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Cepheid, C.H. Briggs, Elkay Manufacturing and hundreds of Model Metrics customers harness the power of cloud computing on the latest tablets and smartphones CHICAGO – November 1, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced significant momentum in its mobile practice with hundreds of customer projects focused on [...]

Model Metrics’ customized cloud application enables Arctic Diagnostics to focus on its mission to help physicians identify the leading cause of blindness in the U.S. CHICAGO – October 12, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced the success its customer, Arctic Diagnostics, is achieving by running its [...]

As 2011 comes to a close, we at Model Metrics are very proud of our accomplishments over the last 12 months, including, but not limited to the introduction of Model FX, the first cloud design lab, and our rapidly growing Social Enterprise and Mobile practices.

Check out two new case studies from AH Holdings and Standard Register on Chatter deployments we recently completed. They are great examples of using social enterprise technology to improve your business. AH Holdings, a growing conglomerate of healthcare support solutions companies, worked with Model Metrics to deploy Chatter for better knowledge sharing among its highly [...]

Many of our customers ask us about mobilizing their workforce. In fact, 80 percent of Model Metrics customers include smartphone and tablet adoption plans in their cloud deployment initiatives. Most need guidance on where to start – from devices to development technology to application design. Model Metrics helps enterprises develop mobile roadmaps to ensure a successful mobile cloud deployment.

One of the things added to Safari and UIWebView in iOS5 is support for XMLHttpRequest 2, which according to W3C adds new features "such as cross-origin requests, progress events, and the handling of byte streams for both sending and receiving". As part of the last bit of that, it's now possible to set the responseType to arraybuffer, which is [...]

  As the Service Cloud practice lead at Model Metrics, I tend to take a more critical look at a company’s service and support process when I’m a customer. My recent attempt to purchase home Internet service left me scratching my head.   I started out the company’s website as usual. After finding a special online [...]

It is with great sadness that our team at Model Metrics recognizes the passing of a true innovator in the technology world, Steve Jobs. Merriam-Webster defines genius as possessing "extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity," and we certainly couldn't say it better than that. Mr. Jobs started Apple Computer in 1976 in [...]

Zimmer is a worldwide leader in providing medical devices that improve the quality of life for people worldwide. To that end, they wanted to arm their sales team with the latest sales materials such as videos, powerpoints, pdf documents, and make them available on iPads. Watch this powerful presentation from the 2011 Dreamforce conference and [...]

After a rather intense lead-up, Dreamforce 2011 is finally behind us – and what a show it was! 4 days, 45,000 registered attendees, Metallica, Will.i.am, MC Hammer, Alanis Morissette, Jay Leno, and on and on. This was one of the largest tech shows we've ever seen in terms of numbers, and the energy was amazing.  [...]

Dreamforcenger Hunt is an Android GPS based scavenger hunt for Dreamforce 2011. You can play during the week of Dreamforce, and win a great Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The game is open now through Noon, PST, on Friday, September 2. The app uses Database.com, oAuth 2.0, the SFDC REST API, and a custom Apex Webservice. We will be [...]

At this point in time, we've implemented the oAuth 2.0 User-Agent flow and the Refresh Token flow for iOS, Android, and Flex/AS3. I figure that makes us as much an expert at doing this as anybody, so I thought I'd take a moment to describe some of the details. First off, the reason you want [...]

This brief video provides a short overview of our mobile capabilities and what our 2GO mobile platform provides to help accelerate project success and lower risk for our clients.

  According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com there are 3 steps to becoming a social enterprise:   #1 Connect to public social networks #2 Create a private social network #3 Make your enterprise applications social   The social enterprise only works if you adopt all 3 steps, without that you will continue to have [...]

If you get into a confrontation or disagreement with a family member in most cases you’re willing to forgive and forget. The same cannot be said for our relationships with our brands.    It's funny how we’re less likely to forgive brands or individuals representing a brand even though our interaction with them will be short [...]

Today Amazon made a big announcement, the availability of Oracle as an option for their Relational Database Service (RDS). What does this mean for the Enterprise?

You can follow Trey Roldan on Twitter. Informatica has added long awaited real time integration capabilities in their latest summer release. Their cloud integrations are no longer bound by scheduled jobs, they can now be called in real time as needed. The latest release incorporates a full-featured REST API that seemingly performs as a cloud [...]

