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When Dreamforce Overwhelms, or Help, I’m Alive….

Aug 302012

Well, the countdown is officially on – Dreamforce ’12 is in it’s final motions…as I write this the counter tells me it is just 18 days away. And if you are like me, you are getting giddy with anticipation. This year looks to be a blazing amazing time, with the Keynote, Jeff Immelt, Gen. Colin Powell, Angela Ahrendts (whom I am absolutely glad she is back – she was a wonderful speaker at Dreamforce ’11), Tony Robbins, Sir Richard Branson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and hundreds of breakout sessions, along with a tonne of networking (and I would be loathe to forget the after party networking!). By the way, if you are going to Dreamforce, and would love to meet, feel free to follow me in the Dreamforce org and send me a message!

From salesforce.com Flikr site

However, if you have never been to San Francisco or Dreamforce before, I will tell you right now that the craziness of Dreamforce can be scary and overwhelming. The area where the Moscone Center is in San Francisco is right downtown in between Union Square, the Financial District and SoMA sections of the city. Add in the thousands of people that are walking from various hotels to Moscone and if you are not used to the hustle and bustle of a large city (think Times Square, New York City) it can be overwhelming. So, what do you do if you find yourself ready to flip out? First and foremost, a tip: you will notice many people walking around San Francisco with lanyards, ninety percent of which have very happy, cordial faces (and the other ten percent likely have coffee cups in front of their tired faces!). If you at any time feel lost, scared, overwhelmed or otherwise needing assistance, ASK! One of the things I love about Dreamforce is the high level of civility, friendliness and compassion each and every attendee has. As a point, I and many others I know spend plenty of time walking Howard, 4th and Mission Streets looking for people who have the Dreamforce bag or lanyard and have a look of fear and trepidation look, to see if I can help them get to where they want to go.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post – where do you go when your at Dreamforce and you need to just get away from it all, but don’t want to head to your hotel room? Well, here’s five places + 1 that you can clamour over towards to get away from the hustle and bustle….

1) Yerba Buena Gardens: While the Gardens have become busier and busier each year, it is still a place where there is a quieter feel to it (last year you got to relax along to some music thrown out by some of the partner luncheons going on). The gardens is located just behind Moscone North – quickest way to get there is up the stairs on the west side of Moscone North.

2) Alcove between Moscone North and Novellus Theatre: Also right by the Moscone Center is a walkway that runs between Howard and Mission in between Moscone North and the Novellus Theatre. While you can still here the hustle and bustle of the roads, it is a walkway that is not often used and as such can be a little bit of fresh air during the conference. To get there, just turn west along Mission and you’ll see it just past the Moscone North building.

3) Children’s Creativity Carousel: Located on the other side of the street by Moscone South and the Children’s Creativity Carousel. When you’re walking towards the Moscone North/South for keynotes or sessions you’ll see it up on the hill. What some don’t know is that there is a small park located right beside the carousel with some trees and a children’s playground. During the day it CAN get busy with children (not always), but if you don’t mind the sound of playing children (I have two hooligans, so it is actually a welcomed sound to me) it is a great place just to get away from 50,000 people for a moment.

4) Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Market Street and 4th: San Francisco has many, MANY coffee houses….I do believe that there is a Starbucks within spitting distance no matter where you go downtown! However, the line ups and crowds, especially at the Starbucks Marriott Marquis, or 4th Street are CRAZY. Just on the other side of the Marquis (across from another usually packed Starbucks…see what I mean?) is the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Co, which I find to be pleasantly busy – no huge lineups, and they aren’t pounding the latest song from Michael Kiwanuka or Jack White (two of the favourites right now at my local Starbucks). It’s pretty decent coffee, with a pretty laid back atmosphere. If the inside is too busy, there is another walkway just west of the shoppe which will, if you follow it south, take you right back to Yerba Buena Gardens and the stairs you walked up to get there from hideout number 1!

