Links for November

Salesforce annual DreamForce conference ran from Nov 17-20. The main announce from Marc Benioff’s kenote was the introduction of Chatter.

Adobe announced Flash Builder for Force.com

WaveMaker announced the release of WaveMaker Studio version 6.

LinkedIn Detroit Salesforce group

Please visit the LinkedIn Detroit Salesforce Group.

This provides a great opportunity for networking with other Salesforce experts as well as relevant discussions.

Best wishes and looking ahead

As 2008 draws to a close and we celebrate the Christmas season and look forward to 2009, we can look back and review all the happenings in the cloud computing world…..

DreamForce 2009 introduced Salesforce Sites – opening up the CRM platform to hosting custom applications. Also integration with Amazon Web Services and Facebook was announced.

Oracle partnered with Amazon to provide backup storage using Amazon’s S3 service

Adobe AIR becomes widely available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Thus allowing developers to develop applications outside of the browser and take full advantage of desktop capabilities (drag and drop, access to local filesystem). This coupled with the Flex/AIR toolkit for Salesforce provides even more integration possibilities.

Dreamforce 09

If you weren’t able to attend DreamForce this year (as I wasn’t), all the presentation have been made available at the Salesforce Community site.

The developer network also provides technical details and examples on integrating with Amazon, Facebook and Force.com Sites.

I think Sites is definitely going to be great selling point for Salesforce. Now from within Salesforce, you can develop applications and pages based on Apex and VisualForce and allow non-Salesforce users to access them. The pricing model still has to be determined and Sites is only in developer preview but it is definitely worth looking into.
You can sign up for a free developer account and attend one of the free webinars at the developer site.

Salesforce and Google Visualization

Salesforce developer network has an excellent tutorial on how you can integrate Google Visualization API with Salesforce data to provide users with a new more visual way to look at their data.

It uses the new Force.com Visualization toolkit that is hosted on Google’s Code Share site.

This really shows the power and flexability of cloud computing.

Visual Map of Cloud Computing

Peter Laird at Laird OnDemand has an excellent article where he explains the different markets in cloud computing as well as mapping how they all are related.
Visit it here.
Some interesting environments that highlight what an interesting time it is to be a developer…

Salesforce Winter 09 resources and developer Webinar

For an overview of the new winter 09 features and how salesforce developers can make use of them, there is a free webinar available at developer.force.com.
Full release notes are available at https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_winter09_release_notes.pdf.
Some of the significant enhancements include -

• Storage enhancements
• Convert existing files to Google docs
• Schedule and email reports
• Visualforce email templates

Learn Adobe Flex in a week

Adobe Flex is an open source platform that allows you to create RIA (rich internet applications) easily that can run on all browsers and uses the Adobe Flash Player. This platform is of special interest to Salesforce users because Salesforce provides a flex toolkit that eases integration between Flex and the Salesforce APIs.

Adobe provides a easy to follow course that will get you up to speed with Flex at Flex in a Week.

Salesforce developers can go to the ADN website to learn more about integrating Flex with Salesforce.

Welcome to Web3.0 – what it all means

TechCrunchIT has a great interview with Marc Benioff – CEO of Salesforce – Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center.

With Google AppEngine, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and others enabling infrastructure as a service, the barriers to setting up your business on the web are now dependent on the business idea and application. No need to worry about server installation, scalability issues or authentication since these are now handled by the services.

What follows is a breakdown of the various acronyms and links to other articles.

Salesforce Approval Process

I presented how we designed and developed an approval process within our company to handle Credit Memos at the Detroit Salesforce User group meeting.

Click here to create an approval process

The approval process within Salesforce is very powerful and flexible. I think the most important point to note is that planning and flowcharting the process upfront can benifit the development and also server as documentation.