Salesforce.com’s support of IE6

As of Q1 2011 IE6 support will shift to maintenance mode and will no longer receive full support from Salesforce.com. What does that mean? Simply put, Salesforce.com functionality available prior to the Spring ‘10 release will function and will receive limited support. New functionality made available with the Spring ‘10 release such as…

1. New UI theme
2. Answers
3. Chatter (note this is a limited release)

…will not be supported in IE6.

The reasons why IE6 is not going to be supported by Salesforce.com follows:

1. Security vulnerabilities
2. Browser speed / performance
3. The standards used to develop the browser limit the ability to develop ‘rich internet’ applications

Salesforce.com recommends that customers migrate off of IE6 by the end of 2010. Customers will not be cut off from using Salesforce.com if they cannot migrate browsers by that time although (as detailed above) they will not be able to utilize new functionality moving forward.

Integrating Clouds: Amazon Web Services and CRM

“Cloud this” and “cloud that” is all that seems to be uttered these days when it comes to business applications and their supporting infrastructure. I would argue for good reason. Cloud based platforms can enable IT resources to focus more on adding value to the business they support (for example – developing system / process enhancements) instead of focusing on keeping the preverbal IT ‘lights on’ by maintaining servers and the software that the business applications run on. Furthermore, cloud based platforms can free up dollars that would be spent on traditional IT functions (servers / utilities (power, cooling) / maintenance of hardware & software…) enabling the business to invest those dollars elsewhere.

An example of integrating two cloud based platforms can be demonstrated by leveraging cloud based CRM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver an on-demand CRM integration.

AWS: Cloud Based Computing

I am going to assume that you are already familiar with cloud based CRM and thus will not detail it here. That said, simply put, AWS is a cloud based web services platform. The platform exposes several services that make cloud based computing and integration possible. For our example we will make use of the following AWS services (note that each service listed below carries its own charge):

1. Machine Instance (AMI): the server image that contains the integration design
2. Data Transfer: volume of data transferred during a process
3. S3 Storage: storage of the AMI and any relevant data
4. Elastic IP Addressing: reservation of a static IP address for your AMI

The cost model presented by AWS is appealing. Add to that that the services can be activated on-demand adds to the beauty of leveraging AWS. In other words, it is possible to spin up and shut down the AMI (read server) on demand. Being the AMI is charged based on up time you are only paying for the actual time a process is run and not paying for the time the process is idle.

Cloud Integration: Real World Experience

What I detail above is based on actual experience. We have been leveraging AWS to house CRM integrations for clients that:

1. Delivers selected CRM data to the client’s data warehouse
2. Cleanses unneeded data from the client’s CRM database

The integration I mention is based on this model. Note that the ‘Integration Engine’ referenced in the model is stored on and leverages AWS.

Since moving this process to the cloud our clients have saved time and expense on the maintenance and utility cost of housing an integration server on-site.

Granted, each company is different and due diligence (cost & volume analysis, business & IT analysis) needs to be done before moving integrations to the cloud. In the right situations, it has been a rewarding proposition for our clients.

Dreamforce 2009: Days Two & Three Highlights

As in most conferences, the big exiting things are divulged in day one. Despite that, days two and three were still packed with over a hundred breakout sessions, a keynote with Marc Benioff (where among other things he announced a $2 million donation to the University of California San Francisco for a new children’s hospital) and a much-anticipated keynote with retired US General Colin Powell.

Days two and three dove deeper into the newly announced Collaboration Cloud with demonstrations and examples of Chatter. While the initial Chatter announcement was met with some disappointment by much of the attending public, further demonstrations showed more promise in how Chatter could be used to solve real problems and raise awareness of important happenings inside your business.