5) Lapu-Laput Street Gardens: This is a find that I made three years ago, and was happy that I did. Although it is a little further than the first three, it is a nice play to just relax for 15 minutes or more. Nestled in beside condos and an office building is a small garden on Lapu-Lapu Street, that I can guarantee will have very few people around. Lapu-Lapu is a side road of a side road off of Folsom, so there is little traffic. And the only people I have ever ran into there were people who were tending to the garden itself. I ended up speaking with one lady who loved her flowers and just chatted for a good twenty minutes once. I would recommend this place if you find yourself really needing to get away but not wanting to hide in your hotel room. To get there, walk south on 4th Street. Just past Folsom, you’ll see Pacific Bicycles on your left side of the road. Cut down the road beside the store, and when you get to the right turn, you’ll see the garden on your left.

So, there you have it – 5 places to hopefully grab a moment of zen within short walking distance of the Moscone Centre if you need to just unwind. I truly hope you don’t need it too much, but it’s always great to diffuse after the hustle and bustle. For those who are returnees to Dreamforce, any ones I missed? I’d love to hear of them!

See you in 18 days!

TimeSaver # 9 – Expanding the Body of an email with an HTML using Letterhead Template

Salesforce, Time Savers No Responses »

Mar 232012

So, I thought I’d pass along this hint for Salesforce – I am not sure if it saves you time if you just live with the issue, but it certainly saves you time if you wanted to send templated emails without needing to know HTML! Of course, many use email templates during their day to day use. However, the HTML body size is locked to 550 pixels when you’ve set up a template using the HTML (using Letterhead). This works fine if you create your letterhead to fit to 550 pixels or less. What happens if you have a letterhead where the footer is longer than the body size though? Your email ends up looking cut, and not quite great looking.

The text does not stretch to the full space of the header...

So, how can we get around this? With four quick steps, you can actually stretch the HTML size within this template.

1) Create an image: With this step, you can use your favourite online image editor – I personally use Online Image Editor. If you use this site, simply use the Create Canvas section to create a new image. The width should be the same width as your header or footer (in this instance it is 700 pixels), and the width you can make as 5 pixels. And finally, ensure that the colour matches the background colour of your email template (the body section of the email template). Click the Create Canvas button, and then save your custom made image (don’t worry – you can’t see it that well, especially if it is white!) to your local computer.

2) Store your image in the Documents folder: Now, in Salesforce you are going to go into the Documents folder, and store the image you just made as a file. Store it in a shared folder, and ensure it is marked off as an externally available image.

3) Edit your Email template: Now, for the final step. Go into the email template you made, and go to the bottom of the HTML body area (the area where your email body is written). Click the image button on your HTML toolbar. Add the image you just created to the end of your email template (in this case, I called the file white space filler).

So, now you’ve stretched your email body so that it is the same length as the header you utilized was.

Now, while there is some steps involved with this ‘timesaver’, it does allow you to reuse the filler image you have added in future templates, and of course lets you utilize the ease of the HTML (using Letterhead) template type, instead of having to use the Custom HTML template type, in which you need to know how to write HTML code. Hope this helps some of you out there!

New Release Feature: How You Could Use Cross Object Workflows

Salesforce 2 Responses »

Feb 172012

So, ~~Winter~~ Spring ’12 is out and one of the new features released is Cross Object Workflow. This has been a long time idea on the IdeaExchange, and put a big old smile one my face. With this release you are able to perform cross-object field updates on:

Custom Object to Custom Object (children of the custom object to the master of the relationship)
Custom Object to Standard Object (children of the custom object to the standard object)
Some Standard Object to Standard Object, being:

Case Comments Updating Cases
Email Updating Case
Opportunity Product Updating Opportunities
Opportunity Updating Accounts

Now, there is one main standard to standard object missing, and that is Cases Updating Accounts, but I hope that this will be something that comes in a future release (and is likely more complex due to cases being connected to contacts as well). However, with what has been released, your life just got a little easier thanks to Salesforce.

