I adapted the code to the following:
location.replace(’/_ui/core/email/author/EmailAuthor?
retURL=/{!Opportunity.Id}
&p3_lkid={!Opportunity.Id}
&p2_lkid={!Opportunity.Registrant_Salesforce_ID__c}
&p2={!Opportunity.Registrant_Full_Name__c}
&p24={!Opportunity.Billing_Contact_Email__c}
&template_id=00XX99234365′);NOTE: Remove the linebreaks if you cut and paste this code.
I put the above code into a Custom Button on the Opportunity Object. The Button behavior should be set to Execute Javascript and the Content Source should be set to OnClick JavaScript.
In the above JavaScript code, the following variables are represented:
- retURL = URL that the user is returned to if they click Cancel on the message
- p3_lkid = The ID of the record that this email should be associated with (the WhatID)
- p2_lkid = The ID of the person that this email should be associated with (the WhoID)
- p2 = The name of the person that this email should be associated with
- p24 = The email address of anyone you want as additional TO’s on the message
- templateID = The Salesforce ID of the email template that you wish to use
Before you jump into certification, study the options available and find out what is right for you and for your organization? Also, consider the following. Since you are working in the nonprofit space, a fair amount of the questions may have little to no applicability to you. For example, questions on territories, assets, products, and super complex security issues are likely not the norm for a nonprofit implementation. Given the domain we operate in, most of you might need to review the study material to get familiar with the sections that we really don’t use on a day to day basis. Salesforce has done a really good job of putting up Study Guides, Sample Questions, and Reference Materials to help you prepare for the Certification Exams.
Salesforce is currently offering 5 levels of certification. I have included them in the image below:
In the above chart, I have rated the difficulty level of the exams based on a cursory review of the study guide and review of all sample questions. The above chart assumes that you are a System Administrator and not a consultant. If you are a consultant, you may actually find all of the above exams to be easy, save for the “Force.Com Advanced Developer” which requires some deep knowledge of Apex and VisualForce. (Disclaimer: I haven’t taken the full exams yet, but plan to take at least two of them in 2009).
Good luck on your certification efforts and feel free to post any resources you find useful in your prep!
]]>Take for example, Acme Org, a human services organization that has implemented a robust CRM solution that tracks almost all aspects of it’s program operations. Below is one of the critical reports reviewed by the Executive Team each month:
The organization is considering the use of these metrics for determining promotions, salary adjustments, and bonuses. After initial review, the Executive team expressed concern about Jon’s performance to Jon’s manager. Jon’s manager on the other hand knew that Jon’s metrics were low because he was always thrown on to the toughest cases. Being on the toughest cases each month meant that Jon would have to spend more time with each client and would be responsible for defining new engagement processes for working through complex cases. Unlike the other client service reps Jon spent a lot of time researching and speaking to industry experts to identify best practices that could be used by Acme to help future clients. In short, Jon was expanding the organizational knowledgebase, capacity, and quality of service delivery. Unfortunately, none of this was being recognized in the monthly report. Jon’s manager decided to add a new metric into the monthly report that would help recognize Jon’s efforts. The revised report is below:
The revised report gave the Executive Team more insight into Jon’s efforts and the demands placed on the Client Services staff.
The point of the example is to proceed with caution when using Metrics for Management level decisions. They can be a very powerful tool when well directed; however, there is usually a story behind every piece of data and it is critical that the entire story is understood before program level decisions are made.
]]>Take the following example. Let’s say you are using the Opportunities object to track Inbound Grants. Let’s say that you have a Payments object that has a Master/Detail relationship with Opportunities (Payments is the Detail).
You can setup the following Cross Object Formulas in the Payment object to reference elements from the Opportunity and Account.
Payment Made By (Account) = Opportunities__r.Account.Name
Payment For (Opp) = Opportunities__r.Name
The beauty of the Cross Object formulas is that it lifts many of the constraints we previously faced with Salesforce. We can now:
- Create more complex reports including more objects than we could in the past
- Avoid writing Apex for something as silly as replicating a parent or lookup field
- Ease data entry and report building for the end user by making data more accessible
There are some limitations to be aware of:
- Limit of 5 cross object relationships per object
- You can reference up (from detail to master) or sideways (lookup), however, for references from parent to child, you still need to use Summary Roll Ups.
