able to provide.  From there you create Page records, which become individual pages in the site.  Users then have the ability to update the content in each Content Block within the Page using a GUI editor.  One page can be identified as the Home page and is the default when users go to your Site URL without specifying a specific page.

Once you have a Page Template and one or more Pages with Content Blocks created, you’re ready to set up a Site to go public.  Once again, just read through the CMSForce documentation for all the configuration that needs to be done.

I’ve hit 2 issues that I’m still trying to resolve in this process.  First, the content within the Content Blocks looks great in the preview but isn’t displaying in the public site.  This I’m sure is a permission issue, and fortunately one of the Sites PMs from Salesforce will be helping me resolve that tomorrow.  If this is a shortcoming in the documentation, I’ll be sure to post the resolution here.  The other is that I created Visualforce page to display data from Salesforce and used that as a Page Template, and it isn’t functioning as expected in Sites.  I suspect this has to do with the fact that my page is embedded as a component in another page, so once I figure that out I’ll post what I’ve learned here.
Revision 8/26: both of these issues were, predictably, due to user error- I hadn’t realized that CMSForce wasn’t deployed yet.  Once deployed, everything works as expected!

All in all, another solid application from Force.com Labs.

This has been posted about elsewhere, but this is a pretty big deal. VR and Salesforce are very nicely integrated, as you probably already know:

http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000000GI9FAAW

• If you already have Vertical Response, email nonprofits@verticalresponse.com to get it for free.
• If you don’t have it yet, go fill out this form and fax it to them directly. I found it at http://www.verticalresponse.com/non-profits/

More details can be found on the VR Email Marketing blog – http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2008/04/non-profits-ema.html, which I recommend heartily for all nonprofit communication folks out there. Janine Popick, who writes the blog, has a great writing style and gives lots of good tips around getting more people to actually read your emails.

Enjoy!

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?

At ONE/Northwest we’ve been looking into Vertical Response (VR) as an emailing solution that is integrated with Salesforce.com. We’ve just completed our first implementations, and I wanted to share what we’ve learned about how VR behaves with Salesforce. I’m going to try to lay out what I know in as concise terms as possible. Some of this is already known to many of you, but it was surprisingly hard for me to get my head around. When I get something wrong please comment on this post and I’ll update as necessary!

First, VR for Salesforce.com is best thought of as an individual Salesforce user’s personal application for sending mass emails rather than a shared solution for an organization. Here’s why I say that:

1. Each Salesforce.com user has their own VR account, and it is impossible for those accounts to share lists
2. If one person starts a send, someone else can’t complete it
3. If one person sends an email, they are the ones who will need to pull the stats back to Salesforce
4. If a subscriber opts out, they are globally opted out of emails in Salesforce

Now that I’ve said that, let me say that VR accounts can share some important info:

1. By creating your email Templates as Email Templates in Salesforce.com, they are available to all Salesforce/VR users.
2. Salesforce Campaigns can be used to represent each send, and the stats get pulled back to them, so those are visible to all Salesforce/VR users. They can even be used for segmentation of future sends.
3. You can pool send credits ($) between any number of users, you just have to email VR and tell them which users.

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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:
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In a previous post, I talked about a few ways that I customize web-to-lead forms. One key change I make is to ensure that certain fields get filled in for every web lead. In a Salesforce page layout, you can require fields, but web-to-lead doesn’t allow you to do this – any web-to-lead form submission will create a lead, even if critical fields such as last name or email are left blank.

Most of our clients want to make sure their leads fill in a minimum amount of information, such as name and email. Moreover, you can catch spam by requiring sensible entries – since spammers don’t always fill in the fields.

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Some time ago, I had a client who needed an easy way for inexperienced users to filter a report, on a regular basis, based on several different criteria.  In Salesforce, anyone can filter a report like this, but it takes a couple dozen clicks and a bunch of typing.  I wrote a simple s-control that allowed users to filter the report in a really simple interface.

When the user selects values and then clicks Search, the Javascript code builds a long URL that tells Salesforce to open the report and apply all the selected filters – something like this:

https://na3.salesforce.com/00O50000001QCuS?pc2=00N50000001JsTx&pn2=eq&
pv2=American%20Sign%20Language&pc4=00N50000001JsUX&pn4=in&pv4=Immunizations&
pc5=00N50000001JvOE&pn5=in&pv5=North%20End& pc6=00N50000001JvNO&pn6=eq&pv6=1

I showed my s-control to Drew Piston at a Salesforce event last year, and it turns out he was hoping to do something similar for his group at the Bay Area Chapter of Red Cross.  This week, he posted a Jing screencast that shows his version of the s-control in action.

Thanks Drew! 

While reading Steve Anderson’s blog (http://gokubi.com), I was inspired to put up one of our screencasts. 

Anand was nice enough to put together a great screencast about creating a basic Apex trigger. This dives into some code but isn’t too technical that the average Salesforce admin can’t understand it. Take a look!

http://www.screencast.com/t/KZyKK0NXrXR