The new Force.com IDE for Spring ’09 is now available for Eclipse. Eclipse 3.4 is still not supported so be sure you’re using version 3.2.2, 3.3.1.1, or 3.3.2. The biggest enhancement in my mind is Code Assistance which includes code completion, error parsing as you type, and class outlines. The easiest way to upgrade is to use the software updates feature in Eclipse.
You can see the release notes here. Enjoy!
It’s been nearly 2 years since we first released our Web-to-Case Asst for AppExchange. The initial product was designed to reduce the number of steps it takes for a call center employee to reply to a Web-to-Case submission in salesforce.com. Web-to-Case asst did this by automatically searching salesforce.com for Contact records that match the name and phone number submitted to your web form, then relating the Case record to the appropriate contact. If no contact was found, it created one for you and related the Case record to the new Contact. All this happened automatically as soon as your employee viewed that Case in salesforce.com. Well, after hundreds of installations and rave reviews, MK Partners is happy to announce a major upgrade to the product.
Web-to-Case Asst 2.0 has been rewritten from the ground up to utilize the Force.com’s Apex programming language. All the original functionality is still included, but Apex enables the tool to run every time a Web-to-Case is submitted into salesforce.com, without the need for a user to open that case record. The upgrade has also enabled us to provide our customers with more control over how the tool works. Customers can now choose from four different criteria to search for matching Contacts:
Future enhancements are already in the works to enable you to search through Leads and control which objects get automatically created. The biggest improvement though is that Web-to-Case Asst 2.0 customers now receive free phone and email support from MK Partners to help them setup and maintain the tool.
Web-to-Case Asst 2.0 has already been uploaded to the salesforce.com AppExchange, but has not been officially released yet. In the meantime though, we’re offering a
free 60-day trial to our loyal blog readers. (Click here for Sandbox Installation)
Here’s a quick tip:
The Force.com IDE allows you to deploy reports from one salesforce.com org to another. This is very useful if you’re a consultant like us, but also if you test changes in your sandbox before putting them into production. When it comes to Reports, you can only migrate reports from custom folders. This means you can NOT deploy reports that are stored in the Unfiled Public Reports or My Custom Reports folders.
Besides deploying reports, you can also modify reports, but it might just be easier to do it from within salesforce.com. One additional benefit to working with Reports this way is that you can index these files in GoogleDesktop or any other desktop search engine and then find which Reports reference a specific field or value before making a change. This is really useful when you have filters on RecordType names and want to change these names to fit a new naming convention.