If you haven’t already used these, you should definitely check them out as they can solve many common problems you may have faced in the past.
If you have any interesting use cases for cross object formulas, please post them in the comments.
]]>We’ve been customizing Salesforce.com for nonprofits for more than a year now - we’ve helped enough nonprofit’s customize, migrate data, integrate with payment tools, Vertical Response and more - and we have just enough information from all of those projects to begin to see what happens AFTER we’re done.
As most know - moving to a new tool of any sort provides benefits and challenges. When I upgraded to the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, I had to fight with the toolbar, and finding the “print” button was excruciating - I wasn’t used to where things were, wasn’t ready to explore new offerings - I just wanted to have all of the new features available so I could use then when I was ready. I’ve been using Word and the other Office tools since their inception - so I’ve been through this before, but I was reminded that even an updated tool, with a LOT of user and usability testing can pose adoption challenges.
Imagine what it’s like moving from MS Access, or FileMaker Pro, or eTapestry to Salesforce then? Add in a complicated data migration, some thinking about doing things in new ways -and all of a sudden Monday morning with that new tool can be grim. Here are some things that you can do to get ready to adopt and adapt!
- It can be easy to overlook some of the key players in your agency - the volunteer that enters data, the finance expert that reviews and reconciles donations, the program team that matches volunteers, the development officer that plans events. Using Salesforce successfully means that your WHOLE team uses the tool actively - not just for reporting. So - you’ll want to make sure their voices and needs are heard during planning - so that when the tool rolls out - they know what they are getting!
- Every agency needs a product champion, a go get it, I love it, this is great, I can help you make it work for you. You don’t want to rely on your vendor for this - you need to OWN this expertise in house. This should be the person in the agency that is excited about Salesforce, participated in planning, has read the documentation, and isn’t afraid to try.
- We provide documentation for all of our projects, and you should expect that from a vendor. Make sure that it has both general information (how do I look up a contact) as well as information specific to your needs (how do I match a volunteer with a client). The information you need to “do it yourself” is probably in your documentation.
- That’s right - no one knows better than you. Make a quick “job aid” - a one page tip sheet, a “I always forget this step” list, and more. You can help your team over the hurdles with some very targeted, agency specific help documents.
- On launch day, have your vendor on hand. Sure, it will cost more -but if your team is frustrated on Monday, and doesn’t get help until Friday - you might not ever get them to use the tool.
- This is an on demand, use it every day type of tool. It won’t add much value if you update contacts, create follow up notes and activities, and create opportunities only every once in awhile. Meet someone at a party that might support your mission? Add them to Salesforce, create a giving opportunity, and make a follow up note to call or write.
- Don’t forget the 70/30 rule - about 70% of your time and money will be in the planning, training, and retraining category, and about 30% in the actual implementation. That sounds like a LOT of money - but if your team can’t get a driving license - the care won’t help much.
It’s easy to assume (at least for me) that most if not all of my nonprofit customers have been able to acquire a nice broadband connection. So I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been!) when one of my customers wanted to know what the bandwidth usage would be like if they moved their work to Salesforce. They have a shared infrastructure and some stringent requirements for ensuring that a certain amount of their pipeline is available to their constituents.
We considered an onsite usage test - but we would have had to reveal customer data - plus - we’d be making things up - what they really wanted to know was “how much bandwidth will OUR implementation of Salesforce use?”
So -we asked Salesforce -and they provided a LOT of information. Here’s the key points:
Bandwidth Required for Users
Salesforce.com is designed to use as little bandwidth as possible so that the site performs adequately over both high speed, dial-up, and over the air Internet connections.
- While average page size is on the order of 90KB, salesforce.com uses compression as defined in the HTTP 1.1 standard to compress the HTML content before it is transmitted as data across the Internet to a user’s computer. The compression often reduces the amount of transmitted data to as little as 10KB per page viewed due to the lack of image content. The site was designed with minimum bandwidth requirements in mind, hence are extensive use of color coding instead of images. Our average user also is known to view roughly 120 pages from our site per day.
- Our application is stateless, therefore, there are no communication requirements in the background once the page loads like traditional client server applications e.g. Outlook. Therefore once the page loads there are no additional bandwidth requirements till a user queries or writes information to salesforce.com.