The well-publisized outage of EBS on multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 Region of AWS last week kicked off some excellent blog posts from companies who, through robust architectural choices, managed to weather the storm quite well. It lasted five days, it's been called the worst cloud computing disaster ever, and Amazon's communications strategy didn't exactly shine, but it has presented [...]

Okay, so the title is a bit harsh. I was intrigued by the rather excellent post over at the blog Il y a du thé renversé au bord de la table, [Rant] Web development is just broken. Yoric makes the argument that web developers are forced to deal with too many "nightmares" that have very [...]

Thought I'd put together an easy to reference list of the various things that can be configured by an enterprise Mobile Device Management administrator for iOS: Password Required No Repeating/Ascending/Descending Characters Require Alphanumeric Minimum Password length Minimum number of non-alphanumeric characters required Maximum password age (1-730 days) Auto-lock (1-5 minutes) Password History (1-50 Passwords) Grace [...]

It is with great sadness that today we announce our decision to transition our business out of the cloud. Please know that this was not a decision we took lightly. Since our founding more than seven years ago, we’ve never bought a server, we don’t have a data center in any way, shape or form, [...]

There seems to be a lot of industry buzz lately around the concept of "gamification", and the idea is basically one of applying game mechanics to the world of business to motivate employees or customers. Bunchball has done a really nice job with their Gamification 101 white paper of illustrating how gamification can work in a [...]

Not only is The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr an enjoyable read but it is also extremely pertinent in today’s IT world. The book reviews a paradigm shift which occurred through the industrial revolution where manufacturing facilities built and maintained their own power generation engines. This started with water-driven power wheels on the riverbank and [...]

Amazon released a really interesting service not too long ago called Simple Email Service (SES). It allows you to send individual or bulk emails without having to rely on your own mail servers. This is important because sending (legitimate) mass emails while staying off spam blacklists like Spamhaus is no simple task, and you don't want [...]

Apple's iPad is the hottest device in the workplace today. According to Computerworld, Medtronic recently purchased 4,500 iPads for employees, and they aren't the only ones. Microstrategy is behaving similarly. Many companies are making the jump early to adopt these devices and putting themselves at an advantage. Given the iPad's vast consumer and business market [...]

So this is an interesting question, many small businesses are finding the cloud extremely useful but how will the enterprises incorporate it?  I am sure you have all seen the Microsoft commercials aimed at the consumer “to the cloud!”, and I am sure most of you have used a cloud app before like drop box, [...]

In this post I will show how to launch a EC2 server, install the tools needed to sync svn repos with a paid svn repository then create a dump file that can be imported to a new SVN server. We were migrating from Codesion, now a CollabNet company to a server that we had built in [...]

TeamCity Distributed Build Management and Continuous Integration Server So a few months ago we installed Teamcity on an ec2 server to mess around with. It was really just for us to see how well it works and we loved it so much we have not stopped using it!  So I thought I would put up [...]

Getting the Nod- Dreamforce/Cloudstock I was extremely lucky to attend Dreamforce and Cloudstock in December and was excited to see all the multi-cloud love. In the keynote given at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced a few new multi cloud offerings; database.com, VMforce, Heroku, and they gave the nod to Amazon Web Services with a live demo. In [...]

Boom, just like that AWS changes the game again. Last night they announced VM-Import. As of now they can only import 32 and 64 bit windows 2008, however they are working on geting the "nixs" working. Can you imagine what this means for diaster recovery? Or what this will do to let enterprises test the [...]

Dreamforce 2010 will be remembered as the year of the platform. As usual, it was an incredible show with all sorts of great product announcements, entertainment, vendors, and innovative customers. Most impressive were the platform announcements that provide us a glimpse into the direction that we are headed over the next year. As with any [...]

Dreamforce this year was similar to past shows: exciting, a source of breaking news, and unbridled energy. But the scale of this year's show really set it apart from the past. As we understand it, there were nearly 28,000 attendees, an increase of nearly 50% on the year before. To say Salesforce is on a [...]

What a great time we live in.  I always love the energy of this time of year as excitement builds around the buzz of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference.  This year will be my 7th time attending the event and each year is bigger and better than the one before.  This year I can’t find enough superlatives [...]

