I am happy to announce that about a month ago, 5Buckets was approved for public listing on Salesforce.com’s Appexchange!!!

The Appexchange is a marketplace for Salesforce.com users and administrators to browse and buy application add-ons for their Salesforce.com  account. We are listed in two different categories and were highlighted on the main page for a few days as a new application. The listing has generated a considerable amount of interest and many leads have been coming in.

Check it out.

It’s a question we get frequently: How do I get this Salesforce.com report emailed to my boss. Or my direct-mail printer. Or to myself.

That’s where we have developed a feature in 5Buckets. You create a Bucket in 5Buckets that points to the SFDC report, and then Schedule it to be emailed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s as simple as that! The report lands in the boss’ or direct-mail printer’s or your Inbox as a CSV file. Open it up in Excel (or Calc if you are an Open Office user) and enjoy!

A few days ago I got an e-mail asking for some help in Salesforce.com -

How to make a field as Read only in GUI. For ex: In Account Tab, i want to make a Phone Field as Read Only in GUI. when we click on Edit on an Account, in that I want to disable that textbox related to Phone field. How can i do this.

So, the assumption is somehow they are entering the phone number data in to SFDC by means of a data-load. They want users to view the phone number, but not edit it. This is actually fairly easy to do using Page Layouts and field level security. Just go to Setup - Customize - Contacts. Click on the field you want to control permissions for (in this case Phone) and then click on “View Field Accessibility”. On that page you can control Field Access by Role! You will of course need Salesforce.com Admin privileges to make this change.

Last week we released a new feature in 5Buckets. It integrates four different applications - RegOnline, RingLead, Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. RegOnline is a event registration application. You can use RegOnline to let your customers and prospects register for your conferences or road-shows etc. Salesforce.com is of course a premier CRM application; RingLead is a product that goes along with Salesforce.com to de-duplicate Contacts or Leads before they are stored in Salesforce.com. ExactTarget is an email marketing tool.

Our customer approached us with the problem that the registrant data captured in RegOnline was silo-ed off in RegOnline. Instead they wanted to move that data to their CRM database - Salesforce.com. Additionally they wanted to use ExactTarget to send out confirmation and reminder emails. And to complicate things further, they wanted to use RingLead to de-dup information going in to Salesforce.com.

The solution is new functionality in 5Buckets under the “Triggers” feature. As soon as a registrant signs-up in RegOnline, RegOnline triggers an event in 5Buckets. 5Buckets then in turn makes an API call to RegOnline and retrieves the registration information. This information is then passed on to RingLead to add or update in Salesforce.com. Once that is complete, 5Buckets then invokes a ExactTarget API call to send a confirmation email to the registrant.

The beauty of this solution is two-fold: data is near-instantly captured in to customer’s CRM database allowing the sales team to know that their customer or prospect just signed up for an event. And secondly, data is now in a central database. Marketing can setup further communications with customer over time such as sending reminder emails or updates about events.

I was on LinkedIn earlier today and looking up the profile of a former colleague, wanting to get back in touch with him. LinkedIn had placed a Google-driven Ad next to the profile listing. Check this screenshot:

A couple of weeks ago I was at a client site doing ExactTarget API consulting. This client is standardizing on ExactTarget as their single source of all e-mail communications from three of their internal applications. They will use 5Buckets for the automation in certain cases, but also needed to develop their own integration with ExactTarget directly.

One of the developers posed me a question about “filters” in the ExactTarget web service. You can use
simplefilterpart() to specify what data point you want to filter on, and of course the value. For example, to filter on CustomerKey -

SimpleFilterPart sfp = new SimpleFilterPart();
sfp.Property = “CustomerKey”;
sfp.SimpleOperator = SimpleOperators.equals;
sfp.Value = new string[] { “TransactionalSendKey” };

Here you are first creating an instance of SimpleFilterPart. Then indicating that you want to filter using “CustomerKey”, indicating the operator and finally the value of the CustomerKey.

Now, if you have two filter criteria, you create two instances of the SimpleFilterPart and join the two using ComplexFilterPart (see code example in the Webserivces API guide, pg. 36)

Going back to the question that came up at client site - they wanted to know how they would add a third filter criteria. Well, it’s simple enough. Create a third instance of SimpleFilterPart and set the property and values as appropriate. Then create another instance of a ComplexFilterPart and assign you first ComplexFilterPart to the LeftOperand and the third SimpleFilterPart to the RightOperand.

ComplexFilterPart ComplexFilter2 = new ComplexFilterPart();
ComplexFilter2.LeftOperand = ComplexFilter1;
ComplexFilter2.LogicalOperator = LogicalOperators.AND;
ComplexFilter2.RightOperand = ThirdSimpleFilterPart;

My co-worker Luke forwarded a nice article.

Hey guys,

Here is a great article I came across that really has some great ideas for driving web traffic. Many of these are tried and true techniques but there are also a lot of other innovative ways included in this article as well….

http://seonoobs.com/104-ways-to-get-backlinks-mega-backlink-guide/

Some of the items on the list are questionable. But it does exemplify why it is hard to make your blog stand out in the mega-crowd of blogs on the Internet. Just posting blog posts won’t drive traffic; you have to do a lot of grassroots effort.

I ran across a couple of very interesting articles/posts -

1. Olinda - a social broadcast radio with beheavior mining and a hardware API! Read here.

2. Google’s upcoming data center plans. Can you imagine how big a data center Google needs…? Read here.

Google has launched an API around social networking. In the words of Google:

What is the Social Graph API?

The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined “add friends” functionality and other useful features.

Now here is what I understand of it - 

We all know that Google crawls the web and figures out which pages link to each other. Google is also crawling the web to find out how sites are related to each other. This is done using -

 a) “XFN”: You can change the links on your page (the <a href=”"> tags) to include a parameter called “rel”. “rel” basically indicates how is the linked site related to the current site - is it a friend’s site, or is it a colleague’s site, or is it another of my sites, etc.

b) “FOAF”: Include a series of tags at the top of your site page(s) to indicate who your friends are.

Google is basically going through the “rel” parameters and the FOAF xml tags and storing how one site is related to another. And they have now made this information available to everyone via their new API.

Take a look at the 3 minutes video here, particularly the scenario at the end.

I was on the O’Reilly Radar home and clicked over to the Web 2.0 page: http://radar.oreilly.com/web2/. At the very top is an interesting and refreshing definition of Web 2.0:

“…..Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by harnessing collective intelligence, openness, and network effects.”

I really like that. Web 2.0 is not about technology or AJAX or video sharing or blogs. It’s about:

a) collective intelligence;

b) openness (which I think goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence); and

c) network effects (a wide, easily available, easily accessible and open network makes the collectivness and openness possible).