Spring '08

My favorite new feature is not Dashboard Scheduling or Apex Code in EE or even Outer-Join Reporting - it's the improved user interface for building list views. I'm creating list views like never before!

Network Effects

I think that Charles Zedlewski gets it exactly right in his post A new wrinkle on SaaS when he says this about "Salesforce to Salesforce":

This is something that would be difficult for on-premise vendors to replicate: an application network effect that's could be genuinely beneficial to the user.

This will be a powerful feature as companies with an indirect business model begin to leverage it with their partners.

Just think how hard it would be to implement this functionality with an on-premise solution - the logistics of coordinating IT organizations would be monumental.

Coincidence or Lax Beta Tester Screening?

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Called "My Location", the feature comes as part of the release of version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile. My Location uses cell tower ID information to determine approximately where you are.

Too soon?

Sales Forecasting Simulator

The Stanford Graduate School of Business has a class called "Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations" that allows students to gain experience forecasting sales using a simulator. The simulator allows students to experience the difficulty of forecasting from the perspective of a sales rep and from the perspective of a sales manager.

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0711/feature-simulator.html

I wonder when they're going to release their simulator for the PS3...

Domain Languages: Apex

Tip #17 in The Pragmatic Programmer is:

"Program Close to the Problem Domain."

Lately I've been spending a bunch of time building Apex web services for my customer and I can tell you that it's a super powerful language. My pseudo-code translates almost line-for-line in to Apex code. Here's an example:

//get the oppty line items for this oppty
List opptyLineItems = [Select Id, PricebookEntry.Product2Id from OpportunityLineItem Where OpportunityId = :opptyId];

In C# this one line of code would translate to four or five lines of code. Visualforce is the equivalent development productivity lever for user interfaces. Pretty cool stuff.

Visualforce

Salesforce.com just announced the next step in their evolution towards becoming a complete on demand platform: Visualforce. I can't wait to be able to start building applications with Visualforce instead of lower-level web technologies like ASP.Net and JavaScript, powerful as they may be in their own right.

Designing Applications

Salesforce.com was originally built as a CRM tool. It's been amazing to see it evolve. I've even begun to see it used to model non-business processes. A co-worker recently used it to manage her wedding's guest list. Everything was stored in our product -Who will be able to attend? Would they prefer Beef, Chicken or Fish? What gift did they give? Has a Thank You card been written yet? The application didn't take very long to build and because of the wonders of SaaS multi-tenancy, my friend got to leverage our reporting module without any extra work!

One thing salesforce.com can't do yet is build custom user interfaces. The building blocks have been exposed, but they're the equivalent of 2x4s, nails, plywood and copper pipe. It still requires traditional software development skills and processes to build a sophisticated custom UI. I've heard that there's a solution coming and I'm excited to hear more about it.

Until then, I'll keep working with JavaScript and ASP.Net 2.0. I just finished up a paper usability study with my current customer for a web-based replacement for their exsiting Excel application. Jakob Nielsen's not surprised, butI'm always amazed by how effective paper prototyping is. I was pretty proud of my hand-sketched design, but after spending an hour with the future user of the system, I discovered a number of workflow flaws. According to Steve McConnell, a requirement that goes undetected during the requirements phase "will cost 10 to 100 times to fix during testing."

It's going to be tough for our ASP.Net 2.0 application to beat Excel for flexibility, but on the upside, our web app is going to perform validation, will use dynamic data sources to populate picklists and will store all user-entered data in a cental location, so our customer will never have to worry about data synchronization issues.

Business Intelligence + Data Model Importance

We're building a system for my current customer that will give them some impressive business intelligence functionality. The market that our customer sells in to is fairly small and rather static, so as a result, our tools will allow them to have an almost complete view of their market. They'll be able to look at that data from a number of perspectives and ask the question of how to increase their market share any number of ways. Questions like, "In which sector of the market are we weakest?" will be answerable with a few clicks of a manager's mouse.

We had to think long and hard about the underlying data model, but once that was worked out, everything just fell in to place. There have been a couple of tradeoffs throughout the process, but what we have now is truly powerful.

Sales Process Diversity

I've been helping a small division of a very large company implement our CRM solution. It's been a unique experience as I've been playing two roles on the project - Technical Consultant and Functional Consultant. The best part about the Functional Consulting role is that you get to learn about the customer's business processes at an even greater depth and breadth than you typically do as a Technical Consultant.

This particular customer has a very unique sales process. They're selling products whose costs are heavily influenced by commodity metals prices and their sales cycle is quite long - typically 18+ months. It's been fascinating to see how those two factors have influenced the way that they sell their products.

Peopleware

I recently finished reading Peopleware. I can't recommend this book highly enough. There are dozens of insightful observations about how teams can be influenced to succeed - or fail. Peopleware should be required yearly reading for managers.

A lot of the suggestions that the authors put forward are rarely implemented in most companies – probably because of their counter-intuitive nature. The only company that I’m familiar with that tries to manage in the Peopleware style is Joel’s Fog Creek Software.

One of the chapters that I found particularly interesting dealt with measuring an individual’s job performance. Instead of using the performance data to precisely promote people, or precisely fire people, the authors suggest that a company should only use performance data to benefit the individual. The idea here is that “individuals are inclined to do exactly the same things with the data that the manager would do. They will try to improve the things they do less well or try to specialize in the areas where they already excel.” The authors postulate that due to the extreme sensitivity of performance data, it can only be accurately collected and measured if workers do not have any fear of management seeing the rating and potentially using it against them. Sounds like an intriguing idea to me.

Peopleware is a quick, interesting read that enumerates the myriad ways that current management principles and incentives don’t align particularly well with people’s intrinsic motivations. Any employee will find numerous ideas for improving the way their employer does business