As the bulk of Internet sites and services have moved or are moving to using the REST API (Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Facebook), salesforce.com is also moving in that direction. Amazon's Jeff Barr has acknowledged that although both REST and SOAP APIs are offered, 85% of the calls to Amazon Web Services use REST.  Since Model Metrics prefers [...]

How many times have we heard, both in our personal and business lives, that good communication is key factor to success?  Sometimes this idea is discussed casually and never acted upon.  Despite the lack of attention that communication sometimes receives we have never had more opportunities, both personal and professional to ‘stay in touch’.  Smart [...]

  The one thing I have noticed in my time as a Force.com Developer is there is a fundamental difference between someone developing in the Force.com language or someone developing on the Force.com platform. Both have to figure out ways to work within the constraints of Force.com limits. People working with the language see the [...]

I get bored. When I get bored I code. Here’s an example:   Two hours later I had this:  Which is all about this:  This is my two hour Salesforce Chatter Air Application. Its simple enough functionality wise, all it does is: Login into Salesforce using Username, Password, and Token Allows a user with the [...]

As pretty much anybody who has a pulse already knows, BlackBerry has released their latest technological marvel, the PlayBook tablet. Initially, it appears to be a direct competitor to the iPad, which as far as we're concerned is a good thing. Competition breeding innovation and all. But what really excites us is that this new [...]

You may recall back in March we wrote a post on the rapidly dwindling need for desktop machines. That trend has continued, except now it's changing directions yet again. Not only are laptops and netbooks increasing sales, but now tablets are all the rage just 6 months later.  Apple has once again defined a new [...]

As we first saw reported by Engadget yesterday (and soon by many, many others) Apple has lifted its development ban on third-party platforms. This of course, is big news because Apple had once infamously blocked the use of those platforms to create apps for the iPhone and iPad.  Why would we care so much at [...]

Model Metrics has a long history of giving back to the communities that we serve, under the "Model Citizen" program. In a little over a month, Model Metrics will sponsor several employees and their family members to participate in this year’s AIDS Foundation of Chicago 5k Run/Walk event. Since its establishment in 2001, AIDS Run and [...]

Just yesterday, Engadget covered stories coming from both Gartner and IDC, two of the preeminent research and analysis firms in the country. Both agree that Android has exploded on the market, moving from a 9.6% market share last quarter to 17.2% market share currently. Google’s grand vision of running multiple devices across multiple carriers is coming [...]

If you don’t follow salesforce.com closely, it’s probably because you’re not currently a user. That will probably change pretty soon. Investors in old technologies are getting worried, with Kaufman Brothers issuing a "Sell" rating on Accenture for that very reason. Cloud computing and SaaS (salesforce.com especially) are taking a significant bite out of the old [...]

One of my favorite parts of being a marketer is how naturally social and outgoing the marketing lot tends to be. It’s why we in particular take to social media so easily. There are a lot of mediums out there, but thankfully there are a few great tools to make it all a bit more [...]

Today, Marc Benioff, the ever-vocal CEO of salesforce.com made a blog post over at Fortune on the end of Microsoft. In his post he outlines Microsoft’s latest ad campaigns, the ones spouting off about Windows 7 being "my idea." He pokes fun at one in particular where Windows no longer crashing was somehow deemed a feature. Is [...]

At long last, the oft-rumored VMForce has been officially announced. Huh? VMForce is a technology brought about by a partnership between salesforce.com and VMware,     the leader in virtualization technology. VMForce enables Java applications to run on Force.com infrastructure, the robust development platform built by the folks at salesforce.com. What does all of that mean? [...]

  Salesforce chatter has been gaining market buzz over the past month or so, especially after salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff posted a guest blog on TechCrunch on what he calls the "Facebook Imperative." His point wasn’t just to get people talking about his own social platform, but to make people realize just how far technology [...]

Got an interest in cloud computing? Wondering what all the hype is about? Listen in to CloudCast, a weekly podcast running anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes. We meander a bit from enterprise applications to consumer applications, but if you’ve ever wanted to get the inside story on what’s hot, find it here [...]

According to John Herlihy, Google’s vice-president of Global Ad Operations, the conventional desktop PC is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Between the explosive sales of smart phones and other mobile devices, netbooks, and laptops it appears the "traditional" means of computing are changing quickly. Google of course has a vested interest in this game, but it’s clear they [...]

