Spanning Salesforce Blog

NewsGator Integrates Spanning Salesforce to add RSS Functionality to Salesforce.com

Partnership delivers time critical CRM information to employees through RSS feeds via NewsGator Enterprise RSS Solutions and Spanning Salesforce

Denver, Col., Jan. 29, 2007 — NewsGator Technologies, the leading RSS company, and Spanning Partners today announced a partnership to deliver updates from the Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) system through NewsGator's Enterprise RSS Solutions. By combining Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator's award-winning solutions, sales, marketing and service teams will have instant access to CRM information when they are in the office or out in the field via the Web, mobile devices, Microsoft Outlook® and desktop readers.

Users can quickly and easily choose from dozens of feeds – or create their own – to track leads, opportunities, activities, contacts, documents and support cases to provide the highest level of customer service. NewsGator customers using Spanning Salesforce will always have the latest information available without needing to login to Salesforce.com.

The capabilities are available through the NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (NGEOD) services. NGEOD delivers this capability in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, eliminating the IT burden of deploying, hosting and maintaining an on-site RSS server. NewsGator Enterprise Server won an InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award last month (http://www.newsgator.com/enterprise-infoworld.aspx).

Users signing up for a free 30-day trial of NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand will also receive a 30-day trial subscription to Spanning Salesforce. For more information, visit: http://www.newsgator.com/on-demand.aspx.

"RSS is clearly the most powerful method for delivering CRM data where it needs to be, in real-time," said Charlie Wood, founding principal of Spanning Partners. "The success of a business can often rest on the knowledge and information sales and marketing teams have about their customers. Giving them a way to have easily accessible, continuously updated information that they can look at anywhere is invaluable. Together, Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator bring that capability to our customers through the power of RSS."

"With sales, marketing and service professional constantly facing information overload via e-mail, having updates from enterprise applications delivered via RSS can significantly improve their productivity and effectiveness," said Dave Keller, General Manager, Enterprise Solutions for NewsGator Technologies. "The combination of Spanning Salesforce and NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand provides the opportunity for sales, marketing or service teams to have access to important information, when they want and where they want it, without having to worry about the IT requirements.

Spanning Salesforce Pricing
Spanning Salesforce is available for $129.95 per user, per year or $12.95 monthly.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies is the world's leading RSS company. Headquartered in Denver, CO, NewsGator develops and markets RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Using NewsGator products and solutions, businesses and consumers can subscribe to news, information, podcasts and other relevant content more efficiently and effectively than with traditional channels. With NewsGator, users have access to RSS information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook, mobile devices and both Windows- and Mac-based desktop clients. All NewsGator products synchronize seamlessly, enabling users to read their RSS feeds anywhere, anytime, with any device. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

About Spanning Partners
Spanning Partners connects you to your most valuable information. Based in Austin, Texas, Spanning Partners was founded in 2005 by former NewsGator Vice President Charlie Wood. For more information please visit spanningpartners.com.

Contact Information
Gavin Skillman or Corey Lewis
LaunchSquad
415.625.8555
newsgator(at)launchsquad.com

eWEEK on Enterprise RSS

eWEEK is running a cover story on RSS titled RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload. From the article:

The momentum behind RSS growth appears strong. [Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young] said that RSS enablement is becoming popular for mainstream applications. For example, Spanning Partners' Spanning Salesforce 3.0 is a tool that lets Salesforce.com send out information about new leads and contacts to salespeople via an RSS reader.

Winter '07 Release Triggers Spanning Feed Builder Display Bug

Two of Salesforce.com's North American servers are now live with the Winter '07 release, which has triggered a display bug in Spanning Feed Builder. This bug does now affect Spanning Salesforce feed users.

I'm working with the folks at Salesforce to see if we can apply a fix without requiring our users to uninstall and reinstall the Spanning Feed Builder application. In the mean time, here's an effective (if somewhat awkward) workaround.