- In short, it is difficult to specify customer bandwidth because of the nature of the Internet and individual corporate usage. Network latency, peering issues, bandwidth at upstream providers, users using their Internet connections for other use besides salesforce.com, etc. all affect the perceived performance of the connection and the amount of bandwidth required to keep performance adequate.
- A Salesforce.com deployment of 80 users with 75% of the users concurrently logged in with a think time between transactions of 2 minutes: Avg Bandwidth = 120 * 60 / ( 120 + 2 ) = 59 Kbits/sec
Obviously - your mileage may vary depending on the nature of your connection to the internet as well as what other internet related work you are doing. It’s likely more helpful to know your total bandwidth needs and to understand how they all fit together rather than to know what Salesforce uses by itself.
]]>Documentation - We initially started with word docs, however, we are more recently moving towards the use of Help Tips, Recorded Screen Casts, and a Help Tab. The idea behind documentation is that it should be complex enough to educate someone on how to use the CRM; however, not so complex that the documentation cannot be maintained.
Training - This is perhaps the most important element for us. We typically provide our clients with two levels of training. We do an end user training session that lasts between 1 and 3 hours depending on the complexity of the client implementation. We also do an administrator training for the Sys Admin level users at a client site. We also encourage the Sys Admin level users at the client site to attend a formal Salesforce training class.
Community - For clients that are in cities where CRM user groups are held, we encourage them to join and attend. This allows them to learn from their peers and get new insights into what is possible with CRM. We also encourage Sys Admin level users to join the NPSF so they can learn through the engaging technical conversations of the online community.
One of the areas that continues to be a challenge for us is Custom Code. Salesforce (and other CRM tools) provide a variety of means to extend the base platform with Custom Code. In the case of Salesforce this would be Apex, VisualForce, S-Control, and API Code. We are always weary of dropping custom code into an organization that has no means of managing or modifying the code. We do our best to avoid code by using as much standard functionality as possible. When it comes to deploying custom code into an organization that is not able to support it, we work through a simple cost/benefit tradeoff. Is this Code performing a high value business function? Is there a high probability the Code will need to be changed within the next 3 years? If the code needs to be changed, can the organization afford the change? If there is HIGH value for the code, LOW probability of the code needing to be changed, and the organization will likely find the funds for a change, then this alleviates our concerns. Custom Code is not to be feared in a NPO CRM implementation; however, a plan needs to be in place to support it over its lifecycle.
]]>- Almost every organization is struggling with adopting and effectively using these tools.
- Lots of these projects started in somebody’s basement (both metaphorical and literal) and grew exponentially as more people with the organization started to adopt the tools
One of the most interesting presentations was from the CIA’s “Intellipedia” team. Essentially they used the Wikipedia platform within the internal intelligence community to start sharing information better within and across the multiple government intelligence agencies.
Link: http://community.e2conf.com/community/sessions/tuesday/gs03?view=all
Take a look at these terrific points from the OSS Field Sabotage manual (sound like your organization?): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/11/sabotage-manual-from.html
]]>Also, there is a free webinar next week which you can register for here:
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/events/visualforcewebinar/registration.php?d=70130000000E15w
Start kicking the Visualforce tires and post comments about your experiences here!
]]>How it works:
- It creates a new field type in your instance called “Text (Encrypted)”. This is fairly similar to a regular text field, except that the data is encrypted.
- In order to see data within an encrypted field, the user’s profile must have the “View Encrypted Data” option checked off
- Any user that does not have this permission in their profile will see a value such as “***-**-****” when they view the encrypted field. (Note: You can specify whether you want the Mask to be either a “X” or a “*”. You can also leave a portion of a field unencrypted, such as the last 4 digits of an SSN.
Limitations:
- Max length of 175 characters. (You can’t really use this to encrypt case notes.)
- Field value can not be Unique, External ID, or have a Default Value
- Can not search, filter, roll-up, query, or use the field value in a Formula
- Can not use in workflows and assignments
Overall, this is a very powerful feature and you should consider leveraging it in your instance if your are storing any sensitive data such as Social Security Number, Credit Card Number, Medical Info, etc.
There is a lot more information on best practices and usage examples within Salesforce Help.
]]>