Back to work...

Well, it's back to work today... Dreamforce 12 is over. I had a great time, though it's super hard to get back in the swing of things here in hot hot HOT Texas. I miss wearing my boots and tights!

Everyone is blogging about their experiences, and I'm reading as many of them as I can!

So without adieu here are a few of my favorite things from #DF12:

Monday night the #GirlyGeeks DF Chatter group teamed up with the Salesforce.com Women's Network, and had a Women in Tech panel. I ran the EventBrite sign up, and helped coordinate. There were 755 women signed up!

Jill Rowley of Eloqua (@Jill_Rowley) was the moderator, and did a FANTASTIC job! We also had:

Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, President, Commercial/SMB Business Unit, Salesforce.com
Geraldine Gray (@GeraldineGray), Senior Consultant, Appirio & Founder of the GirlyGeeks
Rachel Thornton, Vice President, Dreamforce, Salesforce.com
Penny Herscher (@PennyHerscher), CEO, FirstRain
Sarah Friar (@thefriley), CFO, Square
Deepa Patel, President, Halak Consulting

These fantastic and inspiring ladies were sitting on our panel... it was terrific, and I have to say that I'm sincerely honored to have been a part of this!

Tuesday I hosted a session with Mary Scotton (@rockchick32204) called "Building Business Apps - Coding Optional", and sort of choked a bit... LOL but Mary says that no one knew it other than she and I, and Shannon Hale (@shannonsans) so it wasn't that big of a deal. I did a repeat on Friday and did MUCH better. I hope that I get another chance at presenting!

Wednesday I did a little shopping at Macy's, and got some killer boots, then had dinner with a bunch of the #GirlyGeeks before the @ChiliPeppers show and then went to the @Appirio party! I met a bunch of people, and I'm sure I missed someone on my list that I posted on Twitter earlier this week... and if I missed mentioning you, and you read this... Let me know and I'll send a shout out to you!

Friday was sad, and someone stole my old iPhone3 at the airport, but I made it home finally at about midnight CST. I slept most of the day on Saturday, and then spent a lot of time with icy hot and heating pads on my shinsplints and aching feet!

Today, it's back to the real world, and while I love my job, and my house and the fantastic city of Houston... there's still a part of me that wishes that I was independently wealthy and could just spend as much time in San Francisco as I wanted! I've been there three times now, and not yet have I really spent any time being a tourist!

I'm trying to save up enough money so that next year, I can go up a day ahead of time, and come back a day late! I want to do some stalking of my imaginary boyfriend @JamesFancoTV, and visit the redwood at Muir Woods, and ride a cable car and go over the Golden Gate Bridge!

So now I'm off home from the office, after answering about 200 emails and closing about 15 cases today!

And if anyone wants to start planning meeting up at DF13, let's schedule it now so we don't run out of time!

XOXO
Shannon

DREAMFORCE IS COMING!!!!!

Hi guys, I decided I needed to bust out a blog post before things get even crazier than they already are!

I'm still doing the volunteer work with www. SARDAA.org, and I'm helping to manage the GirlyGeeks chatter group, and my latest announcement is... (drumroll please)

I'm co-presenting a session, with the terrific Mary Scotton aka @rockchick322004!

It's called "Building Business Apps: Coding Optional", and it's already full, and there was so much interest they added a second session on Friday! (REPEAT!)

I'm so excited I can hardly stand myself.

Geekend!

Today I just want to share how much of a TRUE GEEK I really am.


Geek Out #1: I got an email from an undisclosed employee of Salesforce.com letting me know that he recommended me to Pluralsight as a potential contributor to their upcoming video series on Force.com!


I spoke to Megan with Pluralsight the other day, and now I'm planning on what my video audition is going to be, and I'm going to record it this weekend.


For those of you who aren't familiar with  Pluralsight , they bill themselves as "hardcore developer training". It's a subscription site for learning how to do .NET, and C# and HTML5 and RUBY and well, lots of other programming languages.


They don't have a Force.com section yet, so they asked me (based on my recommendation from the "unknown" employee of Salesforce.com) to do a ten minute audition video.


