What is Salesforce Chatter?
Unveiled at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2009 user conference, Chatter is like Facebook for your business. This isn’t going to be available until 2010, so right now we can only base assumptions from the demo you see below. The premise is compelling – taking the positive aspects of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and applying them to your work world.
From the video alone, I can see value in a stream of status updates on products, marketing materials, or competitors. By being able to filter those into separate buckets, I could catch up on areas most interesting and relevant to me before an important customer call or meeting.
How to Create a Salesforce.com Custom App
The ability to create a custom application on top of Salesforce’s native platform has existed for several years. It’s been known by several names in the past (AppExchange apps, custom apps) and now, Force.com Apps.
Finally this video provides a nice summation in just a few minutes, to the essential steps in building your first custom Salesforce app.
How to Create Your Own Website on Salesforce.com
Also known as Force.com Sites, Salesforce.com lets you build your website on top of their platform. What’s that mean?
- Your tech folks no longer have to build a database from scratch to capture whatever information your website is trying to get from its visitors.
- You no longer have to get your email inbox bogged down with unsortable data whenever someone fills out a form on your website. (And you really shouldn’t be using the outdated “send an email to contact us” method, because that just causes more pain for the person who has to receive those alerts)
- The information that’s captured goes right into a well-organized database (ie Salesforce) and you can make use of that data right away. Or at least run reports to get a better picture of who’s coming to your site.
Here’s a spiffy demo of what sites can do for you. I enjoy how there’s a good variety of websites mentioned: big consumer names like Dell and Starbucks, as well as those in other sectors (like a blood bank!).
How to Log a Voicemail Call in Salesforce
The Salesforce folks have started publishing short best practice snippets over on YouTube.
Here’s a customization tip that describes how to create a custom button that performs two actions for you:
- Logs a completed activity (that you made a call and left a voicemail),
- Creates a new task to follow up later with a call
So if you’re confident in your basic Salesforce Administrator skills, this is a nice little productivity tool for your reps.
Note: The video only mentions that once this button is created, you’ll have to know how to add it to the appropriate page layouts, so you should be familiar with that concept.