Salesforce.com Part D

This is the 4th and last installment in my blog post series on Salesforce.com based on what I learn from the video training course by live lessons on this SaaS cloud product. I am first of all going to look at editing fields with in this program. You select Accounts/ New choose the type of record and then click save. You can attach an account to social media accounts and also your Chatter feed which is the virtual contact with in Salesforce.com. Edit Layout adds properties to the fields. The read only option displays a field with no editing possible. Normally you can edit a field by double clicking the pencil icon next to it. The recycle bin which prevents immediate loss of data unless emptied stores items for 15 days or until it becomes then auto-deletes. You can drag and drop fields to re-locate them. You can drag them off the screen to delete them. You can also drag and drop sections and fields from the toolbar. If you click the – symbol next to a field it’s deleted. I am now going to look at e-mail. Salesforce.com only lets you e-mail contact which should be with in the database in this program anyway. You usually click the recipients name and then send email, then you fill in the fields and click send. There are carbon copy and blind carbon copy options. With the former they can see the other recipients but in the other they are hidden. There is a mass email button where you check or uncheck potential recipients. Apparently e-mails are most likely to be read on tuesday and wednesday mornings. To set a e-mail template click Set Up/ Communication Templates/ E-mail Templates. Fields in brackets auto fill with selected recipients personal details. They call these merge fields. Clicking Products displays the products and you can add products individually or more likely price books. You might have one for wholesale and one for retail. They also might have a minimum price book for sales people who can price something at their discretion but need a minimum price.

Salesforce.com Part C

This is the 3rd installment and continuation in my blog post series on Salesforce.com based on what I learn on the video training course by Live Lessons on this SaaS cloud product. Salesforce.com lets members of your company especially sales people and managers stay in touch. It integrates information so it is easily accessible to any member who needs it. If you look under Home/ Manage Users / Users you will find you can assign permissions to users. A word of caution keep the job titles relevant so that even in several years they still make sense. Different job titles have different permissions. There is also a Queque tab under Manage Users which prioritizes whose work is processed first. If you look in Personal/ Grant Log In Access you will see it grants permission to log in to users. There are various time periods access can be given over normally 1 month is the default. There is also a log in access for technical support for Salesforce.com staff as well as one for 3rd party companies who produce apps. Of course these are for to fix any problems and will normally have a 1 day limit depending on the job being done. If you are on a new computer and when you first sign up and activation e-mail is sent out with a code you must enter. If you log in from somewhere like Starbucks an activation code will be used each time you log on there and the IP address will have to be deleted afterwards. Otherwise it will be stored automatically. If you contact technical support you fill out a case file each time to let them know the problem and this is stored by them. Sales / App Exchange brings up apps which you can download. At the top of the page is also a search box for developers, apps etc. Developers tend to be cheaper than consulting partners who act as middlemen. The latter offer ongoing support for any problems where as developers only deal with that particular app. Developers charge from $50-$125 per hour. In the Salesforce.com help portal  is advice on training. Many of these are thousands of dollars and held as residential ones in lots of places. The classes which are greyed out are for premier support customers only.

Salesforce.com Part B

This is the second installment in my blog post series on Salesforce.com which is based on what I learn doing the video training course by Pearson IT Certification on this software. Salesforce.com is a cloud based service and the entry level package, contact manager priced at $5 per month is cheapest edition. The features are very basic and mostly non configurable although it does include chatter. Most customers use the more heavy duty versions which are priced accordingly. Group is priced at $25 and like contact manager is for upto 5 users. The other editions allow unlimited users. Performance the top edition is priced at $300 per month. There are also feature licences which you can purchase separately to editions and are for employees who don’t need all the capabilities that an edition brings. For example some might only need the knowledge base for research or chatter to stay in touch. If you need details about what you have purchased simply click set up/ check out and it gives you details. There are 2 types of storage with in Salesforce.com data space which is things like contacts details and file space which is typically things like documents and spreadsheets etc. Typical amounts of storage depend on the edition purchased but are usually around 5-11 GB per user. If you click company profile/ fiscal year you can coordinate the end of the year to set things like tax etc. Reports are often timed according to this. If you click holidays/ new it will set holidays. You can also coordinate if you have reduced opening hours during holidays or have different staff who only work during holidays. If you click manage users/ users/ edit and then uncheck the various check boxes you can deactivate a user. In practice you will often replace a user rather than simply deactivate him. It’s impossible to delete a user with in Salesforce.com because you would lose all that persons work if that happened. To add a new user simply click manage users/ users/ new user and fill out the various fields. Note the ones with a red mark are required fields and must be filled in.

