Salesforce CRM user?

Are you a Salesforce CRM user?  Use Microsoft Excel for analysis or reports?  Then you’ll have met the Salesforce 15 digit ID problem.

Internally Salesforce IDs are 18 digits long.  But, Salesforce Reports reduce them to 15 digits.  So, for example, an Organisation ID internally might be 0014000000LmabcAAB, but in a report it will appear as 0014000000Lmabc. The missing last three digits (the “AAB” in the example) are check-digits; used for error detection.

Now that wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t that Windows applications, such as Excel and Access, are case insensitive.  The 15 digit IDs are unique, which is what you need when you use the Excel function like VLOOKUP, but Excel treats 0014000000Lmabc just the same as 0014000000LMABC (case insensitive!) - so, your Salesforce IDs are no longer unique and VLOOKUP will no long find the correct match … (incidentally, the 18 digit IDs are unique to VLOOKUP!)

There are algorithms you can use to reconstruct the last three digits of your Salesforce IDs (search Salesforce Help for “How can one convert a 15 character id to a 18 character id?“), but better still there’s a script that works in Google Docs online spreadsheet.

Convert 15 to 18 Digit Salesforce IDs with Google Spreadsheets [video] – enjoy:

My thanks to David Engel, of The Engel Journal, for his Post and Video on this topic.  Similarly, David’s acknowledges in his post Damon Douglas, David Padbury, and Stefan Kuehlechner.

If you need further support processing you Salesforce data using Microsoft Excel, or Access, then please don’t hesitate contact me.  Alternatively, there’s a Java script that converts Salesforce 15 digit IDs to 18 digits that can be found here.

My partners computer crashed yesterday – it’s irreparable! So I re-moved her hard-drive to my server and, thankfully, she now has full access to all her files.  But what if her crash had damaged her hard-drive; wiped all her data?  Classic: we have no back-up of her PC files!

Losing your business data (i.e. data loss, rather than merely data unavailability when, say, your network is “down”) could be significantly more catastrophic than my experience with my partners PC.  Studies have consistently shown that hardware failure and human error to be the most common causes of data loss:

• Intentional Action - intentional deletion of a file or program
• Unintentional Action – accidental deletion of a file or program, misplacement of CD/DVDs, administration errors, …
• Failure – power failure, hardware failure, business failure (e.g. bankruptcy of your software vendor), data corruption (database failure), …
• Disaster – water damage, fire, …
• Crime – theft, hacking, sabotage, malicious software …

The risks of data loss to  your business could be great (statistics from here):

• 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control
• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures
• and, finally, the most disturbing statistic: 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster

So regular back-ups of your business data, preferably stored off-site, whilst not sexy is very sound advice – that even your average IT Consultancy should follow diligently!

All you need is a reliable, value for money, solution.  So what’s available.

For a number of years now I have been using Amazon for my off-site back-ups of my business data.  Amazon? Aren’t they just books?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 (part of Amazon’s Web Services – aws) “can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It [provides] access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites (my italics).”  Amazon states that “it’s designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.” And, I can confirm that it’s very cost effective!  There’s No restrictions on what or how much you back-up. You only pay for what you use, and there’s no minimum charge.

Amazon S3’s “standard storage” is:

• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement
• Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability
• Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities
• Amazon S3 provides further protection via Versioning” (OK – really that’s a little too geeky!  Essentially, it means older versions of your backed-up data can be retrieved)

Unfortunately, Amazon S3 interface is not the most accessible for the average user.  You’ll need to create an account with Amazon, but then I suggest you use other, third party, applications to manage your back-ups.

There are free Browser add-on’s that provide some management of your data stored on Amazon S3 (see for example S3Fox for Firefox), but the best tool I have found, and used for a number of years now, is one provided by Jungle Disk (acquired by Rackspace in 2008).

Jungle Disk is designed to make use of cloud storage. It comes in a number of different editions.  So, for example, the Workgroup Edition provides secure backup, synchronisation (more about this later …), and access to your data between up to 100 PCs.  Their Backup Vault feature uses de-duplication technology – so you don’t back up the same data twice.

With the combination of Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk you’ll have a very reliable, off-site, value for money Disaster Recovery solution.

Costs?

