Dexter on steroids

Well, long time no write. So, the testing for the "Dexter project in Salesforce" has been going pretty well. Technical difficulties have mostly been eliminated, although a couple still crop up now and then. I met with Cathy and came up with a list of customizations that would help make the process more streamlined.

However, in the meantime, I attended Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user's conference. It was great, packed with people (around 30,000 attended) and ideas. Ken also went to parts of Dreamforce. On one day we met with our sales rep to walk around the "Expo," where there were booths of different companies who build on Salesforce. I had checked out several booths beforehand and recommended Ken check out two of them.

One was M-Files, which is a program that has a plug-in for Salesforce which allows you to seamlessly link files from your network servers into Salesforce. For the user, what they see is an "M drive" that looks like our other lettered drive (F, G, H, etc.). When they save to the M drive, it prompts them to associate it with lookups to Salesforce. So, for example, as you save a spec to the M drive, you would be able to select the project in Salesforce that it is associated with, which in turn would tie it to the account and location and contact of that project. When you go to the project, there's a kind of band in the middle with a button to click to get to the files. Right there from within the project, you can launch any file and work on it. M-Files has versioning and check-out, check-in features as well. To me, it looks like something I've been searching for for a while -- a way to do your work in the project, rather than having to remember to add the files to the project as you work.

The other was ServiceMax, which I'd stopped to check out because the company where my husband works, Labcyte, uses it for their field service engineers. ServiceMax is made for managing service-related processes, including tracking hours, work requests, dispatching with a drag and drop interface and so on. After Ken watched a demo he said it looked like "Dexter on steroids." I agree and I'm really looking forward to getting a detailed look at it when we get back from the break.

In light of this development, I've pushed the pause button on the testing process. If we do find that ServiceMax is the tool we'll move forward with, we would not need to use the project I created, or at least that's very likely. I'll keep you posted!

Progress Report

The testing has gone fairly well. Again, I must say how grateful I am to Cathy, Joel and their teams for doing this testing. There have been some frustrations and they've been very patient.

Speaking of frustration, Cathy has had a few with some of the differences between creating the project in Salesforce vs. doing it in Dexter. She and I met so I could write down a detailed list of the pain points. I figure if she finds them painful, others will, too. Some things are differences we'll all have to get used to but some are things that I should be able to make changes to either eliminate or improve.

October's been a busy month which included two trips for me so I haven't devoted as much time as I could wish to Salesforce, but I hope to focus more exclusively on it now and see what I can do to whittle down the pain point list and then roll the new process out to everyone.

I'll keep you posted.

Testing commences, and who knows what's next

Yesterday I had Salesforce training with Cathy, Joel, Garlenzka, Ken M, Mary M, Alyse and Stacey B so they could start testing the new "Dexter in Salesforce" process. A big thank you to all of them for doing this testing. When you're a beta-tester it means you deal with the glitches and bugs so others don't have to. That can be bothersome. Here's hoping it goes well and soon a lot of more of you will join in.

Before they could truly use the new Project object in Salesforce I needed to get the sites from the Sites Database into Salesforce. I thought that'd be pretty easy and straightforward but, as is usually the case, nothing's ever simple. I worked on it for a couple days with no luck but finally yesterday, with some help from Apprivo, the consultant we've been using for Salesforce customization help, I got it. So now the sites from the Sites database for the companies that were sent to Salesforce from Contact are in Salesforce, too.

It feels good to make this progress. I'm excited about moving forward. A few days ago I reviewed Salesforce.com with Harvey, the sales ops managers and Sandy. It was fun to watch ideas for more and more ways we could use Salesforce bubble up from everyone. There are so many possibilities it's almost overwhelming. Now we need to figure out the priorities together and forge ahead!

Ready for prime time

So the "Dexter project" in Salesforce is ready. I've tested it and shown it to Sherri and it's ready to be used by a pilot group. I'll be asking some teams if they're willing to try it out this week. I'm thinking we'll test it for 2 weeks and then roll it out.

This new project form in Salesforce accomplishes one main thing: It makes it so people don't have to put company & contact information both into Contact and Salesforce in order for the information to be used in Dexter.

Next is the bigger step. How do we move more functionality into the cloud? Stay tuned.

Wanted: Testers of the new system

I'm very close to having the new "Salesforce Dexter" ready to test. My plan is to have one sales team, maybe two, try using the new process for a week or two, then roll it out to everyone. If you're interested, let me know.