An easy (and broad) example would be the Account type field. In my experience, this field is planned for and has high expectations at the beginning of a company’s use with Salesforce, but usually falls flat, as many don’t update this field. Why? Well, after an opportunity is won, an account with the type of Prospect should be moved to Customer. However, this is on a different record, and after you’ve closed the Opportunity happily, many don’t go to the Account, and edit the field. But, with cross-object workflow, this can be done automatically. How to do this?

1. Create a new workflow rule. Set evaluation to ‘When a record is created, or when a record is edited and did not previously meet the rule criteria’, and your Rule Criteria should be Opportunity: Stage EQUALS Closed Won AND Account: Type EQUALS Prospect(and any other Account types that you may use to denote a non-customer).

2. For the Action, create a Field Update. The Field to Update is Account:Type, and the new field value is Customer (or whatever you deem your current clients to be).

3. Activate the Cross Object workflow rule, and voila! You’re good to go!

Now, as I said, that is a very simple example, but it could be very powerful for you. Now you can create a list view and now that if a customer is listed as a customer, they have been set due to the fact that you and your company has closed an opportunity! So, how will use cross object workflows? Let me know any cool and nifty ways you’ll be using them!

Timesaver #8 – Calculating Business Days

Salesforce, Time Savers 1 Response »

Nov 112011

Hey all,

So, on Twitter this week Jon Adams from Florida asked a question using the #askforce hash – “Is there a way to replicate the WORKDAY function in Excel in SFDC?”. My first response was to send him as link to an answer on the Salesforce Community page which laid out how to calculate the number of business days between two date fields. It’s a great formula to have in your back pocket, but it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. What if you had a Start Date, and knew that you wanted something to run for 26 business days which populated via a number field?

So, later that evening, I sat down to see what I could come up with. The idea actually would save me a lot of time in the professional services field. If someone from xLerate was going to be on a project for 13 days (business days), I wouldn’t have to play the calendar finger dance we do when we are attempting to figure this out.

To do this, I went on a custom object called Projects (you could easily use any native object you wanted as well…). There is a field called Start Date, which I have used for the beginning date that we are attempting to calculate from. There is also a field called “Number of Business Days” which has an API name of BizDays. This is the number of business days you wish to count up to.

Next you will need to create a formula date field, which I have called End Date. The formula would be as follows:

CASE(
MOD(Start_Date__c – DATE(1900, 1, 7), 7),
0, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + FLOOR((BizDays__c-1)/5)*2,
1, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + FLOOR((BizDays__c)/5)*2,
2, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + FLOOR((BizDays__c+1)/5)*2,
3, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + FLOOR((BizDays__c+2)/5)*2,
4, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + FLOOR((BizDays__c+3)/5)*2,
5, (Start_Date__c) + BizDays__c + CEILING((BizDays__c)/5)*2,
6, (Start_Date__c) – IF(BizDays__c>0,1,0) + BizDays__c + CEILING((BizDays__c)/5)*2,
null)

From this, the End Date will be calculated to the amount of business days (Mondays through to Fridays) stated in the field Business Days using the Start Date.

Fields from the formula

A caveat though – each country has separate and distinct holidays, so no holidays are added in this formula. I am sure this could be calculated using a custom object and Apex, but for clicks not code administrators, this should assist.

How could I see this being used? Well, from a PS standpoint, it would be great for working out an end date of a project knowing the number of days that someone was to be working. Or what if you wanted to know the date where you should be finishing an opportunity stage (above and beyond a Close date – say you wanted an opportunity to be closed if it took more than 30 business days to get to a 50% probability or above.

Hopefully you find this of assistance – if you think of other ways this could be use, let me know!