  I hate cloud computing. There, I said it. OK, maybe it’s not cloud computing I hate, it’s the buzz and hype associated with the term. Whenever a technology acquires a sexy new term, companies that have nothing to do with it use the term in order to be associated with being hip or cool. [...]

  Today Amazon made a couple of interesting announcements.  First off they have opened a new region (Northern California) with multiple availability zones (analogous to data centers, but each on separate flood plains and electrical grids).  This further increases their computing capacity and also puts data closer to all of the start-up’s in the Bay [...]

There’s a known redraw bug in the OSX version of the Firefox Flash Player plugin that’s pretty irritating. If you do something that causes too many redraw events to get called in quick succession, Flash will fail to redraw the screen properly, and you end up with a mish-mash of phantom objects on the screen:   [...]

Companies taking on a CRM initiative, whether it a new concept or simply a new system, wisely leverage outside help for technical expertise and strategic best practice. Each situation, organizational culture, and level of readiness presents its own unique set of circumstances, but there are some universal truths when it comes to implementing CRM. One [...]

If there was any doubt remaining about the viability of Cloud Computing for enterprise companies, that doubt should now be summarily dismissed. The company (symbol: CRM) reported earnings Thursday night that were well above last year’s results, and beyond what analysts expected to see. Their shares leapt 16% yesterday after reporting earnings of $21.2m on revenue of [...]

For many companies exposed to sales automation tools for the first time, workflow is identified as a key driver of success. After all, allowing a system to monitor your data and intelligently notify appropriate parties that they need to take action is an attractive proposition. In this way, workflow puts the “automation” in Sales Force [...]

How the perplexed CEO achieved enlightenment The journey of enterprise technology advancements can be a real challenge for executive leadership. Questions arise around cost, return on investment, business process improvement, and once those decisions have been made – who will run the new system once it’s live? Companies don’t always have the internal resources needed [...]

Automated testing tools like FlexMonkey, RIATest, and QTP in Flex require you to add a few .swc files from Adobe to the compiler arguments in order to run. This is easy enough to set up in the project settings: -locale en_US -include-libraries "${flexlib}/libs/automation.swc" "${flexlib}/libs/automation_agent.swc" "${flexlib}/libs/automation_dmv.swc" But if you try to do this in version 3.3.0 [...]

Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s webinar.  I’ve recorded step by step how to add Cloud Converter as a web tab in your org.   

An updated version of Cloud Converter is available this morning. It includes several new and useful features. Upload from XLS now allows multiple tabs in your source document. Includes both Simple and Advanced options for import.  Simple is the same as it ever was.  Advanced is all new. Edit Object labels and plurals in Advanced [...]

Contact the author at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com or @ReidCarlberg I’m on a quest to eliminate the term “resource” as a synonym for another human being.  Why?  Simple: everything I do is about people. Everything succeeds or fails based on the people involved.  The term “resource” feels like an attempt to whitewash this fact, to neutralize it.  And [...]

For CRM users and strategists, the inherent value of centralizing customer data for the purposes of collaboration and presenting a single face to the customer is well understood. The goal is to break down functional and individual silos to bring value to the customer relationship and encourage an open means of communication, management, planning and [...]

CRM implementation strategies are often decorated with goals like establishing “Holistic view of the customer”, “360 degree view of the customer”, and “One-stop shop”. These are ambitious goals when you consider everything that is required to effectively identify, secure, service, and maintain a customer. Ambitions should not be squelched by the enormity of the effort, [...]

What do Siebel, RightNow, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce.com all have in common? The answer is that none of them will change your business and further your CRM effectiveness all by themselves. If you are looking at any of these systems as being the savior for your organization, you are going to find yourself [...]

Calendar2GO Lite for Salesforce CRM on the iPhone   We just found out Calendar2GO Lite was approved by Apple.  This is a free little application that allows you to easily see your Salesforce calendar on your iPhone and shows all the events for the current week, broken out into days and is very similar to the home [...]

We have had a lot of great interest in Cloud Loader, so the next question is "How do I start using it?"  Well, here is a simple 5 Step guide to get going with Cloud Loader to start doing integration for $0.10 an hour (or less with a reserved instance).   Step 1 – Sign [...]

