MK Partners Archive for May, 2008

I’m sometimes embarrassed to admit it, but I don’t have a blackberry. I prefer touch screen devices, but I don’t have an iPhone either (it’s not available on Verizon). So, even though I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft, I do use a Windows Mobile based device. Until recently, I had a great system for keeping my information in sync. I synchronized Salesforce with Outlook, Outlook with Windows Mobile, Outlook with Plaxo, and Plaxo with Google Calendar. It actually worked and I didn’t have any weird duplication issues.

When I upgraded to Office 2007, everything took a turn for the worse. Outlook was so slow that I had to stop using it. Luckily, we use Google Apps, so I could access my calendar (and email) via the web. It’s been about a month now that I’ve been using Google Apps as my primary calendar client and I love it. It’s starts faster, has better search, and has made me more productive on the email front. There’s just two problems, it’s not in sync with my phone or with Salesforce.

After weeks of scouring the web, we finally have a working solution! Thanks to Appirio Calendar Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps I can now sync my Salesforce calendar with my Google Apps calendar. And thanks to NuevaSync I can now sync my Google Calendar with my Windows Mobile calendar!

No more missed appointments or dialing into calls that were postponed. Now, I just need a way to sync my Tasks between Salesforce and Remember the Milk and a way to sync my Contacts between Salesforce and my Phone!

Special thanks to tipsfor.us for pointing me to NuevaSync.

One of our clients uses Salesforce to manage their call center. They really wanted a way to display their “Open Cases” view on the Home Tab. In the past, we’ve accomplished this by recreating the view in an s-Control. The problem with that is changes made to the fields displayed in the view on the Cases tab would not be reflected in the s-Control, so it’s not ideal for a dynamic organization.

The consultants at MK Partners put their heads together and came up with a simple yet dynamic solution. We leveraged a Custom HTML Component, an iFrame, and the Console functionality already in Salesforce to allow you to display an existing custom view on the Home Tab. Here’s how we did it:

1. Enable the Console Setup | Customize | Console
2. Create a new Console Layout
3. Add the object whose Custom View you want to use to your new Console Layout
4. Edit your Console Layout Assignment and make sure all your profiles have access to your Console Layout
5. Go to the Console Tab
6. Select the Object and then View you want to add to your Home Tab
7. Right-click anywhere in your View and select This Frame | Show Only This Frame*
8. Copy the URL for the Frame
9. Create a new Home Page Component Setup | Customize | Home | Home Page Component
10. Name it, select the HTML Area type, and click Next
11. Check the Show HTML checkbo
12. Paste the following into the box, replacing [INSERT URL HERE] with the URL from step 8:
<IFRAME src=”[INSERT URL HERE]” frameBorder=0 width=”100%” height=”204″></IFRAME>

13. Save your Component and add it to your Home Page Layout
* This function is available in Firefox

Here’s what it looks like:

Some Tips:

* Working with iFrames in HTML components is a pain because you can’t edit them
(the iFrame gets rendered instead of the code being displayed) you’ll
have to delete it and recreate it if you want to make any changes.
* Hyperlinks for fields in the Custom View will open in the iFrame unless you create Formula Fields with the “_top” attribute.