Starbucks.com is down right now. We don’t know the nature of the outage, however, their force.com powered Ideas site is still up! Just another good reason to host content at both your corporate site and a force.com powered one.
Here’s the proof:
And
Salesforce.com will be performing some longer than usual maintenance on the NA3 server on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 from 7:00pm PST to Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 3:00am PST. Typically these long windows mean some type of hardware maintenance, so this probably is unrelated to the Spring ‘10 release.
As always you can see all upcoming maintenance windows at http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ (ironically, this maintenance window is not currently shown on the page due to the long list of upcoming maintenance windows for the Spring ‘10 release).
If you didn’t already spend the whole weekend playing with Spring ‘10 features in your sandbox then you’re a few days behind us. This past Friday night, salesforce.com upgraded sandbox orgs on the cs0, cs2, and cs3 servers.
Visit the ideaExchange for the list of new features.
Click here to view the entire sandbox upgrade schedule.
What’s your favorite new feature?
If you visit salesforce.com/events you may be disappointed by the lack of events going on in North America right now. It’s not even a search option! Fortunately, salesforce.com/community has its own events page which does have a list of web-based events that do occur during North American business hours. One of which is coming up next week and sounds perfect for beginner to intermediate admins struggling with data issues. The webinar is being given by two salesforce.com employees and doesn’t mention any partners, so it should be a little less biased than a Dreamforce session.
For more details visit salesforce.com/community and click on the events link in the sidebar
Salesforce.com sent out the below notice last night about a change to the custom object creation process in the Spring ‘10 release. The basic change is that from now on when you create a new custom object, the default permissions for all profiles will be to not have access to that object (as opposed to the current behavior which is to have complete access).
Overall, this seems like a really trivial change that doesn’t do much. Afterall, when you create a custom object, you’re presented with a screen listing all profiles and the access you want to give them. But wait, there’s more. The notice goes on to say that the ability to modify security persmissions for custom objects will not exist on standard profiles. This means that the next time you create a custom object, you will have to ensure that all of your users (who need access to it) are assigned to a custom profile and not a standard one. Again, not that big a deal since there’s already a function to create a custom profile based on a standard profile.
This change seems to be oriented toward larger enterprise customers who have many profiles and security requirements. It will save them time and help meet their security requirements when creating new custom objects. For the rest of us, it’s just a few more clicks than we used to make.
Here’s the notice in case you didn’t get it emailed to you:
Dear Administrator,
At salesforce.com, trust is our top priority, and it is our goal to ensure that any changes we make have a minimal impact on your business processes. You are receiving this email because we have identified you as a system administrator of a Salesforce organization that may be affected by a change to Custom Object permissions in the Spring ’10 release.
What is the change?
In Spring ‘10, when you create a new custom object, the “Read,” “Create,” “Edit,” “Delete,” “View All,” and “Modify All” permissions for that object will be disabled by default. After the Spring ’10 release, you must specify which users should get access to custom objects.
Note: You can only change the object permissions for custom profiles, not standard profiles. As a result, users with standard profiles (except System Administrator) will not be able to access custom objects created after the Spring ’10 release.
How will this change impact me?
If you have users assigned to standard profiles, clone these profiles and reassign your users to the newly created profiles. Then, when you create a new custom object, you will edit the user profiles to enable object permissions. Additionally, you can use enhanced profile management to edit multiple profiles at once.
Note: For custom objects created before the Spring ’10 release, access to these objects will not change. Therefore, standard profiles will continue to have access to custom objects created prior to the Spring ’10 release.
When is this change taking place?
This change will be made with the Spring ‘10 release. Please check http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/#maint to understand when your instance will be upgraded.
How can I get more information?
Customer Support works in conjunction with our Technology & Products team and is equipped to answer your questions.
Best regards,
-salesforce.com Customer Support
Salesforce.com is holding a webinar titled “Beyond virtualization: revolutionizing application design” on January 28, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. PT. David Claiborne and Peter Coffee will be speaking. Details below.
For all its benefits, virtualization doesn’t move beyond the boundaries of traditional IT data “silos.” But forward-looking CIOs and developers are going much further, by building new highly-connected systems in the cloud.
Learn about the application design revolution that’s unleashing tremendous business value—join us for this next Cloud Computing Uncovered Webinar, and discover:
And don’t miss Peter Coffee’s monthly mythbuster: “Is virtualization the key to the cloud?” Discover the advantages of making your next IT initiative truly new vs. merely more efficient.
Register now
Suzanne Vera at kherize5 has a great post today about what you can do to keep your customers loyal. Salesforce.com is a leader in this arena and they definitely have followed her advise for years. Has the formula worked for you? Let us know in the comments what you do to keep your best customers/donors coming back.
Disney has started a “Give a day. Get a Disney day” program which rewards you for volunteering at nonprofits with tickets to one of their resorts.
This is a great idea and extremely generous of Disney. Of course few people visit a Disney resort alone and it’s hard to spend the day there without making additional purchases, so I’m sure they wont lose any money in the process, but the there’s nothing wrong with that.
The program is actually powered by the HandsOn Network, a volunteer coordinating organization. If you don’t already encourage your employees to volunteer, then this is an easy way to start. There are thousands of volunteer opportunities across the country and for different types of causes.
You can find out more information about this program on their website http://disneyparks.disney.go.com
There’s a great post by Alex Lucas at CallingShotgun.net about what companies can do to make their API’s more developer friendly. Salesforce.com stands well against the list, take a look:
I received an email today from salesforce.com with the following subject: “Basic Loyality Support Survey”. I don’t know what “Loyality” means and neither does dictionary.com. I assume they meant “Loyalty”, since that would make more sense.
The interesting part of the email was that the survey is done using clicktools. At this point these surveys could be done natively using force.com sites, but it’s nice to see that Salesforce isn’t cutting off business to their partners just because they have introduced new features that surpass them.
How do you run your surveys, let us know in the comments?