The connection between Salesforce and Notes has been going well for a few days. Now I'm working on a way to enable users to create the Project Checklist and Project Cover Sheet right from Salesforce. I had hoped that as soon as you created a Project in Salesforce, a process would kick off to send it to Dexter, and then you'd immediately be able to get going on the rest of your work within Dexter.

However, it turns out that's not quite possible -- not the way I envisioned it anyway. On both sides, in Salesforce and in Notes, there's no way to trigger the automated process right when a new project is created. The automation has to run on a time interval schedule. In Salesforce, I've set it to run every 1 minute, and look for any new projects. However, the process to send it to Dexter takes longer than a minute, and if it happens that 2 projects were created, the process works serially, the first project is processed first and then the next and so on. So it can add up to a few minutes before a project gets sent down.

Then on the Notes side, again the automatic process to send the requested messages (such as request for a labor quote, or Kham number or whatever) also runs on a schedule, probably every 5 minutes. I talked with Sherri and a few other users and found that there are times when, at the same time as you create the Project, you also print the Project Checklist and Cover Sheet and put it with the order entry package. It would be an inconvenience if, every time you did that, you had to wait 5 minutes or more before you could complete those steps.

So, I tried to come up with a way to prevent that inconvenience. After a bit of thinking and experimenting, I finally remembered, hey, maybe there's an app for that. I sometimes forget that Salesforce, like the iPhone and other programs and devices, has applications that developers share with others, sometimes free, sometimes paid. I found one called FormFactory that looks promising. It has both a free and paid version. I'm learning how to use it. The extra few minutes doesn't matter so much when all you're doing is sending an email request but I hope FormFactory will work as the way you'll be able to print Project Checklists and Cover Sheets from Salesforce.

I'll let you know how it goes. Next week I'll be on PTO for a week so testing won't start until after then, but I'm really, really close!

Managing Projects and RFPs in Salesforce - Promising Stuff

I've been working as much as I can on getting the Project object set up in Salesforce. It's the first step to getting the project management functionality of Dexter into Salesforce and I'm excited for it to be ready.

I don't mean to sound like I'm making excuses but I haven't been able to do as much work on it as I'd like because there are so many other things that I also need to do. A week or so ago I was lying in bed around 3 in the morning, unable to sleep, thinking and worrying about all the stuff I had to do. Finally I decided to just get up and clean up my Inbox. I thought at least I'd feel like things were more under control if I did that. I decided to delete or "folder-ize" anything that wasn't a task I needed to do, and the tasks I'd mark with a little green follow-up flag. I went through everything in my Inbox ... and ended up with a huge list of emails with green flags on them! Click scroll, scroll, scroll and everything has a green flag. Not helpful. I'm sure you all can relate.

Anyway, I will keep plugging away on the Salesforce Project. I'm hoping to have a pilot test team within a week or so. I'm feeling a little discouraged about finding an already-made application for managing projects in Salesforce. I'd hoped there might be something "out of the box" rather than my designing everything from scratch. So far what I've seen doesn't seem like a good fit. But I have an appointment next week to see a demo of one that our Salesforce rep recommends. For now I decided not to spend as much time on that search because I want to spend my time getting the Project ready. Then I'll get back into a more dedicated search.

Oh, I did have a kind of exciting development this week. Sandy talked to me about wanting to figure out a better way to manage bids / RFPs. She at first was thinking of ways we could assign teams, tasks, deadlines, etc. in Notes. We met to talk over how we could use Salesforce to accomplish this and I'm eager to work on that (again, waiting until I get the Project working). The exciting development was that when I mentioned this whole RFP management thing to our Salesforce rep he said, in so many words, "We have an app for that." Salesforce themselves has a process they use for managing RFPs and they are offering it to their customers. He sent me a link. Haven't checked it out yet but it sounds very promising.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Oh, my goodness (my version of OMG)!! Salesforce is even cooler than I thought! I finished a 4 day class on Salesorce Thursday and my brain runneth over. There are so many possibilities with Salesforce that I can hardly keep track!


Automation is one thing I think we are really going to like. I can create "workflows" that trigger when you save records. They can update fields, send tasks (to do list items) to yourself or others, or emails. It will be fun to figure out what will help you the most. They can be timed, too, so for example something can happen a week after you save a record, and then a week after that, and so on.


The final day we talked about leads and marketing. Very exciting. I already emailed Mica about meeting with our current email marketing partner, ExactTarget, which has an integration with Salesforce. Even the instructor said that to get the full benefit of marketing with Salesforce, it's best to work with a partner. Last week Mica was asking for updates to some vertical market lists. In the future, we can send the email blasts out, then see the results - even to the point of seeing when and how many times the recipient clicked to open the email.