• Jungle Disk (e.g. “workgroup edition”) – $4.00 / month / user
• Amazon S3 (e.g. “US Standard”):
  • First 50 TB / month of storage used – $0.150 per GB
  • All Data Transfer In –  $0.100 per GB
  • Requests – $0.01 per 1,000 requests

Need help and support with this?  Do give me a call …

Notes

1. “50 TB” that’s 50 terabytes -  where 1 terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes (GB)
2. There is a less expensive approach via Jungle Disk using Rackspace’s Cloud Storage as an alternative to Amazon S3

One of the unavoidable complications with your email marketing newsletter is that you cannot fully control the font in which it is displayed. The email reader, or the browser, that your customer uses is not guaranteed to use the font you have so diligently selected for your newsletter. This is just as true for your carefully crafted HTML email, or your web site – i.e. the font may not be available (loaded) on your customers PC. Obviously, the alternative for your newsletter is to send it as a PDF document attached to a covering email; but that’s one extra click required of your time-starved customer …

So what’s available to ensure that your extensively researched look&feel, your brand, is consistent between your website, your newsletters, your HTML emails, and your ‘paper’ publications? You could depend on the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) font-family property (see font family, or w3school.com, or for a more general introduction: sitepoint), alternatively you might consider Google Fonts!

I’m currently mentoring a charity that require a non-standard layout for their new information newsletter. We’ve reviewed Litmus: Email client market share, and have compromised, for their first issue, on a standard font. They are non-profit Salesforce user, using Vertical Response as their email marketing App. (incidentally you don’t need to be a Salesforce user to use Vertical Response, you can use it as a standalone application … this is well worth considering if you’re a charity). However, for subsequent newsletters we’ll be using Google Fonts.

So what are Google Fonts? Google Fonts are “… high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages …” With simple code (the Google Fonts API) in the HTML of your newsletter you’ll have significantly more control over the fonts your customer will view your newsletter in. Essentially, Google Fonts are downloaded from the Google Font Server when the newsletter is first read (technically: the fonts are saved in the email/browser cache so subsequent newsletters will be quicker … ).

Some example Google Fonts and their effects (Yes! Google Fonts work in WordPress!):

This is Cardo!

This is Tangerine!

This is Tangerine, with shadow!

To preview the currently available Google Fonts try here … So, no excuse now; move your Fonts to the Cloud!

Need more information? Do contact me.

The Gartner Group have published their Social Media predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Gartner analysts acknowledge that a lot has happened with social software and collaborative software in 2009, and that there’s been a growing use of Facebook and Twitter by business.  But their predictions for beyond 2010 don’t read so encouragingly.

The five predictions are:

1. By 2012 over 70% of IT department led Social Media initiatives will fail

• similarly, only 50% of business led social media initiatives will succeed
• but, even to enable these successes the Gartner analysts warn organisations that they will need new skills sets around designing and delivering Social Media solutions

2. By 2012 over 50% of organisations will be using microblogging.  But, only 5% of these will be stand-alone/single purpose enterprise microblogging applications – the rest being consumer services like Twitter

3. Post 2012 social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of Social Media on business and society

4. By 2014 social media will replace email for 20% of users for business communication

• essentially, microblogging is better than email for status updates and expertise location within the organisation
• therefore, Gartner recommends organisations must develop:
  • long-term strategy for collaborative and social networking software services, and
  • policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes

5. In terms of analytic’s, by 2015 some 25% of enterprises will utilise social-network analysis to improve performance and productivity.  Social-network analysis (and here)  is used to examine interaction patterns and information flows among people and groups within the organisation, and among business partners and customers.  The Gartner analysts claim that this is an untapped source of insight – but requires trust and buy-in, due to privacy & confidentially concerns

More information available from Gartner: “Predicts 2010: Social Software in an Enterprise Reality” – http://www.gartner.com/resid=1243515

In a rather superficial Q&A in Computer Business Review (CBR), late last year, Parker Harris (executive VP of Technology, and co-founder of salesforce.com) identifies what salesforce.com will be concentrating on in 2010.

The majority of the article focuses on Cloud Computing gaining acceptance, salesforce.com competitors, and [Cloud] Security.  Then, in the final paragraph, Parker not surprisingly states that the Service Cloud, to which he is actually referring to salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2, “will be the next billion dollar business”, but, then there’s no surprise there.  Similarly, and maybe more significantly, he acknowledges that Collaboration (Wikipedia: “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals”) is not fully understood by business.  Here Parker is referring to salesforce.com’s pending collaborative layer/tool Chatter.  Parker, or Janine Milne the author of the Q&A, then slip into verbal melt down and end the Q&A with “instead of being data-driven your data will come alive … the whole concept of viral communication will take off.”  Now, I’m familiar with the phrase Viral Marketing, and one of my favourites (below) is the Cadbury’s (should that now be Kraft?) Gorilla Advert of 2007, but viral communication?  With definition’s like “is the dissemination of information (either true facts or plain rumours) between individuals by self replication” (Behavioral Finance Group) – Oh, come on!