Salesforce.com Part A

This is the first installment in a blog post series on Salesforce.com which is based on what I learn on the video training course by Pearson IT Certification. Salesforce.com is a customer relationship management software in cloud computing which is used by many business professionals not just salespeople. It is used primarily to keep in touch but also has things like a calendar which can be used for things like appointments or tracking projects. In your personal website on Salesforce.com on the left is the 10 most recently opened items. There is a recycle bin which functions similar to the one in Sharepoint in that you can undelete stuff or empty the recycle bin. You can configure the dashboard however you want. To configure it choose the template you want to base it on and select with a tick the components. You then click save and click home to display it. You can look at other workers calendars. In my tasks you can search for tasks using criteria in the drop down box on the right of the screen. The customize my tabs button lets you add components. You may find your browser won’t display all of them and may have to scroll through them with them with the + button. There is an app drop down menu on the right of the screen. You can get more apps with the app exchange button. You can have different components visible to different people. You can use filters to find and delete records etc. When you select criteria in the accounts drop down box you must click to make and many people are caught out by this and can’t understand why it won’t work.

Chatter

The book I read to research this post was Developing Applications With Salesforce Chatter by Rakesh Gupta which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is rather short but is part of the same series the book on Yammer which I did yesterday was also part ot. It can be split into 2 halves with the first portion about using Chatter & the rest on writing apps. Chatter is similiar to Yammer in that it’s a program you can run on a company server that allows a corporate social network normally for employees at a company. You can have 1 main group and then lots of smaller groups for maybe different departments. You can have a community group which allows in trading partners and customers to participate in a group. You can also have hybrid groups where part of the network is stored on cloud computing and the rest on a company server. Like Facebook & Yammer each member of a group has a feed to keep them updated as to what is going on. In addition to group members there are a group owner and a group manager both with additional powers. This program integrates and is owned by salesforce.com and there suite of products. Your customers can buy either a standard licence or plus licence that allows them to participate in your Chatter group. Obviously the plus licence grants more powers. In addition as well as the standard version of Chatter there are developer, professional, enterprise & unlimited versions. The developer edition is for people learning Chatter and app writing. I think most companies can get by with either the standard or at most professional version. I enjoyed reading this and it’s an interesting subject but is somewhat short. There don’t seem to be many books about Chatter which is a shame.

Virtualization

The book I read to research this post was Virtualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Moore’s Law states that in the computing world processing power doubles every 2 years which basically means if you are a computer user you have to buy a new computer every 2 years. Anything which helps you upgrade less often has to be a good thing. Virtualization does just that. The most common virtualization is server virtualization where particularly with hard drives the price per gigabyte has plummeted. What would at one time have been on separate servers can now be put on one server. You still need a spare though in case one crashes. The beauty of client servers is you can set up an account that limits what the user can do on that client pc then use that for going on the internet & if it gets infected by a virus the damage it can do is severely limited. This book was released prior to the release of windows server 2008 which was due to have virtualization features included so the information on virtualization products is a bit limited but I think VMware which is featured in the book is still one of the major players in this field. Another aspect of virtualization is cloud computing or software as a service a good example of this is google search where you enter a search term, googles many servers process your request & send you the results. Can you imagine how long your home pc would take to do the same job? Salesforce.com is probably the most well known cloud computing service although there’s many companies getting in on the act. With cloud computing only a minimal amount of processing is done on your computer because most of it’s done on the service providers server. Another aspect of cloud computing which has been pioneered by IBM is charging people & companies according to how much use they make of a cloud computing service which I think is fair & has potential.

Salesforce.com

The book I read to research this post was Salesforce.com for Dummies 4th edition by Tom Wong et al which is an excellent book and which I got from kindle. Salesforce.com is an online CRM form of software. By online I mean that you pay a monthly direct debit, you access the program over the internet and most of the processing is done by salesforce.com’s servers. There is loads of different options as to what version to use. CRM is an acronym for customer relational management. Salesforce.com is part of cloud computing which is revolutionizing computing especially for businesses. There are two major types of groups who can benefit from salesforce.com which are sales departments and customer relations which in a lot of companies are merged to some degree. There is a database version called Force.com and for those interested in marketing there is a jigsaw database into which you can enter criteria and then email people who are on that database. Salesforce.com integrates with twitter & facebook so you can keep in touch with your staff. There is special business versions of twitter and facebook which are worth looking into. If you have a business website you can integrate salesforce.com and force.com into it although you need specialist help to do that. There are also certification programs in salesforce.com.