One cool thing I learned is I can include "web tabs." Salesforce uses tabs, such as "Accounts," "Contacts," and "Opportunities." I can create tabs that are a portal to anything on the web. I already experimented with creating a "Khameleon" tab that brings up the login to Khameleon. We could have one for Kiosk, for Google, whatever. As we start to live in Salesforce more and more, this will make a lot of sense.


I've still got to work on the Lotus Notes connection first but I am so excited about the possiblities for us!

So, now what?

Now that Salesforce is here, now what?

Well, my first priority is to get the Project object set up and sending itself down to Dexter so we can keep from having to duplicate data entry.

Beyond that, though, what do we want to accomplish with Salesforce? I've started reading a book called Salesforce.com: Secrets of Success by David Taber. Yes, believe it or not, there are nerdy people who go to that geeky area of the bookstore and not only buy but actually read those incredibly boring looking computer books! :) In one section, the author lists mandates for Salesforce.com (SFDC). Here are some of them:

• To be the only source of information about customer relationships. If other systems contain customer data, they need to be integrated with Salesforce.com over time so that the company achieves a 360 degree view of the customer.
• Not to be used as a spying machine or a micromanagement tool.
• To be used as the command center or virtual war room for winning accounts and keeping customers happy. The data entered into the system needs to be good enough to drive real decisions and allocate resources.
• To eliminate excessive emails, data reentry, and forgotten action items.
• To use Salesforce.com data for management meetings, as the system-of-record data.
• To enable the company to move toward an MBE -- Manage By Exception -- policy, meaning routine decisions should be handled "in process." SFDC's alerts, thresholds, workflows and reports should be used to handle normal situations and to automatically flag or escalate the unusual cases.

Sounds good, doesn't it? We've got some work ahead of us!!

Wanna chat? In Salesforce!

Today I went to a meeting of the Silicon Valley Salesforce.com user's group. The topic of the day was "Chatter," a new feature in Salesforce. It's still in beta but we can start using it any time we're ready.

Chatter gives us the ability to do a sort of combination Facebook/Instant Messaging within Salesforce. At first thought, it's hard to imagine what the benefit would be of that kind of capability. In fact, several of the speakers at the meeting today confessed they were skeptics but now they were all touting the benefits.

As with Facebook, you can post a status - something saying what you're doing - and those who are following you will see that status. But, even more interestingly, you can follow objects within Salesforce and have live discussions about those.

For example, you could go to an Opportunity and post a question about that opportunity - maybe "I'm with the customer and they're asking if we could show them an example of xxxx type of furniture." Everyone following either the person asking or that opportunity would see that question in a chat window, and could immediately chime in with suggestions or answers.

Soon we'll be doing projects in Salesforce. Think of the possibilities there. What if the leads for each project were able to instantly post updates on how the project was going? OK, they'd need a internet-connected device for doing that, but still, wouldn't it be cool?

You can post links and files and discuss those. We can also bring in feeds from external sources. For example, we have a Pivot Facebook page, we could bring in the updates from there. We could bring the updates from Herman Miller's page and other of our vendors.

Chatter in Salesforce is an exciting development! It'll be fun to explore it.

What's the best way -- or ways -- to organize a project?

After we roll out Salesforce to replace our Contact and Sites databases in Lotus Notes, the next thing I'll be working on is the Project "form," called an "object" in Salesforce. I'm creating the Project object there to replace the Project form in Dexter so that when you create a Project in Salesforce you can use the account, location and contact information from Salesforce in the same way as you use the company, site and contact information from Contact and Sites in Lotus Notes.

So that's the beginning. But ultimately I'd like to move us into the cloud for all that we do in Lotus Notes. That does not necessarily mean, though, that it makes sense to just re-do everything in Salesforce that we currently have in Dexter. As glad as it makes me that the databases in Notes which I created have helped Pivot employees to accomplish their work for all these years, I'd be the last person to say they are perfect. Well, nothing is perfect. As much as I wish it could be, Salesforce is not perfect, either.

But here's our chance to stop and look at how we work, and see if it makes sense to try a different way. A big piece of what we do in Dexter right now is project management. We create a project, and then a bunch of forms, requests, information and communications about that project. We use other programs for the project besides Dexter: Cap, Autocad, our network file storage, Khameleon, our time tracking spreadsheets or forms, email, faxing, scanning,...more? Lots of items are created that make up the project. Lots of steps make up the project process. What's the best way to organize those items and steps?

