On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.
1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The [...]
Did you know the federal government spends over $75B annually on IT? With that number in mind, you can imagine the enormous amount of manpower it takes to choose, customize, build, deploy, and maintain separate instances of applications to run the government’s operations. I cannot imagine a more perfect environment to deploy cloud computing, and [...]
Anyone who has ever owned a home knows the feeling of moving into a clean, empty space. Initially, everything is in order, and everything has a place. Over time, however, things begin to change… clutter starts to collect, carpets begin to wear, small things start to break, paint starts to peel, etc. Left its own [...]
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 [...]
I recently had a conversation with the VP of Sales at a large manufacturing company. For the purposes of this discussion, I will call him John. John and his sales organization have never had a centralized, collaborative CRM system before and they are about to begin a salesforce.com implementation. Among the goals of the project [...]
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:
This happens [...]
Share this post:
Share this post:
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 [...]
Posted a couple of minor updates to Cloud Converter, mostly small bug fixes that affected the metadata explorer feature. If you already have it installed as a web tab in your org, there’s nothing you need to do. You automatically have access to these. Enjoy!
Share this post:
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 [...]
Had an interesting challenge the other day: all the best last data migration plans were failing. Why? The tool of choice — which one is not important — failed. What to do?
I used Cloud Converter. Quelle surprise, right? I could have used something else, but it’s some decent code that I’m [...]
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 [...]
(credit to Interperetivist Clog)
As the New York Times’ David Pogue put succinctly in his article, Apple may have stepped in it by rejecting Google’s "Google Voice" application from their App Store. Speculation abounds, but many feel AT&T put the kibosh on the application - highlighting the dangers mobile device manufacturer’s face when tethering themselves to [...]
Twitter remains a popular topic in the mainstream media these days, gaining more and more popularity with public support from celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. Most recently it garnered worldwide attention for its role in documenting the uprising in that followed the country’s controversial election.
Some people have even suggested that Twitter can be a [...]
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 for [...]
This post is part 2 of the "What’s in it for me discussion." Part 1 is here.
Provide the visibility they need to further penetrate existing accounts (farming vs. hunting)
The collaboration gains in a CRM implementation will support the ability for users to see beyond their own functional area and into upstream and downstream processes that [...]
you can follow Scott on
I was watching an episode of Ace of Cakes the other day. Duff and the crew were using a shot gun to destroy sample cakes they no longer needed in the shop. Each of them commented on how cathartic it was to purge the old to make way for the new.
Let’s [...]
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 of the [...]
Hundreds, or even thousands, of companies claim they have created Cloud Computing-based applications. I don’t doubt that in the least. However, almost all of these applications either a) use the company’s own platform or b) leverage one or two infrastructures, such as Force.com, Amazon Web Services or Google. Very few applications leverage more than two [...]
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.
Share this post:
On the second day keynote at Google I/O they unveiled something big. This is new product is built by the guys who brought us Google Maps. Remember how surprised you were the first time you saw interactive maps IN THE BROWSER and could zoom down and see your own house? Well these guys asked themselves [...]
I have an iPhone and for the most part I love it. I like the interface, the seamless access to music and all the apps on the AppStore. I don’t like the shortcomings, such as the lack of cut and paste, no video capture, lack of landscape keyboard, etc… Many of these will be addressed [...]
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 View.
Create External IDs [...]
The successful strategy for CRM implementation in your organization needs to be well thought out and aligned to your culture, business needs and problems. However, there is significant value to examining what has worked (and not worked) for others that have blazed this trail before you. This two-part post will address some of [...]
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 that’s [...]
I recently listed the desktop version of CardLasso on Adobe’s AIR Marketplace. If you haven’t heard of AIR, check it out on the Adobe site. It is the “Adobe Integrated Runtime” which allows you to run RIA apps on your desktop and distribute them with the ease of a web app. Our AIR version of [...]
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 [...]
Remember When Video Killed The Radio Star?
By now we should recognize the signs of a major shift caused by a new, “disruptive” technology. After all, we have seen it happen so many times before. The only difference is that today the shifts are quick and dramatic, catching off guard anybody that dares to [...]