While DCS will delve more deeply into Chatter in future blog entries, a few simple examples where Chatter might be useful to you could be:

• Using the status updates to quickly know where your coworkers are and what they’re working on (and whether they need on something NOW!)
• Implementation of Chatter alerts that notify you that your partner has logged in to the partner portal and modified the stage and close data of a large opportunity you were working on together
• Create a group where members of your sales team can subscribe to and facilitate idea sharing on how to succeed in winning against your competitors
• Notification from your manufacturing system that the delivery of an important product to a key customer has been delayed due to a problem with a component

While these examples are ideas that could be solved using alerts or workflow today, the main difference is the context where this information is presented. Today, most companies overuse email as the delivery mechanism for this type of information, leading to important messages getting lost in the static of the Inbox. Chatter changes that by moving this information into a news feed inside of salesforce.com while also relating the news feed to the object (contact, opportunity, custom object) where it originated. Additionally, Chatter alerts can be generated by happenings both inside and outside of salesforce.com.

Aside from Chatter, many other ideas and concepts were covered in the sessions. While far too many to cover them all here, some of the things that were discussed that might be of interest to you include:

• A new salesforce.com user interface, coming in 2010, that features a more Facebook-like skin with useful reorganizations of controls to be more intuitive and easier to use. Also, the inclusion of a Facebook-like news feed is prominently featured.
• The recently released bulk API allows you to better accommodate integrations to systems with hundreds of thousands or millions of records. Handled asynchronously, not only does the system allow for much higher load limits (5 million records per rolling 24 hours) but also allows integrations to perform multiple tasks at once rather than keeping tasks in a single-file line.
• The newly previewed Apex scheduler (currently in limited preview) which will allow you to create tasks (similar to cron jobs in UNIX parlance) to kick off at scheduled times of the day

Overall, another successful conference! Demand Chain Systems has been attending Dreamforce from the very beginning and always uses the event as an incubator to conceive new ideas that will better solve your business problems.

We welcome the opportunity to talk with you at more length about the ideas and topics discussed at Dreamforce! Whether you weren’t able to attend or you just couldn’t make it to all the sessions you wanted to, please let us know if we can help!

Dreamforce 2009: Day One Highlights

If there were any questions as to whether the economy was going to affect this year’s Dreamforce conference, wonder no more. The answer is a resounding ‘No’. Long lines, people everywhere and music blaring from every speaker welcomed every one of the almost 19,000 attendees to day one of the conference. The day started with a keynote session, delivered by Marc Benihoff and several Salesforce.com executives then transitioned into a handful of breakout sessions, separated by track and areas of interest. Here are some items we picked up on day one:

• Much discussion was dedicated to the next generation of salesforce.com’s sales related application, dubbed Sales Cloud2. Some functionality has been delivered while some is still coming, Sales Cloud2 touts many enhancements including:
  • - A new drag and drop report builder with sample data to more quickly arrive at the report design you desire
  • - Built-in ability to generate and send quotes from the opportunity
  • - The ability to package up and deliver documents directly to customers without sending attachments in email
  • - The ability to suggest meeting times and schedule meetings easily across organizations
  • - The Content library product is now included as part of the standard product to keep sales presentations and collateral easily organized
• Similar to the Sales Cloud, there are many new enhancements for the next version of the customer service side of the application, called Service Cloud2. Among them:
  • - Salesforce for Twitter, the ability to capture Tweets and automatically create cases
  • - Knowledge as a Service, the ability to share knowledgebase to salesforce.com users as well as users on the web and users using search engines.
  • - The ability to have customers ask questions, have experts answer them and then leverage the internet community to vote on the best answers
• Aside from the Sales and Service Cloud enhancements, the big news was the creation of a new cloud, called the Collaboration Cloud. Slated to be available in early 2010, this is salesforce.com’s newest initiative and the first offering is called Salesforce.com Chatter.
• - Chatter borrows heavily from the Facebook and Twitter platforms and allows users to subscribe to get updates on enterprise data that they care about. All salesforce.com native and custom objects can generate real-time feed updates, more visibility to important information allowing for better business decisions.

Salesforce.com Annual Conference - Dreamforce 2009

Demand Chain Systems is attending Salesforce.com’s annual conference again this year and will be posting items we think are valuable to our customers..

While this conference is just one of the many events held by CRM vendors, Dreamforce is more than just a CRM conference and is a forum for cloud computing in general. Stay tuned, day one is just starting!

Cloud computing 101...

