To all those who are attending, Welcome!  To all those that couldn't make it, hopefully these posts will give you a taste of what you're missing.

We had our meeting today at Tableau Software here in Fremont.  

There is an orientation session for first time Dreamforce attendees on the 17th at 5pm.  This is the first year that it's being held, so I am going to go check it out.  Tom Wong, author of Salesforce.com for Dummies and VP of Dreamforce is hosting that session.

I'm sorry for the late notice but we have a last minute location change for our Wednesday October 14th User Group meeting.  The meeting will now be held at Barry's - Tableau Software - Fremont Office.

Map Link - http://bit.ly/bbVUd

837 North 34th Street, Suite 400

Seattle, WA 98103

There is limited parking available around the building.  There are also some pay lots east of the building on Northlake Way.

The meeting will be held from 8:00am - 10:00am.

The agenda for this meeting will be as follows:

• Navigating the Salesforce Community- Serge Paxton, Salesforce Customer Success Manager, will give us a tour of the Salesforce Community and how best to find the information that you need!
• What's Coming in Winter '10 - A member of the Salesforce Professional Services team will give us an exciting preview into what's coming in the Winter '10 release.
• Dreamforce! - If you're planning to attend, Barry will talk briefly about some Dreamforce best practices and where we, as a usergroup, can meet up!

Our next User Group meeting is approaching quickly. 
Wednesday, October 14th.

Time: 8:00 – 10:00 AM PST

Location: Twisted Pair
3131 Elliott Avenue
Suite 200
Seattle, WA 98121
Twisted Pair Map Link

Our next informal user group meeting is approaching quickly and will be held on Wednesday September 16th. 

Time: 4:30pm – 6:30pm PST

Location: King's Hardware

Seattle, WA 98107  

These informal meetings are a great way to network with other Salesforce users in a relaxed setting.

Reminder - Our next Seattle User Group meeting is approaching quickly. 

Wednesday, August 12th.

Time: 8:00 - 10:00 AM PST

Location: Twisted Pair

3131 Elliott Avenue

Twisted Pair Map Link

Parking is available, but expensive in the building.  There may be street parking available, but the area is well serviced by public transportation, so carpool or use transit if possible.

The agenda for this meeting will be as follows:

• AppExchange - Salesforce will give a short presentation on some exciting changes to the AppExchange!
• Best Practices for Salesforce Integration - We're excited to have a panel of leading Salesforce implementers to discuss best practices around integration projects.

Any remaining time will be devoted to an informal question & answer roundtable.  This will be a great time to query the group on any issues, features, or projects you may be working on!

If you are planning to attend the August 12th meeting please send an email to Courtney House (chouse@egencia.com) to RSVP. 

Also, mark your calendars now for the next two User Group meetings!

Wednesday, September 16th - King's Hardware in Ballard
Wednesday, October 14th - Twisted Pair

Thank you and we look forward to seeing you on August 12th.

Courtney & Barry
Seattle Salesforce User Group Co-Leaders

What do you use to analyze your data?

Do you have an on premise solution that you download your Salesforce.com data to?  Or do you use a company like Business Objects or LucidEra (who, apparently is closing very soon)?  Or do you use Salesforce.com's wonderful internal analytics?

Though the funnel chart introduced in the Summer '09 release is cool, it really doesn't give you the ability to do any complex analysis.  As a dashboard chart, it's nice to be able to see in bold colors where the numbers are, but if you really want to know where your big deals are, who is (or isn't) following up on their opportunities, etc., you need a BI package.

SaaS BI vendors like Business Objects and LucidEra connect directly to your Salesforce.com data and allow you to do analysis, but sometimes don't give you the flexibility that an on premise BI solution can provide.  Of course, one of the trade offs is how do you get your data into your BI solution if it's on premise?  Can it connect over the internet?  What's the performance like?

There are several vendors that offer tools to get your Salesforce.com data local.  This has some side benefits as well.  Have you ever had a user run up to you and say, "Can you help me? I just deleted my contact?"  And then, when you teach them how to use the recycle bin, they admit that they didn't delete the WHOLE contact, just some of the contact information.  If you have a local copy of the data, just do a query, get the info and update the data.  Handy, no? 

My favorite tool for this is DBAmp from ForceAmp.  Not only is it a simple application to install, the support is great (and it's not that pricey).  It allows your Salesforce.com organization to appear as a "Linked Server" to Microsoft SQL server.  This allows you to not only copy your data locally, but even update it (I can hear the DBAs salivating about writing stored procedures to do all sorts of fun stuff with their data).  Of course, there are other tools out there for this like Cast Iron and Pervasive that allow you do it with a point and a click, but they'll cost you.

Now that your data is local, what are you going to do with it?  Well... I'm going to toot my own horn here, I don't do it that often, so if it offends you, skip this paragraph.  We use our own product here at Tableau Software to analyze our Salesforce.com data.  Chris Stolte, one of our founders, wrote an awesome blog post about it a while back.  I love to use Tableau to make pivot tables and slice up our data to find specific data or groups of records that I need to get to.  We even use it to generate lists of ids to update using Demand Tools.

So, again, what do you use to look at your data?