Salesforce AppBar vs. Firefox Plugin

I’ve been using the Salesforce Firefox Plugin for more than a year now and its been absolutely fantastic. I was just browsing some applications on the exchange and noticed a listing for The AppBar, which is a browser toolbar specifically for Salesforce.com. I’m not normally a fan of browser toolbars simply because of the amount of space they take up, but I think this one might really be a winner for Salesforce users.

The Firefox Plugin is really simple – once installed it adds a searchbox inside your browser and lets you perform an advanced search across any object in your organization. It actually works better than the default search on the homepage since it uses the “advanced” search, not a standard search.

The new Appbar developed by 3 Salesforce employees (although it doesn’t see to be an official Salesfoce app) goes way beyond the simple search functionality and creates a bunch of shortcuts into your application. When you complete a search you can choose from several options, even searching the appexchange. One of the big time savers should be the ability to directly link to add accounts, contacts, tasks, etc. The next big time saver are the views buttons. Each of these buttons lets you instantly link to any of your pre-formatted views, saving at least a few clicks each time.

I’m definitely going to try this out a bit longer to see if I hit any snags, but so far the only drawback seems to be the real estate I lose at the top of my browser.

I highly recommend trying out both of these if you haven’t already. If you’re stuck using IE as your only choice of browser, well then I really feel sorry for you….

Salesforce Content Demo

Salesforce.com recently added some more information about the new Salesforce Content product coming out soon (late Q4?). You can check it out at Salesforce.com/content or view the demo here. This product was developed after Salesforce acquired the 9 person, San Mateo based Koral.com

The features look really nice – making it much easier to organize, find, track, and use documents but once again I’m left feeling that this should be an included upgrade to the sub-par document system we currently have rather than paying an additional fee for an add on service. I would hope that at some point this is rolled into the service levels much like Google Adwords product was but I’m guessing that will depend on how high the demand for the product will be.

This is definitely something we would use and would make our work more efficient (the product really does look good), but as a small business owner the price we pay for Salesforce is already a significant part of our overhead and this could increase it by an additional 30% – 50% if the buzz I heard about pricing is true. I understand that they would need to limit bandwidth but perhaps this is a product that could be based on usage or total storage rather than the standard per user / per month pricing we’re used to.

Timeline S-Control Is Very Cool – Too Bad I Can’t Use It.

Salesforce Labs just came out with the Timeline S-Control application that is incredibly easy to install and has some great functionality.  It allows you to place a visual timeline on any of your Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, or Cases and quickly scroll through all of the items in a rich visual format.  The original application came out of MIT and is called Simile.  I was really excited by some of the examples and began to implement the application until I realized it is only for Enterprise editions and higher.  I really need to beg Salesforce to open up the API in some other pricing format.  It is still not practical for my company to invest thousands of dollars per year extra for EE when the only functionality I need is the API.  If you’re a professional edition user like me and want to cast your vote for API access please vote here or here

Good Ideas That Need Promoting

Yesterday I posted about an idea that I had for the IdeaExchange, and I thought I would occasionally post other ideas that are languishing at the bottom of the heap.

I think this one is worthy of promotion:  Create a repository in the AppExchange for strictly S-Controls that may be conducive to re-use.

http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/25070

If there is demand for it I can host sample S-Controls and formulas that might be helpful to others.  Please post in the comments section if you think this is a good idea.

Calling all Professional Edition Users

I recently posted an idea on the SFDC idea exchange to allow Professional Edition users the ability to access the API and to charge based on usage. The current product matrix only allows for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition users to access the API. Please vote by going to the idea exchange and promoting this idea:

http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/24160

The moderator on the roadmap panel told us that the best way to get our ideas implemented was to post it on the idea exchange and hope they get promoted. Apparantly Marc Benioff also reads through the ideas from time to time and Salesforce does really seem to listen to its customers.