I am looking into different possibilities of tools we could use for our project management -- and then I'll be asking our managers and employees to look at them, too, so we can decide what makes sense for Pivot. There are lots of possibilities. Some examples:
- We could create a project in Salesforce, attach all the related files there in that project rather than on the F: or Q: drive or wherever we're storing them now. We could also do all our emailing right from that project. We'd need to figure out how to request others to do things such as create quotes/proposals, work requests, labor requests, etc. Use objects similar to our Notes forms? Or templates similar to Word & Excel templates? Automatic emails?
- We could create a website or a web page for each project and store all the files there.
- We could purchase an application that manages projects using a Gantt chart kind of flow, with milestones determining the flow of one process after another.
- We could do some kind of automation based on a project workflow.
Those are just a few possibilities.

It's fun to try to think about what we do with a clean slate, not assuming we should do things the way we do now, even if they are working. Have ideas? Pass them along!

Is that Mom or my IT Manager??

I read this article, "Mom's Voice Packs Soothing Power," and it made me think of  how someone at work once told me I had a calming influence -- in my role as an IT Manager. I do notice that everyone is very relieved to see me when they're having IT issues. I remember once driving to our San Francisco office because they were down. When I walked in the door, there was a cry of, "Mavis!" I thought to myself, "Little do they know I have no idea what's wrong or if I'll be able to fix it." But it's nice to create that feeling in others anyway.

I'm sure Paul has experienced this, too, and people in other professions have the same experience. When you're stranded on the side of the road and the mechanic shows up. When the doctor or nurse walks in the door. It's a beautiful thing.

But wait, there's more!

There's a lot more in Salesforce than the pieces that replace Contact (Accounts, Contacts & Opportunities). I haven't learned how to use all of the features yet and I'm not even sure I know what all the features are yet!

This morning there was an article in the San Jose Mercury News about IM (Instant Messaging) coming into the enterprise. They featured a lot of information on Microsoft's Sharepoint which will include IM in their next version. Salesforce already has that. They call it "Chatter" and it was released this Spring. I saw a demo of it at Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual users' conference. Besides being able to "chat" with people, as with all IM programs, in Salesforce's Chatter, you can chat with objects. So, for example, you could mark an Opportunity to let you know any time someone updates it.

I'm eager to learn more about Chatter and see how it can help us here at Pivot. As we move more of what we do in Dexter into Salesforce, I see even more opportunity for Chatter to be a very useful tool.

Another new feature released this Spring is "Answers". I've just started looking into this but it looks like a way to post questions to a community, then as people answer the questions and answers are kept on the web. I'm thinking this may be a good alternative to those emails the salespeople often send out asking, "Does anyone know where I can find....?" I think being able to keep all those questions and answers, and search in them, will be very useful. I could see the designers, and others, building up an excellent knowledge base with "Answers", too.

There's a Quotes module, too, that I plan to check out. Also a Self Service Portal that I believe we can use both for our customers to be able to see and submit certain information and for our vendors. There's a big module called Content for uploading and sharing files which will be very useful for marketing but also potentially for sharing files among ourselves, perhaps creating a vendor library online. There's an object called Cases which looks like it might be something we could use for our service and warranty work. And who knows what else there is in this cloud?!

I'll be reading, watching videos and learning about more of Salesforce's features as time goes on, and I'll be encouraging you to, too. In June I'm scheduled to attend a 4-day certification training on Salesforce and I'm hoping I'll come back for that bursting with new ideas and things to try.

Opportunities Will Really Matter

In Contact we have Opportunities and we'll have them in Salesforce, too. I have a feeling, though, that many people will find they matter a lot more in Salesforce than they did in Contact.

Why? Well, because in Salesforce Opportunities are the ONLY way to forecast. There is no such thing as the 3 month forecast form we have now, where you write 3 numbers -- how much this month, how much next month & the month after. With Salesforce, those 3 numbers will be computed mathematically from the Opportunities.

We decide what Opportunity amounts to include in those 3 numbers, and that's a topic we'll be discussing as we prepare Salesforce for roll-out and, I imagine, re-discussing as we begin using it. There will be several stages of an Opportunity and we will determine what Opportunities in which stages will we include or exclude from our Forecasts.

The stages, at least at this point, are:

1. Prospect
2. Qualify
3. Cover the Bases
4. Expecting to Close
5. Closed Won
6. Closed Lost

I expect that we will include the Opportunities in stages 4 and 5, those that we're expecting to close and that have closed -- and been won.

How does that sound to those of you who forecast now? Do you feel you'll be able to create Opportunities and manage the stages with this type of logic?