It needs to be something that can actually be learned within ten minutes, not just a ten minute portion of a larger training. I'm leaning towards "Creating Custom Buttons" right now, but I'd be happy to take some suggestions if any of you have some ideas!


Geek Out #2: I'm coordinating some volunteer time with our local area user group leader Rachel Rogers. (Houston Area User Group aka HUG). 


At my suggestion, Rachel reached out to the community, and gathered a group of us who would like to volunteer training, or development or even data entry for a Non-Profit Organization that uses Salesforce.com 


We heard back from the Board of Directors Chair with the Schizophrenia and Related Disorders Alliance of America here in Houston, and we are getting ready to start meeting with her to get started helping them out! 


I'm really excited about that, I love donating my time to help those in need, and I love working in Salesforce.com, so this is just right up my alley!

Local Time!

I was sincerely surprised that SFDC doesn't have native functionality to determine what the current time is at the Account's location. It seemed like pretty "basic" functionality to me.... AND THEN...

I figured it out... I was SUPER surprised at how very difficult this task really is, especially when you start considering that some states have multiple time zones, and some don't observer daylight savings time, and that's not even considering any of the overseas countries!

I had this brilliant plan though. I built a Visualforce page, that simply pulled in an online time clock and replaced some of their parameters with the data from my Salesforce org, then dropped it into the account page layout and TADA! It's beautiful... and even ticks like a real clock and changes the seconds and everything!

Houston, Texas, US

© The Time Now

Okay, so here's the bad news...

After I did this in my sandbox (yet another reason to use the sandbox ALWAYS when testing) I discovered that a lot of the cities and states weren't programmed on that website/service. So, unfortunately that's not going to be my final iteration.

Yes, I've found quite a couple of apps on the appexchange that do this and Local Time v1.9 looks pretty good...


Go Local looks pretty good too... but it's $100 bucks a month for unlimited users!?!

I haven't found a way to pull VF components into a report... and I can't in good consciousness recommend a component that doesn't do everything we want that costs $1200 dollars a year. (we've got 350 standard users, 1503 portal users, and 29 partner users.)

So, now I'm going back to the drawing board. Just because this didn't meet my users requirements doesn't mean that someone out there might not want to use it. So here's the code!

I'm sure that there are other ways to do this... but here's the one I personally cobbled together.

<apex:page standardController="Account" renderAs="{!$CurrentPage.parameters.renderAs}">
<div style="position:relative;width:200px;">
<iframe src="http://www.thetimenow.com/clock/{!Account.Country_Full_Name__c}/{!Account.ShippingCity}/{!Account.State_Full_Name__c}?t=n
&embed=1&text=15&textdate=15&format=12&digitalclock=36&analogclock=60&letter_spacing=-2
&bordersize=1&bordercolor=BCE2F7&bgcolor=EBF8FF&colorloc=000000&colordigital=2C8EBF
&colordate=000000&styleloc=normal&styledigital=normal
&styledate=normal&right=0" frameborder="0" width="200" height="90" scrolling="no">
</iframe>
<a href="http://www.thetimenow.com/{!Account.Country_Full_Name__c}/{!Account.ShippingCity}/{!Account.State_Full_Name__c}" 
style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0; display:inline-block; width:200px; height:90px; z-index:50;" 
target="_blank"><span style="display:none;">{!Account.ShippingCity}, {!Account.State_Full_Name__c}, {!Account.Country_Full_Name__c}</span></a>
<div style="margin:0;padding:1px;font-size:11px;color:#666;text-align:center;">
&copy; <a href="http://www.thetimenow.com" target="_blank" style="color:#666;text-decoration:none;">
The Time Now</a>
</div></div>
</apex:page>

To explain, I noticed that the specific time clock that I was using had full names for the country and the state, even though in my SFDC org, we were using the USPS abbreviations. 

I created two formula fields, one for the Country Full Name, and one for State Full Name.