The user interface should look like this:

If you've installed Spanning Feed Builder in your Salesforce instance and are live on Winter '07, your Feeds tab probably looks like this:

To restore the tab to its previous look and feel, perform the following steps as an admin:

1. Click "Setup" in the upper-right corner of your Salesforce.com window
2. Choose "Exchange", and "Installed Apps" from the left-hand sidebar
3. "Packages Installed from AppExchange", click on "Spanning Feed Builder 1.2"
4. Under "Package Items" click on "Feed Builder"
5. Click "Edit"
6. In the "Content" field, replace these two lines:

   <link href="/dCSS/common.css" type="text/css" media="handheld,print,projection,screen,tty,tv" rel="stylesheet" >
<link href="/dCSS/custom.css" type="text/css" media="handheld,print,projection,screen,tty,tv" rel="stylesheet" >

   with these:

   <link href="/dCSS/Theme2/en/common.css" type="text/css" media="handheld,print,projection,screen,tty,tv" rel="stylesheet" >
<link href="/dCSS/Theme2/en/custom.css" type="text/css" media="handheld,print,projection,screen,tty,tv" rel="stylesheet" >


7. Click "Save"

Obviously this isn't an optimal fix. I'll post a more elegant solution as soon as we have it.

Coordinating Marketing Events Using Spanning Salesforce

By combining Salesforce.com, Spanning Salesforce, the Spanning Feed Builder, and NewsGator Enterprise Server, one MarCom manager's job just got a lot easier, and the executives she supports just got a lot better informed.

This afternoon I got an email from a Marketing Communications manager asking me if it was possible to automatically send out updates about her company's marketing events, which she manages in Salesforce.com, to her company's executives on their BlackBerrys.

As it turns out, her company uses NewsGator Enterprise Server, so the pieces were all in place. I called her on the phone and walked her through the process of installing Spanning Feed Builder into her Salesforce.com instance and creating a custom Events feed. She subscribed to it and said in a delighted (and more than just a little surprised) voice, "Hey, it works!"

I explained to her that should could email the link to the feed to anyone in her company so they could subscribe to it. But she reminded me that since they use NewsGator Enterprise Server, she could just add the feed to the proper exec's subscription lists and they'd start getting updated Events information--on their BlackBerrys--without lifting a finger.

So after 30 minutes on the phone, I've got seven new subscribers to Spanning Salesforce, she's got an automatic way to connect her company to its most valuable information, and Salesforce.com has one very happy customer. I love it when things just work.

Update: NewsGator investor Brad Feld thinks this is all very neat. Me too, Brad!

Spanning Salesforce on StartupSquad

I recently spoke with Vivek Puri, who writes the StartupSquad blog, about Spanning Salesforce. He's written up our conversation in a brief article titled Spanning Partners: small team, great solution.

Unanticipated Uses of Spanning Salesforce

This morning I got an email from a customer in the UK which began:

Charlie,

So I have been playing with your product. I love it. I am finding that it can be bent and twisted to do really remarkable things. Actually, I am not sure that I am necessarily staying within your preferred usage scenarios...

The message went on to describe some fascinating applications powered by Spanning Salesforce being created for several very large global development and relief organizations. It's this kind of unanticipated use of our technology that I find most gratifying.

If you're using Spanning Salesforce in a novel way, email me or post a comment and let me know what you're up to and I'll post your story to this blog. (Our customers' privacy is extremely important to us, so be sure to let me know if you'd like to remain anonymous.)

New Tasks and Events Webcal Feeds with Alarms

One of the most-requested features being delivered by Salesforce.com in the Winter '07 release is reminders, and as soon as they're supported in Salesforce, you'll see them in your Spanning Salesforce feeds.

But some Spanning Salesforce users can't wait for Winter '07. Yesterday David Stevens, Founder and Chief Architect at Conduit IT, made a request for alarms to be added to our Tasks and Events calendar feeds. Today we've got two new webcal feeds for you:

My Events with Alarms
My Tasks with Alarms

Alarms for events are set to 10 minutes before the event begins. Alarms for tasks are set for 7:00am local time on the day the task is due.

These feeds, which use the webcal:// protocol and the iCalendar format, are compatible with Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird, and Microsoft Outlook 2007.

