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:

• connectivity between Joomla and the Contacts object in Salesforce.com
• Joomla user registration with additional custom fields that auto-populate a corresponding Salesforce.com new contact
• profile updating syncing with Salesforce.com
• search directory extension, providing a searchable interface of your Contacts object from Salesforce.com through your Joomla Web site (especially useful for membership directories)
• a user-friendly, customizable and templateable search form, results page, and detailed view page for Salesforce.com Contact records in Joomla

This is just the beginning!  Our vision for version 2.0 includes:

• a multi-object form builder, allowing connectivity between Joomla and any object in Salesforce.com
• ability to create and edit multiple forms
• additional administrator management of Salesforce.com records

Limited-time offer

Until November 30, 2009, new Soapbox clients can request the J!Salesforce add-on for FREE!  Interested in signing up for Soapbox with the powerful J!Salesforce connector?  Fill-out our form and we’ll get you started right away.

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.

In our effort to build bridges in the non-profit tech community, we’ve been keen on the development and delivery models of Salesforce.com’s Non-Profit template. Essentially, think the power of Salesforce.com customized for the needs of non-profits.

Well, kinda.

Steve Wright and the rest of the gang at the Salesforce.com Foundation have led a tremendous effort to aid non-profits in their missions by providing a customized solution with donated licenses of Salesforce. I led a great session on Salesforce.com at the recent Non-Profit Technology Conference, and I was happy to hear that the community strongly supported Salesforce’s efforts, and was eager to provide feedback.

Now Salesforce seems to have taken active listening to the next level, and I think that this summit will provide the community and Salesforce with a win-win.

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.

My dream application stack of stacks: salesforce.com -> Joomla!/Apache/Linux/mySQL -> RoR frontend to salesforce.com via ActiveSFDC/svn -> Chipin.com

He goes on to write:

Price: Despite the mix of for-profit and open-source vendors, it’s still free. However, this stack requires a lot of programmer know-how and is only recommended if you have in-house programmers. The cost in this solution is the labor cost.

Why the Ruby on Rails front-end? Well, RoR will get you to a clean finished state much faster than you would otherwise if you did a PHP to salesforce.com front-end. This is my dream application stack after all. Notice how I mix both open source and for-profit solutions right into one another. That’s right, this is an ultimately pragmatic stack. Get ‘er done is my motto. I only choose open-source solutions that have strong developer and consultancy support.

(Deep breath)

Everything here sounds great, doable, and gosh darn should have been done already. However, I do quarrel over the idea of using RoR to be a front-end to Salesforce.com. With our OSS delivery of J!Salesforce, I think that it would actually be easier to have a front-end to Salesforce.com through Joomla, especially since the hardest work has been done already.

So, what’s that leave us with? It seems that the Joomla CMS, or more specifically the Joomla framework, becomes the pivot point. It’s the flexible front-end that ties the systems together.

It’s the network of bridges. And that’s what I think Joomla’s untapped power lies.

The power of open source, combined with best of breed proprietary systems with open APIs give organizations the power they need combined with a price point they’re more likely to afford.

Which leads us back to the islands and bridges. The winning solutions at the end of this year won’t be those that try to pack as much under the hood as possible, but rather those that are most flexible and connect most effectively with other systems.

In short, the non-profit sector’s needs demand more choice, and that’s just what open source and open APIs can do.

Now if only there were some bridge builders out there…

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:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

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.

Readers of our blog have probably seem our use-cases before, so I won’t dive into them here, other than to see we’re about at a point that we’ll be releasing the open source version of this code to the community in early January 2007.

Meanwhile, I’ve got some reading to do thanks to Meghan’s gift of The Business of Changing the World (guess who wrote it), and some grassroots efforts. We’ll soon have the Joomla component up on the AppExchange, and are eager to start building some really cool applications around it, such as:

• member directories
• online donations
• mini-Salesforce dashboards via Joomla administrator
• …and plenty more!

As everyone knows, we’re rather agnostic when it comes to CRM tools. Pick the best tool for the job and move forward. So our goal at PICnet is to build bridges from your organization’s Joomla CMS to your CRM system. DIA, Salesforce, and CiviCRM are all great tools we have connections that make life easier for non-profits. Now it’s time drill deep, and really give these users some powerful applications that sit on top of their CRM of choice.

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:

• search
• search results
• detailed view of a record

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.

Custom fields, no problem

Just to top off a great week, Kevin has also been able to easily bring over custom fields, which are fields that are not in the standard contacts table in Salesforce. Say you want to track a client’s favorite flavor of ice cream. That’s not a field standard in the Salesforce contacts table, but you can extend that table using a custom field for it (and that field can be of any type – dropdown, textarea, etc – and then display it Joomla lickety-split.

Three cheers to Kevin on an awesome week, and here’s to more exciting developments next week! Keep your comments coming, we’re all ears to your ideas to what you want this component to do for your Joomla sites.

The goal here is to build a strong framework that future developers (including ourselves in our Non-Profit Soapbox system) can continue to extend. For instance, our J!Salesforce component will allow Joomla site visitors to input their contact information in Salesforce through Joomla, using a simple form. Then, when a visitor returns to the Web site, they can login using the Joomla login form, be authenticated against Salesforce.com, and then be able to edit their contact information in Salesforce securely.

Pretty darn powerful.

We’re proud to be the first ones developing this connection for the Joomla community, and look forward to working with the Salesforce Foundation to help spread the good word to our non-profit users. Don’t worry business users, we’ve got something in store for you too.

We should be rolling out a roadmap to the development of this component, as well as add-ons for J!Salesforce at the end of December 2006. What would be nice is to hear from the community as to what users and developers would like to have this integration piece do for them, so we can make sure we’re meeting the needs of the community.

[Digg this story]

Our friends at One/NW released something similar for Plone with the help of Enfold Systems and a nice grant from Salesforce Foundation. For our version of it, we’re looking to really expand beyond just the integration and develop a full suite of tools that Salesforce.com users can access directly from their Joomla installations.

Speak up, let us know what you’d like to see in J!Salesforce.