Enter Lockergnome’s piece today titled, Five Reasons Not to Trust the Cloud in which Chris or one of his trusty minions lays out these five reasons:

1. Companies Come and Go
2. Security is Never 100% Guaranteed
3. Cloud Services Aren’t Immune to Hardware Failure
4. Local Connectivity is Required
5. Bandwidth Caps Imposed by Internet Service Providers

eSignatures

A conversation with a client recently led to this discovery:

“Everything went great on the call and they wanted a proposal. So, once we hung up we put together an agreement and emailed it over. The client had to head out that day and we haven’t been able to track them down since. That was two weeks ago and this happens all the time.”

Life today is filled with interruptions and many get in the way of completing even what we are committed to and enthusiastic about.

One might consider overcoming these interruptions the duty of all professionals but assisting your clients in overcoming them with you will delivery higher revenues and satisfaction from your clients.

The key window I am focusing on here is the time between the verbal commitment and then actual project agreement that leads to a check.

In the above scenario, the addition of an Electronic Signature or eSignature application would likely avoid ending the conversation before the deal is signed. For example, while still on the phone my client could spend 2 minutes customizing a document and have it sent to the client via email. Whether in the office or on their iPhone or Blackberry, they could review it with the benefit of the sales rep on the phone and eSign it while still on the phone.

Now you just need the check but that’s a separate issue – you got the deal signed by providing a convenient and accommodating method of turning verbal commitment into a written confirmation.

Also, you can add eSignature capabilities to any workflow or document using MS Word, PDF, or any image. You don’t need CRM or any sophisticated system.

My readers can try it for free with the service I use: www.EchoSign.com.

I provide 15 minutes of free advice for first time callers to prove my value. Schedule it here.

To your success.

jc

I recently did some work with a precious metals company that had some very unique compliance requirements that in part also occur with many financial services firms.

The issue relates to disclosures. In a real estate transaction you have lots of disclosures but they are written and reviewed prior to or during the visit to the Escrow office.

What happens when many of these need to be conveyed over the phone and then archived for future reference? What if they also need to include order specific information such as pricing or quantity information? Additionally, how do you insure that updating the compliance script in the future won’t overwrite previously saved versions that are only valid if kept as they were read originally?

The last requirement is the most important and challenging one to implement, especially in light of custom information to be included within the text to be read to the client.

The first option many would choose here is to use text formulas which work great for simple statements that will have minimal or insignificant changes in the future. However, since changes to formulas are global, they must be changed with care as they will automatically update previous records and leave no trace since formula fields currently can’t be included in Field History. This will work for some but certainly not all as legal language will have to change over time without overwriting data on previous records.

The best option is to separate all the necessary information into simple descriptions that have custom, order specific data that use formulas such as:

 "Your order today, December 12, 2010, will be for $58,434.92."

and more detailed disclaimers and proscriptions that use field default values such as:

"You understand that the purchase of physical precious metals does 
not pay dividends, interest, or earned income and may lose value."

Salesforce.com Field Default Value

By using field default values for the key aspects that are read to the client, you avoid the issue of overwriting by field updating as changing the field default value only affects future records, not previous ones. The formula values will update previous records but since they are simple and descriptive when done correctly, it will be insignificant.

I provide 15 minutes of free advice for first time callers to prove my value. Schedule it here.

Happy new year.

Live blogging of CloudCamp LA 2009

The Organizers

5:15pm – About 10 people so far…

5:30pm – The amazing Persian food arrives thanks to CKK. The lamb is amazing – and the hummus!

6:30pm – Thanks to our sponsors: RIGHT SCALE, Microsoft Azure, alestic, Cisco, Axis Technical Group, & 3 tera. They funded the food, the beer, the venue, and facilitate our gathering to connect, learn, and move cloud computing forward.

6:45pm – Lightning Talk 1: David w/ Microsoft Azure Cloud

This is a cross between Google App engine & Amazon EC2. Nov 17 is go live date.

