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!