A little Chatter chit-chat

I was looking at my Chatter home page the other day. It had all the updates of my network, with necessary files as attachments. It was complete……and boring!!! Yeah, you read that right. Despite having all necessary updates, it was so mundane to look at it. It was doing its functionality alright, have no qualms about it, but I thought, ‘It could do with some tweaks here and there. I can upload my fishing photo!’

I also wanted a few other customizations and wanted to be able to share ideas and knowledge of other users. But I did not want to spend a lot of time on it! I felt too lazy to code. I thought of my options here. That’s when I recalled I could use Chatter tags!

If you are familiar with Chatter, you know it provides collaboration features such as real-time feed updates to the users. Now here’s a bonus! Salesforce has provided Visualforce tags to utilize standard Chatter functionality in our Visualforce pages or site pages with little or NO CODING…! Yes…!!!

Suppose you want to show the user’s profile image along with his profile details. Or you want to enable him to collaborate with his team members, share and follow ideas. This is possible with Visualforce tags.

Let me show you a few examples.

1. chatter:feed :-

Chatter feeds are like updates about a particular entity. Using this tag, you can display feeds related to a particular entity which can be an object, record or a User within Salesforce.

2. chatter:userPhotoUpload :-

You can include profile pictures for standard user profiles using this tag. Just make sure that you have these check boxes checked:   

• To use this tag, it’s mandatory to enable Chatter in the Org
• User must belong to one of these Profiles: Standard User, Portal User, High Volume Portal User, Chatter External Users  

3. chatter:feedWithFollowers :-

Chatter enables us to stay connected to a particular entity or an object and stay updated with all its operations and activities through the 'follow' option. This tag displays the feeds related to a particular record and also displays the list of followers for that particular record.

4. chatter:follow :-

Chatter allows users to follow or unfollow an entity. This tag displays buttons to the user from where he can choose to follow or unfollow a Chatter record.

5. chatter:followers :-

Entities in chatter have followers and sometimes you might need to display the list of those followers. This tag helps us to display a list of Chatter followers for a particular record whose entityID is provided.

6. chatter:newsfeed :-

Using this tag, you can display the chatter newsfeed for current user.


All said and done, you will face some challenges using the Chatter tags!

1. Some of standard chatter tags will work properly only when your Visualforce page has standard header enabled. When you set showHeader="false" on the Visualforce page, that Chatter tag may not work properly.
2. On the other hand, if you have Salesforce standard header enabled on your Visualforce page or Site page and you want to make that site page responsive using Bootstrap or any other framework, it will not be responsive. Use of standard header restricts the responsiveness of the page.

While you try out different Chatter tags and play around with your Visualforce pages, here are some additional links that could help you know more:

• https://developer.salesforce.com/page/An_Introduction_to_Salesforce_Chatter
• https://developer.salesforce.com/releases/release/Winter11/Chatter+Components+for+Visualforce
• https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Chatter_Code_Recipes

Written by Pankaj Paryani, Salesforce Developer at Eternus Solutions

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Salesforce Launchpad – Get, Set, Code!

I still remember my first day at Eternus Solutions, fresh out of college! A tad nervous and not an inkling about Salesforce, I was apprehensive and full of anticipation, despite not knowing what to expect. Then slowly yet firmly, over the next couple of months, I took to Salesforce like a fish takes to water. I started writing lines of code and build functionality with Salesforce’s amazing ‘point-and-click’ features…and here I am today, with the experience of working on a few Salesforce projects behind me, all amazed and wowed, eager to share my experience with you.

Teeing Ground

Salesforce started off as a pure CRM solution and soon diversified into a whole suite of services along with a dedicated development platform called Force.com. This suite includes: 

• Sales Cloud: A comprehensive sales solutions suite that empowers your sales reps, managers and executives alike to manage end-to-end sales cycle, including lead management, opportunity tracking, revenue forecasting and much more! 
• Service Cloud: A robust application suite to address and manage all your customer issues and provide them end-to-end support.
• Force.com: An on-demand, cloud-based platform to build custom applications that reside and run in the cloud, powered by world’s first on-demand programming language Apex and a tag-based markup language Visualforce.
  
  If you are a code junkie like me, Apex and Visualforce is the way to go!!
  
  
• AppExchange Marketplace: A marketplace similar to AppStore and Google Play Store, you can create your own applications on the Force.com platform and make it available to the world through the Salesforce AppExchange. 
• Salesforce1: One platform to build anything and connect to everything, Salesforce 1 enables you to perform all operations from within your mobile device. 
• Chatter feeds: Chatter is the social perspective that Salesforce provides, enabling you to share and collaborate with other users in an instant, exciting manner.

Catch 22? No more...