Cloud models have implications:

• Private – you own it but must manage it. (own the car)
• Infrastructure – (rent the car)
• Private – (public transportation)

100 Globally distributed data centers. Moving the data closer to the customer.

SQLAzure seeks to be relational DB in the cloud. Microsoft is looking to do a hybrid model

7:00pm – Lightning Talk 2: Uri w/ RIGHT SCALE

What are customers doing with the Cloud?

A single admin managing 100 to 1000 servers.
Auto scaling of instances based on load.
Animoto started with 40 servers and move to 4700 in 3 days. Signing up 25,000 people per day.

[Shows many charts showing amazing load variance, ability to peak to extremely high points]

7:15pm – UnPanel (all those who claimed to be “experts” in Cloud Computing)

7 Questions get answered

1. Q: 20 servers paid for + 2 good employees + no power problems. why should I use the cloud?
   A: The hype always precedes the deep usefulness and need of a product. If it doesn’t make sense now, don’t use it. Just evaluate some of the solutions before you invest in your next 10 servers.
2. Q: Ho do I move my ASP.net app to the cloud?
3. Q: When should I stop using Amazon SimpleDB?
4. Q: Large infrastructure, consistent utilization, why should I use the cloud?
5. Q: How do I avoid lock-in?
   A: Carlos: Use systems that have lots of users and developers, use systems that use standards that are interoperable and portable.
6. Q: How do I keep my data secure?
   A: We can’t because someone else owns the disks and could steal them. Although homomorphic encoding is providing some hope of interacting with data without having it leave its encrypted form.
7. Q: How can I put client server apps in the cloud?
   A: Look at each app and analyze it individually. Web apps move the easiest.
8. Q: What is the operational definition of a cloud computing service?
   A: It’s what you use a computer for but with a metered pay schedule that’s scalable, and delivered over the Internet
9. Q: What is one positive nontechnical motivation for the cloud?
   A: Cost reduction, eliminating the complexity of IT, dynamic scalability with no punishment for scaling down, lower risk with little long term consequences
10. Q: How do you build a CAP app? (Consistency, Availabily, Partitioning)
    A: Very carefully as certain architectures do not support it.

7:45pm – Breakout Session Proposals (15+ proposed)

Sometimes the flexibility of Salesforce.com can be intimidating. Whether potential buyers, admins, or users, wrapping your head around all the various tools available to you and imagining how you might used them can be challenging. Sometimes it is the most simple example that starts the wheels turning and leads to a real use case in your business.

I hope this is one of those simple examples. Please let me know otherwise below.

Workflow is a feature of the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce.com that provides a lot of that powerful but daunting flexibility.

I am going to focus on a simple but valuable way to use Workflow to make your data more consistent and readable. I will then show a few screen shots as examples of the setup process and then offer a few additional ways this could help you.

You and I have a different way of taking notes. You probably write very well. Me, not so much. I use pictures (thanks Tony Buzan!) and you use abbreviations. I oscillate between ALL CAPS and Camel Case (also called Title Caps) and you write in all lowercase.

So, let’s say we are both working together on a deal in Salesforce.com and logging calls, tasks, updating Opportunity and Account information, etc. Our style of writing will start making the information look strange. Certainly my doodles would be absent but my ALL CAPS, Title Caps, and your lowercase notes would certainly stand out.

Many companies require all written forms to be filled out in ALL CAPS due to the variance in how people write letters like o, i, l, and others. It is probably a good idea to set the same rules for information that is typed in since all are used to looking at capitalized letters.

Workflow can do this automatically so no matter who enters valuable information, it will be placed in the right case when it is saved. All we have to do is setup a simple rule with some actions and it will all happen automatically from there.

Inside the Salesforce.com Setup area (click the “Setup” link at the top, just right of center), we will navigate to Setup | Create | Workflows & Approvals | Workflow Rules. Click New Rule and select what object it relates to. In my case, I want Account fields to be saved in ALL CAPS.

