Appirio Calendar Sync and Salesforce Summer ‘08
Posted on June 11, 2008
Filed Under Salesforce | 2 Comments
To my fellow Salesforce admins: If your organization has enabled the Appirio Calendar Sync to sync Google Apps calendar with Salesforce, and your organization has been upgraded to Salesforce Summer ‘08, have your users double check their settings in the sync application. It’s likely they’ll find something like this:
The sync stopped on Friday, June 6, just as we were being upgraded to Summer ‘08. I have administrator login privileges on a few user accounts, and sure enough their sync stopped at exactly the same time.
Much love for CRMFusion
Posted on May 21, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 2 Comments
This morning I was in Salesforce creating some new Dashboard views. Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Dashboard. I’m having so much fun creating all different ways of looking at our data.
Warning…the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense unless you’re familiar with Salesforce.
In the process of creating a dashboard component, I realized that about 150 donations this fiscal year were not allocated to the right fund (a custom field on our opportunities/donation object).
We use the Opportunity Contact Role object to link individuals to donations. I also found a bunch of donations (200 give or take) where the contact role was properly set to “Donor” but the Primary flag was not checked. Without that primary flag, any report that looks for “Primary Contact” (so a report run on Donations alone without the contact role object) would not find an individual name attached to the donation. It’s a bit of a bother to use both the primary flag and set that primary donor to “Donor” but it works well when we do.
Without CRMFusion’s Demand Tools, my choices to correct these problems would have been:
- Individually edit each donation record in the browser. Ugh. No. Way.
- Use the Salesforce provided data loader to download all the donation records, fix the fields using Excel and re-upload the corrections. Do able. But no.
The reality? In Demand Tools I used the “Mass Change” module to:
Find the opportunity records where the donation name contains the fund and change the “Fund” field to the correct value. We have strict naming rules on our donation records so every donation to that fund had it in the name. Easy.
Find all opportunity contact role records where Primary = false and Role = donor and change them so Primary = true.
Each change literally took 30 seconds to effect hundreds of records, and you get a restore file in case you make a mistake.
When I’ve attended nonprofit Salesforce user group meetings, I’m always surprised at the number of organizations that don’t know about this great tool…or the fact that the company matches the Salesforce nonprofit grant!
It’s a Windows-only desktop application, but it runs just fine in VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
More on the Salesforce/Google calendar sync bug
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Salesforce | 5 Comments
Update: See comments. Appirio fixed the bug and all is well. 
As I mentioned in my previous post, the new Google/Salesforce calendar sync seems to have a bug.
The Appirio Sync For Google Calendar appears to only sync events based on the “Assigned to” field.
When you invite another user to a meeting in Salesforce, the “Assigned to” field remains set to the person who did the inviting….
…even though the event appears on the Salesforce calendar of those folks who were invited (whether they accepted the meeting or not)
That likely explains why I had 8 copies of the same meeting sync to Google calendar, synced to each person who was invited. When I deleted the duplicate instances, the user was erroneously notified the meeting was canceled.
It may also explain why the meeting below is not syncing to Google Calendar. I was invited, accepted, and it appears in my Salesforce calendar. But not in Google calendar.
Carlea hasn’t set up her Google-Salesforce calendar sync yet (I haven’t deployed it to her) but if she did sync, I’d wage money she has multiple copies of the meeting…one for each person she invited.
Now to log a case with Appirio referencing this post. I’m surprised I can’t find a mention of this anywhere else.
Google Apps and Salesforce - Finally! A first look
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 9 Comments
There were rumors for weeks that this was coming. And here it is. Salesforce has finally rolled out its integration with Google Apps. Not just a simple “add email to Salesforce” from Google or “write document from Google Docs,” this is a whole suite of tools and settings to integrate every corner of Google Apps with Salesforce.
The obligatory demo video is below.
Here’s a first look at what it all really means, from the point-of-view of a nonprofit organization that uses Google Apps for email, chat and some documents and Salesforce for the main constituent database, calendar and inter-office task delegation.
Salesforce IP checking is a royal PITA
Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under Internet & Technology, Salesforce, mobility | 5 Comments
A few months ago, Salesforce implemented a security feature that while I agree with on principle (and therefore don’t want to take steps to completely disable), it has been driving me crazy.
In short, when you log in to your Salesforce account, the system looks at your IP and recognizes whether or not you have logged in from that IP before or if your IP is already cleared by the system administrator. If it’s a new IP in your account, you have to click an activation link which sends an email to the account you’re trying to log in under. You click the link in the email which activates the IP and you’re good to log in and get work done.
Businesses that have static IPs (or even dynamic IPs that don’t move around that much) aren’t bothered by this. However, someone like me whose office usually consists of a laptop and any power outlet she can find is finding this security feature challenging to say the least.
Even when I’m home, Verizon is changing my IP at least 2-3x a day. It’s annoying to have to dance over to my email so often to authorize yet another IP address. Thankfully, that email arrives in fractions of a second after I click the link so I’m not delayed that much. Otherwise, I would just authorize entire IP blocks that Verizon DSL uses, which I’m not sure I want to do.
However, yesterday I found out what happens when I can’t get to my email: Not fun.
I did a little presentation/demo at the New York City Nonprofit Salesforce Usergroup. The meeting was hosted at Wells Fargo Insurance services in midtown Manhattan. When I attempted to log in to Salesforce, of course I got the “Activation Needed” box. Okay, so I fire up a browser window to check my email. Now that we are fully migrated to Google Apps, I no longer use a separate mail client. A window pops up that mail.google.com is blocked by the corporate firewall. The little note on the message says that all external email applications are blocked. Uh oh.
So what did we do so I could use my Salesforce account during the demo?
Another attendee (thanks again, Marc!) found that he could use my computer to log in to his webmail (SquirrelMail). I guess they let that one get away, likely since it was webmail.domain.com and not a known mail application. So I clicked the link to activate, retrieved the message on my Blackberry, forwarded to his email where he could open the message in a window on my computer and activate. Phew!
I completely agree with the extra security measure of making sure that the account holder is the person logging in to Salesforce. I agree with the notion that if there’s a doubt, notify the user via the email address on their account. But I wish Salesforce wouldn’t base this decision solely on IP/physical location. Guess what? That’s the point of Salesforce. We can log in from anywhere and move around.There has to be a better way of verifying that I’m me.
What about a software token (Mac compatible, of course) that one could install on a computer in a secure way that Salesforce could check for if it doesn’t recognize the IP address? That way, every time my computer is used to log on, Salesforce knows it’s me. I don’t know.
