I was pleased with the turnout. 30 people showed up and filled the room to capacity. A big thanks to Kathy Barton at Allied-Barton Security for allowing us access to the conference room. Everyone came away impressed with both the conference room and the facility in general.

For salesforce.com 101 - I spent some time showing how to track marketing campaigns for both Professional and Enterprise Edition customers. We used Report Types to help solve our questions.

 Diana Englemeyer from Exact Target took control for the Deep Dive and discussed email marketing techniques. I have inserted her slides into the deck. You will find them highly informative.

There will also be an annoucement soon of the Pittsburgh 3 day workshop for new salesforce.com admins. I'm looking to do this event in November.

As promised, I am announcing that our next meeting will be August 25th at a new and larger location. We will be meeting in the Cardello Building courtesy of Allied Barton.

This meeting should prove interesting for most as we will be focusing on Marketing through salesforce.com.

We will cover the following topics:

-Email marketing
-Event registration
-Marketing Campaign management

Even if you are a Professional Edition user, we will show some tips and tricks.

Please click here to register.

The Pittsburgh Technology Council is holding an annual social event where they invite all the groups they are associated with together for a night of networking and conversation. Who am I to deny us this opportunity for us to get together with the larger Pittsburgh community?

The event is called Summer Slam VII and last year's event brought a large and highly entertaining crowd and I would expect something of the same to this year's event.

I invite you to join us. I'll be there with a few prizes for the salesforce.com crowd.

Date: Thursday, July 17
Time: 5:00 - 8:00
Venue: Calico Jack’s – 353 North Shore Drive (Between PNC Park & Heinz Field)
Cost: Free
RSVP: Council events at 412.918.4229 or events@pghtech.org

I want to thank all that showed up for yesterday's user group meeting. I appreciate everyone braving the size of the room and making the best of the situation. It certainly appears that I will need to find a bigger room for future meetings. We definitely filled the room to capacity.

As a recap we covered the following yesterday:

Salesforce 101 - How to enhance the User Interface, using tags to make searches and organization more personalized, and Web to Lead to take interest from your website directly in to salesforce.com thereby saving a great amount of time. I was especially surprised about the highly postive feedback about tagging.

Deep Dive - How custom linking works and how to create your own. This is an often untouched feature of salesforce.com that can create huge improvements of your environment with relatively little effort.

Group Think - We helped a few new people with salesforce.com and how to properly implement as well as brainstorm how to show billable hours in salesforce.com.

The next meeting will be in the August time frame. Between now and then we are having a social gathering on July 17 with the Pittsburgh Tech Council.

Hello all,

Quite a few people from the group have been asking when the next meeting is. My apologies for not scheduling one sooner.

For our next meeting I thought an appropriate theme would be, "what can I do to make salesforce.com faster?" So the agenda for June's meeting is:

• Salesforce 101 - How to make salesforce.com bend to your will
• Deep Dive - Custom linking and the special sauce that makes these critical to your org
• Group Think - Your questions and concerns are always an important part of the meeting. We will once again open the floor to any of your questions.

Time and date for the meeting

Date:Tuesday June 3
Time: 9:00am - 11:00am
Location:
Panera Bread
7217 McKnight Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15237
(please note the NEW location)

If you are interested in attending, would you please contact me at bgross @ akustica dot com?

I want to thank those that showed up on a very snowy and miserable Pittsburgh evening for another adventure in the Pittsburgh User Group. Although those that showed on the web conference showed some dedication as we lost the connection a few times.

The lead conversion was interesting but what really got me going was CMU's presentation on their add-in for salesforce.com idea and CRMFusion's Tools. I greatly appreciate their time.

Also congrats to the individual who won the Garmin GPS.  It was a raffle for those attendees that showed up. Thanks again CRMFusion for the great gift.

The next meeting will be scheduled sometime in the April timeframe.

I have an interesting agenda for next week's salesforce.com user group meeting. As well as trying a different venue I am going to be quiet for a large portion of the meeting and let someone else talk.

First off - Carnegie Mellon University will be here to talk about a research project to improve the speed of accessing salesforce.com data.

In the salesforce 101 segment I'm going back to the absolute basics and discussing lead conversion. I'm going to answer the when, why, and how on converting leads as well as present a few theories that people use for this.

For the Deep Dive - we are going to have a guest from CRMFusion talk about data quality. For those new to salesforce.com or those with large amount of records this will be especially important to you.

As always we will open it up for General Q & A so that your questions get answered.

The meeting will be on Feb. 12 at 4:30 at Steelcoast Creative. Their address:

33 Terminal Way
Suite 419
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
412-431-4190

With the success of the last meeting in Cranberry, we are going for a return engagement there. I also wanted to have one more meeting for the year before the holidays.

Date: Dec. 19
When: 8-10am
Where: Panera Bread - Cranberry

What's on the agenda???

Salesforce 101 - I received a request to go over the Mapquest integration. While this is a bit much for 101, I'm going to give it a shot. If you have other requests I would like to hear it.

Deep Dive - There have been a boatload of changes recently with the latest releases. I'm going to cover some that I consider "high impact" to your org.

Your Questions - As always I will leave a portion of time open to your questions.

We will also have a special guest that I will announce in the email reminder. If you're not on the list - please let me know...

And just like last time - breakfast is part of the deal.

I look forward to seeing you there.

I wanted to thank everyone who came to last week's meeting. Appears that everyone enjoyed both the location and the time. We definitely had a lively discussion during the 2 hours.

Among the agenda that was planned on being covered (custom app dropdown and campaigns), we also discussed the AppExchange, custom objects, person accounts, and even what is coming out in the next release.

The next session is currently being planned for sometime in December. That date should be announced shortly.

Thanks to all.

Want to apologize for the lack of updates to this blog. I'll try to get better at this.

We are having a meeting this week on Friday morning. Here is the agenda

• This week I am starting a new series called "Salesforce 101". We are very lucky to have many new users in the group. This series will get you new users up to speed with the core components that make salesforce.com work. This week we will be focusing on the "Custom Apps". No you don't need programming skills for you to use this.
• Salesforce.com will be in to give a 10-15 minute overview of the big announcements at the annual user conference.
• In our deep-dive session, I will discuss campaigns and how it can help your marketing teams set a value on their efforts.
• Finally I want to segment a large volume of time for your questions.

Have something in particular that you need an answer on - bring it to the group for all of us to answer. From technical to method, we will try to answer your question.

Friday Oct 19
8am
Panera Bread - Cranberry
YES - WE WILL SERVE BREAKFAST - COME HUNGRY!!!

If you are coming please let me know by adding some comments. I will respond to you.