Everyone,

I'm still recovering from the amazing time I had at Dreamforce and I hope that we'll have a great discussion at our next meeting about some of the things I and others found at this year's Dreamforce!  We will also have Kimberly Hunt from the Salesforce Foundation coming to speak with us about the Foundation.

Here's the info for our next meeting:

When: Wednesday, December 10 from 8:30 – 11:00 AM
Where: The Nonprofit Center, 89 South St., 1st floor, Boston, MA 02111 Bring ID please
Directions: Red Line to Downtown Crossing or South Station

Next Meeting Agenda:

1. Intro to the Salesforce.com Foundation - Kimberly Hunt 8:30 - 9:00am
2. Integrating your Drupal-based website with Salesforce - Ben DiMaggio, Digital Loom 9:00-9:45
3. Connect with the Community Presentation (short!) - Marc Baizman 9:45-10:00
4. Dreamforce Take-aways: Marc Baizman, Samantha Fernandez, others 10:00 -  10:30
5. Next Meeting date/time/location and user showcase volunteers
6. Networking  10:30 – 11:00a

First, let me apologize for the delay in getting these posted and also for the brevity of the minutes - next time, I'll need to have someone else record them, I obviously suck at this.  :)  Getting ready for Dreamforce occupied most of my time.  I'll be summarizing my experience in a separate post, and I'll also present at our next meeting about it.

We had a slightly smaller turnout for the October meeting - I'm hoping to get higher attendance for December and next year.  Please let me know if there's something you'd like to see or demo at an upcoming meeting. Email me or post in the comments here.  I also spoke with several vendors at Dreamforce who are willing to demo their products at our meetings so I'll be reaching out out to them as well.

User Showcase: YearUp - Aaron Schutzengel

Yearup is using Salesforce for:

• Measuring Student Performance
• Admissions Tracking
• Student Tracking
• Alumni Tracking
• Apprenticeship Seat Sales
• Volunteer Tracking

Some of the AppExchange apps YearUp is using are:

• Picture Uploader - storing a picture of the student on the contact record
• DemandTools - data cleaning and updating
• Contact Connector - creating and maintain relationships between contacts

A few challenges YearUp faced:

• No %'s on a gauge - had to create a workaround to do this
• User Adoption - created detailed manuals for each functional area, created a sense of competition between sites to get people on board, people measured using metrics in Salesforce

Salesforce Presentation from Steven Petalas:

Steven talked about:

• Summer 08 and Winter 09 Releases
• Workflow Rules and Cross-Object Formulas
• Google Apps integration - AppExchange Link
• Pollzter - surveys for SF and free for nonprofits!

Here are a couple of PDF files that have more detail about these:

• Download salesforce_workflow_cheatsheet.pdf
• Download salesforce_useful_workflow_rules.pdf
• Download salesforce_useful_formula_fields.pdf