Thursday, February 12, 2009

SaaS vs. On-Premise: What Did You Do This Weekend?

Here's a tweet from salesforce.com customer Jeff Grosse:

I'm glad that Salesforce.com is performing an upgrade to my CRM system tonight so I don't have to.
Compare that with Dan Blake's description of upgrading Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0:

We’ll be installing the update to the update in the CourseMax data center this weekend. It’s a pretty involved process. Here is the process we’ll go through:

  • Apply the update in the sandbox
    • Since our CRM server roles are split up, we’ll have to install it four times
  • Run through the test plan on all four servers
  • Apply the update on the production servers
    • Six different servers this time
  • Run through the test plan again on Production
... This is also why I’m not really comfortable yet with the 2 month update cycle. I like to keep current with updates but it is a lot of work. Keep in mind that this is in addition to the testing and updating we do for our own software. If we would have installed the first version of Update Rollup 2 we would have had to go through this whole process twice within a month [emphasis added].
This might be the most compelling argument for SaaS I've heard - you get to keep your weekends!

Monday, February 02, 2009

He's the DJ, I'm the Wrapper Class

A common request on the Visualforce developer board is to be able to display a selection check box next to every record in a table. Check out these two posts on the developer.force.com wiki for details on how to use a "wrapper class" to accomplish this requirement.

http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Checkbox_in_DataTable
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Wrapper_Class

Also, be sure to check out this classic: