i can has apex?

One of the biggest changes we saw when moving from an on-premise CRM solution to Salesforce was the difference in development time for small changes (such as modifying a page layout).

Previously, we had used the time-tested method of "develop in dev, test it in QA, deploy to production", which we still use for major releases and integration work. But for a page layout change? Yes - even there, our old system required that to mitigate the risk that a missing semi-colon or bracket could bring down production for a time, so a 5-minute task turned into weeks of project requests, approvals, scoping, developer time, weekly release dates, testing, and deployments.

Now, we're back to 5 minutes! Life is good.

But the challenge arises when we need to do large integration projects or other major developments. How do we keep our dev and QA sandboxes in sync with production? Typically, we would just do a refresh from production, and we're ready to start developing! However, due to the nature of our integrations, we have to refresh at the same time as our other on-premise apps refresh into their QA environments - once every 6 months.

For a while, this meant triple development - add the field in Prod, add the field in QA, add the field in dev. Ick.

The we discovered the Force.com IDE in Eclipse! Now, we periodically "deploy" from Production to our QA sandbox, ensuring all configuration is in sync, without touching the data that the integrations rely on. All in just a few minutes.

And a good thing too - as you'd expect, our "triple development" solution, and the potential for sub-optimal syncing had created a number of discrepancies between the environments - not to mention that our QA environment now has access to all the reports and list views used by production.

The developer sandboxes that were once a royal pain, are now a great benefit - and ease deployment into production as well. And it's easy to deploy. That's the key.

Very cool.

Some may be confused by the grammatically incorrect nature of my blog title. Please be assured - I am not an idiot. ;)

It's an homage to lolcats - those hilarious, ad-hoc, and grammatically incorrect cat pictures that have spread themselves far and wide on the internet, or intentionally gathered for your browsing pleasure.

Specifically, it's an homage to the original lolcat - "Happy Cat" (below) - that originally swept through the internet all those years ago (3 years is forever in internet time!).



You may see the occasional lolcat throughout the blog - other than that, it's all about Salesforce.com and developing on the Force.com platform! Hope that clears things up.

Enjoy the site!

My company uses Cisco IP phones, and recently upper management decided that our sales team needed an auto-dialer. As in, right now.

If you've ever worked in a call center, you know that auto-dialers are great when you have a group of people making scripted calls of a giant list. You sit with your headset on, and - bam! - you're talking to your next "customer".

But if you're talking to individual contacts that you've been working with, a script doesn't cut it. So when "Bob Johnson" suddenly comes up on your screen, you have no idea why you had him on your call list, what you've discussed lately, or where he is in the sales process. Sure - you could just take a glance at his contact record for 10 seconds - but by the time you see his name, he's already said "Hello!".

"Hey Bob, it's Zach. Say - could you hold on for 10 seconds, while I figure out why I called you?"

No good.

Still, upper management wanted to make the reps more efficient with their calling, and gave us 6 weeks to do it. Solution: Salesforce.com and Cisco's "Click to Dial". Best part: if you're on Salesforce, you already have it (you just don't know it!)

It's no more difficult to use that it sounds. Click on the phone number, and the phone at your desk starts dialing. Very cool.

So our resident Cisco guy called our Salesforce Sales Engineer, who brought in a subject matter expert from Cisco - and a few conversations later, it was ready to go! We tested internally, then with a small group of sales reps, and are now rolling out to all 800 users - all within the 6 week deadline.

There was some frustration (inspiring the image on the right!). A widget that connects your computer to your phone that needs to be installed (software...ick). After the admin configures it (basically just adding your cisco call manager account username and password, and your IP phone's MAC addresss), the user then needs to select their exension one-time the next time they log in. No problems, just the trial-and-error one expects from such an endeavor - missing passwords, substituting "5" for "S" in a MAC address, etc.

I've never been a big blogging fan. The poster at the right sums up the reason.

And yet...here we are.

So why are we here? Because hopefully I can share news, info, code, and links that will help my reader (or readers? Dare I hope?) with the Force.com platform.

Oh - and because I wanted to post the lolcats I've been making it work. (And yes it's good use of work time! They're about Force.com! That's work - right?)

Because seriously - it's tough to find a niche on the internet these days. Have a web site that's one-in-a-million? Then there are 185 sites (or so) JUST LIKE YOURS!

But there don't seem to be any Salesforce.com or Software As A Service lolcats out there - and I think that makes it worth sharing. ;)