In that article I talked about doing some simple A/B testing. A/B testing is best described as doing some effort while changing one variable in the hopes of learning something about how to affect the outcome of effort. It’s been perfected by the direct mail industry–mailings are run as experiments and each mailing adds to the base of knowledge of how to increase response rats.

As I was writing the article I became dismayed that what I was proposing wasn’t actually very easy to do in Salesforce.com, the system I champion on a daily basis. We use Campaigns for outreach efforts, and while Campaigns are incredibly powerful and easy to work with, randomly breaking them into segments for A/B testing wasn’t easy.

I say “wasn’t” because I have released a tool for A/B testing that is free to users of Salesforce.com, which is listed on the Appexchange under the name Campaign Segmentation Wizard.

Build your list of people to whom you want to reach out, then use the wizard to randomly break them into segments of the exact size you desire. Those segments are Campaigns of their own, and can be used in any way you see fit–mass email, phone banking, etc.

Here’s a short video showing how it works.

If you install it and use it, please rate the app on the Appexchange so others will get a sense if it’s helpful or not.

S-controls have been superseded by Visualforce pages. Salesforce will, sometime after January 2010, remove the ability to create and distribute new s-controls. Existing s-controls will be unaffected.

At Dreamforce it was made clear that this technology is on the way out. S-Controls are being replaced by VisualForce. I have gushed about VisualForce in the past. I think that it is a design marvel–the balance of simplicity and power continues to blow me away. The more I use it, the more impressed I am.

But with all it’s power and simplicity, VisualForce currently can’t do everything that S-Controls can do.

S-Controls run in your browser and use the API when communicating with Salesforce. How many interactions they can do with Salesforce are limited by the number of API calls your organization can make and by the amount you can ge done before your browser connection times out. You can actually get a lot of data processing done this way.

VisualForce is light-years ahead of S-Controls in how it works. It hands all the Salesforce heavy lifting to Apex, which runs on the server. This is a great idea–why send all that data across the wire to you only to send it back to Salesforce? Theoretically, you could process a whole lot more on the server and get very fast response. But, because the server is a shared resource, there are operational limits to the amount of processing you can do. These limits are hard and fast, and haven’t budged since Apex was announced two years ago.

There are a number of use cases where I can’t get VisualForce to do what S-Conrols can do for me. One such use case is when you are trying to compare two lists of data and look for similarities. Like comparing the Campaign Memberships of two Campaigns, or looking at all Campaign Members on a Campaign and flagging all the Accounts that are represented more than once. I can’t figure out how to use VisualForce and Apex to handle these kinds of operations that may be comparing lists of 1000+ members.

I’m all for killing S-Controls–I haven’t written a new one in over a year, it seems. But I have some that I haven’t re-written as VisualForce, because I can’t replicate the functionality. I hope that before S-Controls are killed, VisualForce can do the kinds of processing that S-Controls can do, and more. I hope Salesforce.com figures out how to take the operational shackles off VisualForce and Apex in a way that good coders can use to do much more intensive processing than is currently possible.

[Update]: Via twitter, Simon Fell reminded me that VisualForce pages can interact directly with the API. I’d rather be able to use Apex to touch 5000 records, but nice to have this option. Thanks Simon!

In this example, Contacts are added to a Campaign that is configured with a number of planned email sends. Once the Email Series is kicked off, the Contacts will receive emails on the determined schedule. This example uses hard dates for the individual sends–we’ve also got working code that sends out emails on interval from the individual Contact’s campaign join date. That allows for open-enrollment to an Email Series.

Check out the example, I’m very happy with it. Check out the background noise–we sound like a CRM sweatshop!

You also need a system to help you grab people depending on which activities they have been a part or, or have not been a part of. Example: give me everyone who attended our luncheon and isn’t on our special VIP nurture track. It’s these people who I want to reach out to with some special information. But I don’t want the VIPs to get this info, because they’re getting something in a couple weeks that is more in-depth.

Right now Salesforce.com can’t do this kind of reporting. I can look at inclusion on certain campaigns, but can’t look across campaigns. I wish I had a report with this kind of interface:

This way I could pull out people based on what they have and haven’t done. If you agree that this is a worthwhile feature, please vote for this idea!

For an example of Sites in action, navigate over to the Dreamforce Attendee Portal.

This is a major breakthough for Salesforce.com on one of it’s weak areas–as CRM relationships become increasingly bi-directional, and more reliant on interactions with the public, it has been hard to give the public access to data inside Salesforce.com.

No longer. Now, full-fledged web applications can be written on top of your core CRM database. You can construct portals for customers, authenticated or not, with an amazing degree of flexibility. Force.com’s Model-View-Controller architecture is in use, giving the developers a full stack in the cloud for writing web apps.