After clicking next, choose the criteria of your rule. This is just Salesforce.com asking, “when should I do these actions?” I chose every time the account is saved and when Account Name not equal to null so it will run every time it is saved, whether a new or existing account.

By clicking Edit on this screen, you can add/modify the actions you want to execute when the rule gets invoked.

In this case, we just want to take some existing text, such as “Hello world!” and make it “HELLO WORLD!” before saving it. We do this through a Field Update as we are updating the text that exists within a field.

Here is the simple formula that transforms text into ALL CAPS. You can use this exact syntax for each field as long as you just change the part that is inside the parenthesis to be the specific field you want to change. Use the Insert Field button to pick one and it will insert it into your formula for you.

Once you have done this, simple go back to an existing Account record, edit a field and save it. If done right, all the text fields you assigned actions to will automatically turn to ALL CAPS. The page will be SCREAMING SUCCESS TO YOU!

I’m not angry, I’m excited. Really.

To your success.

When it comes to business, using flexible tools in the wrong place can make your profitability flexible too. Every business does it for at least a short time but the successful will proactively innovate to avoid the high cost it brings with growth. Here’s a short test to see where you are on the scale.

The Test

1. Do you have at least 2 versions of the same form and have difficulty getting your team to use the right one?
2. Do you let your sales reps come up with their own method to manage leads?
3. Do you only hear of a deal once it’s been signed?
4. Does your staff complain of too much “admin” or “overhead” time?
5. Do you have an employee that manages docs and spreadsheets regularly?
6. Do clients complain that their expressed needs were not met or items were forgotten?
7. When a sales rep departs, is their little hope of finding, not to mention working his in progress deals?
8. Does your sales manager have little visibility into your sales pipeline (i.e. accounts, deal size, win rate, discounting)
9. Is there little historical data available without significant manual labor?
10. Do you often have to search through numerous docs and emails for account related info?

Each ‘yes’ answer on this list is shaving hundreds of dollars from your profitability for each employee!

The flexibility of these tools is very helpful at times, especially when doing one-off tasks or exploring a process. However, when you are looking to grow and add on additional resources as needed, this flexibility puts too much creativity into the hands of each person and leads to an organization headache with lots of confusion. Especially if the situation isn’t changed before the next growth spurt.

The worst time to change is when potential customers are knocking down your doors.

The Solution

Most businesses make the decision to move away from this flexibility toward a manageable system when they are small and want to grow. Profitable growth is very challenging in general and without a simple, consistent system to manage the increase of very important information, it can be stunted.

My recommendation to any business that answered ‘yes’ to at least one question above is to consider starting with Salesforce.com Group Edition. With a free 7 day trial and just $8 or so per user per month for up to five users, you can see quickly the benefits of having a common system for all your team.

One of the biggest challenges with any database, especially when they are easy to use for your whole team, is keeping the data accurate. The most common problem is duplicate data due to the variance in spellings, abbreviations, and other ways that information can be stored with a slight variance in syntax or specifically how it is written.

Salesforce.com definitely falls into the category of an easy to use database and the great potential of getting your entire team directly involved with the data can quickly change your data from a couple varieties of lettuce, each in their own bag to a large tossed salad with few or no ways to discern duplicates, the data of record for conflicts, or organize and separate the lettuce out again.

There are great solutions like RingLead that can proactively check for duplicates when entered and even help you sort them out quickly once saved. However, pricing is based on which features you use and the total number of records. I checked pricing on just the de-duping feature called Declone Data Cleansing for less than 3000 existing Accounts and Contacts and the price came back in excess of $1000 annually. (Their free trial enabled me to test their system on de-duping my Contacts with names ending in A – C which was a nice way to get a few records done.)

