MK Partners Archive for February, 2010

Salesforce.com has two in person events coming up in the next few months. If you’re an experienced Administrator that wants to start building out custom functionality, we recommend the Admin to Hero Roadshow. If you’re brand new and don’t really know where to start then the Cloudforce 2 Essentials is a good place. Here are the details.

Admin to Hero Roadshow: Free Force.com training session
Mar 16, 2010
9am or 1pm
salesforce.com
900 Concar Dr
San Mateo, CA 94402

Cloudforce 2 Essentials: Sacramento
Apr 8, 2010

Hyatt Regency – Sacramento
1209 L Street
Sacramento, CA 95814

MK Partners is proud to announce that we have a new Contact Us page on our website. Our former Contact Us page was a web-to-lead form that submitted new leads directly into our salesforce org. It was very good at what it did, but we really needed a more powerful page.

Our new Contact Us page is powered by force.com Sites and it does much more than just enter leads into salesforce. The new page dynamically changes the questions on the screen based on why you are contacting us. If you’re contacting us for product support it you have to fill out questions related to the issue. If you’re contacting us for sales you have to fill out questions related to your project. But wait, there’s more, not only do the questions on the screen change, but the resulting record in salesforce changes too. Support inquiries turn into cases and sales inquiries turn into leads!

We fell this upgrade is is long overdue for us, not only because we are such proponents of using force.com Sites but also because it improves our efficiency and helps us respond faster to support requests.

If you’re interested in having MK Partners create a custom force.com Sites powered page for your website, fill out our Contact Us form at http://www.mkpartners.com/contact

For those of you that don’t subscribe, here’s a great post from lifehacker.com about some must use Google Settings.

http://lifehacker.com/5470671/top-10-google-settings-you-should-know-about

If you have a business credit card from Mastercard then you should enroll in their Easy Savings program. There’s no fee to join and no obligations once you do. The program is very simple. If you use your card at specific vendors, then you get a percentage of your purchase back in the form of a rebate on your statement.

Vertical Response, the longtime salesforce.com email marketing partner, just joined the list of participating vendors. So if you’re already one of their customers be sure to enroll in the program and then pay the bill with a business Mastercard to get a 10% rebate on your Mastercard statement.

1 minute or less of reading this blog just saved you 10% on your email marketing costs. Beat that Geico!

Last month we wrote about Disney rewarding volunteers with free passes to their parks. Well Southwest Airlines has joined in too. They’ve partnered with Disney to give away a vacation for four to both the essay writer and the amazing volunteer they write about.

Read more about the contest or enter at www.southwest.com

Jesper Joergensen posted some interesting info last week about a new endpoint for the API that is currently available. The new endpoint is https://login.salesforce.com and according to Jesper will reduce your authentication time slightly.

While you’re at it, you may want to update your SOQL queries to take advantage of some of the new Aggregate Functions.

Check out the full post at http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2010/02/new-api-login-endpoint.html

Our partner Arrowpointe has a great post about one of the new features in the Spring ’10 release, Aggregate functions.

The Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) is familiar to anyone with SQL experience, however, it has always lacked some more advanced functions. This gap along with some of the Apex governor limits can sometimes make it very difficult to slice and dice data to meet your needs. The new Aggregate functions are a huge improvement to SOQL and returns grouped query results so you don’t have to loop through them in your code.

Check out more details at www.arrowpointe.com

In the last week both Google and Salesforce.com have made announcements that they will stop supporting IE 6.0 later this year. While the two companies have close ties, this doesn’t appear to be an attack on Microsoft but rather just a push to take advantage of the latest (and future) web technologies which IE 6.0 doesn’t support.

Even though the announcement states that the change will not occur until the end of 2010, some users on IE 6.0 have already reported minor issues since the Spring ’10 release. Our guess is that these issues will be fixed with a maintenance release over the next few weeks, something that is common after a major salesforce.com release.

Over the next year, prior to the official desupport of IE 6.0, Salesforce.com will be releasing some pilot enhancements which require an explicit opt-in. This may explain why the new look and feel demonstrated at Dreamforce is not generally available yet. Salesforce.com has stated that it will be made available after all servers have been upgraded to the Spring release, scheduled to occur this weekend.

What browser do you use? Let us know in the comments.

MK Partners is extremely please that Invisible Children, one of our clients, was recently voted to the top of the Chase Community Giving List. As the winner of the contest. Invisible Children will receive 1 Million dollars from Chase to further their mission.

We worked very closely with Invisible Children last year to implement salesforce.com to manage their inventory and touring educational groups. Their implementation has been extremely effective and was even featured at Dreamforce ’09.

You can learn more about Invisible Children and they great work they do at their website www.invisiblechildren.com.

MK Partners is extremely please that the executive director of one of our clients recently won an Ashoka Fellowship. The lucky winner is Chris Balme of Spark. Spark is the only youth empowerment program in the country that addresses the dropout crisis by re-engaging at-risk students through hands-on, individualized apprenticeships.

We worked very closely with Chris last year to fully power and integrate their website’s online giving portal with salesforce.com. The portal has been a huge success and was even adopted by one of Spark’s sister organizations.

You can learn more about Spark and they great work they do at their website sparkprogram.org.

Way to go Chris!