They look like this:

Country Full Name
CASE( ShippingCountry ,
"US", "United States",
"USA","United States",
"CA", "Canada",
"UK", "United Kingdom",
"SZ", "Swaziland",
"ET","Ethiopia",
"MEX", "Mexico",
"IS", "Iceland",
"GU", "Guam",
"GB", "Great Britain",
"GR", "Greece",
"IE", "Ireland",
"DE", "Denmark",
"FR", "France",
"PE", "Peru",
"CAN", "Canada",
"JM", "Jamaica",
"MISSING")


State Full Name
CASE( ShippingState ,
"AL","Alabama",
"AK","Alaska",
"AZ","Arizonan",
"AR","Arkansas",
"CA","California",
"CO","Colorado",
"CT","Connecticut",
"DE","Delaware",
"FL","Florida",
"GA","Georgia",
"HI","Hawaii",
"ID","Idaho",
"IL","Illinois",
"IN","Indiana",
"IA","Iowa",
"KS","Kansas",
"KY","Kentucky",
"LA","Louisiana",
"ME","Maine",
"MD","Maryland",
"MA","Massachusetts",
"MI","Michigan",
"MN","Minnesota",
"MS","Mississippi",
"MO","Missouri",
"MT","Montana",
"NE","Nebraska",
"NV","Nevada",
"NH","New Hampshire",
"NJ","New Jersey",
"NM","New Mexico",
"NY","New York",
"NC","North Carolina",
"ND","North Dakota",
"OH","Ohio",
"OK","Oklahoma",
"OR","Oregon",
"PA","Pennsylvania",
"RI","Rhode Island",
"SC","South Carolina",
"SD","South Dakota",
"TN","Tennessee",
"TX","Texas",
"UT","Utah",
"VT","Vermont",
"VA","Virginia",
"WA","Washington",
"WV","West Virginia",
"WI","Wisconsin",
"WY","Wyoming",
"MISSING")

You don't have to put them on any page layouts, but they do need to be visible to at least the system administrator profile.

Good Luck, and feel free to hit me up with questions, or give me some answers!

Errors That Disappear on Their Own

My absolute favorite thing is when I get 5 or 6 cases, all of them for the same error with a system. But... by the time the user puts in the ticket, and I go look... the error has disappeared.

Personally, I think that's just Karma's way of humbling the users, and tweaking the nerves of developers/helpdesk support.

I'm SuperGirl.

On Monday I received an email from my friend Erin, who is the Marketing Communications Manager. The CEO wanted to make our company meeting more interactive, and would like for us to "stream" some chatter comments during the meeting on Wednesday (yep 2 days away) a la' Dreamforce.

Now, my first thought was... holy moly... the CEO must think I'm magic! (then I found out that Erin forgot to tell me until Monday LOL)

I wasn't really even sure where to even start... the DF feed was from twitter, and I don't remember even seeing anything about that on the appexchange... but I went and looked anyway. I found some things for streaming twitter, but the CEO didn't want that, because she wanted this not to be public. So... I google searched like mad.

I finally found one thing that seemed to be similar to what I wanted. Interestingly enough, it was a "private" listing from Force.com Labs!

I have to tell you guys, this was the bomb. I edited it to get rid of the groups postings, and set it to refresh every 10 seconds.

https://sites.secure.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000003HjzsEAC

Tracking Portal Access, and Licenses

I recently wrote about how difficult it was to track how many licenses you have left, and that I was going to be working on a way to track those.

I also have another issue, that may or may not be relevant to each of you, but is a very big deal for my company.

Our portal users are billed for access to our data base on a monthly basis, based on the specific projects to which they have access.

I added a custom object, that has a master/detail relationship with the custom object "Project", and look ups to the user, the contact and the account, as well as specific fields such as "Activation Date", "Type of Access" and so forth, so that we can see when they were given access to that project, what site from which they view it, and if they are ever deactivated for that project, we can see what date that happened as well.

Now, I never had a reason to try this before, so it was a complete surprise to me that if you put a look up to the user object on a custom object, you're not going to be able to look up to a portal user. What I mean by that, is as of right now (this is still pending confirmation via #askforce on Twitter...) it appears that the look up field automatically excludes client portal users!

So I am currently searching for a way to do this via the API, with a trigger or something. I had SUCH a great idea... which was thwarted with this little conundrum.

Such a sad thing to happen on my birthday, or well... the day before my birthday.

;-)