All these amazing features in your armory notwithstanding, why should you still turn towards Salesforce and not any other CRM? What is it that makes Salesforce stand apart?

• To begin with, it is a cloud based service, meaning all you need is an internet enabled device and you can access it anytime, anywhere!
• No administration required at your end! True to its motto: “No Software”, Salesforce takes care of all patches, bug-fixes, maintenance and administration required. Now isn’t that cool?
• Force.com provides easy yet powerful techniques to create apps with ridiculous ease. Talk about user empowerment!

Taking Guard: How to get started?

If you want to be a Salesforce developer, it’s quite easy to start! 

• Create a free developer account:  Go to https://developer.salesforce.com/signup., fill in the requisite information, activate the account and experience the force!
• Look out for the resources: You can get a whole lot of resources in order to begin your journey with Salesforce. You can download a free e-book titled “Force.com Platform Fundamentals” which guides you in a friendly, “do-it-yourself” manner to get you started. Salesforce also makes resources available on their website https://developer.salesforce.com/.
• Try it yourself: Try Salesforce hands-on and if you get stuck somewhere, you can find almost all the answers on the Salesforce developer communities.
• Socialize: Salesforce has an extensive and social community forum where experts discuss and deliberate on all things Salesforce! Additionally, Salesforce holds a global conference called the “Dreamforce”, where you can meet other Salesforce experts and enhance your knowledge and vision for your Salesforce investment.
• Get certified: Salesforce also provides options to get certified and be recognized around the Salesforce world. You can choose the path for being a developer by picking out the Developer Certification or you can try the Administration Certification if you are interested in the maintenance and administration of your organization’s Salesforce org. More information can be found on: http://certification.salesforce.com 

Salesforce is a powerful platform unlike any other you might have seen till now. Not only does it make creating apps ridiculously easy, it also empowers users to a hitherto unexplored level! As a developer, its extensive list of features and functionality keeps you engrossed, as you explore one layer after another. 

Can’t wait to explore Salesforce for yourself? May the Force be with you!

Written by Saket Joshi, Salesforce Developer at Eternus Solutions

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Salesforce for Emerging Businesses: Is it worth your moolah?

You have just about started your business and are setting up the operations gradually. This is a tricky and critical time for you. Not only do you have to manage a lot of things, you also need to be very smart with your investments. Office space in the suburbs or one downtown where the rent is more affordable?  Open source or licensed software? Excel sheets or a Project Management tool? Any CRM or Salesforce? What do you do?

If you are running an emerging business, you are likely to prioritize streamlining of your business above other things. As a Salesforce professional, I am often asked how Salesforce can help emerging businesses with its ‘huge’ licensing costs and overheads (read: customization, custom development and integration costs over and beyond the license fees). I hope to touch upon some of these issues and quash a few myths in this post.

Salesforce: Packing the Productivity Punch!

Traditionally, SMBs are often guilty of doing business with traditional IT in a bad way, including inadequate backup and systems which are susceptible to malware and difficult to configure. Like any other business, you are looking to increase your customer base, drive consistent growth and increase your revenue. Salesforce helps you achieve all this by streamlining your operations, through process automation and seamless collaboration.

Using Salesforce, you can improve the rate at which you respond to your prospects, thus creating and cementing the foundation of your business. Salesforce has an extensive reporting that leverages on your organization data, measures the effectiveness of your KPIs and enables you to focus on right opportunities while collecting data that is critical to your business.

You can also make use of the email templates that Salesforce provides to give your business the much-needed branding and use email marketing to its full potential. Salesforce Chatter lets you leverage the wisdom and networking reach of your workforce, helping you close more deals faster, while its availability on mobile enables you to speed up the whole process of innovation and productivity. Salesforce’s availability on mobile makes you ultra-productive on the fly; so now you can submit approvals while going home, close deals on the spot and submit documents during a client meeting and approve invoices after your tennis match! With Salesforce, you no longer need to wait for manual updates from your teams and it eases the whole process of managing your tasks. Salesforce also helps you get rid of dirty data, eliminating redundancy and inaccuracies and providing complete visibility to your pipeline.

Attuned for Emerging Businesses

Salesforce has dedicated editions for SMBs and SMEs which allow you to choose an edition which has the features and pricing plan that is right for your organization. Salesforce Contact Manager is available at USD 5/month/user for a year’s subscription which includes complete Account and Contact Management functionality. In this edition, you get task and event tracking, integration with your Outlook and Gmail, mobile support, content library, custom reports and chatter for social connect with your customers, which are sufficient to support a business That has just about started to grow its wings.