Know that I’m gonna be your dangerous side effect …

Salesforce, Time Savers 4 Responses »

Nov 092011

So, this past week, salesforce.com released a new feature within their core application called “Social Contacts”. Those who happened to attend or watch Dreamforce this year know that the Social Enterprise and the social contacts function got some major airplay during the Keynote speech by salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff (if you watch again, you can actually see me three different times in the first part of the keynote – I know because my kids counted…).

What is Social Contacts? Social Contacts “lets you view your contacts’ social network profiles directly in Salesforce. This social information gives you a better perspective on your customers’ needs and issues—information you can use to build deeper relationships and increase business connections” (from salesforce.com help page). In other words, when you turn this function on, you have quick and easy access to the public profile that your contact within Salesforce has allowed. What networks are available? To begin with, Salesforce has (for free) a Twitter and a Facebook link, and for a fee (this is actually LinkedIn’s AppExchange application and not an add-on fee from salesforce.com) you can utilize LinkedIn.

So, what happens after your administrator enables Social Contacts (for those who have an org that wasn’t created after October 7th, 2011)? First, you will notice that your contact page changes slightly. Up by the name is a new placeholder box for an image, much like we have become used to with Chatter (for those who don’t wish to add pictures in your org, I refer to you as the greyskins, in honour of Whitley Streiber). We also have three social network icons of which we have all become accustomed to.
Clicking on these icons brings you to a tab page where you can choose the person’s Facebook or Twitter profile, and after this see their latest tweets, their public Facebook profile, and have a quick link to open their actual Twitter or Facebook pages in a new tab (please note: I have not paid for the LinkedIn app, so I cannot comment on this portion). And, you can decide to add their Twitter or Facebook profile picture to their Salesforce contact. And that’s it. Yes, there is no integration, or pulling information (technically, Salesforce is using public API from Twitter and Facebook, so pulling information from these social networks would not be possible at this time, and to be honest, I think two way integration would end up costing), but it is a time saver.
How, you ask? Well, consider these points:

Prior to Social Contacts, if I was on a contact’s detail page within Salesforce, and wondered what was up with them via Facebook or Twitter, I would have had to open a new window and go to Facebook, or flip over to my TweetDeck and search for the user (or open their URL). Now, I have one-click access to their recent Twitter stream (which is how I find myself talking to people more and more) AND can reply, view their Facebook profile, and open with one click (and in a new window). Now, I’m not sure about you all, but the moment I open either Facebook or Twitter, this massive, time sucking vortex is opened and the fifteen minutes I lost just moments ago can prove it. This is a massive time saver for me, as I can check when a contact last tweeted, and send them a reply to their last tweet, or open straight to their Facebook and reply and write on their Wall (now salesforce.com needs to close my Facebook window once I click the Submit button! LOL).
I love the simple addition of the Facebook or Twitter profile picture. I am a very visual person, and seeing something that reminds me of the actual contact (whether it be a nice picture like others have, or some weird kaleidoscope picture like I currently have) allows me to quickly remember who the person is I am currently viewing within Salesforce.
Especially with the Twitter aspect, being able to see and reply to a contact’s latest tweet, whether it be 10 seconds ago or 10 hours ago could be huge for someone maintaining a relationship with Salesforce contacts. Let’s put aside the fact that we all work trying to be successful, whether it be selling widgets, services, knowledge or advice. This is 2011, and the Mad Men ideal of a split between business and homestead is dead. You follow these people on Twitter or Facebook, so unless you have a completely separate corporate account (an idea I am both am philosophically against, and loathe like the plague), your contacts know that outside of work you may have a life (in my case, I am sure that any business contacts or colleagues who follow me on Twitter know of my love of my family, hockey, live music, and my mistrust of the current Conservative government of Canada along with my love of all things Salesforce). So, be a human. Reply with a personal remark to their child’s picture, or their latest tech gadget, or their tweet of an article. Make that conversation, strike up a personal report with the clients you deal with. Personally, your circle of friends and acquaintances grows, and professionally, people are more likely to remember you because you’ve made that personal connection.

