MK Partners Archive for April, 2010

Normally when we discuss efficiency it’s in the workplace, looking at business processes, screen flow, etc. The Motley Fool has an interesting article about efficiency from an investor’s perspective. The basic concepts are the same, look at what you put into something and see what you get out. In this case they’re talking about stocks and the return on your investment or ROI.

ROI is a commonly used buzz term. We often recommend our preferred vendors (Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Grasshopper, etc) because they have a high ROI and you get a lot out of them for little cost.

With our clients, we’re usually more interested in increasing the efficiency of processes and improving the return on your effort or ROE. The more that we can automate from a single click, the higher your ROE. Ultimately, if we can fully automate a process then that reduces your effort to zero and you can focus on more important tasks.

How have you improved your ROE lately? Let us know in the comments.

The next salesforce.com tech webinar is coming up on May 6 and it’s going to be a hot one! This session is going to cover the new features in the upcoming Summer ’10 release. If you a techie or just a big sfdc fan, then this is well worth watching.

You can register at developerforce.com

For those of you not familiar with the Tech Webinar series, they are the opposite of the typical marketing webinar you may get invited to on a daily basis. These webinars are given by technical individuals who actually use the features and concepts they review. They dive deep into examples and answer a lot of technical questions at the end. In case you couldn’t tell, we really enjoy them.

Most of you are probably still a little confused about yesterday’s big announcement regarding VMForce, so we figured we’d break it down for you.

If you’re a business user of salesforce (read not technical), this has 0 impact on you.

If you’re an administrator of salesforce (read not a programmer), this has 0 impact on you.

If you’re an IT professional, you now have another low-cost option to host applications for your userbase.

If you’re a java programmer and not familiar with salesforce.com, you have some homework to do. In addition to running your applications on the google, amazon and other cloud services, you can now run them on force.com and take advantage of a lot of its native functions.

If you’re a java programmer and already familiar with salesforce.com, you just won the lottery. You now can fully use your two skill sets to create any application you want, written in Java and running on the force.com backbone.

That pretty much sums it up, you can check out more info at vmforce.com.

This month, salesforce.com announced a new category on the AppExchange, Aloha Apps. Aloha Apps are salesforce.com add-ons and applications that don’t count against the number of custom Apps, Custom Tabs, and Custom Objects limited to your org. This is great news for those of us that use salesforce.com to run our entire businesses.

MK Partners already has four Aloha Apps available for your use.
View more information about Aloha Apps
View all the Aloha Apps

Salesforce.com has something new in the works. They’ve partnered with VMWare to build something called VMForce. For those of you who don’t know, VMWare is a provider of virtualization services and products. Both companies are keeping a tight lip about the announcements, but there are plenty of posts and tweets full of speculation.

What do you think the announcement is? Let us know in the comments.

Register for the April 27th at 10:30am PDT webinar at www.vmforce.com

It seems 2010 is a year full of visual enhancements for salesforce.com. In case you didn’t get the notice, On May 22, 2010, salesforce.com will be activating its Chart Analytics 2.0 look and feel for all customers who have not adopted it yet. The feature was first release a year ago in the Summer ’09 release, so if you haven’t adopted it yet, you probably forgot that it existed.

The new look and feel of Chart Analytics 2.0 is not only more modern but also more functional. It includes these enhanced features:

• Drill to a report from a dashboard can now be filtered to a subset of records
• New chart types: funnel and donut
• Enhanced chart colors, labels and formatting
• Customizable colors for picklist field values
• Combination charts to see more data in the same chart

What do you have to do?
Absolutely nothing! As always salesforce.com upgrades are automatic, so it’ll happen for you on May 22 whether you’re at work that day or not.

Last month, we wrote about the new campaign functionality becoming standard in salesforce.com. Well this week it’s finally happening.

All you need to do is nothing! Salesforce.com provides automatic updates, so the change will happen for you on 4/20. If you want to test it ahead of time, you still can by Clicking Setup |App Setup | Critical Updates and reviewing the update summary so that you understand the change and how it may impact your organization.

If you have any concerns feel free to post them in the comments.

Yesterday, InformationWeek had an “article” titled “Enterprises See Risks In Cloud“. I’m the first to admit that I’m drenched in the salesforce.com cool-aid, but come on, it’s 2010 and InformationWeek is still skeptical about cloud computing? Is this a scare tactic or just a Unisys ad disguised as a tech article.

The so-called article states that Unisys polled 120 enterprise users and “essentially” asked them if they would move their mission critical apps to the cloud? They go on to state that 46% of those polled would start moving development and support applications to the cloud, another 22% would move disaster recovery services, another 17% would move QA and pre-production services, and only another 15% would move mission critical applications. I’m not a math whiz, but that means that 100% of those polled said they would move some of their in-house services to the cloud. 100%, not a single respondent said that they were totally disinterested in cloud computing; to me, that’s a huge win and a much bigger headline (it’s also a huge indicator of a flawed survey or rigged results).

The article has some quotes form a VP at Unisys and goes on to state that all of the respondents “valued cloud computing” but were “reluctant to give up control”. Finally, it mentions that the survey was part of a marketing campaign for Unisys Secure Cloud Solution! Shenanigans!! I said it, you read it, this is blatent marketing and not real research or a real article. If you don’t believe me, just visit the “About” link on InformationWeek.com‘s footer, the title of the page is “Create your next customer”. Their parent corporation’s entire business is based on selling ads as “articles”.

Well, InformationWeek, we too have done a survey, and it was of 121 enterprise users and they all said that they that cloud computing is secure. They all said that they regularly give away their credit card number on the web while making online purchases, divulge their deepest secrets via hosted email, expose their most precious and embarrassing moments via photo-sharing sites, and even allow their locations and activity to be tracked at all times on social sites. 100% of respondents went on to say that they would pick MK Partners to implement their mission critical apps on the cloud over any other consulting firm.

What are your thoughts on the cloud? Do you trust it? Have you moved mission critical apps to it? If not, what’s stopping you? Let us know in the comments.

This month marks our second product giveaway and in case you didn’t already know, this month’s prize is a free 6 month 10 license subscription of SaaS TEa our Time and Expense application built entirely native to the force.com platform.

SaaS TEa leverages Apex and visualForce pages to provide you with spreadsheet-like interfaces that makes it very easy for employees to quickly enter multiple hours or expenses without a lot of clicks.

The giveaway begins now, if you’re one of the first 10 people to install the app from our products page and then comment on this post, you win!

Good Luck.

Before every major release, salesforce.com lets its customers have a sneak peak at upcoming features. Not only do you get to play with some cool new functionality, but you also get to validate it against your own data and your own existing configuration.

The Sandbox Preview Window for Summer ‘10 is scheduled for May 14, 2010 through June 12, 2010. You can learn more about the preview window at
http://sites.force.com/ideaexchange/ideaView?c=09a30000000D9xt&id=08730000000H4CB

The instructions are somewhat complex as they are server specific, but in general:
1. DO refresh your sandbox prior to May 1, 2010
2. DON’T refresh your sandbox after May 1, 2010

If for some reason you don’t want the Summer ’10 preview in your sandbox then just break the second rule above. If you accidentally break it, then you’ll have to wait until Summer ’10 is live in your production org before being able to have it in your sandbox again.