Chicago User Group Notes: FreshDM, Dreamforce and Verizon Wireless - December 18, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Just finished up at the Chicago User Group.  Pretty good crew showed up despite the weather and the time of year.  The particular one was hosted by Click Commerce and sponsored by Allegro and Model Metrics.

 

Who is Allegro?  Fair question.  They produce FreshDM, an on-demand direct marketing print fulfillment thing.  (There’s a catchier phrase for it — I just can’t find it right now.)  You know all those hours you’ve spent on postcard addressing?  Or letters?  Or whatever?  They take that process and make it point and click.  Put in your direct mail piece template, select the recipients and they do the rest: print, address, stamp, mail.  

 

One word: AWESOME!

 

If I think back a few years to when I would design a postcard and ship it out to PrintingForLess.com (who, by the way, still rocks) (I think, I haven’t used them in a few years), wait for the results to ship to me, print out a bunch of labels, peel and stick and run it through the postage machine OR WORSE apply stamps — you get the idea.  What a waste of time that was.

 

FreshDM — if you read this — feel free to set me up with a sample account so I can try it out on my Christmas cards.  You would make my day!

 

OK enough of a non-too-subtle plea for help getting Christmas cards done — back to CUG.  

 

We talked about Winter 09.  Standard stuff.  It’s funny — no one is talking about Visualforce Email templates which I LOVE.  Think about it — the ability to create an attachment that’s either CSV or PDF and send the whole thing out.  It’s AWESOME.  Not that the rest of the release isn’t — but I’d like to see more people talk about it for sure.

 

Then we had a chance to talk about some of the Model Metrics neatness — Lasso2Go mostly.  Ever notice that your Verizon wireless card sloooooooows down when you’re in front of a crowd?  Mine certainly did this time.  Ah the many joys of live demos!

 

But we had a good number of questions (not soft balls — actual questions) about how to work with Force.com sites and Amazon Web Services — enough that I don’t think too many people other than me noticed the slow wireless.  I took pictures of cards with my web cam, everything was transcribed in pretty near real time and we had what were I think a couple of pretty legitimate ooh’s and ah’s.

 

Thanks to Cecile and Denise for organizing everyone and for inviting us.  I look forward to the next one!