The web experience is written with VisualForce, Salesforce.com’s web templating language. These web pages may have whatever structure and look-and-feel you desire–VisualForce spits out XHTML just like any other web templating language.

Your data lives in Salesforce.com objects, and is accessible via controllers you write in Apex, the server-side language of Force.com.

These programatic pieces are not new as of today they’ve been put into place over the last 3 years. But today Salesforce.com ties them together as a platform for building public web applications that are 100% hosted by Salesforce.com.

When you enable a Site, you get a force.com URL and can also map it to your own branded URL. You set a VisualForce page to act as your home page and you’re off. Hitting that URL now displays the VisualForce to the web user.

Permissions are robust and allow for multiple levels of access. You can have publicly accessible pages, that are available to the unauthenticated masses. You can also integrate with Salesforce.com’s Customer Portal functionality to create sites that authenticate against Contact records in your Salesforce.com CRM. This gives you the power to create multiple customer portals that have the exact web experience you desire.

Because it’s all built right on Salesforce.com, the web user can add/edit/delete any data you have in Salesforce.com, according to the access you give them. This is incredibly powerful, and can be used in myriad business cases where end user input is helpful.

I was given a chance to build an application to help show the power of Sites. I built a distributed phone banking site, based on my.barackobama.com. Distributed phone banking is the practice of allowing your supporters to make phone calls on behalf of your issue. For Obama, it was about calling voters to find out if they were going to vote for him. For an environmental nonprofit, it may be having members call other members to see if they will attend an important hearing, or about calling people who live near a proposed development that will harm the environment.

In my phone banking app, you can give access to any Contacts in your database. They can then login and make calls to people on the call list. It’s a pretty simple application, but the power of extending the business process across the outside edge of the organization is evident.

Sites enables this blurring of the organizational boundry that is incredibly exciting (because… ?). At ONE/Northwest, we’re doing this kind of thing with our Plone Salesforce.com integration and will continue because there is sometimes real value to having your external portal be a part of your web content management system.

For many use cases, Sites will be enough to get the job done. Some ideas that come to mind:

• build major donor portals for enabling donor-fundraising
• create a fully hosted, publicly-accessible, REST web service interface
• create public landing pages for marketing campaigns
• build public forms for information capture
• create an RSS feed for public consumption, or to loosely integrate with your website or anyone else’s

Sites is a big breakthrough, but different from the Apex announcement of 2006 or the VisualForce announcement of 2008. This is a way to extend what you’re already doing to the world. Sites enable opening up your database in controlled ways to your constituents, with the exact look and feel you want. Prepare yourself for a wave of innovative add on products that take advantage of this new way of thinking.

I hope we learn more shortly about the Sites pricing model. At this point all we know is that there will be two models–one based on traffic and another based on user count. I like that Salesforce.com is working on their pricing with respect to Sites–there are many scenarios where the old per-user-only pricing model just won’t work.

Nice work Salesforce.com on coming up with another big Dreamforce announcement. I’ve got a couple groups who will want in on a pilot…

Am I missing something? Seems like this would be really easy for Vertical Response to implement.

Here are my favorites:

• Packageable VisualForce
• Better Campaign Member management
• Visualforce for list buttons
• Tons of Ideas features
• Marketing influence reports
• Documents in Metadata API
• Reports in Metadata API
• SOQL Outer Joins
• Visualforce as Email Templates

Obama just announced surrogates will be talking about John McCain’s houses and his forgetting about them in 16 states tomorrow. Ouch. Looks like the general is really underway.

Basically, you mark that a Contact should start a drip email series, and from then on they will receive your templated emails automatically, at the time intervals you configure.

The sending of these emails requires no User intervention, and no code is necessary to make this work–it’s unattended drip emailing from plain vanilla Salesforce.com.

I love working on a team, because someone often comes along with a different approach to a problem that I was blind to. This is so much better than what I was coming up with. We still have a limit of 200 emails a day, but because these are going out daily rather than in large batches, we have more ability to level our sends, staying under 2000.

I’m not sure why workflow sends to Contacts was a blind spot for me. I guess I have been thinking about email as large-batch sends, rather than thinking about them as one-offs. Or maybe I still haven’t recovered from summer vacation…

Thanks again to Matthew for this great idea. If anyone can think of limitations we’re not considering, or ways of doing this better, please post a comment!

You could do this kind of thing with workflow field updates (there is an option for moving fields to the next option in the picklist) but there isn’t a great way to query the objects. A List Button won’t work because you have to page through and select all your Contacts before clicking the button. So, this is what I came up with.

IF(NOT(ISNULL(CampaignId)),HYPERLINK("/" & CampaignId, Campaign.Name ),"")

Which is a hyperlink to the Campaign to which an Opp is related.