Ever have your eye's glaze over when you hear the words "Cloud Computing" or all your data is in the "Cloud"? I stumbled upon this video today at CNN.com which does a good (and humorous)job of answering the question..."What is Cloud Computing?"

Get more value from your CRM system and increase sales without spending an arm and a leg

It's no secret that many companies are unhappy with the value they're getting out of their CRM systems. One of the chief complaints we hear is that sales teams resist their adoption. Even when sales reps do use CRM daily, it doesn't seem to have much impact on their productivity. Sales managers can easily track their time and activities, but are sales reps actually selling more? Often, the answer is "no." And who gets the blame? The CRM system.

So what to do? Start all over with a new system? Overhaul your current system? Not many companies in today's economy can afford such choices. But don't give up on your CRM system. There are numerous things you can do right now to get more value from it, and many can be implemented quickly at a relatively low cost.

Make it sales-friendly

Sales teams' resistance to CRM technology shouldn't be so surprising. If sales reps perceive your system as something that just tracks their time and activities for the convenience of sales managers—like Big Brother looking over their shoulders—and doesn’t actually help them sell better, they’ll naturally be wary of it.

The best CRM implementations are sales-focused rather than management-focused. They give sales reps all the data they need to maximize sales calls or other customer interactions. Take a hard look at your system. Is it primarily a management tool used to collect data and track resources? Or is it a tool that gathers every bit of information about prospects and customers in your financials and other systems and presents this information to sales reps in the field as they plan their week and prioritize their activities?

You likely already have this information. But if you keep it locked away in accounting or transactional databases and don’t push it out to sales rep in the field through your CRM system—often a feature of CRM technology that isn’t enabled—you’re missing out on what may be the most powerful capability of the system. Integrations between CRM and financial systems vary in their complexity and cost, but many tools are available to make this possible without a massive development effort.

Take advantage of add-on tools

Leading CRM systems have legions of independent application developers and partners who have developed hundreds value-enhancing tools and add-on applications. Consider, for example, voice-to-text applications. With this technology, calls, voice memos and voicemail flow into CRM systems, eliminating manual typing updates and allowing sales reps to better capture and share customer information. There are literally hundreds of valuable add-ons like this that range in price from free to several thousand dollars (see the links below for examples). If you haven’t checked out what’s available, you’re probably missing out on one of the easiest ways to add value to your CRM system.

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/home
http://crm.dynamics.com/partners/find-a-partner.aspx
http://saleslogix.qisys.com/saleslogix_addons

Don’t forget data quality and integrity

Nothing undermines the value of a CRM system more than bad data—duplicate, out of date or just plain inaccurate. Sales reps won't trust the system, and your administrative burden increases. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available that can help keep your CRM database clean. Typically, these are administrative toolkits for a variety of data quality needs, including merging duplicate records, batch normalization, duplicate prevention, and comparing external data to data in CRM databases. Costs vary, but often they are as little as $50 per user per year, a small price compared to the loss of confidence that dirty data causes.

Streamline through workflow

If you're not using the customizable workflows built into most CRM systems, functionality you've already paid for, you're missing out on a zero-cost way to get more value from your CRM investment.

Built-in CRM workflows can often eliminate 90 percent of repetitive tasks—things people do every day in the same way. But many organizations don’t take advantage of CRM workflows because they implement the basic features and think they’re done. Other organizations don’t have the money and a long-term strategy to develop more advanced CRM features after their initial implementation. Don’t fall into either of these traps. You’ll lose an easy opportunity to get more value from your CRM system.

Stay informed

Did you know that some organizations are using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as part of their CRM strategies? It may be a little premature to discuss the value of these sites as sales tools in the general market, but the phenomenon helps illustrate a point. CRM is a journey, not a destination, and if the system you have in place a year or two from now only does the same thing it's currently doing, you’re probably never going to get the maximum value from your investment. That's why it’s important to pay attention to what's happening in the evolving CRM marketplace. One good way to do this is to stay in regular touch with an implementation partner like DCS. It's our job to pay attention to what's happening in the marketplace, and we're more than happy to share this knowledge with you.