Also by user request, all webcal feeds now include "who" (lead/contact) and "what" (account/opportunity) information in the description field of the task or event.

Thanks to David and our other passionate users for the enhancement requests. Keep 'em coming!

Datetimes are Now Shown in the User's Local Timezone

All datetime fields, including event due dates, object creation and modification dates, and others, are now shown in the user's local timezone. This should make deciphering datetimes a little easier for those of us who don't live in Greenwich.

Update: The .ics feeds for My Tasks and My Events are now timezone-aware too. This shouldn't change how they behave, but will help some calendaring apps like iCal display event times in the user's local timezone. It also allows me to add alarms to events and tasks, which I've done and will be announcing in the next post.

Skinkers Releases Salesforce Alerts

UK-based Skinkers today released Skinkers Salesforce Alerts, a flash-based desktop alerts system that's tightly integrated with Spanning Salesforce.

The Skinkers application provides desktop alerts and tickers that use slick animation effects to deliver timely information from Salesforce.com via Spanning Salesforce feeds. Users can also easily add other web feeds through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Skinkers Salesforce Alerts are by far the easiest way to get started with Spanning Salesforce, especially for users who don't want to have to learn about the technical plumbing that makes it all work.

I encourage you to watch the screencast, browse the AppExchange listing, and download the free trial.

To access the Salesforce.com feeds, you'll also need a Spanning Salesforce account. If you're not already a Spanning Salesforce user, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial at spanningsalesforce.com.

AppExchange Listing Fixed

At some point during the last few weeks, the AppExchange listing for Spanning Feed Builder became corrupted and lost its Get It Now button in the process. From the looks of things, someone in Salesforce IT tried to change something and it didn't quite work.

Regardless, I've created and published a brand new (but still unregistered) listing for Spanning Feed Builder v1.2. You can access it by visiting http://spanningsalesforce.com/feedbuilder, which will redirect you to the right page.

If you haven't tried Spanning Feed Builder, I encourage you to watch the screencast, then Get It Now. It's free, and provides hours of fun. Well, at least it does for CRM RSS geeks like me.

Spanning Feed Builder: 'Too Many Custom Objects' Bug Found, Fixed

This morning Belgian user Benny Fajwlewicz reported a bug that caused Spanning Feed Builder to fail to load for organizations with a large number of custom objects. A fix for the problem was quickly created, tested, and applied to the live server. If you've encountered this problem, just log out of salesforce.com and log back in (to flush the Feed Builder cache), and the problem should be gone.

With the help of users like Benny, we're continually making Spanning Salesforce and Spanning Feed Builder even better. If you find a bug, please let us know by emailing customer.support@spanningpartners.com. Thanks!

90% or Better Opportunities Feed Fixed

The link to the "90% or Better Opportunities" feed on the Spanning Partners site had the wrong URL. It's now been fixed, so if you're subscribed to the old link, just unsubscribe and then subscribe to the link that's now on the site:

All 90% or Better Opportunities

Apologies for any confusion.

SFB-Generated Feeds Move From RSS 2.0 to Atom 1.0

A quick programming note: I've made the switch from RSS to Atom for all feeds generated by Spanning Feed Builder, but will leave the preconfigured Spanning Salesforce v3.0 feeds in RSS to minimize disruption with third-party applications.

Please email me if you have any questions, or more importantly if this is going to cause your app to break.

SFB v1.1 Reaches Feature Parity with SSF v3.0

If the above headline leaves you scratching your head, don't worry. But here's the scoop:

Spanning Salesforce 3.0 introduced a bunch of new feeds, including several that had criteria based on period-relative dates, like the end of the previous quarter or the beginning of the current month. Until today, Spanning Feed Builder was capable of reproducing all of the SSF 3.0 feeds except these. But now that final limitation has been removed, and SFB is capable of building all of the SSF 3.0 feeds.

Now when you build a feed in Spanning Feed Builder, you can specify a date like "current quarter start" or "next month end". This makes it possible to create feeds like All Opportunities Closing This Quarter. Here's how:

(If you'd rather just watch a video showing how it's done, click here.)

