And so it begins,...a new adventure

We are going to begin a new adventure -- another move into cloud computing -- ServiceMax. ServiceMax is a cloud-based application that works as part of Salesforce.com to manage field service operations. Here at Pivot, the plan is that ServiceMax will replace Dexter.

Similar to the way that Dexter connected with Contact and Sites, it makes sense that, now that we have replaced Contact and Sites with Salesforce, we would want to have a program that uses the company, contact and location information for managing our projects. ServiceMax will be different than Dexter, but enable us to do what Dexter does --- and beyond.

Our plan is to begin our changeover with a pilot team -- Cathy & Joel and their support team, as well as key individuals at Tech Services. ServiceMax customers are mainly field service providers, so the product is geared towards businesses that service equipment on customer sites. That's a little different than what we do but the concepts and many of the things we do match that model closely. In the next several weeks I will be working with ServiceMax to configure the program to correspond with our way of doing business.

I will keep all of you informed as we figure things out. I'm going to be meeting online with our project manager from ServiceMax on April 14th. We'll start planning how this project will proceed.

I'm excited about this big move forward -- or should I say upward? -- to the cloud. Stay tuned for more details!

Chatter at the Superbowl

Did you notice Chatter was at the Superbowl, too? Kinda cute. Will.i.am was at Dreamforce (Salesforce's annual user conference), too.

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!