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We’ve been excited to see the popularity of our J!Salesforce integration tool between Joomla and Salesforce.com (also available to all our Non-Profit Soapbox organizations!). Some folks have been interested in seeing some videos to better understand what the tool can provide to Joomla Web sites. Well, I made a little video tour of the administrator interface and the front-end search form builder to help provide a visual overview. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. J!Salesforce Search Functionality Video TourJ!Salesforce Administrator Video TourDoes your organization currently use Salesforce? Are you looking to get the most from your Salesforce application through innovative customization or integration with your website? If so, read on for important news that could supercharge your CRM! Connect your website with Salesforce through J!SalesforcePICnet offers J!Salesforce, an elegant and powerful tool that integrates your Soapbox/Joomla! website with your Salesforce install. This tool provides:
Interested in implementing this on your site? Contact us today about tapping into the power of J!Salesforce. Salesforce.com Foundation Grant Program: Technology Innovation 2010 GrantsLooking to expand your use of Salesforce? The Salesforce.com Foundation is seeking to fund innovative proposals through its 2010 Grant Program. Through this program, they are soliciting applications that meet the following:
Strength in numbers: Collaborative applications for a common solutionAt PICnet, we’re huge fans of Salesforce and the power it has to transform an organization’s relationship with its clients, donors, and partners. This is why we created J!Salesforce. This is why we plan to expand its feature set in the future. This is also why we are doing more than simply passing on the good news about the Salesforce.com Foundation grant program. PICnet is currently reaching out to interested clients and other potential partners to facilitate a joint application that will center around expanding connectivity between Soapbox/Joomla! sites and Salesforce. Our intention is to provide technical guidance to translate individual organizational goals into common coding tools in order to produce maximum benefit for multiple clients and an increased ability for the collaborators to submit a successful application that provides a “realistic plan for replication to the global nonprofit community.” If you are interested in participating in this collaborative effort, please contact us today! Not a Salesforce user but curious about becoming one?Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM. What’s more, it is free to non-profit organizations through the Salesforce.com Foundation. Check out their program today to learn more about how this robust CRM can enhance your organization’s work. We’re excited to announce the availability of our J!Salesforce 1.0 release, connecting Joomla with Salesforce.com! Even better, for a limited-time, new Soapbox clients (non-profits and socially responsible businesses) can receive J!Salesforce for FREE! With J!Salesforce, organizations and businesses using the powerful Salesforce.com CRM can now seamlessly share data with the Joomla CMS. This has been a long and winding road, but we’re proud of the new suite of extensions, and look forward to delivering them to the world. This release of J!Salesforce 1.0 is currently available to new and current Non-Profit Soapbox organizations and businesses. Sign-up now! Key Features This new suite of tools includes our first step in strong integration of Joomla and Salesforce.com, including:
This is just the beginning! Our vision for version 2.0 includes: Read more » We’ve got another cool tool to share with you this week: Salesforce, probably the most popular CRM in the galaxy, has recently announced a new product – the Contact Manager Edition of its CRM. This is a lighter-weight version of their CRM application that leaves out many of the frills… but comes at a much lower price at $9 a month per user. This is great news for non-profits who have been itching to use it but feared the steep cost. It may be missing some of the bells and whistles, but it’s still a pretty impressive way to manage your contacts. It will still integrate with your email – from Gmail to Outlook to Yahoo – and will track your emails and present them in preconfigured reports. But what is really cool – especially for many PICnet clients – is that the Contact Manager Edition integrates with Google Apps automatically. Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and more are intigrated into the new system, so there are no extra database integration steps needed when using these two systems together. Step over to www.safesforce.com for more info. We hope this will be something useful for you!
Even more ironic, we at PICnet use the open source SugarCRM to have heavy access to the CRM’s API. This is something we couldn’t do with Salesforce.com for less than, gulp, thousands of dollars a year. It’s funny being priced out of the chance to eat your own dog food, especially since we’re heavily focused on building bridges between the Joomla and Salesforce platforms. I’m not sure what the solution is, but if non-profits are being provided 10 donated seats to the Enterprise level of Salesforce.com, it’s difficult to see how those other than the largest consulting firms working with the large end of the non-profit marketplace will be able to afford the same level of Salesforce that they deploy to our sector. I’m not sure what could be done to help make these tools more affordable, I just needed to get this irony off my chest as I simultaneously continue to applaud the Salesforce Foundation for all its hard work.
At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful. A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.
Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive. I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:
When I had a chance to demo what we’ve already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin’s tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.
Basic use-case proven: member directory One of the basic use-cases we had to achieve was to display a basic member directory system, that allows visitors to search for members in the Salesforce database based on any of the variables the site’s administrators allow searching within. We now are able to have three basic views for this directory:
Best part about all this: it’s pretty quick! Even though we’ve got the system pinging Salesforce a few times, the roundtrips for data retrieval are very tolerable. I’m sure the bigger your database, the longer it might take, but it’s pretty quick in our development test bed. Create new user in Joomla and contact in Salesforce at registration Another big hurdle leaped over by Kevin last week was the ability to make a seamless registration system for Joomla and Salesforce. When someone signs up to be a member on your site, or to be added to your organization’s rolls as a volunteer or donor, J!Salesforce immediately adds them as a user in Joomla and a contact in Salesforce. This one step alone will save countless hours for administrators that are fed up with having their Joomla site and CRM user managers out of sync, and hopefully keep hair on the heads of development directors that are sick and tired of missing the connection. Goals for this week With all this great work going on, we’re gearing up to let the non-profit world know about what’s about to be released in early January. We’re keeping in touch with our friends at the Salesforce Foundation, and we’re hoping to work closely with Salesforce to help spread the word through either their AppExchange or other online collaboration tools. Meanwhile, on the development side, Kevin will be continuing to clean up the front-end and build some developer guidelines, so when we release it, we’ll be able to make life easier (not harder) for our developer friends.
Now that all your thank you messages are pointed in the right direction, let me give an update as to what Kevin’s got cooking. Two days ago we were successfully able to push/pull data to/from Joomla and Salesforce. This means that we can now display data from Salesforce directly in Joomla, and then edit that data via forms in Joomla back into Salesforce. It all happens rather quickly, which is a little surprising since the data has to go back and forth between two servers in completely different parts of the US. Dynamic display of layout features Today Kevin just hit another major milestone. Now we’re able to bring in form fields from Salesforce following the layout rules prescribed within Salesforce. For instance, say in your Salesforce layout you have a dropdown list for a contact’s suffix. Now without any hassle you can have Joomla directly display that dropdown populated properly from Salesforce. Pretty darn cool. |
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In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for 
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