So, those who know me know that my love of what I do for a living is superseded likely only by my love of hockey (of course my wife and kids come first for everything….).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!
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?