1. Click on the Feeds tab in Salesforce.com
2. Select "All" and "Opportunities" for the data type
3. Select "Closed", "Is", and "False" for a criterion and click "Add"
4. Select "Close Date" and "Is on or after" and enter "current quarter start" for a criterion and click "Add"
5. Select "Close Date" and "Is on or before" and enter "current quarter end" for a criterion and click "Add"
6. Select "Name" for the feed item title and click "Add Field"
7. Enter "All Opportunities Closing This Quarter" for the feed title
8. Click "Build Feed"

Voila! Now, go nuts!

New SSF Feeds for Manticore Virtual Touchstone

Manticore Technology specializes in marketing optimization and lead generation. Manticore's Virtual Touchstone for AppExchange tracks the behavior of leads and opportunities and ties that information back into salesforce.com, so sales and marketing professionals can know when prospects visit their web sites, open or forward their emails, and subscribe to their mailing lists.

Now users can subscribe to RSS feeds from Virtual Touchstone to track this vital information without clogging their email inboxes with notifications.

Virtual Touchstone for AppExchange features individual feeds for web, email, and list activities:

• My Recent Web Visits
• My Recent Email Activities
• My Recent List Activities

Alternately, users can subscribe to a catch-all feed that includes results for all activity types:

• My Recent Marketing Activities

To subscribe to feeds from Virtual Touchstone for AppExchange, users must have Virtual Touchstone for AppExchange, a feed reader that supports secure feeds, and a current Spanning Salesforce subscription.

Spanning Feed Builder Gets a Big Performance Boost

I've written before about various optimizations I've done to Spanning Feed Builder, but I just made a change that will have a dramatic impact, not only on load times of the S-Control, but also on my bandwidth bill.

When a user logs into Salesforce.com and clicks on the Feeds tab to access SFB, a back-end process builds a model of that user's objects and fields and ships it down to the browser as a big glob (somewhere north of 500K in size) of JavaScript. Until now, that big glob was getting sent every time the user returned to the Feeds tab. But now that glob is cached by the user's browser¹ along with the user's Salesforce.com session, so after subsequent clicks on the Feeds tab result in almost immediate screen redraw. This is a big usability win.

The only downside is that in the rare event a user modifies his object model, say, by adding a new custom application, object, or field, the Feeds tab will have out-of-date information—but only for the duration of the current session. So logging out and logging back in brings the Feeds tab up to date. (Navigating around the site long enough for the session ID to change will work too.)

So one big optimization is done, and only one design flaw is yet to be addressed before next week's announcement.

---

¹ Unless that browser is Mac OS X Safari, which completely ignores cache directives. Ugh.

SFB Now Supports Documents and Attachments

Document and Attachment feeds created with Spanning Feed Builder now feature RSS enclosures containing the appropriate file. To create a "New and Updated Documents" feed:

1. Select "All" and "Documents" for the data type
2. Select "Last Modified Date" and "Is on or after", and enter "7 days ago" for the criteria, then click "Add"
3. Select "Document Name" for the title, then click "Add Field"
4. Enter "New and Updated Documents" for the feed title
5. Click "Build Feed"

Once you've subscribed to the feed, just set your feed reader to automatically download enclosures and you'll always have the latest version of your documents stored in Salesforce available locally.

Service Restored

Today at 16:37 GMT, the facility that hosts the Spanning Salesforce servers experienced a power issue (either a loss or a surge--they're not sure which) that took down several routers, leaving Spanning Salesforce unreachable. Service was restored at 21:14 GMT.

Spanning Feed Builder 1.0 on the AppExchange

Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a033000000252knAAA

Update: As luck would have it, a switch has failed at our hosting facility, taking Spanning Salesforce--and the new feed builder--offline. I'll post a notice when it's back up.

Changes Under the Hood

The AppExchange Feed Builder pulls a good deal of data down from salesforce.com, so I've been looking for a way to speed things up.