Why, you might ask. Because for some reason, Campaign isn’t available in the Related List for Opportunities on the Contact Page Layout. And sometimes it’s nice to see giving history along with the Campaigns those gifts came in from. I had a customer ask me for this today, as a matter of fact.

Would be even nicer if I didn’t have to fake it, but this will do.

Public Tagging

Public tagging enables users to view and use tags applied by other users within an organization. Any public tag that a user adds to a record can be viewed by any other user who can also access the record. As with personal tags, administrators can enable public tags on accounts, activities, assets, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, documents, events, leads, notes, opportunities, reports, solutions, tasks, and any custom objects (except relationship group members).While any user can add a public tag to a record, only users with the “Tag Manager” profile permission can rename or delete public tags.

Across all users, an organization is limited to:

• 1,000 unique public tags
• 50,000 instances of public tags applied to records
• 5,000,000 instances of personal and public tags applied to records

Interesting. Could really be powerful for decentralized flagging of records. Appears that you can’t report on these yet.

Enhanced Lookups

If enabled by your administrator, account, contact, user, and custom object lookups can behave as enhanced lookups. Enhanced lookups update standard lookup fields with the following functionality:

• Enhanced lookup search queries are broken into separate search terms at any split between alphabetic, numeric, and special characters. In other words, if you enter ALL4ONE in an enhanced lookup field, the resulting query searches for All and 4 and ONE. Consequently, entering ALL the 4 and ONE returns ALL4ONE. Also, searching for S& returns fields containing both S& and &S.
• Enhanced lookups allow users to sort and filter search results by any field that is available in regular search results. Users can also hide and reorganize the columns that are displayed in the results window.
• Enhanced lookups return all records that match your search criteria and allow you to page through large sets of search results.

If enabled by your administrator, both standard lookups and enhanced lookups can display a dynamic list of matching recently-used records when a lookup field is edited. This list is populated from recently used items and is restricted to objects of the appropriate type. For example, while editing an Account lookup, you can see recently used accounts with names that match the prefix you have entered. Recently used contacts do not appear in this list.

Could be really cool. A bit limiting that you can only lookup against recent items–that’s a pretty short list. Will be nice in VisualForce interfaces.

Update: Pretty nice with the autolookup. Seems that the filtering doesn’t work as I had hoped. I would love to have a lookup that would show Accounts, but only of a certain record type. No go on that.

Enhanced List Views

you can now edit single records directly from a list view by double-clicking on individual field values. If your administrator has granted you the “Mass Inline Edit from Lists” user profile permission, you can also edit up to 200 records at a time with inline editing.

There is lots more about List Views–these are clearly a big platform feature for them moving forward.

Custom Default Landing Tab

In Summer ’08, you can now specify a custom default landing tab when creating or editing an app.To do so, use the Default Landing Tab drop-down menu below the tab selection
area of the app creation wizard. The default landing tab is displayed at login and at any time a user switches between apps with the app menu. For example, the Call Center app can be configured so that the Console tab is the default landing tab.

Might be a nice feature for in context help and links–maybe more so than the current home page.

New Metadata API Objects

• Custom Page Web Link
• Home Page Components
• Home Page Layouts
• Layouts
• Validation Rule
• Workflow

Oh, My, God. Page Layouts take FOREVER to recreate by hand. If we can do this via the Metadata API it will be huge!

Cross-Object Formulas

In a previous release, we introduced cross-object formulas in validation rules, workflow rules, and other business rules.With Summer ’08, you now have the same flexibility with formula fields. These formula fields can now reference merge fields from parent records that are related via master-detail or lookup relationships. In addition, cross-object formulas can reference up to five related objects.You can also create a formula field to display fields from related objects on detail pages, list views, related lists, and reports. For example, a Discounted Amount formula on the opportunity object can use a Discount Percent field defined on the account object.

Now that I’ve said Oh, My, God once, let me say OMG! Particularly useful in Reporting and Email templates where you only get fields off one object. Huge for communications!

Update: These are indeed the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Apex changes: Developer Preview

Dynamic Apex is composed of dynamic SOQL and SOSL queries, as well as dynamic DML. Dynamic SOQL and SOSL queries provide the ability to execute SOQL or SOSL as a string at runtime, while dynamic DML provides the ability to create a record dynamically and then insert it into the database using DML. Using dynamic SOQL, SOSL, and DML, an application can be tailored precisely to the organization as well as the user’s permissions. This can be useful for applications that are installed from the AppExchange.

Apex managed sharing allows developers to use Apex to programmatically share custom objects. When you use Apex managed sharing to share a custom object, only users with the “Modify All Data” permission can add or change the sharing on the custom object’s record, and the sharing access is maintained across record owner changes.