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 [...]
Follow @CRMTrainer on Twitter
or email Scott: smccambridge(at)modelmetrics.com
I just finished listening to a Pod Cast of This American Life show #377 “Scenes from a Recession”. In one act of the show they explained in detail the process by which the FDIC comes in and takes over a bank that has failed. As a trainer, I was [...]
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 [...]
Have you wished your business process was highly automated with instantaneous workflow notification triggers sending a flurry of communication to all the appropriate people?
Have you thought implementing this stroke of brilliance in salesforce.com (or any other system) would cure the ailments of your current business process?
If you have not had the opportunity to test [...]
We’ve been working more and more with Adobe AIR and Salesforce.com recently, and as such we’ve been putting the AIRConnection class through its paces, fixing bugs and adding functionality along the way. Here are a few of the modifications we’ve made, and why:
SQL Reserved Words
One of the first things that we noticed was that we needed to [...]
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 screen in [...]
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 Up for [...]
Contact Reid by email (rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com) or Twitter (@ReidCarlberg).
I’ve been working on a new feature for Cloud Converter, the ability to import an app from an Excel spreadsheet. Here’s a walk through. You can use this for free, link code at the bottom.
You can add this to your org — DE, EE, UE — [...]
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 [...]
So why do I need a server again to integrate with the cloud?
Historically one of the arguments against SaaS, or now “The Cloud” was that integration is difficult or expensive. Several great providers have emerged in this space to make integration with cloud platforms inexpensive and more recently, even cloud based. These approaches are great [...]
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 freed [...]
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 solution [...]
A pair of my co-workers and I took a trip out to Seattle to visit everyone’s favorite online retailer. We weren’t visiting the commerce side of the house, but the online services group Amazon Web Services (AWS). Which meant free shipping wasn’t an option for this trip. We walked through their current and upcoming product [...]
Follow Reid Carlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Dear IT Leadership,
Today, your business needs you more than ever. The economy is weakening. Competition is intense.. You’ve helped it navigate technologies for years. But the business has immensely complex new challenges today. It needs your help to operate more efficiently. It needs your help to [...]
Follow ReidCarlberg on Twitter or contact him at rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Hey Stumbleupon — welcome! You might also enjoy "Import Your App from Excel".
Gmail experienced an outage in Europe overnight. There’s some handwringing and frustration about it. But you know what? I don’t care. Here’s why.
1. The last significant Gmail outage looks to have been in August. Four [...]
This has obviously been a hot topic since last fall. Many have written about it, from Forbes and The Industry Standard on down. While most seem to be casting their vote for Cloud Computing success through this recession, there are others who are non-believers. Those who believe in the cloud computing model believe that this [...]
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 performance. With [...]
I just wanted to share my Gmail transition experience over the past 24 hours.
I was extremely resistant to switching to Gmail. I’m one of the last in the company to do it. I love folders, I love offline, I love exchange/outlook/entourage (EOE). But as a company, it just made sense to make the switch. From [...]
One of the main advantages to using Flex and AIR for development is the ability to rapidly generate interface prototypes which can be be directly utilized into development itself.
Another side of this aspect is that we can also use AIR to develop a simple interface to iterate against Apex web services. Apex [...]
A few years back, we (the development team here at Model Metrics) were looking for a technology to build an offline application (this later became the framework for our 2GO line of products) with a rich front end and salesforce.com as the data endpoint.
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 to [...]
Optimization
If 2009 is the year to do more with what you have, then optimizing your salesforce.com configuration should be one of your top priorities.
Model Metrics has helped scores of companies to “optimize” what they accomplish with salesforce.com. To be clear, optimization clients are existing subscribers of salesforce.com whom Model Metrics did not initially implement. [...]
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.
First blog since Dreamforce… not good! The marketing guys are all over me. “You have to blog consistently.” Of course they’re right, but who has the time! Inauguration was yesterday, pretty amazing times. So now that Obama is in and the recession will be coming to an end, banks will become stabilized, the capital markets will bounce back, and general [...]
