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!