Salesforce Group edition has all the features of Contact Manager as well as Opportunity tracking and email templates for sending branded and customized emails to your customers. It enables you to get more insights into your business with basic reporting and dashboard. It does not have person accounts and mass-mailing features but you can easily find supportive tools on the AppExchange which help you send mass emails from within your Salesforce.

Salesforce Professional edition gives you the ability to manage your marketing campaigns, contracts and orders, in addition to the basic sales and marketing features provided by the previous editions. The customizable dashboards enable you to get more business insights and accurate forecasts for your pipeline. At USD 65/user/month, it is quite a bargain to manage your entire sales cycle.

…and it has some helpful tools...

Salesforce has small business tools that help grow your pipeline and increase sales productivity. They help improve the performance of your sales reps and give you complete insights about your business that inevitably helps you gain more sales. These tools are available on Salesforce AppExchange, some even for free! A lot of Salesforce ISV partners have created scalable apps that are targeted for small and medium size businesses using Salesforce and Heroku platform which enhance employee productivity and help you collaborate with teams seamlessly.

Great! Tell me more about these tools…

Some of the tools that help you streamline your business and enhance the productivity of your mobile workforce are listed below:

• Dropbox for Salesforce enables you to collaborate you’re your colleagues and customers on all your important data saved in Dropbox, from within your Salesforce. It is available for both Group and Professional editions. 
• LinkPoint 360 streamlines data access with an instant view of your Salesforce data in your Outlook, recording emails, creating new contacts and syncing content to Salesforce directly from Outlook. It supports both Group and Professional editions.
• Free Sales Funnel is an app tailor-made for your Sales Managers and VPs, enabling them to learn at which stage they lose deals, see real percentage conversion by opportunity stages, forecast accurately by percentage conversions to Closed-Won and win more deals. It supports both Group and Professional editions.

The final word...

Irrespective of the size of your business, Salesforce packs the same punch in the features and functionality that it makes available through its various editions. One of the best ways that I recommend to business owners who are just starting with CRM or new to Salesforce is to choose the edition whose pricing plan suits the scale of their business and gradually go for editions with additional features. This enables you to leverage the benefit of Salesforce without too much of a cost overhead, consolidate your business before you are ready to scale up.

Written by Nupur Singh, Technical Lead at Eternus Solutions

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Salesforce Magic Tricks: Lead & Account

How many times in a day do we wish we had magical powers? To make the traffic jam vanish, to fit in our favorite shirt that have ‘shrunk’ a few inches over the years, to make Indian bowlers take 20 wickets in an overseas test match? While I can’t do much about any of these, I have a few magic tricks for easy and simplified Salesforce implementation up my sleeve! Today, I am going to tell you how a few tricks will help ease your job while you work with two of the most commonly used Salesforce standard objects: Lead & Account.

Lead “Defer’ Workflow

Typically, your leads take some time to understand your product/service offering, express an interest if it is something that they are looking for and if your negotiations fare well, they become your customer. Lead management is of a great significance; sometimes you need to give your leads time to make up their mind. In such cases, as per your business process, you may want to contact them or carry out an action after a certain number of days. 

For example, every time one of my leads say that currently they are tied up in their business and therefore will look up at my proposal a little later, I make a note of contacting them after three months. I can either create a reminder or a follow-up task for this. However, this comes with a catch! I need to create a reminder or a follow-up task for each of my leads separately, even though according to my business rule, I would contact each of them three months after the date of last contact. What if I could automate this whole process, so that for all such leads, I could get a reminder three months hence? 

My Eureka Moment!

Sometimes beauty lies in simplicity! I simply added another value ‘Deferred’ in my Lead Status picklist. Now whenever I select ‘Deferred’ value for Lead Status, a workflow rule (record created/edited) is triggered to create a follow-up task for me to contact my lead three months after the date. You can set the ‘Task Due Date’ as per your requirements; in my case, I have set it as 90 days.

Simple and neat, isn’t it?

Merging Accounts

Salesforce does not provide an out-of-the-box functionality for easy and effective merging of accounts. Instead of using AppExchange tools to merge your accounts, here’s a simpler way to do this, without much ado!

Keeping It Simple & Sweet!

Currently, the Account Merge functionality is available from “Tools” panel on “Accounts” tab. You can have a custom “Merge” button on the  detailed page layout of Account, which will pre-populate the search string as Account's name as shown below.

There, it’s done! Merging accounts was never this easy, was it?

In my next post, I will share some simple yet useful implementation tips for some other standard objects like opportunity, case and report.

Written by Vimal Desai, Project Manager at Eternus Solutions

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Time for some inSite (.com) !

I will let you in on a secret. Whenever I feel like pulling a fast one, I randomly ask my unsuspecting colleagues if they have worked on Site.com. An emphatic “YES” is the reply 90% of the times, only for me to ask them again, that perhaps it was Sites that they had actually worked on. The ‘yes’ this time would be feeble and the look on their face a priceless one!