I initially went down the path of using AJAX to only pull down information as needed, but due to some quirks in the design of the sforce API, that didn't address my problem.

Happily, I discovered that a long-standing bug in PHP's SOAP compression has been fixed in the 5.1.4 release, so I was able to upgrade my servers, make the appropriate changes to the sforce PHP Toolkit, and shave about 35% off of the Feed Builder's initialization time, from an average of 6.5s to 4.3s.

The changes will also improve the performance of all of the Spanning Salesforce feeds.

Cool!

AppExchange Feed Builder Alpha

I've been hard at work on Spanning Salesforce v4.0, which in the halls at Spanning Partners we refer to as "Infinity" since the major feature is that it will enable an infinite number of (user-created) feeds. If you're extremely brave and not afraid of ugly error messages and a sparse UI, feel free to check it out. Just log in with your salesforce.com username and password.

If you'd like a little help figuring things out or would like to report a bug, drop me an email at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com.

Thanks!

It's Good to Be the Platform

Last month at SAPPHIRE, Erik Keller and Vinnie Mirchandani ganged up on SAP platform ecosystem EVP Zia Yusuf, accusing him of letting ISV's shoulder the risk of exploring uncharted application areas, then taking over the areas that prove fertile. Well guess what, guys. It's good to be the platform.

In the Enterprise 2.0 space, the most promising platform is salesforce.com's recently-launched AppExchange. Mobius VC Principal Seth Levine goes so far as to say the AppExchange is the New Black. (Seth, 2005 called. It wants its meme back. :-))

Obviously, I agree that the AppExchange is great platform to build on--I've spent a lot time over the past year immersed in the AppExchange (née On-Demand Marketplace) universe, meeting with partners to understand the ecosystem, and creating services to extend the platform itself. And I'm hardly alone.

The AppExchange now boasts over 250 applications, the most interesting of which bring together the CRM capabilities of Salesforce with the tidal forces of Web 2.0. For instance, Kieden (which I wrote about here) elegantly fuses Salesforce and Google AdWords. Google itself has extended the AppExchange platform with its own enterprise search appliance. There are even components to integrate Skype into Salesforce.

The AppExchange platform is far from perfect. For instance, the new OEM Edition is a severely limited implementation of what could prove to be a profound idea. Basic database capabilities like joins and and sorting are missing from the AppExchange API. And of course, there's the availability issue. But the people at salesforce.com are incredibly smart and move very quickly. I expect their platform to be a dominant force in Enterprise 2.0.

New Features for the AppExchange Platform: Spanning Salesforce

Salesforce.com's Partner Success Blog carries the announcement that custom RSS feed development is now free for AppExchange partners:

AppExchange partners can now add RSS feeds to their applications at no cost. Spanning Salesforce delivers RSS feeds of data stored in the AppExchange, including standard objects, custom objects, and custom fields—anything accessible by the API. Spanning Partners will create and host simple custom feeds—for free*—for AppExchange partners wanting to make their applications' data available to their users via RSS. By adding RSS feeds to AppExchange applications, partners give their users access to data that is constantly-updated and always-accessible online and offline.

To subscribe to partners' feeds, end users will need to sign up for Spanning Salesforce, which costs $12.95/month or $129.95/year after a 30-day free trial. They'll also need an RSS reader that supports secure feeds, several of which are featured on the Spanning Salesforce site at http://spanningsalesforce.com.

* Feeds requiring complex logic may require some paid consulting work.

Interested partners should contact Charlie Wood directly by phone at 512-217-6551 or email at charlie.wood@spanningpartners.com.

Releasing the news at 5:00pm on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend is all part of my diabolical stealth marketing plan. :-)

Outlook 2007, Internet Calendars, and Salesforce

Outlook 2007 supports "Internet calendars" (which is a better term than ".ics subscriptions"), so users can subscribe to their salesforce.com calendar events through Spanning Salesforce. I've done some testing against Outlook 2007 Beta 2, and found that while not all of the subscription methods work, the easiest one does.

Simply click on a "webcal://" link like this one, enter your salesforce.com username and password when prompted, and you're done. Changes to your salesforce.com events show up in your Outlook calendar.

