I had the chance to attend the sfdc city tour event in NYC last week. It also just happened to be the same day that it was 104 degrees with humidity in Manhattan! Humid heat in mid-town Manhattan at mid-day is like no other heat, that's for sure.
So now that I've recovered...here's what I gleaned from the day:
1. Many, if not most, of sfdc's partners are matching the 10 license donation salesforce offers to nonprofits. These can all be installed from the AppExchange in salesforce. The most useful ones I discovered were:
Business Objects - have a new web-based version of Crystal Reports they are offering for free to nonprofits, up to 10 licenses.
DreamFactory
DreamTeam - DreamTeam is a project management tool that mimics MS Project OrgView - new release coming out by DreamForce in October that will be a visual map of connections between contacts in sfdc, creating a diagram of social networks based on your data. The existing version doesn't do much yet, but supposedly the new release in October will.
OpenAir - Time sheet tracking that plugs into sfdc
2. The birds-of-a-feather round table discussion was interesting in that we had a variety of groups at various stages of knowledge about sfdc for nonprofits. Some were looking for basic info on how sfdc worked for nonprofits, others wanted to expand their usage of sfdc beyond just contact management to include donation/grant tracking, event tracking, etc., and the third group was interested in integrating sfdc with other applications they had in-house like GetActive and QuickBooks and Outlook. It's funny being a consultant...you start to assume everyone already knows this stuff when in fact there's still a lot of education that needs to be done for groups interested in using salesforce as their solution. It was interesting for me to hear people's misconceptions as well. One person was frustrated by the AppExchange in that once an app was installed it did not directly connect to their existing salesforce interface, rather it was "separate" within the sfdc
interface. What's misleading about the AppExchange is that you still need to make the connections between the custom objects that are part of these AppExchange apps to the standard objects that are part of the out-of-the-box software. Ideally the documentation that comes along with the App tells you how to make these connections! There was also a lot of misunderstanding about how to use Outlook with salesforce, not realizing the Outlook plug-in could tightly integrate their use of Outlook with their sfdc contacts/tasks/meetings and email messages!
All in all it was a really useful day, and I got a lot more out of it than I normally do at these kind of events!
Meghan Morrison
www.swiftriverconsulting.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meghan Morrison, Founder
Swift River Consulting
415.508.4486
meghan
swiftriverconsulting.com
http://www.swiftriverconsulting.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
.