MK Partners is proud to unveil its second new force.com Sites powered page in just as many weeks. Our new Products & Services page dynamically displays a list of active products in our salesforce.com pricebook. This change makes it much easier for us to release new products and update descriptions on existing products.

We’re really looking forward to powering this page from salesforce.com and already have a long list of future enhancements to make, including prepopulating our Contact Us page when someone is looking for help with a specific product, displaying the number of active customers for every product, and enabling customers to purchase or renew licenses from our website.

Please tale a look at the new page and let us know what you think in the comments. And if you’re interested in getting a page like this for yourself, visit our Contact Us page to have someone contact you right away.

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

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

We received an email from Salesforce notifying us that force.com Sites will be down during the upcoming Winter ’10 upgrade window. As you may know, MK Partners is already using Force.com sites to power a portion of its website and has plans to use it more (stay tuned next week). While our website is a valuable tool and one that we would not want to be without, we still have confidence in force.com Sites and will not change our plans due to maintenance releases like this one.

From the beginning, we have recognized that WordPress (the Content Management System that powers our website) is an amazing tool that makes it very easy to setup a professional website with a blog. Our strategy is to leverage WordPress for our home page, blog, and static content and then leverage force.com Sites for dynamic content that needs to interact with salesforce.com. So during the Winter 10′ maintenance window, visitor to our website will be able to view our homepage. blog, and other static content, but will not be able to apply for a job at MK Partners. Since the window is on a Friday night, we’re not too concerned because we encourage our employees to have an active life outside of work and hope that any potential candidates would too.

For those of you that didn’t get the email and want to read it, we’ve included it below.

You are receiving this email because we have identified you as a system administrator of Force.com Sites and wanted to make you aware of best practices as related to salesforce.com major release windows.

Salesforce.com plans three (3) major feature releases each year. During these releases, we conduct a release maintenance window. Because Force.com Sites are directly served from your company’s Salesforce organization, Force.com Sites availability is directly related to your Salesforce organization’s availability and up time. For all major releases, including the upcoming Winter’10 release, your Salesforce organization and Force.com Sites will be unavailable during your organization’s release maintenance window. During the maintenance window, your end users will see a Force.com branded maintenance page when they try to access your site via HTTP.

How am I notified of major releases?
One month prior to every major release, salesforce.com sends release communication to system administrators of every Salesforce organization to make them aware of the upcoming release maintenance window. Additionally, these dates are updated on our Trust site.

For the upcoming Winter ’10 release, please visit http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/#maint to understand release maintenance window for your Salesforce organization and related Force.com Sites.

Are there best practices I should follow?
Salesforce.com recommends that you inform your end users, as well as any other Salesforce stakeholders, of the release maintenance windows and related Force.com Sites unavailability.

How can I get more information?
For information on our upcoming Winter ’10 release features, visit the Salesforce Community “New Release Resources” page for information on new features, release notes, and much more. For any additional questions, please contact salesforce.com Customer Support.

Best regards,
-salesforce.com Customer Support

MK Partners is proud to announce that it has migrated yet another area of its website to Force.com sites. As of today, individuals looking to join the MK Partners team can do so via force.mkpartners.com/careers.

The migration to force.com Sites allows MK Partners to manage all aspects of online recruiting directly from the force.com platform. “Our business is growing rapidly, we need to be able to make changes to our job position listings instantly without going through a web developer.” said CEO Matt Kaufman. Using force.com sites enables MK Partners to accept applications directly into salesforce.com with attachments, manage multiple applications from a single candidate, and report on recruiting results all from a single location.

If you are interested in leveraging force.com Sites to power your organization’s job listings, contact MK Partners today at http://www.mkpartners.com/contact

Our customer list changes often. While we are very happy using WordPress as our content management system, it’s really not conducive to the rapidly changing environment in which we work. Having to login to yet another system is just one of the many hurdles to overcome to advertise our successes and get credit for our work.

Fortunately, there is an easier way. Force.com Sites enables you to create dynamic website content and control it from within your existing salesforce.com or force.com database. Not only does that means one less login to remember, but since we are already tracking our sales and projects in salesforce.com, we don’t have to retype our customer information. We took it a step further and use the built-in workflow, triggers, and approval processes to automate the entire process of updating our customer list, all with existing salesforce.com functionality.

As of today, our customer list is 100% hosted by Force.com Sites, check it out at force.mkpartners.com/customers

And this is just the beginning, stay tuned as we not only add more Customer stories to our website but also use Force.com Sites to control our Partner list, our Customer Portal, and much more!

This summer, salesforce.com has begun offering the Force.com Free Edition, a “light” version of their Force.com platform enabling customers to build applications and run websites using salesforce.com’s cloud-based resources.  With this offering, clients are given a set of tools to build and deploy their first cloud computing application to up to 100 users.  Clients will also have some free access to Force.com Sites, salesforce.com’s recent addition to their cloud platform, which allows companies to build and run public-facing websites using their platform.  Clients using the free edition will get up to 250,000 pages views per month, as well as 10 custom objects/custom database tables per user, a sandbox development environment, online training, and a library of free application templates.

MK Partners loves this idea! This is the perfect solution for a small startup, medium-sized nonprofit, or just a low-budget initiative in any sized company.

For more information on salesforce.com’s Force.com Free Edition, check out this article.