For sales reps, the Opportunities also play into the Focus Four form and discussions you have with your managers. I plan to design a dashboard in Salesforce that will show the opportunities in the Focus Four quadrants so that you don't need to create the Opportunity in Salesforce and turn around and write it again on a Focus Four form.

Using the Opportunities in this way will fit into one of the goals set by the sales department, to have a better, more detailed view of what is in the "funnel" (the opportunities out a ways, waiting to be funneled into real sales).

Location, location, location

I promised to write about some of my customization plans in Salesforce.com. One of them is regarding locations.

In Dexter, as you know if you use Dexter, you can pick a billing location from Contact and a jobsite or shipping location from the Sites database. There are times when that scheme doesn't work so well. If a client has several billing locations, you have to create the company several times in Contact. And then when you're making Contacts you have to decide, which Company will I put this Contact under? Sometimes you might have to decide to put the same contact under two companies. Not good!!

In Khameleon, it's set up that every company can have as many locations as needed, and they can all be under the same company. One issue in Contact, though, at least as I understand it, is that if you need to put in a different "Attn to" name, you end up having to create a new location for each "Attn to" name. Not good!!

I'm hoping to avoid those issues in Salesforce by having one Company -- in Salesforce they're called Accounts -- and a custom object called "Locations". You will be able to create as many Locations for each Account as needed, and then you will be able to choose whichever location you want in the Projects you create (another custom object I'm creating in Saleforce, more on that later). And you'll create all your Contacts under the one Account, and, again, be able to choose whichever Contact you want, wherever you want, on the Project.

In my current plan, I'm keeping the Account object (in Salesforce there are "objects" rather than forms) very simple, not even requiring an address. That way you won't have to create an Account, put all the address info in, and then have to create a Location and put that same address info in there. When you create a Contact, you'll have the option to associate him/her with Location(s) but it won't be required.

Sound good?

One concern I have, though, is whether at any point we'll wish we had the address information in the Account. What if we're looking at a report or dashboard of a bunch of Accounts and we wonder where they are? Should I require putting in the city and state at least? But what about when there are billing addresses in several cities & states? Would it be okay if you had to pick one "best" city and state for each account, probably the headquarter's? Would you resent having to put the city and state in on the Account object, and then still having to create the Location and put that same city and state in again??

Such deep, philosophical questions!

Next I'll talk about one of the biggest changes -- for some of you -- in Salesforce: Opportunities. No more 3 Month Forecast forms, only Opportunities. Change is a-comin'.

I've looked at clouds...

I sent out an email a while back saying "Pivot's moving to the cloud!"

I like this cloud computing stuff. My use of it started with my work at my church. (On Fridays I work as a "techie" for my church. When I found out that you could get Google Apps for free if you're a non-profit, I immediately thought that'd be perfect for a church -- no servers to maintain, no worries about the fact that the minister and the youth leader have Macs while the rest of us has PCs, no back-ups. Sounded great. And it has been good for us. I wrote an article about it for a networking website I use.

Here at Pivot, our first foray into the cloud is with Salesforce.com. I'm glad that Pivot is moving to this technology and also personally happy that I get to learn more about Salesforce.com.

Why do I think it's a good thing to move to the cloud, you ask? Well, since you ask, I'll tell you. Personally, I have always preferred the software side of IT over the hardware. I enjoy making databases work, creating processes through technology, getting feedback from users on what helps them work better and implementing that through software. I'd do those kinds of things all day rather than update or build servers, take apart computers, hook up monitors and cables, blah, blah, blah. I know some people tend to think of IT people in a similar way as mechanics, but that mechanical side of things is what I have to do, rather than what I really like to do.

Cloud computing, therefore, is right up my alley. There is no hardware. Well, there's no software, either. In fact, Salesforce.com's tag line is "no software", as in the image at the beginning of this post. But, even though there's no software to install, it functions like software, except through a browser. The fun part of Salesforce.com for me is the designing part. I can create custom fields and objects, arrange them in the way that makes the most sense, and also do more advanced things such as creating work flows and automated tasks (which I still need to learn how to do).

Salesforce.com, like Google, also offers their product to non-profits for free so I began using it when I got it for my church. One thing that impressed me greatly is the way I could do so much customization, yet not "break" it. You know how Khameleon has a bunch of Herman Miller customizations, and because of that when Khameleon is updated, we lag quite far behind because they have to do a bunch of testing to make sure the HMI customizations will work with the new software upgrades? With Salesforce.com, they've done a great job of making it so that the customizations continue to work even as they're adding new features all the time.

In my next blog, I'll talk about some of the customizations I'm working on in Salesforce.com for Pivot. I'll be interested to hear what you think of my plans.