Salesforce.com is hosting an all-day event on June 22, 2010 at the San Jose Convention Center. The event is being marketed to customers and developers but with a mix of non-technical and semi-technical breakouts. The agenda has an emphasis on Chatter but there are some other interesting topics as well.
Registration and Event Details are available at salesforce.com/events.
Salesforce.com is holding a Cloudforce 2 city tour in Southern California on June 17, 2010. The event is being held at the Westin Long Beach and all attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Service Cloud for Dummies (co-authored by MK Partners’ very own Matt Kaufman).
June 17, 12:00 – 6:30 p.m.
The Westin Long Beach
12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Registration & Expo
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Keynote: Welcome to Cloud 2
2:30 – 3:00 p.m. Break & Expo
3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Breakout Sessions
4:00 – 4:30 p.m. Break & Expo
4:30 – 5:30 p.m. Breakout Sessions
5:30 – 6:30 p.m. Reception & Expo
Get ready to toss your security server out the window. Symantec is offering hosted protection against viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, bots and rootkits. Protection that extends past workstations to notebooks as well. Welcome to Security-as-a-Service.
It’s the definition of scalability, always-on, managed from the web and easy to configure. The offering is limited to North American customers only, and delivers AV, AS, firewall, host-intrusion prevention for both end-user systems and file servers. Interested in a free trial? Check it out at:
http://www.messagelabs.com/trials/hep
In case you didn’t get the email yesterday from salesforce.com, we wanted to let you know that early registration for Dreamforce ’10 is now open and on sale now through July 30, 2010 for $599.
If you’ve never attended Dreamforce before but use salesforce.com or are interested in using it, then you must attend. Besides being an amazing event in general, Dreamforce is the single place where you can exponentially improve your business overnight.
Dreamforce ’10 (DF10)
December 6-10, 2010
Moscone Center, San Francisco
Our May giveaway is finally here. This month we’re giving away the latest version of our Lead Relatives product. Lead Relatives is designed to make your sales reps more efficient when working with Leads by providing them with critical information immediately when they view a Lead record. Specifically, it lets you see if any other Lead, Contact, or Account records exist that are similar to a given Lead.
This latest version, 1.7, allows you to customize which fields are displayed in Lead Relatives and sort by columns.
Features:
Finds duplicate Leads, Contacts, or Accounts as soon as you view a Lead.
Instantly know if a Lead needs to be transferred or is free to go after.
Fully customizable to use your existing custom fields.
Requirements:
Enterprise Edition, Nonprofit Edition, Unlimited Edition, or Force.com Editions
Leads, Contacts and Accounts
How to Install:
You can install Lead Relatives via the products page on our website.
Configuration Steps available at www.mkpartners.com/support
Giveaway Details:
MK Partners is giving away a free 12 month 5-user subscription of Lead Relatives to the first 10 people to install it from the link above (must use that link to get the latest version) and then post a review of it on the AppExchange. That’s it, it’s that easy, no hidden fees, it’s absolutely free.
In a milestone move in line with the Obama Administration’s cloud initiative, Recovery.gov has been moved to Amazon’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. On a conference call with reporters, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra stated “It is the first government-wide system to move to a cloud computing infrastructure, and the first to run on Amazon EC2″.
The cloud-computing initiative was a top priority since assuming command as CIO in early 2009. To demonstrate Kundra’s commitment to the newly created position as CIO, he ordered all new IT budget requests for FY 2011 to disclose whether they’ve considered the cloud as an alternative to on-premise systems.
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is looking to save around $750,000 over the next two years, with realized ROI happening this year at $334,000. The board hopes to shift those savings to it’s core purpose of preventing waste, fraud and abuse.
In Kundra’s blog post, he states:
“As the world’s largest consumer of information technology and as stewards of taxpayer dollars, the federal government has a duty to be a leader in pioneering the use of new technologies that are more efficient and economical, By using cloud services, the federal government will gain access to powerful technology resources faster and at lower costs. This frees us to focus on mission-critical tasks instead of purchasing, configuring, and maintaining redundant infrastructure.”
Security was one of the factors holding back previous moves to the cloud. Amazon.com was required to participate in an rigorous certification process. Requirements such as US-only data storage and compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act had to be met and independently verified.
Kundra concludes: “I am hopeful that that the Recovery Board’s move to the cloud will serve as a model for making government’s use of technology smarter, better, and faster.”
You can read more about this major milestone at recovery.gov.
If you haven’t heard of salesforce.com Chatter yet then you must be way too busy. Since Dreamforce ’09 salesforce.com has not stopped promoting their latest feature as the backbone of what they call the Collaboration Cloud.
So what is Chatter? It is essentially like your facebook news feed, it lets you see what’s going on in your salesforce.com org and lets you post what you’re doing.
So what is the Chatter Developer Challenge? If you’re a developer or a savvy admin, then this is your chance to get in the salesforce.com spotlight by building a chatter based app. You can also win some great prizes. If you’re not a developer, but still have a great idea, feel free to share it with us. We’ll build it for you and even let you have the prize!
Lifehacker.com had a great post on the cleverest ways to use dropbox that you’re not using.
For those of you that don’t know, dropbox.com is one of our favorite cloud based services that you can use to keep files synchronized across multiple computers. Your files exist on all the computers and their central server and the dropbox service keeps them all in sync and keeps track of revisions and edit conflicts. Using dropbox is extremely easy, sharing is controlled on a folder basis and you can select which users each folder is shared with. The service has been around for a while, so it’s not just a passing fad. It’s compatible with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux and also has a web interface.
We love using dropbox to share large files among our team and also as a way to have an automated backup on key documents. Do you use dropbox? What clever tricks have you come up with for it?
In April, Salesforce.com opened the official Dreamforce 2010 Call for Papers. They are looking for innovators that have developed best practices, built cool apps, or just use force.com in an ingenious way. If you’ve ever been to Dreamforce then you know it is the single event that can revolutionize the way you use salesforce.com and the way your organization operates. Don’t assume that someone else has thought of your ideas, share them with the community and you might earn the chance to be in the spotlight.
Visit the new Dreamforce Ideas site for more details
Facebook has announced a bold initiative which is sure to get the blood pumping over at Google.
A quick primer. Searching in Google is essentially flipping to the back of a book, locating a word, and referencing a list of pages that word appears on. Ever click on a link in Google search results, only to go to a non-existent page? This is because the famous (or infamous) Google Bot reviews all pages on the internet with links to and from other sites, and stores them in a list. A page may be indexed once, but not twice for a long time. During that time the page may be taken down. Powering this process is a unique algorithm, which largely depends on links to and from websites.
So what does this mean to me?
Facebook is essentially taking Google out at the knees by diminishing the importance of backlinks, and moving our attention over to “Likes” indicated by our friends on Facebook. Not only would this encourage Facebook users to become more active on Facebook, but this would most likely result in better search results. Now all that stands between Facebook and Google is half of the UCLA Math department to generate a scoring system that can compete with Google’s.
For now, we’ll just have to suffice with old-fashioned backlinks and antiquated indexing.