Is it perfect? No. And understandable so. This is a first pass at this with Salesforce, and their utilization has been limited by the public API limitations of both Facebook and Twitter. Do I foresee an evolution of this product? Definitely. It may come at a price to Salesforce users (lest we forget that Facebook and Twitter are companies, and are in the business to make money), but we don’t know that for sure. However, given how salesforce.com has evolved products previously (do you remember the day when customization meant making a custom object, then we could use S-Controls, followed by Apex and Visualforce and now Heroku?), part of the application’s allure is seeing how the evolution of a feature will occur. It truly is the dangerous side of Salesforce – waiting with baited breath for the next release and the newest updates!

So, have you turned on Social Contacts yet? Let me know if you agree with me or not!

Hello out there, we’re on the air, it’s ‘Hockey Night’ tonight…

Personal, Salesforce No Responses »

Nov 042011

So, those who know me know that my love of what I do for a living is superseded likely only by my love of hockey (of course my wife and kids come first for everything….). I played hockey for a very long time, until I couldn’t anymore, and now I spend a many a night listening and watching hockey, and spend a good part of the weekends coaching my son’s team. And, yes, I am a Leafs fan living in Ottawa, but that’s for another post on another day…

This year (via Twitter) a bunch of us kool-aid kids of Salesforce decided that we should start a hockey pool. Of course, this is typical for any Canadian hockey lover, but how would we manage it? There are tonnes of cheap alternatives, but then I got to thinking – why not use Salesforce? So, that is exactly what I did. And believe it or not, it really only took a night of planning and a half a day of configuration to get the base done. What did I do?

Created lead and account fields with each of the choices a person could make (we created a box pool, where you chose 18 skaters…15 forwards and 3 defencemen and 3 goaltenders)
Created a custom object called Players, which listed all the players, along with major stats (GP, G, A, Pts, W, L and GAA and Save Percentage….I should state I was a goalie so I like goalie stats!)
Created a custom object called Player Selections, which allow a team (placed in as an account) to be associated to their choices). Cross-object formula fields allow me to pull the information from each player to each team that chose them.
A bunch of reports and dashboards to let people know where they stand on any given day.
Chatter used as a conversation piece (or to trash talk the living hell out of anyone cheering for a team that is not Blue and White in colour! LOL)

So, why did I do this? Many MANY apps exist on the net to do this, officepools.com, Yahoo sports, and ESPN/TSN are just three that popped in my head. To be honest, I did it for a few reasons. One – I live in salesforce.com’s applications and actually love what I do. The idea of logging into a separate app in salesforce to update a hockey pool is not a bad idea for me – I’ve created little apps for my son to keep track of his beyblades, organize the hot lunch and milk programs at my kids’ school or manage a highland dance competition, so tracking a hockey pool wasn’t a far stretch. Second, I hope that when 14 free seconds of time come up sometime between now and June (when hockey ends) I could use this to play and learn a bit more about Apex triggers and Visualforce. Right now, that’s not happening (which is ok, as I manually update the stats every morning or second morning … I am a hockey fiend so the 15 minutes isn’t too bad), but I am hoping that soon I will be able to play more.

It’s been fun, and will keep you up to date with any progress – I’d like to add some triggers to automate score updating (right now I update all the scores, then use LexiLoader to update all the player selections to 0 so a formula runs), and start to create a VF page that is accessible online so people who are in the pool (and those just interested in seeing the ridiculousness of it all) have an easy place to go – right now we just log into the salesforce org, but it’d be great just to have an URL where you could quickly look at the dashboards, or how each team is doing! I think it’s a really cool showing of how CRM apps can help people out who really don’t have C’s (not your typical sales company) quickly and efficiently. You tell me though…

Everyone enjoy their weekend, and Go Leafs Go! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go add in Kessel’s points to the CloudPool!

