Salesforce Archives - Page 5 of 6

Project: Change Owner Button in Visualforce

November 13, 2008 by David Schach 7 Comments

Drawing upon some code I found in the Developers Guide, I have written a Visualforce page to mass-change the owner of all selected records to any active User in Salesforce. Yes, it only works with Contacts for now, but my next step will be to use Dynamic Apex to pass the sObject name to the page and its extension/controller, allowing me to reuse one bit of code for multiple objects. We'll see how it goes. But in the meantime, enjoy this page that lets you perform a search, check which records you want to transfer, and then input a User. I've tested it with 50 records at once, so that should suffice for most uses.

X-Squared at Dreamforce 2008

October 28, 2008 by David Schach Leave a Comment

Please be sure to register for sessions at Dreamforce. And DEFINITELY don’t miss my session! Wrangle Data & Pump up the Configuration “I’m administering Salesforce. I’ve learned the ropes. Now I want to get great!” In this session, we’ll review the latest insights and subtlties that top Salesforce consultants have learned on the front lines. […]

Winter 09 Full Training Orgs

September 26, 2008 by David Schach Leave a Comment

Sure, prerelease orgs are nice, but something’s always lacking. We have to go in and enable all the cool features, which is nice in that we learn them better, but it’s also nice to get to play in a full-featured org. Salesforce CRM (the new name) has had Exercises to teach us what to do, and I’m sure they will again this time…

Meanwhile, I stumbled upon an even better treat: TRAINING orgs. Yes, orgs with tons of data and all the add-ons you could ever want:
Where is this? I’ll tell you:
Standard Prerelease org: https://prerelwww.pre.salesforce.com/form/trial/prerelease_winter09.jsp
Premium Training org: https://prerelwww.pre.salesforce.com/form/trial/training_winter09.jsp

Absentee Voting Forms (Necessary for Dreamforce Attendees)

September 24, 2008 by David Schach Leave a Comment

I realized a while ago that Dreamforce would be on Election Day. Somehow it took a while to register (no pun intended) that I needed to fill in an absentee ballot. But where to get one? Thankfully, there is a website devoted to absentee ballots, http://www.longdistancevoter.org/. Please go to this site and do what is […]

Winter 09 (156) – New And Updated Documentation

September 19, 2008 by David Schach Leave a Comment

More Winter 09 documentation has been released. Scott Hemmeter wrote a post listing some of the pages containing new content, but I wanted to go a bit in-depth on those and some other parts of developer.force.com.

Documentation
This should be your first stop whenever you have any questions about ANYTHING on the Platform. It has sections on Web Services API (formerly just called API, to distinguish it from Metadata API), Metadata API, Apex, Visualforce, AJAX, Office Toolkit, Force.com Migration Tool, IDE, and the Library.

Core Resources
In addition to a super Documentation page, force.com has a new section which contains, well, resources sectioned by the Platform’s service categories: Logic (Apex), User Interface (Visualforce), Database (Objects, formulas, triggers, etc.), Integration (API, REST), Services –What? We now have Services as a Service?–(Workflow), Packaging and Distribution (AppExchange), Development (Metadata), and Tools (IDE, Force.com Builder, Data Loader).

Salesforce Application Name Change to Salesforce CRM

September 5, 2008 by David Schach 1 Comment

As you can see from these logos, with the Winter 09 release the application Salesforce is now called Salesforce CRM.

To clarify any confusion:

The company is called salesforce.com (no capitalization).

The application is called Salesforce CRM.

The platform is still force.com.

Convert between Business and Person Accounts (B2B – B2C)

August 19, 2008 by David Schach 13 Comments

I’m a huge fan of Person Accounts (Salesforce’s phenomenal combination of Account and Contact that allows selling B2C–the best example I use is Land’s End, which sells to people). Orgs can use a hybrid model, allowing a company to track its, e.g. partner companies (B2B) and individual customers (B2C).
There is an interesting limitation to Person Accounts: They cannot be converted to B2B via the Salesforce front-end. The record type can only be changed via the API, using a tool like Data Loader or the Excel Connector.
I set out to create a tool that would use the API to convert the record type of a B2B to B2C and back.

Activities Tabs – Enhanced View and One Set of Tabs

August 14, 2008 by David Schach 7 Comments

What was I thinking? Using something as complicated as a hijacked (from the Console) Task view was bound to have problems when creating an Activities tab.

Let’s restate our goals:

Create a tab that will show Activities, using the Enhanced Lists view.
Don’t have two rows of tabs.
Question: Is there any way to make a view and to specify that we don’t want to see the Sidebar AND the Tabs?

Answer: YES. The answer is Visualforce!

Google Docs Now Has Templates for Google Apps

August 4, 2008 by David Schach Leave a Comment

Google Docs has templates, and those of us using Google Apps with our Salesforce org (which should be almost everyone, since it’s free and easy to use) can design company-wide templates. This, combined with Google Docs’ super collaborative features, should make things much easier for consultants.

Appirio Now Backed by Sequoia Capital

July 18, 2008 by David Schach 1 Comment

Chris Barbin has released another blog post, explaining that Appirio is now backed by Sequoia Capital. Pretty neat, huh? This is a serious company with some seriously good research, apparently. So their backing of Appirio means that Appirio is in some really good company. Appirio’s website lists Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital on its Board of Directors and writes that “Appirio is privately held, with funding from Sequoia Capital, salesforce.com, and a select group of angel investors.” Congratulations, Appirio, on securing some high quality (and, I hope, high value) funding. I know that this will cement your place amongst the top product companies in the sfdcverse, and will enable you to vault to the top in the pure-implementation rankings as well.