An Apex annotation modifies the way a method is executed, similar to annotations in Java. Use the future annotation to identify methods that are executed asynchronously.When you specify future, the method executes when Salesforce has available resources.

Can’t wait to play with these features. Asynchronous Apex could solve a lot of problems as it might allow governor limits to go up for these kinds of batch jobs. We’ll see.

Double Master Details

In Summer ’08, you can now create two master-detail relationships on a single junction object to make it easier to represent a many-to-many relationship in your data model.

Will be nice for those annoying junction objects we all have to create. Will we get summary rollups in two directions??? Update: Confirmed that rollups work both directions.

Analytic Snapshots

Analytic snapshots enable users to run a tabular report and save the report results to fields on a custom object.With analytic snapshots, users with the “Manage Analytic Snapshots” permission can map fields from a source report to the fields on a target object, and schedule when to run the report to load the custom object’s fields with the report’s data. Analytic snapshots allow users to work with report data similarly to how they work with other records in Salesforce, such as:

• Creating and running custom reports from the target object
• Creating dashboards from reports that reference the target object
• Defining list views on the target object if it is included on a custom object tab

Scratches an itch I have right now for a client–benchmarking groups over time.

Ideas

With Summer ’08, Salesforce Ideas now lets administrators create multiple communities that can be made available to internal Salesforce users and portal users, or restricted to internal Salesforce users only. In addition, Salesforce Ideas now includes many of the powerful Force.com platform features you are accustomed to using on other standard and custom objects. For example, you can now do the following with Salesforce Ideas:

• Create custom fields
• Specify the layout of your custom fields
• Use validation rules
• Create workflow rules
• Define Apex triggers

I was pretty surprised they launched Ideas without custom fields. I’ve come to expect that kind of customizability with all Salesforce objects.

Salesforce to Salesforce

Publish and Subscribe to Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce to Salesforce You can now publish and subscribe to accounts and contacts using Salesforce to Salesforce. Publish Related Tasks in Salesforce to Salesforce You can now forward tasks that are related to a shared record using Salesforce to Salesforce.

This could be interesting for sharing data between groups in a coalition. I still have yet to get my head around it, but am very interested now that it includes Contacts.

Multiday Events

About time! Litterally!

Extended Mail Merge

With Extended Mail Merge, a mail merge operation cannot exceed the following limits:

• 1000 records
• The selected mail merge template(s) total size cannot be larger than 1 MB.
• For mass mail merges, the number of selected records multiplied by the combined sizes of the selected mail merge templates cannot be larger than 50 MB.

Extended Mail Merge is available by request only. Please contact salesforce.com Customer Support if you are interested in this feature.

Nice that the limits have gone up. Not so nice that you can’t effectively estimate the number of records that will be allowed. Who wants to do the math described above???

Converted Leads

Converted Lead Page Previously, if you created a link to a lead detail page and later opened the link after the lead was converted, Salesforce provided a message stating that the lead was converted. Now, applicable information about the converted lead is also provided, including the name of the account, contact, and opportunity.

This makes a lot of sense. There will also be some new reports for seeing Leads and Contacts together.

Please comment if I’ve misrepresented anything or I’ve skipped a feature you’re really excited about.

Adam Mordecai, a Dean staffer who helped run the Perfect Storm [Dean's 2004 effort to blanket Iowa with volunteer door knockers], described the problem as follows: “The one major issue that really foiled the perfect storm…was the completely dysfunctional voter-file system. The company we contracted the voter file to was way out of their league. Their system would crash perpetually, field organizers would be lucky if they could ever access the system to download lists and said lists were usually way out-of-date or incorrect because no one could get access to the system to update them. Iowans would get repeated calls from different volunteers within the same hour. It was a disaster. It alienated a lot of Iowans who were simply tired of hearing from Deaniacs over and over again.”

The voter file in political campaigns is really just CRM, if used correctly:

The new crop of campaign software tools sends data back instantly to a centralized database, so effort isn’t wasted on voters who have moved or died. And campaign knowledge is accretive, with voting history, political identification and contact history retained every cycle.

Doesn’t this sound like CRM to you? It’s really great to see Democratic campaigns getting CRM and understanding that to get that right they have to tackle the problem of having many, many volunteers utilizing that CRM in a coherent way. It sure looks like campaigns are doing that very well this cycle.

It doesn’t hurt Democratic turnout to have Mr. 27% still in the White House, but if you don’t actually get people out to the polls, that doesn’t matter. CRM can help in building the relationship and getting people’s support, just like it can in so many other arenas.

Here’s a short movie about moving Opportunities from one Campaign to another in Bulk:

And another about moving Opportunities to Campaigns in Bulk from a list view.