Timesaver #7 – Forcing Opportunities During Lead Conversion

Salesforce, Time Savers 3 Responses »

Sep 162011

A couple of days ago, a good friend and fellow MVP, Becka who is also known as @SFDC_Nerd, put out a tweet using the AskForce hashtag. It was as follows:

“Any way to have a trigger fire before lead convert? Trying to force oppty creation on all leads. #askforce (yeah, I’m back to this again)”. Now, a few things on this tweet – first, I gathered from the tweet that she had been working on this issue for some time, and I had likely missed the first call for help due to an extremely noisy twitter stream. Secondly, I had a time saving validation rule for that.

To ensure that users HAVE to create an opportunity when converting a lead, you need to add a validation rule. The rule is as follows:

AND(IsConverted=true, ConvertedOpportunityId=”", ISPICKVAL(Status, “Qualified”))

What this validation does is check to see if the lead is being converted (IsConverted=true), there is no opportunity created (ConvertedOpportunityId=”") and that the status is set to qualified (the standard status for converted leads). As a converted lead without an opportunity would meet this requirement, and the rule would be equal to true (all three requirements are met), the the validation would kick in, and you would not be able to convert. I would highly recommend setting the error to the top of the page, and adding in a error message stating that an opportunity is required to convert.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

Salesforce 2 Responses »

Sep 022011

So, I sit here in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis, killing time before my red eye flight takes off from SFO. Another Dreamforce has come and gone, and once again salesforce.com put on an amazing show. From the Monday night pre-dreamforce meet ups and greet ups right to this morning’s final sessions, Dreamforce was a business conference masked as a rock concert festival for 45,000 people…

So, what were my personal highlights for the conference this year? Here are my top five, while I sit and await my flight home.

1) The Community Conference, a keynote and a set of sessions for the salesforce community and/or ‘new to’ attendee was an amazing success on Tuesday morning. The keynote was standing room only, as the present and future of the salesforce community was laid out, and eight community members were honoured by being named as the Summer ’11 MVP’s. Along with the keynote, two hours of breakout sessions centred around how the community works, how to get the most out of dreamforce and even some ‘Answers Live’, where people could come with their questions they’d typically post on the community site and have them answered right then and there. If you use salesforce, and are asking ‘What community???’, I’d recommend you visit the salesforce community and see what it’s all about.

2) The layout for the keynotes this year was new and worked very well. Marc Benioff has a penchant of wandering while he speaks, and the new setup up, fanning out almost like orchestral seating made the session much more intimate than last year’s setup, allowing more people to be closer, and possibly have Mr. Benioff wander by. And I’d be remiss to say I was excited to have a received seat, an honour given to me as an MVP (I even got to shake Marc’s hand during the show). But much more important than the layout or my plush seat placement was the new features announced. Salesforce’s main focus was ‘Social Enterprise’, and it’s main goals to tie salesforce into the social data of external applications such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as new social features of Salesforce Chatter. Many new features extending the social enterprise were announced, as well as mention of many other features that were quietly announced via the slide deck being shown. I will post a blog about this one point early next week, after all of the dust settles and my brain (and body) are not exhausted.

3) The keynote closing speech with Google chairman Eric Schmidt was absolutely wonderful. This now ranks second in my Dreamforce keynotes with industry or world leaders (the talk given by Cisco CEO John Chalmers still resonates with me- one of the few life changing moments I have had via speech). The setup was similar as to previous keynote in the same vein, with two chairs for Benioff’s and his guest in a fireside chat format. However, Mr. Schmidt’s candor, openness, analysis and guidance for the future and his clarity and intelligence were breathtaking. Don’t take my word for it? The salesforce channel on YouTube now has it up – you can watch (or repeat) the discussion by searching ‘Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote’ on YouTube – I will post a link when not running on simple wifi, as I work off…

4) My new iPad. I did not own an iPad prior to my departure to Dreamforce, and I am heading home with one. What company had the contest? I do believe it was Merced Systems, but that is not the important part. The part that is important is that I won. an. iPad. Very, very happy about that!