CRM Kicks SaaS!!! Why CRM Optimization Is Your Future Optimization, Optimization, Optimization!!! I am amazed at the number of optimization projects that we are being retained to perform these days. Amazed and very impressed with what our clients are targeting as their objectives. They are taking CRM way beyond the borders of sales, marketing and [...]

One of the things I like about Salesforce.com and the Force.com platform is that they enable people to do more while talking less. Let me clarify: people still get to talk, but they get to talk less about what they’re trying to do on the platform.  They’ll probably talk more about other, unrelated stuff, once [...]

Follow Reid: Twitter.com/ReidCarlberg. A few people on my team contributed to this at different points.  Props to Shoby Abdi for getting it all together.  Twitter.com/ShobyAbdi. I recently ran into a challenge regarding a Salesforce-to-Salesforce mashup.  We didn’t want to move the data (traditional integration, S2S/org to org sharing), but we also wanted to keep the [...]

  I’ll start by saying that Clang is a must-have tool for every iPhone developer. It’s easy to use, and it does a fantastic job of profiling the memory usage of your apps. The iPhone is a powerful hand-held device, but the memory constraints are tight enough that they can cause serious problems with application [...]

  Adding a contact to the iPhone’s address book isn’t horribly complicated, but it’s not the most straightforward process in the world, either, because the documentation leaves a bit to be desired. There is an Address Book Programming Guide published by Apple, but at 28 pages, it feels a bit bloated when you’re just trying [...]

Following are some lessons indented for developers who are well versed in any number of other programming languages, but who are coming to the iPhone for the first time.

You can follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter.     …along with a pretty decent fleece. This Force.com First 500 Certified thing — it’s like the gift that keeps on giving.  (First the pin & hat, the certificate and now this.  A bonanza!)  

You can follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter. My prior ground-breaking* work on "dirt computing" has proven it’s worth!  "Dirt bound" is now insanely popular.  Or, if not insanely popular, it has appeared in at least one blog post outside of mine.   Although I should probably admit that even that blog post is about my [...]

Has anyone else noticed the Facebook explosion over the last 6 weeks?  I’ve been mulling over the reasons why it’s happening now…..right now, and have only a couple very subjective conclusions.  It can only be that the holidays represent a time for people to catch up on the things they’ve been meaning to do for [...]

Article briefly outlining tools a CMO can use to get the job done faster. Includes brief descriptions for Google Sites, Content Management Systems such as Wordpress and Joomla, Salesforce CRM’s Web to Lead functionality, and CS4.

I was fortunate to present a couple of our Flex and AIR based solutions at Dreamforce with Dave Carroll (Salesforce.com Evangelist) and James Ward (RIA Cowboy and Flex Evangelist) while at Dreamforce.   The feedback from the audience was great and it is exciting to share the message of Flex and AIR with more developers to [...]

We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities.  Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000.  That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending [...]

I’m at Dreamforce in the keynote. And the focus is all about the cloud computing convergence. Everyone is excited about the new force.com Sites product. With Sites you can now use the power of Visualforce to create a public facing website. The Site is dynamic and content is delivered directly from custom objects. You can [...]

It’s just two days away.  No, not Dreamforce, although that’s definitely important to me and to Model Metrics.  What’s two days away is the Presidential election. Last month I commented on the first big drop in the financial markets.  Since then it’s been a bit of a stock market roller coaster and the Presidential campaigns [...]

  Amazon has made some interesting announcements lately around their cloud computing environment that you should be paying attention to.  This platform has really come together and is a viable alternative to offerings by other companies.  Let’s break down what Amazon offers: Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) This is essentially “a server in the sky” (or [...]

Intuit founder Scott Cook’s "The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business" (Harvard Business Review, Oct 2008) tells business owners they should harness the power of user contributions. However, it’s missing one important ingredient: how they should do it. Cook writes: First, you must learn how to spot opportunities for creating value from user contributions. [...]

Dreamforce 08.  It’s coming, and I’m excited. Yeah, it’s over election week, which is a little irritating, but I’ll register for the absentee voting and that will be that. Then there’s the traveling to SFO, being away from my wife and young son.  I’ll probably miss him doing something totally cool.  My wife will have [...]