Hopefully Microsoft will get the kinks worked out with subscribing via Outlook Account Manager.

Salesforce.com Announces Spanning Salesforce

Following a particularly lengthy vetting process, salesforce.com this morning issued a press release announcing availability of Spanning Salesforce on the AppExchange. You can read it on the Spanning Partners site. It includes this endorsement from Adam Gross:

"Spanning Partners' delivery of secure RSS feeds as a service on the AppExchange creates a great mashup of RSS and on-demand CRM," said Adam Gross, vice president, developer marketing, salesforce.com. "Given the explosive adoption of RSS, we are thrilled to have Spanning Salesforce among the vanguard of AppExchange applications."

Subscribing to Events and Tasks with Mozilla Sunbird

Continuing on today's "free software" theme, I've done some minimal testing of the new Event and Tasks .ics feeds with Mozilla Sunbird and everything seems to work. One non-obvious thing: when you're asked for the format of your new calendar, select WebDAV, as shown here.

Tip for Using SSF with Mozilla Thunderbird

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird as an RSS reader, you should be aware that there's a small setting that can make a big difference in your Spanning Salesforce experience. When subscribing to SSF feeds, be sure to check the checkbox on the Feed Properties dialog box labeled "Show the article summary instead of loading the web page". That way you'll see the details of your leads, opportunities, etc., as intended.

More iCal Integration: Tasks

You've been able to subscribe your calendar to your salesforce.com events for ages now. Well, OK, for almost two weeks now. But that's old news. Starting today (about 3 minutes ago, in fact) you can also subscribe to your tasks, or as iCal likes to call them, TODOs.

My Salesforce.com Tasks (beta)

Just subscribe to this calendar with your iCal-enabled PIM (only Apple iCal has been tested so far), log in with your salesforce.com username and password, set it to refresh periodically (not more than once an hour, please), and make sure to uncheck the Remove To-Do Items option.

Remember, you must be a Spanning Salesforce user to access this service.

If you have any comments, questions, feature requests, or bug reports, just leave a comment here. Thanks!

(Not) Using SSF with Windows Mobile Devices

This morning I got en email from Carl Vescovi, a new subscriber to Spanning Salesforce, reporting a problem he was having accessing the service from his O2 XDA, which runs Windows Mobile 5.0. After some research, I discovered that Windows Mobile 5.0 and earlier (which means basically all Windows Mobile devices) don't contain my server's root certificate in their list of trusted root certificate authorities.

There are instructions online for installing new root certificates in your device, but the process isn't for the faint of heart, and isn't allowed by some carriers. So the real fix for this is simple: I need to get a new certificate from a CA that's been trusted since at least 2003.

I'll be doing that as soon as possible, but until then Windows Mobile users won't be able to access Spanning Salesforce. I'll post a note here when the issue has been resolved. Thanks to Carl for identifying this bug.

Subscribe Your Calendar to Your Salesforce.com Events

As you know, Spanning Salesforce has feeds that contain your calendar events from salesforce.com. But until Ray Ozzie's vision of RSS+SSE+hCalendar gains widespread adoption—which, given the fact that Microsoft is only now adding .ics support to Outlook 2007, doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon—you're going to need something a little less "Web 2.0ey", which is where the newest Spanning Salesforce "feed" comes in:

My Salesforce.com Events (beta)

Note that this isn't an RSS feed—it's an old-school published .ics calendar, albeit a dynamically-generated, personalized, encrypted, salesforce.com-integrated one. You must be a Spanning Salesforce user to access it, but signing up for a free 30-day trial takes less than a minute. When prompted by your calendaring app to log in, just enter your salesforce.com username and password.

The service is currently in beta, since it's only been tested with Apple iCal, but results with that application have been great. If you use another iCalendar-capable calendar app, I'd appreciate it if you tried it out and gave me some feedback.

I'll be posting more on this in the coming days, since there's some pretty cool RSS+SLE stuff going on under the covers. Thanks to Ismael Ghalimi for the impetus.