2009 April » News from the Basement...

Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon…

Apr 152009

Wow – as I look at the calendar today, I realize the importance of the 15th of April… Today, xLerate turns one year old. And with that, I feel very proud. Looking at numbers and statistics (ah, how we love and loathe them all at the same time) people passed on to me when I first started down this venture, the numbers were astonishingly horrific. Thanks to an article in Entrepreneur Weekly, it was stated that 70 to 80 percent of all small businesses fail within the first year. (I would like to add that this magazine is no longer in publication as of today…). That is a massive number, albeit one that I always thought was slightly inflated…

Looking back over the year, I am extremely proud of what has been accomplished. We have been able to :

assist over 40 companies with their Salesforce.com implementations, with a focus on the small to medium business sector.
use our experience and expertise with the application to act as advocates in the Ottawa area through the user group and through emails/phone calls from people using the system and just wanting to ask a quick question.
without much in the way of a marketing budget, been able to piece together a web presence, business collateral and local reputation for getting a quality job done for our clients.

Of course, making enough revenue to pay the bills, and continue to plan for the future also helps, and for that I thank my clientelle.

What’s next? Well, those who know me will let you know that I have a hard time keeping still. And this is the main drive for this year at xLerate. Over the next twelve months, planned actions will occur, to assist xLerate in bringing more quality to both our own clients and Salesforce.com users globally, as well as hopefully allow us as owners, professionals and people to grow as well.

As a first step, xLerate has applied for, and been accepted as a member of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, or OCRI as it is known locally. We hope that this membership will increase our visibility in the local business community, and personally, I hope to be able to learn much from executives who have successfully paved their own successes previously. We also will tie our commitment to the Salesforce Foundation through activities to charities that are tied to the Ottawa area (such as OttawaReads).

Of course, other plans are ‘perculating’ … as things become a reality, I will be sure to share them here! Until then, thank you to all of our clients, colleagues, friends and most importantly my wife Stephanie and kids for making this first year such a resolute success!

Two Updates From Salesforce.com

Salesforce 1 Response »

Apr 052009

So, with the beginning of April comes a little spring cleaning from Salesforce.com. Received a couple of emails around some enhancements to the Salesforce application, one incorporated now, and another released on Monday, April 6.

1. – Changes to Email detail page in Customer and Partner Portal

Currently, there is no differentiation between the email message detail page, whether viewed through Salesforce.com or the Customer or Partner Portal. To fix this, Salesforce.com set the default on the email related list to be off. IF you wish for your clients or partners to have access to all emails through a case in one of the portal applications, simply edit your page layout and add the email related list. You can get here by clicking Setup | App Setup | Customize| Cases | Page Layouts.

2. Opportunity Save Change – affecting Workflow Rules and Triggers

With the Spring’09 edition of Salesforce.com, a change in the application “ensures that standard and custom opportunity save logic is triggered when updates are made to the Opportunity, Opportunity Products or Schedules that cause an update to the parent record”. Or, in laymans terms – changes to the products associated with an opportunity, or the revenue or product scheduling finally allow worfklow rules or apex triggers to fire on the parent opportunity record (as if the record was edited!).

This, however, could mean issue with existing workflows or triggers. If your organization uses:

Opportunity/Opportunity Product Custom Validation Rule
Opportunity/Opportunity Product Apex Trigger
Opportunity/Opportunity Product Universally Required Custom Field
Opportunity/Opportunity Product Unique Custom Field
Opportunity/Opportunity Product Workflow Rule (Field Update/Email/Task)

then you may need to reassess the workflow/trigger, so that an endless loop workflow or trigger cycle doesn’t occur (and those are always bad things…). Good news is, Salesforce.com has given you an idea on whether or not your instance of Salesforce is affected or not. The email you receive will let you know whether or not they believe you are affected right under the How will this change impact me? header.

If the email your administrator receives says “Based on our analysis, the change will not affect your application.”, nothing needs to be done. The critical update will be installed and activated. However, if it says “Your organization has a customization that may be affected as a result of this update”, then the critical update will be available but deactivated.

If you need to test out your workflows, I would recommend the following:

Click through to the Critical Updates page (Setup | App Setup | Critical Updates)and read the release notes on the critical update.
If you have EE/UE, use a sandbox to test the existing workflows and triggers to ensure that nothing nefarious occurs when the update and your customizations play together.
If you are on PE, I would work with the administrator and/or developer to ensure that the critical update and workflow or trigger work together.

There is some time before the critical update will be activated for all customers on December 15, 2009. So, hopefully eight months warning is is sufficient time for those affected to make any changes required.