5) Finally, the new layout for the Birds of a Feather luncheons was a great step in the right direction. Birds of a Feather (BoaF) have been run for some years now, but in previous years, you chose a role on registration, and you sat with people in similar roles. This year, a chatter group was created where people could post their desired topics, and based off of votes and repeats, the BoaF table topics were chosen. When you got to the BoaF session, a resource from either salesforce.com or community would moderate the discussion. Moderating when I could, I found the new setup with topics instead of roles to be an excellent improvement as well as a hit with the crowd.

So there are my five highlights of Dreamforce from my eyes, as blurry and tired as they are. And while I had an absolute blast this year, as the song (and blog title says), “it’s time I had some time alone”. Taking the redeye back to my lovely wife and children, going to enjoy a few days recharging the batteries and see my hooligans off to school before work beckons on Tuesday. Next week, I will be doing blog posts on the new, upcoming features of the Winter ’12 edition of Salesforce, as well as one on ideas I have on how to make the already awesome Dreamforce even more awesome. Until then, safe travels and rest to all Dreamforce attendees, and enjoy the Labour Day long weekend.

When Something Stands For Nothing

Salesforce 1 Response »

Aug 212011

So, while listening to the new Headstones song (BINTHISWAYFORYEARS…check it out!) I was also looking through twitter, when yet another #SFDCrevealed tweet came across my stream.

Now, those who know me understand that I am not a big fan of the “attack ad”, or using any method of advertisement that boosts your service/product through the belittlement or trashing of a competitor’s service or product. Think of Volkswagen – they have made some pretty good (and a few crappy) cars, but their ads are ever so impressive. They have an aura to them – funny, sophisticated, different. And because of that, they stand out. Everyone remembers The Force ad from last year’s Super Bowl, or the No Bathroom Stops TDI commercial currently playing every ten minutes on my TV (and making me chuckle each time). What’s missing? Not one comment about any other car….ever. And I truly wish other companies would start to follow suit. However….not the reason for this post.

In their tweet, @MSDynamicsCRM makes mention of the SLA issue, and the fact that salesforce.com has none. So, I thought I would go searching and look for the MS CRM SLA. I found this site, which outlined the ‘financially backed’ SLA. And kudos to Microsoft for doing so – it’s a great marketing campaign to put money behind your uptime. But this led me to reading down further, to the exclusions. Section D lays these out, and they are the following:

D. Exclusions

1.       Downtime does not include:

a.       The period of time when the Service is not available as a result of Scheduled Downtime; or

b.      The following performance or availability issues that may affect the Service:

i.         Due to factors outside Microsoft’s reasonable control;

ii.         Related to add-on features for the Service, including, but not limited to Internet Marketing or Reporting Services;

iii.         That resulted from Customer’s or third party hardware, software or services;

iv.         That resulted from actions or inactions of Customer or third parties;

v.         That resulted from actions or inactions by Customer or Customer’s employees, agents, contractors, or vendors, or anyone gaining access to Microsoft’s network by means of Customer’s passwords or equipment.

vi.         That were caused by Customer’s use of the Service after Microsoft advised Customer to modify its use of the Service, if Customer did not modify its use as advised;

vii.         Intermittent periods of Downtime that are ten minutes or less in duration; or

viii.         Through Customer’s use of beta, trial offers, early access programs and/or demos (as determined by Microsoft).

Let’s look at these in detail. First point is a given – if it’s scheduled, it is not really downtime. But when is the downtime scheduled? I have yet to find a site where Microsoft keeps track of the current status of their online servers for MSCRM or their scheduled downtime. Looking at the next eight points though, I am hard pressed to think of a scenario where an outage would not fall under one of these eight processes?