As a stark comparison in the same edition of CBR there’s another related Q&A.  Rob Howard, founder and CTO of enterprise collaboration firm Telligent (“a pioneer of social media platforms”) explains how social media is becoming the established way for businesses to communicate – Rob also has a blog Enterprise 2.0 and social computing.  Rob’s reply to “will 2010 be year of social media?“, is that he doesn’t think we are there yet, and that we have some 12 to 18 months for the market to mature.  More pertinently he warns against the misguided belief that Social media replaces the way business work – and that it’s all about “integration”.

As an act of due diligence I searched for the phrase “viral communication”.  For your amusement here are some of the references I found:  from the MIT Media Lab of 2005 a disturbing claim that “Viral Communications focuses on constructing agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves.” [Aargh!] And, in Changeworksblog, written by Sue Tupling, you’ll find several posts listed against the keyword/s “viral communication” – but only one post, from 2008, includes the phrase.  And, finally in an Abstract of the IIW Institute of Information Management, “The paradigm of viral communication” (published in 2002!), which apparently identifies “… viral messages as a new paradigm of communication …”  So, now you know.

OK.  It is another salesforce.com video – but it’s good about explain SaaS … enjoy.

Chatter: chat⋅ter (from Wiktionary)

Noun – chatter

• talk, especially meaningless or unimportant talk
• …

There’s a lot of talk at the moment on the web about salesforce.com’s new social media offering: Chatter. Marc, once again, has skilfully used his salesforce.com playbook (see Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry) …

Chatter, when it becomes available next year, should provide a social media layer across salesforce.com Sales, Service and Custom clouds.  It is also planned to integrate with other market social computing platforms – see my earlier post

Below are my selection of five posts relating to Chatter.

They cover:

1. Chatter is only 20% of the enterprise social web …
2. Salesforce.com has, again, confused it’s customers, partners, analysts, press, as well as its own salespeople
3. People will become the platform of the new social business
4. That Chatter alone will not create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information
5. That clients might see your social network site … !

In his Post “Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone” Jeremiah Owyang (“a Web Strategist”) praises salesforce.com for taking the lead in the CRM vendors pack in providing tools that connect the enterprise with the social web.  But, rightly states that technology alone is not sufficient to “truly embrace customers in the social web.”  That “80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change.”

Meanwhile, Jeffrey M. Kaplan (a Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies) in his Post “Salesforce.com: The Double-Edged Sword of Iterative Marketing” states that he admires salesforce.com for “genuinely enhanced its offerings and expanded its capabilities” with Chatter.  However, he claims that many of the attendees he interviewed (following the keynote introduction of Chatter at Dreamforce 2009 – see my earlier post) “were confused about Chatter.”  He claims that “salesforce.com has also succeeded in confusing its customers, partners, analysts and the press, as well as its own salespeople …”

In a more enthusiast post Michael Fauscette, in “Salesforce.com introduces the world to the Collaboration Cloud”, states that “Chatter moves from the app itself …[to focus] on the people…people become the platform of the new social business.”

Steve Hodgkinson (of Ovum, part of the Datamonitor Group – “a premium business information and market analysis company“) in his Post “Salesforce: chattering its way to social integration in the cloud” (an extract taken from Ovum’s Straight Talk service) correctly states that chatter “will provide a means to stimulate collaborative information flows between the users at the enterprise’s sales and service front line.”  But then Steve is rightfully concerned that technology alone doesn’t “create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information.”

Finally, in “Has Your Organization Thought Through its Social Media Policy?” Dee Albritton, of Fast Forward, in a Post on The Nonprofit Technology Network site NTEN, warns non-profits that their “clients could see their social network site.”  Whilst there is no explicit reference to Chatter, Dee goes on to say, “it is hard to turn down a client for services when they saw the picture of the big check on your site.”  Dee references the results of a survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 plus employees:

• 54% now completely block social networking by employees
• 90% restrict usage to business purposes only, and
• 8% of employers reported firing employees as a result of social networking use

Interesting times …

Dreamforce 2009.  Keynote – Day 1. Marc Benioff (CEO, salesforce.com) and Parker Harris (Co-founder. Head of Technology, salesforce.com) introduce Chatter: ” … it’s very very simple … the magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise. … Join the conversation.”

It’s Marc enjoying himself …

The current Economist debates is:

Cloud Computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.

With Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, surprise-surprise being Against the motion.

So a brief resume of Marc Benioff, and his poster child salesforce.com:

Intrigued by web sites like Amazon.com Marc started salesforce.com in the mid-1990s whilst still working part-time at ORACLE (which then employed 200 people).  Larry Ellison, CEO of ORACLE, was his mentor and provided some $2 million seed money to Marc’s and his “software on the web, on-demand” company (though this phrase is currently out of favour, with Marc prefering real-time, SaaS and multitenant).  In this short history salesforce.com has received many business awards: The Wired 40 three years in a row: 2005-2007 (No. 7 in 2007), Forbes Top Ten Disrupters (2006-2007), Forbes 25 Fastest-growing Tech Companies (2007, No. 3), and  BusinessWeek Top 100 Most Innovative Companies (2006, No. 79).  Essentially, salesforce.com continues to be a disruptive success.

