The next release of Salesforce, Summer '08, is getting close.  Salesforce are presenting their Summer '08 Seminar on 24/06/2008. So while us Salesforce users are up and about we will hold our User Group meeting just after the Seminar at the same venue.

Our main topic is "AppExchange discoveries. What have you found that has become an essential part of your Salesforce.com implementation?" Please come along with some thoughts to share on an area that surely is a key opportunity to leverage your Salesforce.com investment.

Melbourne User Group Agenda

1. New member welcome - Welcome and introduction for new members
2. Salesforce.com news - Announcements, news and rumours and what they mean to us.  This meeting will obviously further discuss the details of the Summer '08 Seminar?
3. Meeting Topics - Pre-arranged discussion topics / presentations.
• AppExchange discoveries. What have you found that has become an essential part of your Salesforce.com implementation?
4. Member activity - What you've been doing since we last met:
• Successes
• Discoveries
• Problems
5. Next Meeting - Planning for next time
• Propose topics of interest to your organisation and others.
6. Calls for help - Your chance to ask the group for advice or help another member

The group will be as useful and effective as the contributions we all make. Please consider the strengths and weaknesses of your organisation's Salesforce implementation. We'd like to learn from you and help you at the same time.

Summer '08 Seminar: 2:30 - 4:00 p.m.

Visual Force is Here - Build any User Interface, Any Application

Summer '08 delivers breakthrough technologies that let you build any user interface and any application on Force.com. With Visualforce now available in every edition, it's easy to build custom user interfaces using Visualforce and new custom components from the Force.com developer community.

Summer '08 empowers users with two new applications for your communities with Salesforce Content and Ideas now available in the Customer and Partner Portals. With more than 50 new CRM features and our new Salesforce for Google Apps office, it's easier than ever to collaborate with your employees, customers, and partners.

Light refreshments will be provided

Melbourne User Group Meeting: 4:00 onwards

Location:

                                                           

	The Westin Melbourne
	Wine Room
	205 Collins Street
	Melbourne
	View Map

Salesforce '08 Seminar first, then our Melbourne User Group meeting.  Same day. Same Venue.

See you there

Michael O'Leary

The Spring 08 discussion notes contain Meagan's summarised questions/comments raised during the meeting.  Thanks Meagan for letting me include them here.

Hi folks,

I have shot around an email to those who attended and wished to be listed so we can share questions and answers between meetings.  I will extend this further in subsequent meetings with a bit of a profile for each member to make this listing even more useful.

Holding our meeting prior to the salesforce.com City Tour session worked well.  We agreed to do this again.  At this stage we are planning a late June meeting which will be followed by a release update on the expectation (no promises!) that Summer 08 will have been released.  More on this later.

In this session I talked about External Attachments (PowerPoint presentation - 1,082KB).  External Attachments is a no charge App that saves you on Salesforce storage (very expensive) and retains the ability for you to search your documents with tools such as Windows Explorer.  I've made quite a few modifications to it and to suite our purposes and we now use it extensively.

I will let you know when we schedule our next meeting.  Please let me know if you have a topic you would like covered at the next meeting, particularly if its one you'd like to share / present.

Cheers.

Michael O'Leary

In this session I talked about Conga Merge (PowerPoint presentation - 506KB), a pay-for app that provides "A solution to merging across multiple Salesforce objects (and other stuff)".  Conga Merge allows you to do the things you want to do with Mail Merge but can't.  The product is well implemented and the support is excellent, usually same day response.

I wanted to be able to generate a form (Microsoft Word) by drawing data from data the Account Record, a linked Contact record (one with a specific role), the logged on user, a linked Contract record and two linked custom objects.  This would not be possible with Salesforce merge, but Conga Merge gets the job done.  It can also merge to Excel or Acrobat Reader formats.

Conga Merge can streamline routine mail merge and is advertised as being suitable for Custom quotes, proposals, account plans and more from any custom object and multiple related lists - as little as one click to print, attachment or email

Licensing is per Conga Merge user.  If you need to go beyond Salesforce Merge, give it a try.  It's rated with 5 stars on the AppExchange.

Cheers.

Michael O'Leary

For those that attended the meeting will remember that it had a very full agenda.  There were requests for copies of the presentations shown.  The main agenda items were:

• Usergroup election
• Summer 07 release highlights
• Best practices - Reporting and Dashboards

A full copy of the slides can be found at: Download melbourne_meeting_070814.ppt

At the August 14th Usergroup Meeting, Michael O'Leary was selected as the new Usergroup Leader.

Michael is Corporate Systems Manager at NewSat.  NewSat is a company that provides a full range of managed communication services, TT&C and carrier monitoring from our Mediaports in Perth, Adelaide and Newcastle to Australia/Oceania, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.  Utilising latest generation satellite and VSAT technology, NewSat delivers end-to-end, affordable, high-speed, two-way satellite broadband communication services, products and solutions.

Michael has been a Salesforce administrator for about two years.  In that time has has done some S-Control/AJAX work to fill-out the delivered functionality.

