PICnet Blog

With all the great discussions happening at the Non-Profit Salesforce.com Summit this week, there’s one ironic point that I think many of us “for-some-profit” consultants face in the sector: the Salesforce.com solution we provide to our clients is well outside our own budgets as small businesses.

Even more ironic, we at PICnet use the open source SugarCRM to have heavy access to the CRM’s API. This is something we couldn’t do with Salesforce.com for less than, gulp, thousands of dollars a year.

It’s funny being priced out of the chance to eat your own dog food, especially since we’re heavily focused on building bridges between the Joomla and Salesforce platforms. I’m not sure what the solution is, but if non-profits are being provided 10 donated seats to the Enterprise level of Salesforce.com, it’s difficult to see how those other than the largest consulting firms working with the large end of the non-profit marketplace will be able to afford the same level of Salesforce that they deploy to our sector.

I’m not sure what could be done to help make these tools more affordable, I just needed to get this irony off my chest as I simultaneously continue to applaud the Salesforce Foundation for all its hard work.

I’ve been very impressed by the individuals gathered here this week for the Salesforce.com Non-Profit Summit, including the Salesforce sector leaders like Steve Andersen of One/NW and Rem Hoffman of Exponent Partners. Even more interesting was learning that some of our favorite clients and friends, like Bryan Nunez of WITNESS have been using Salesforce.com for years!

Today’s discussions have been focused on the past and the present, and Gunner lead us through a series of breakout sessions that allowed us to expand our understanding of the sector. One important “ah-ha” that I realized is the following: handing Salesforce.com to most organizations is like giving them the keys to a high performance race car when all they really want is a 10-speed bicycle. Ok, maybe 18-speed, but you get the point. Heather Carpenter’s team came up with a wonderful cross-sectional chart the married key feature sets with verticals in the non-profit sector (like health care, social services, etc).

If Salesforce.com is going to be more effective in reaching directly to the end-users, it will need to provide a more targeted series of building blocks that will easily get organizations up and running on their platform in an end-solution manner. It will need to do this without adding pain to the consultants in the room, of course, which better knowing the SF.com team pressing for better NPO services has lead me to believe this is quite a reasonable request.

Further ah-ha’s:

• Steve Andersen really knows his stuff (duh), and I have the video to prove it. Check out the clip below where Steve saves SF.com a few dollars by laying out an effective road map for them in our sector.
  
• Gunner wears his Joomla hat even when not attending endless Joomla conferences
• DIA has officially opened a new office in San Francisco
• more than half of all the traffic running over SF.com servers are from people accessing the system from their own application and not from the SF.com site, which seems to add credence to the notion that we in the NPO sector should be doing the same (one of our primary bridges we’re building into Soapbox)

Tomorrow through Wednesday I’ll be joining quite an esteemed list of non-profit technologists at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Roadmap Summit, June 4-6, in San Mateo, CA. I’m eager to see how successful this crew can be at helping shape the roadmap for the non-profit template, and even more eager to see if this model can be replicated for our Non-Profit Soapbox. This is truly a unique opportunity to shape the future of a major application for our sector.

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Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called Islands and bridges: why Soapbox will lead the way to CRM and CMS integration for non-profits, where I detailed our vision on breaking down the walls between important technology silos in the non-profit community.

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

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In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for Joomla and Salesforce.com users. We’re a bunch of regular matchmakers.

Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive.

I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

When I had a chance to demo what we’ve already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin’s tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.

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In our continuing efforts to bring you breaking news from the Joomla - Salesforce.com integration front (humbly known as J!Salesforce), we’re pleased to report that our master J!Salesforce developer Kevin has made a few more breakthroughs that should make developers’ hearts skip.

Basic use-case proven: member directory

One of the basic use-cases we had to achieve was to display a basic member directory system, that allows visitors to search for members in the Salesforce database based on any of the variables the site’s administrators allow searching within. We now are able to have three basic views for this directory:

• search
• search results
• detailed view of a record

Best part about all this: it’s pretty quick! Even though we’ve got the system pinging Salesforce a few times, the roundtrips for data retrieval are very tolerable. I’m sure the bigger your database, the longer it might take, but it’s pretty quick in our development test bed.

Create new user in Joomla and contact in Salesforce at registration

Another big hurdle leaped over by Kevin last week was the ability to make a seamless registration system for Joomla and Salesforce. When someone signs up to be a member on your site, or to be added to your organization’s rolls as a volunteer or donor, J!Salesforce immediately adds them as a user in Joomla and a contact in Salesforce.

This one step alone will save countless hours for administrators that are fed up with having their Joomla site and CRM user managers out of sync, and hopefully keep hair on the heads of development directors that are sick and tired of missing the connection.

Goals for this week

With all this great work going on, we’re gearing up to let the non-profit world know about what’s about to be released in early January. We’re keeping in touch with our friends at the Salesforce Foundation, and we’re hoping to work closely with Salesforce to help spread the word through either their AppExchange or other online collaboration tools.

Meanwhile, on the development side, Kevin will be continuing to clean up the front-end and build some developer guidelines, so when we release it, we’ll be able to make life easier (not harder) for our developer friends.

First, I need to point out to the world that I am simply the messenger of all this wonderful news we have about the Salesforce.com - Joomla integration. Our lead developer on this, Kevin Devine, has put long nights and sweat into what is shaping to be a fantastic contribution to the open source community.

Now that all your thank you messages are pointed in the right direction, let me give an update as to what Kevin’s got cooking. Two days ago we were successfully able to push/pull data to/from Joomla and Salesforce. This means that we can now display data from Salesforce directly in Joomla, and then edit that data via forms in Joomla back into Salesforce. It all happens rather quickly, which is a little surprising since the data has to go back and forth between two servers in completely different parts of the US.

Dynamic display of layout features

Today Kevin just hit another major milestone. Now we’re able to bring in form fields from Salesforce following the layout rules prescribed within Salesforce. For instance, say in your Salesforce layout you have a dropdown list for a contact’s suffix. Now without any hassle you can have Joomla directly display that dropdown populated properly from Salesforce.

Pretty darn cool.

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Someone had to step up and do it, so PICnet is doing it. We’re bringing a fully connected Salesforce.com component to the Joomla community, and should have a beta version ready for download by the middle of January 2007.

The goal here is to build a strong framework that future developers (including ourselves in our Non-Profit Soapbox system) can continue to extend. For instance, our J!Salesforce component will allow Joomla site visitors to input their contact information in Salesforce through Joomla, using a simple form. Then, when a visitor returns to the Web site, they can login using the Joomla login form, be authenticated against Salesforce.com, and then be able to edit their contact information in Salesforce securely.

Pretty darn powerful.

We’re proud to be the first ones developing this connection for the Joomla community, and look forward to working with the Salesforce Foundation to help spread the good word to our non-profit users. Don’t worry business users, we’ve got something in store for you too.

We should be rolling out a roadmap to the development of this component, as well as add-ons for J!Salesforce at the end of December 2006. What would be nice is to hear from the community as to what users and developers would like to have this integration piece do for them, so we can make sure we’re meeting the needs of the community.

[Digg this story]

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