Due to the relational nature of Salesforce.com, various records like Tasks, Cases, Campaigns, and other information may be connected to a Contact or Account so keeping the Master Record, the one that is most accurate, and deleting the rest is not the best solution as any connected data either gets deleted or becomes orphaned.

The solution is Merging and Salesforce.com includes very simple wizards for merging up to three Contacts and Accounts at a time. Merge Contacts by clicking “Merge Contacts” button above the Contacts related list when viewing an Account. Merge Accounts by clicking the Accounts tab and then clicking the “Merge Accounts” link at the bottom under “Tools.”

The above method can be time consuming and is not in context to where you might see the problem. If you were to determine if you had duplicates, you would use Views or Reports. What I did was simply enable a custom link from separate Contact and Account Reports so that when I saw a duplicate, I could click the link and it would take me directly to the Merge Wizard for the set of Contacts or Accounts that I wanted to merge.

Here are some points to help you do the same.

1. Create a new Custom Formula Field in both the Contact and Account objects
   Setup | Customize | Contacts or Accounts | Fields | Custom Fields & Relationships > New
2. Name is what you like such as “Merge URL” and select Formula Field. Click Next.
3. Select Return Type of Text. Click Next.
4. Click the Advanced Formula tab and enter the corresponding Formula below:
   • Account (i.e. /merge/accmergewizard.jsp?srch=Joe’s Crab Shack):
     HYPERLINK('/merge/accmergewizard.jsp?srch=' & Name, 'Merge Accounts', '_blank')

   • Contact (i.e. /merge/conmergewizard.jsp?id=0018000000RrGuG):
     HYPERLINK('/merge/conmergewizard.jsp?id=' &  AccountId, 'Merge Contacts', '_blank')
     Click Next.
5. Make them visible to Profiles and add them to Page Layouts as you need.
6. Customize the Contact and/or Account Report you would like to add the field to.
7. Select “Choose Columns” in the top right pull down menu and check the box next to the Merge URL field from #2.
8. Select “Order Columns” in the top right pull down menu and move the Merge URL columns to the top of the list or where you desire.
9. Click “Run Report” and see how it looks. You should see your Merge URL formula fields within the Report and can click one for a test. If you are using grouping, your Account field may be next to the Account name and the Contact field may be down near the Contact
10. If you like it, click Save and you have a quick way to Merge Contacts and Accounts with just a few clicks.

Formula field in Report with hyperlink to Merge Contacts

For more detail, I provide Digital Coaching, Training, and Implementation services for Salesforce.com and Basecamp.

Glad to help.

As a Digital Coach, I leverage Basecamp in my business and coach others to do so as well. It helps managers better manage and everyone executes better because they know what is expected by when in a simple, easy to understand fashion.

One of the underused elements of Basecamp is it’s ability to render tables for columnar data. I used this when detailing out field, page layout, and formula changes prior to implementing them in Salesforce so they can all be seen at a glance and updated in a Writeboard before ever hitting the Salesforce.com admin portal.

Basecamp renders visual tables very well with the help of Textile.

However, there are many other reasons tables are generally useful. One example is sorting by a specific column. You cannot do this in Basecamp but you can in OpenOffice Calc or Excel. However, if it was easy to go back and forth between them then using the best of each when needed would be feasible. This is what I will be illustrating.

I prefer the former so this tip will be using OpenOffice.

I want to create a table in Basecamp but rather than create it as text and insert the pipe (“|”) symbols, etc. as I go, I start with a new Calc doc and drop in my column headings and fill in the rows.

OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet

When I am ready, I simply copy the text I have entered into the spreadsheet and paste it into JEdit, a free java based text editor. The great part about JEdit is you can create custom Macros that do common manipulations to text. In this case, I am replacing the tabs automatically created from my copy/paste operation with pipes (“|”) and new lines with pipe and new line combinations. Here is the macro so you can quickly create your own. My Mac stores them in /Users/joncline/.jedit/macros/, your computer may have a different location.


textArea.goToPrevLine(false);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("\\t");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" | ");
SearchAndReplace.setBeanShellReplace(false);
SearchAndReplace.setIgnoreCase(true);
SearchAndReplace.setRegexp(true);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchFileSet(new CurrentBufferSet());
SearchAndReplace.replaceAll(view);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchString("\\n");
SearchAndReplace.setReplaceString(" |\\n| ");
SearchAndReplace.setBeanShellReplace(false);
SearchAndReplace.setIgnoreCase(true);
SearchAndReplace.setRegexp(true);
SearchAndReplace.setSearchFileSet(new CurrentBufferSet());
SearchAndReplace.replaceAll(view);


So, I paste this now tab separated value (TSV) text block into Jedit:

Field Type Values (CSV) Note Landing
MonthlyUnits number(8) - What is their average monthly unit volume per month? Account
MonthlyUnitSales number(8) - What is their average monthly sales? Account
SeasonalBusiness boolean yes, no From Lead Questionnaire Form Account


Run the macro on it to turn it into this:
(you may have to add the leading or trailing pipe symbol depending whether you had line breaks before or after your tab)


| Field | Type | Values (CSV) | Note | Landing |
| MonthlyUnits | number(8) | - | What is their average monthly unit volume per month? | Account |
| MonthlyUnitSales | number(8) | - | What is their average monthly sales? | Account |
| SeasonalBusiness | boolean | yes, no | From Lead Questionnaire Form | Account |


I can now paste this code directly into any Basecamp Message, Writeboard, ToDo/Milestone Chat, etc. to get a table.

BONUS: What if I want to edit my Basecamp table again or add more fields? Must I do it in basecamp now?

This is a great question and since Basecamp is collaborative, I would expect this. The method is actually quite simple if you are using a Writeboard, which you should be since you are collaborating on the source data, not just commenting on it (read: Message). Instead of opening the spreadsheet and typing in your columns and rows, you simply go to your Writeboard, click the Export button at the top and view the HTML version.

Now, simply copy the columns and rows you want from the HTML file and paste them into your spreadsheet. You may get a confirmation menu to confirm the columns and rows were selected accurately but you quickly are back into the powerful spreadsheet interface for sorting, additional columns, reordering, etc.

Once finished, simply follow the directions above and move the data back into Basecamp from TSV text again.

Keep working together, and that doesn’t mean using “Track Changes” in your favorite Office app!

Your Digital Coach,

P.S.
If you don’t want to do any of this and your data is not confidential, you might consider just embedding a public Google Spreadsheet into your Message, Writeboard, etc. and you can just modify it as needed.

Specifically, they wanted to know how I could have over 20 open Tabs at once and still remain sane. The ability to have multiple pages in your browser be seen as Tabs instead of unique windows has been in Firefox for a few years and came to Internet Explorer and Safari more recently.  Each Tab indicates a unique web page and with all of the various on-demand apps, sites, and pages I make use of, having 20 open pages seems to be the rule nowadays, not the exception.

Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox

I am one of those people who “get’s nervous” — my words — when I have many things open and cannot easily discern or navigate them. This is why I moved to the Mac and this is why prior to this Add-On I would only have as many Tabs as I could horizontally stack and still read, usually about 4-7, depending on page titles.

So, try this in your Firefox and let me know how it helps you.

Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox.

Additionally, here are a few additional tips for Firefox:

• By default, the Tab bar will be organized horizontally at the top like Firefox does without it. Change it to organize them vertically to get the productivity gain.
• When you have multiple tabs open, the first 10 are attached to keyboard shortcuts CTRL/+0 through CTRL/+9 so you can move between the tabs quickly.
• When you want to navigate Tabs in context rather than by number, you can use CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB for next Tab and previous Tab respectively.
• Now that you can handle many pages as Tabs at a glance, you might consider bookmarking an entire set of pages as Tabs such as “Shopping” instead of just Amazon.com or WhatSheBuys.com.