Did weather or such cause the outage? Not covered (which is expected and understood, but also raises the question of how many data centres does Microsoft have for their MSCRM application – Salesforce has five I know of, all highly secure and redundant for disaster recovery).
Did an add-on feature cause the issue? When looking at their add-ons, to me it is similar to salesforce.com saying “The outage was caused by reporting/marketing within salesforce natively. Sorry”. So, unless it can be unequivocally proven that your system has no add-ons that could have caused the issue, the downtime is excluded.
The third point makes me laugh – hardware. Tee hee…
Points 4 through 6 to me, mean that if there is something you are required to do and you missed it, you are SOL when it comes to a financial recovery attempts.
Downtime that is less than ten minutes in duration doesn’t count. So, if an incident is eight minutes, the server comes back up and then crashes again, is it a separate downtime count? Let’s also remember that in a month of 31 days, 99.9% uptime includes an allowance of 40 minutes, and that doesn’t include any ‘scheduled maintenance’ time.
The final point I’ll just leave be.

When looking at salesforce.com’s history, which you can all view on the Salesforce Trust site, you can view the history of uptime for each and every server. Taking a look at the incidents, the one outage for one server was 7 minutes, and the others were intermittent login issues. These intermittent issues (all quickly solved by the way, and not long in duration) would have been covered under the exclusions list offered by Microsoft. In fact, the last major outage I remember with salesforce.com (knock on wood) was January and March of 2010, and these were of durations of just over 60 minutes and 30 minutes. Depending on the amount of scheduled downtime, the January 2010 may have still fit under the 99.9% uptime rule, and the March outage definitely would have still given 99.9% uptime.

Yes, Microsoft has done a wonderful thing for their clients with their financially backed SLA. Is it all encompassing or give them an advantage over salesforce.com? Well, as we have just walked through, I don’t believe so – it makes for wonderful marketing and a great paper for their customers if they have a large outage that falls through the cracks of the exclusion, but it is not a major point of contention in the difference between the two applications. All this, and it is time to answer the question @MSDynamicsCRM asked – is a trust dashboard enough? To me, yes. Yes, it is.

Timesaver # 6 – Measuring Time between Lead Creation and Opportunity Close

Salesforce, Time Savers 2 Responses »

Jul 182011

One interesting question came up a month or so ago on the Salesforce Success Community page, and it reminded me of some customizations I have done for some clients in the past. And the time saver centres around measuring the time between a lead creation (first touch) and opportunity close.

With salesforce.com native, you can measure how long a lead was a lead until it was converted, and how long an opportunity was open before it closed. But, for those opportunities that came directly from a lead, to determine the time from lead creation to opportunity close requires a couple of different reports to be merged outside of Salesforce. The good news is, with two custom fields, you can fix this issue! To do this:

1. Create a custom date field on the lead object called Lead Creation Date, and set the default value to Today(). (I know this is a redundant field from the native Created Date field, but bear with me…). Also, remember that this will not automatically set for the leads that exist already. To fix this situation, run the Data Loader (or Excel Connector if you are on Professional Edition) and do an export on Lead ID, CreatedDate, and Lead_Creation_Date__c, then simply update by setting Lead_Creation_Date__c to the original CreatedDate.

2. Create a custom date field on the opportunity object called Lead Creation Date.

3. Back on the Leads object, click the Map Lead Fields button on the Lead Custom Fields section, and set the Lead.Lead Creation Date field to write to the Opportunity.Lead Creation Date field, and save.

What this will do is when a lead is converted AND an opportunity is opened, the opportunity custom field will now be populated with the original lead creation date. From this, you can:

create formula fields, determining the number of days open since lead creation
create formula fields, determining the pre-opportunity stage length of time (it took x days for this lead to convert into an opportunity)
create workflow rules or email alerts on opportunities that had a lead opened more than x days or months ago (to track stale opps)
create reports and dashboards on the opportunity cycle from lead creation (pre-opportunity) to opportunity close, from one report.

As always, hope this helps and hope you are having a great summer!

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