Salesforce.com reported in July 2009, at its earnings conference Q2 2010: 2 million users, a customer base of 63,200, and a net-profit of $21.2 million.  It’s moving up market with customers like CNN, Motorola, and Starbucks.   It’s moving vertically with investments in the financial and healthcare industry.  A threat?  Well Microsoft and ORACLE are expanding their offerings to compete in the SaaS arena. At the Q2 conference Benioff boasted scoring wins against Microsoft (much in love with their own CRM) and ORACLE (busy building it’s own CRM).  Then, in October, Microsoft offers customers of salesforce.com, and ORACLE CRM, the equivalent of 7 months free switch subscription until the end of 2009 (however, after the trial the standard twelve months contract would apply – compare this with salesforce.com rolling monthly contract …)

But salesforce.com, with its Cloud suite, is very much tied to success of it’s customers with Applications, then Platform, then tools to build applications

• Sales Cloud: SFA and CRM applications
• Service Cloud: customer services, call centres, and web-portals
• Custom Cloud: the Force.com platform for custom applications

The latter two being more than 25% of new business.

Contra to the scale of the Google kingdom Salesforce.com relies on only two data centres – and, the main one in California has only 500 servers and handles 200 million transactions per day.

The Economist debate ends with a Post Debate follow-up on Friday 20th November – so go there soon …

Gartner Group top 10 trends for 2010

Last month the Gartner Group analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends for 2010. Number one is Cloud Computing – up from third position last year.

So for a small to medium sized charities what are the benefits of Cloud Computing?

Firstly, there is an acronyms you’ve most likely heard in connection with Cloud Computing: SAAS.

SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) is where a service provider gives access to their software via the Internet. All you need is a PC, a browser, and Internet access. All the back end hardware and software is managed for you.  So let us consider the SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing – what are the opportunities of SaaS for small to medium sized charities:

• No support costs – though there may be an annual license
• No need for in-house IT support staff – all installations, upgrades, back-ups, and on-going maintenance are handled for you
• No server – so no purchase, maintenance, or support issues. You don’t need to worry about installing the latest patch, replacing ailing hard-drives, the replacement funding strategy.  They’ll be no annual license, or support contract
• Access: staff, and volunteers, can access your application from almost anywhere. Just a PC, web browser, and Internet access
• No urgency to upgrade in-house computers – less powerful PCs will do fine

But there are risks:

• You are dependent on Internet access – but you could always access the system from home, a library, or even the local coffee shop …
• The up time and response time – see for example the System Status page at trust.salesforce.com
• Backups – you still must take back-up copies of your data!
• And maybe, depending on the size and nature of your charity, Security and Regulatory compliance issues

Garner Group Hype Cycle 2008

In the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle special report of 2008 Cloud Computing was highlighted as “the latest super-hyped concept in IT”, with 2 to 5 years before main steam adoption.  It’s already main stream!

For small to medium sized charities, then, with limited capital, limited space, limited access to technical staff, do consider choosing SaaS and reduce your dependence on hardware.

Salesforce.com is the poster child of SaaS. It can be used for SFA (Sales Force Automation), or as a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool.

Consider fund raising as an example.  Salesforce.com has created a special configuration of it’s SaaS for non-profit organisations, and charities.  This Non-profit edition of Salesforce.com provides:

• Tighter communication with your donors
• Stratification of donors
• Collaboration between staff – fully manageable by Salesforce.com.  Merge all those disparate spreadsheets, databases, and notes into one easily accessible system …
• Creating and managing a donor development pipe line
• Manage contacts, accounts, and communication sequence: you can also richly manage the relationships between contacts and accounts such as affiliation, board member, reporting relationship, …
• And, with Salesforce.com you can always add new screens, adjust the layouts, add extra fields, include relationships between records, install new applications from AppExchange (“… the complete marketplace for cloud computing“, many of which are free for non-profit/charities) – essentially fully adapt their software to your organisational needs

Obviously, much of this can be handled by a custom built database – but the long-run costs of developing and maintaining such an application can become prohibitive.  Using a SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com to deploy a streamlined application is almost always going to be faster, and more flexible.

Finally, keeping the theme of fund raising, using Salesforce.com is about gaining and retaining donors; not about “managing” them – it’s more about managing the increasingly rich information you gather about them.  But ultimately it’s not about “donor” strategy, process, or the technology.  It’s people – and this includes your staff.