Posted by Brian Greenon January 27, 2011 CIC, Salesforce /
Comments Off
Following from my earlier Post, Salesforce IDs and the 15-18 digit problem, here’s some Visual Basic code that can be installed as a User Defined Function (UDF) in Microsoft Excel (or, Microsoft Access) to easily convert Salesforce 15 character IDs to the “unique”, required by Microsoft applications, form of 18 characters … and a YouTube video to get you started. Enjoy!
Click on the code below to copy the Visual Basic …
If you have any queries concerning this code, or installing it in MS Excel or MS Access, don’t hesitate to contact me.
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.
Posted by Brian Greenon August 05, 2010 Social Media /
Comments Off
Just come across this excellent Youtube video by David Armano (Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital) presented at TEDxPennQuarter. A more appropriate title might be Reinventing Social Media. Enjoy …
As part of this month exploration of Twitter I’ve come across a really smart intuitive on-line tool for reporting Social Media metrics: SWIX (Social Web Index).
SWIX allows you track several Social Media Campaigns. It simply enables you to track how you are doing, and where to focus your attention. It very easy to configure the tracking “pods” for RSS Subscribers, or RSS Hits of your Blogs; or track the number of Twitter Followers or Friends over This Week,This Month, Last 3 months, … all constantly updated. There’s also a whole batch of different tracking pods available. So you can track Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Flickr, … SWIX also provides a Social Media Dashboard to which you can choose which metrics you have reported – numbers and charts. Well worth exploring!
There’s also the obligatory YouTube video – enjoy …
Posted by Brian Greenon February 02, 2010 cloud, Salesforce /
Comments Off
Today (Tuesday 2 Feb.) an enterprise collaboration tool from SAP, that is based on Google Wave, will enter public beta. With the informative beta name 12Sprints, the application will allow “users to collaborate on solving business problems in real time.”
Being dependent on Google Wave, SAP will be following Google’s classic approach with 12Sprints having a beta period that will “never end.” In acknowledgement of this, David Meyer (senior vice president of emerging technologies, SAP) has stated that the “… whole idea isto learn from [its] usage.”
Why is this interesting? Software giant SAP have plans to launch web-based sales management software (i.e. SaaS) in the middle of 2010 – they will be competing directly with their long term rival salesforce.com.
Of course, there’s the obligatory YouTube video’s (there are 13 in all) for 12Sprints:
And, you can become a friend on Facebook, and follow the beta on Twitter …
12Sprints is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool – a tool that enables decisions based on the response from multiply persons within the organisation. But, essentially it employs the same tools used to make a decision as “normal” business group might. However, SAP appear to be taking Enterprise 2.0 serious. Below is a brief video of part of a round-table held by SAP titled “Enterprise 2.0 – A Look into the Crystal Ball” (this video is about Gravity a forerunner of 12Sprints).
Observe, 12Sprints is an excellent example of the use of Google’s Wave within the organisation, but it’s not a replacement for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc (i.e. unlike salesforce.com’s Chatter – which is yet to become available in the wild. In beta, or otherwise!).
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.
