As I promised in delivering monthly webinars, I've marked off on my calendar every third Thursday of each month. This is my our road map for the rest of the year. I'm going to try and follow the Sales Cycle for topics.  Since the next month is a Marketing topic I figure we'll start there.

Dates and topics are as follows:

• May 21st Quarterly Meeting - 9 am. Carla Shih speaking on Social Marketing
• June 18th Webinar - 10:30 am - Lead nurturing, Lead tools
• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Marketing qualification - Opportunity Management
• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon . Quote to Cash - Pipeline, Quoting, Order Processing (ERP integration)
• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am - More about ERP integration, and Quoting.
• Oct 15th Webinar - 10:30 am - Support, customer portal.
• Nov ( Dreamforce User Conference 18th-20th)
• Dec  17th - Webinar - Post Dreamforce briefing. Share what you learned or missed.

If you want to present, sponsor anyone of these (well the quote to cash meeting), please contact me. Pete Fife (pfife at mirapoint.com)

First, Arnt Hearing led a great demonstration of how to create Validation Rules to keep your data clean. One example he presented was creating a rule that when an opportunity’s stage is “Closed Lost”, it cannot be saved without also choosing a “Lost Reason” field, such as “price too high”.

Along the way, Eric Kintzer reminded us that the Winter ’09 release includes new Logical Operators, such as && (AND) and || (OR). Very handy to use when creating those Validation Rules! Another tip Eric provided was Apex must be used to write validation rules against multi-select picklists (as of Spring ’09).

Second, Arnt and Pete presented how CRMfusion’s DemandTools product can be used to “MassChange” your data and find matching records and merge them. Utilizing DemandTools to look at any standard or customer object and based on pre-defined or custom criteria you can identify hundreds of records across thousands all in minutes. For the mass impact example they looked at finding all the Accounts with a NULL Territory and then updating the Territory to the Owner’s Territory. This example showed the usefulness of cross-object lookups.

We ran out of time to present Sharing Rules. A topic for another day!

The Web conference was enabled by a product from iLinc. This allowed for great interaction among the 16 or so attendees – multiple presenters, application sharing, chat, video, and surveys were all part of the webinar. You can contact Barry Duncan if you’re interested at bduncan @ iLinc.com or 602.718.1592.  He has a user community discount.

If you missed it, the entire webinar was recorded and is available here https://sfug.ilinc.com/join/xvtzvzh.

The next webinar is cancelled since we'll be having our meeting on the 21st of May. The next webinar will be on June 18th.

(blog authored by Bryan B. and Pete F.)

O.k. thank you all for taking the survey and I just wanted to update you on those results and on tomorrows Webinar.

It appears we have the right location, Sunnyvale. Now I need to put a list of those in the area to start hosting!  Looking at my results I think I needed a radio button and not multi-select. Anyway if you where to take the "Doesn't matter I'd go to both" answer and apply it to San Mateo AND Sunnyvale areas the result would be: Sunnyvale - 48 v.s San Mateo - 26. And that's with only 7 votes for San Mateo only. report summary

As far as the webinar, data management, we have 25 attendees signed up. I've figured out my issue with the recording so I'll be recording this and posting here and on our linked in group.

As my commitment to you here is the registration for the monthly webinar, https://sfug.ilinc.com/register/jhhhzhv. The topic will be determined by the linkedin group discussion.

The meetings will be Every Third Thursday at 10:30 to 11:30. 

Quick update. Save the date for May 21st at 9 am.  We're trying something different for this meeting.  The location is still tentative however I think I'm going to try and have it at my work, pending on the number of registrations I get.  We'll be having Clara Shih from Salesforce talk about Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.

Clara Shih and Kingsley Joseph, two of the people at the forefront of Salesforce.com's social media marketing strategy, will share an introduction to social media marketing for business through channels like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs as well as share their insight on what works, what doesn't and what's next.

I'll be sending out an email with more details in the coming weeks.  Remember if you're a member to sign up on the linked in Group.