With the introduction of Apex, Salesforce began enforcing unit testing for code deployment. For most people, this would be a Good Thing(tm) and for people running on a distributed cloud type application, it would be a Really Good Thing(tm) (or at least, the neighborly thing to do).
This is what shame looks like:
That is several [...]
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!)
Share this post:
In case you haven’t heard we announced CardLasso back in November of last year. We have had a lot of interest and received some great feedback since it was shown in the Dreamforce keynote by Adam Gross, namely:
This is great, but I don’t have an iPhone
Could I use this for Tradeshows?
Do you have any Corporate [...]
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 blog post, [...]
Cloud Converter(???????????)??????????????????????????(??????????)??????
(English language version here.)
????????????Google Code??????????????????Java????????????????????
? ????????????JDBC???????????????????(Lotus Notes, Oracle, MySQL, ??)?
? ????????
? ??????????????????
? ???????????????????????????????????????
? ?????????????
???????????????ReadMe.txt??????????????
??????????????????rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Share this post:
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 [...]
Cloudware — used as early as 2007 to refer to things like Google Maps, normal people will start saying it this year to refer to just about everything.
"AWS It" — putting something on AWS’s S3, EC2 or Turk instead of going the dirt computing route.
Web 11.0 — someone will surely co-opt this meaningless string of [...]
It’s the time of year for predictions. Everyone has their prognostication hat on. My thoughts? We’ll need a buzzword for all those servers we’re killing. It should be slightly negative.
I call dibs on "dirt computing".
From what I can tell, 2009 is not likely to be a good year for dirt computing.
Share this post:
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.
Heading to Cloudforce in NYC? So am I. We’ll be talking about some of the standard stuff as well as one supercool addition. You should definitely stop by our booth (I think it’s a booth — might be a table — either way stop by) and ask for a demo. I’ll be there all day.
Share [...]
So Dan Galorath has noticed Force.com and started to quantify the savings he believes users can achieve with it. It looks like Marc Benioff sent the results around to all of SFDC. With good reason - Galorath estimates 30-40% lower costs when compared to Java.
Very cool. And consistent with my experience.
In an explanatory article, How [...]
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 [...]
Pretty psyched about the new developer account limits: 2 full licenses, 3 platform, 5 partner, 10 customer. Now that’s what I call a dev account.
Oh and yeah there’s sites in there too.
I’ll probably sign up for a second one today just so I have a spare.
While I’m thinking about it: I’ve heard a few people [...]
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 [...]
Well, if you did, you definitely weren’t hanging out with me. Certification exam done (and passed — hooray), many people said hello to and one very late dinner at a very nice restaurant complete (thank you, Informatica geniuses).
You’d think with all that I’d be asleep. You’d be wrong. I’m up polishing some slides [...]
Just pulled into SFO. The Nikko, actually. I have a tiny room but boy is it quiet. Love it!
Why? It gives me space to get my thoughts together. The next three days are going to be long ones — but they also promise to be very interesting.
I’m kicking off with a cert exam, then [...]
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 have [...]
Hey all, first blog here. I’m sure my prose will thrill the masses. What could be more exciting than reading about CRM? Truly thrilling!! We’ll try not to make it too dry. Maybe we’ll throw in some discussion around platforms and CSS and other equally compelling topics.
So let’s see, what’s going on. One word (or [...]
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 multiple servers). EC2 [...]
It was actually during the development of Expense2GO that we first started kicking around the idea of what else we could do with a basic iPhone framework into Salesforce, and the ability to search across contacts took about fifty or so seconds. Later it was decided to use SOSL to search across many standard objects [...]
Interesting times. Yesterday the House of Representatives failed to pass the $700B bailout bill. The Dow fell almost 800 points during the afternoon, the largest one day loss in its history. The last time I remember hearing those words was back in 2001, when the Internet bubble burst. Of course the NASDAQ took a relatively [...]
When we heard about Apple’s iPhone development program and the App Store, Model Metrics grabbed on with both hands. It was a pretty fundamental shift for us - but that goes somewhat without saying, it was a pretty fundamental shift for everyone. Having witnessed the craze of the Palm Pilot (I actually still have [...]
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. Second — [...]
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 the video [...]