A very special thanks goes to the groups previous leader, Mark Bergin, the Managing Director from EventOFFiCE.com.  Mark has done an excellent job at looking after the group for the previous 2 years.

It has been now 4 weeks since the official release of Winter '07. Many of our customers took advantage of the new features to help them address a variety of their business challenges.

However you don't have to undertake major configuration changes to realise immediate benefits. One of the very powerful additions is the Data Validation option.

By implementing the simple validation rule on contact, opportunity or case records you can dramatically increase data quality and improve user adoption.

Here is a sample you can use to verify that the user enters only a valid name in a state field. Go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | Contacts | Validation Rules, create a new rule and enter below text into the "Error Condition Formula" field.

AND(
MailingState <> "ACT",
MailingState <> "NSW",
MailingState <> "NT",
MailingState <> "QLD",
MailingState <> "SA",
MailingState <> "TAS",
MailingState <> "VIC",
MailingState <> "WA"
)

For more information on Data Validation please click here

Click on the image below to see a screenshot of configuration page

Tomasz Oczapowski

There have been many requests for this, so here goes……(Note:  There are 3 parts to this solution below)

(A)  Creating the new custom link

Firstly, navigate to following within the Salesforce application:

Setup | App Setup | Accounts | Custom Links

To create a new custom link for the Account, click on the [New] button.

1.      Step 1 of 5: Define Link Name and Type

Enter the following values into the fields below:

Link Label:    Google Maps

Link Type:      URL

Click on [Next]

2.      Step 2 of 5: Define Link Contents

Copy and paste this into the Link URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q={!Account_FullBillingAddress}

Click on [Next]

3.      Step 3 of 5: Choose Window Open Type

Accept the default radiobutton:  Open in separate popup window

Click on [Next]

4.      Step 4 of 5: Define Window Properties

Enter Window properties according to your preference

5.      Step 5 of 5. Confirm Custom Link Settings

Click on the [Save] button when you are ready to proceed and have confirmed all your settings.

Note:  Click on the [Previous] button to navigate back to previous screens/steps in the process if you need to change/edit any settings

* You now need to add this custom link to your Page Layout

(B)  Adding the new custom link to your Page Layout

1.      Navigate to the following:

Setup | App Setup | Accounts | Page Layout

2.      Click on the [Edit] button next to the Page Layout where you are adding the new custom link

3.      In the “View” drop-down list on the right-hand side of the screen, select the value [Account Custom Links]

4.      Select and drag the [Google Maps] custom link to the [Custom Links] section/box on the lef-hand side of the screen

5.      Click on [Save] to save the new page layout assignment

(C)    Testing your new Google Maps custom link

1.      View an Account record

2.      In the [Account Detail] related list, click on the [Google Maps] link under [Custom Links]

3.      A new Google Maps browser window will open, pointing to the Account address!

IMPORTANT POINT TO NOTE: 

You can also choose to add a custom BUTTON instead of a custom link! (details to be provided shortly)

Posted by:

Nai Ann Lee

Customer Success Manager, Salesforce.com Sydney

There was definately a real buzz in the Usergroup meeting that was held on the 26th September at "Langham Hotel"

Mark Bergin, from thinking.com.au, the Melbourne Usergroup Leader took us through the following items during the afternoon:

• Summer '06 enhancements.  Barry Rutledge, Sales Engineer, from Salesforce.com gave us live presentation of the new features, including PRM.
• Will Scully-Power, Marketing Success Manager, from SqwarePeg took us through some marketing ideas and solutions/services that they provide. Download will_scullypower_marketing_success_manager.PDF to see Will's presentation.
• Carol MacDonald from NRMA discussed their marketing challenges, the solutions and results that they achieved.  This goes to show how you can get a true ROI from your marketing spend. Download nrma_case_study.pdf  to see Carol's presentation.
• Chris Gartlan, CEO of ExactTarget APAC showed us how simple and easy it is to create rich and dynamic content and deliver targeted email campaigns from Salesforce.  Download exacttarget_for_appexchange_user_group_presentation.pdf  to see Chris's presentation.
• Birds of a feather.  The main group was divided into three subgroups by topics of interest where like minded users roundtabled their thoughts on the topic.

The afternoon finished with a beach party and some drinks.

Hi everyone. Adoption dashboards are great reporting tools that can provide managers and administrators with tangible metrics to help monitor and improve user adoption across your organization. We would like to share with you the adoption dashboards that were posted to the AppExchange this week!!

Here you will find an example of a Hall of Shame dashboard mentioned at our city tour event a few weeks ago, (see Adoption Usage Dashboard Folder), as well as many other dashboards that are great for tracking not only adoption but also data quality and business performance. And it's FREE!

Take a test drive of each and pick the one that works best for your company. Then simply download the Dashboards and Reports for modification in your own environment.

Also make sure to write a quick review. This information is very valuable to other customers as well as the authors of the AppExchange apps.

Enjoy!

Regards

Isabelle Kalinauckas

Customer Success Manager