A little history...

Salesforce introduced Siteforce as a web content management system in 2011 and later rechristened it as Site.com. Site.com was developed with an intent of empowering business users to prepare UI-rich web pages, simply with clicks, instead of code.

Site.com: Empowering your business users

Let us assume you want to create a website for your company in a traditional world. It would definitely be a Herculean task, involving web developers, UI designers, hosting experts etc. and a long list of other stakeholders. Imagine the time and effort you would take to rollout and maintain the website! 

Site.com: the differentiator

• Enables us to create data rich web pages by using the point-and-click features for effective website management and easy maintenance
• A great way for business users to update the site branding and Content with minimal training!
• Build once and use multiple times! It offers the ability to create web page templates in order to ensure consistent branding and page structure across the website
• What You See Is What You Get!! Provides a powerful preview functionality to visualize development changes real-time
• Configure various levels of authorization for website users with ease.
• Supports standard web development technologies such as HTML, CSS and Javascript for better control and flexibility.
• Support for interactive content is also available

Deep dive into the Site.com Studio

The place where all the Site.com magic is woven is the Site.com Studio. Let's see what makes it so special.

• If we were to design a Web-to-Lead form to integrate with our website using Visualforce, we would need code to create a Visualforce page, Controller and a Test Class; too much effort for a simple form!
• Site.com eliminates the need for establishing a database connection, servers etc. which would be required if an onsite CMS were used
• The image below shows a Web-to-lead page created within 3 minutes (from scratch!)

Decoding the Site.com Studio 

• Panel 1 showcases a wide assortment of Drag-and-Drop elements provided in the Site.com Studio. It allows you to add elements such as content blocks, breadcrumbs, menus, fields etc. with a mouse click! Customize the components as needed and you are ready to go!
• Panel 2 represents a preview pane where all the elements from Panel 1 are dropped. Provides a WYSIWYG interface to visualize your development changes real time.
• Panel 3 known as the Properties panel, can be leveraged to customize the look and feel of an element using custom HTML or JavaScript. 
• Panel 4 offers numerous functionalities like:
  • Allows importing videos and images in the website pages
  • Provides the ability to switch between Design and Live modes with a mere toggle. 
  • Click the Publish button and see your website live instantly!

So, is Site.com all-encompassing?

The answer is No. Like everything else, Site.com has a flip side too!

• It is bad news for Apex and Visualforce code junkies as Site.com does not recognize Apex code and Visualforce tags
• It is often said “All good things in life come with a price tag!” So does Site.com. Site.com is a feature offering by Salesforce and hence involves additional cost.

Its limitations notwithstanding, Site.com is a great way to quickly build websites, requiring minimal efforts. So refurbishing your website over the New Year weekend is no longer a dream, but reality.

Note: At Eternus Solutions, we have successfully implemented Site.com for multiple clients across our global client base. Global organizations like HP and Häagen-Dazs have also reaped huge rewards of successfully implementing Site.com

Written by Saba Shaikh, Salesforce Developer at Eternus Solutions

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Fun with Progress Bars

I am sure as a Salesforce professional, you would have run into similar situations where your customers have asked you to build them something to track and monitor the progress of their tasks. One of the most common ways that I have come across to achieve this representation of information is through a progress bar, which facilitates the users with precise and accurate information and enables them to quantify the actual progress.

Here’s a catch though! As a developer, you might fall into the trap of trying to use Apex and Visualforce to accomplish this requirement. But hold on and recap what Salesforce recommends – “Use clicks and not code, unless code is imperative.” 

Progress Bars needs simple Formula Fields!!!

Let me show you how you can achieve this with simple formula fields! Yes, you read that right, with mere formula fields!!!

Let’s assume that your customer wants to determine the Lead profile completeness based on the following fields. It’s a good idea to only consider those fields that would be the real game changer for Lead conversion. (Don’t forget the 3900 character limit for formula fields within Salesforce!!)

• Phone
• Mobile
• Email
• Fax
• Title

The first step that you need to do is to write a simple formula field on Lead, that quantifies the profile completeness as a number, which is computed based on whether any of the above mentioned fields are blank or not.

Now, leverage the number computed in the earlier step to visually represent it on the progress bar by creating another formula field on Lead, as shown below.

 

Voila!  What you get is a sophisticated progress bar visually representing the profile completeness as shown below.

 

You can use the same formula across multiple scenarios. I would be including additional use cases in the next few weeks as an extension to the current post to showcase additional avenues where the same can be leveraged!! Till then, have fun trying this out!

 

 

 

 

Written by Jigar Shah, Solution Architect at Eternus Solutions

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