Spanning Salesforce Blog

Maintenance Tonight

The hosting facility that houses our servers will be performing maintenance on our rack tonight, so Spanning Salesforce will be unavailable beginning at 11:00pm PDT (0600 GMT).

7.0 API Changes Now Live

I used today's Salesforce.com scheduled maintenance window to do some maintenance myself, and pushed out the aforementioned SSF upgrade to v7.0 of the sforce API. I added a custom image field to my contacts object to show off SSF's new support for such, as shown here. Very cool.

As always, please let me know if you have any problems.

SSF Updated to AppExchange API 7.0

I spent several hours today updating the Spanning Salesforce Web Services Core to use Version 7.0 of the sforce AppExchange API, something that has been on my to-do list way too long.

I haven't been able to test the system with all of our recommended RSS readers yet, so the changes haven't been pushed to the live site. When the update does go live (hopefully tomorrow), you'll notice a few small changes including support for image fields.

The other big news this week has to do with the AppExchange itself, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Why Salesforce Bought Sendia

Three words: developers, developers, developers.

Phil Wainewright ponders the meaning of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Sendia in a recent blog post, Who will Salesforce.com buy next?:

The big question in my mind yesterday was, why buy the company when Sendia was already effectively acting as an exclusive Salesforce.com partner?

The answer to me as an ISV developing applications for salesforce.com's AppExchange platform is simple. By buying Sendia, Salesforce pushes wireless capability down into the platform layer of the stack, immediately making it available to third-party applications. The richer the platform, the more attractive it is to ISVs. Platform vendors know this, and rant about it.

The success of any platform is determined by the quantity and quality of the apps built for it, both of which are largely influenced by the breadth of the platform itself. Mark Benioff talks a lot about how serious he is about making the AppExchange a platform for what he calls "the business web". With the Sendia acquisition, he's simply putting his money where his mouth is.

Spanning Salesforce Traffic

I decided to perform some simple traffic analysis against the Spanning Salesforce logs and was delighted to see the trend. Traffic for April is estimated on a pure pro rata basis, and doesn't take into account accelerating adoption.

Perspectives on Salesforce Gives Spanning Salesforce Five Stars

Scott Hemmeter of Perspectives on Salesforce has written a thorough review of Spanning Salesforce, giving it five stars—his highest rating.

Scott runs Arrowpointe, a prominent Salesforce consulting provider, and is the creator of the wildly popular User Adoption Dashboard. His name and his work were mentioned several times at the recent AppExchange seminar in Austin, and his suggestions for things like platform edition licensing are clearly having an impact on the folks from One Market Street.

Scott Hemmeter is a well-respected voice in the Salesforce community, and I'm thrilled to have earned his highest rating. Thanks, Scott!

Opportunities Won and Lost, Past and Present

This morning I created four more feeds, this time with a focus on wins and losses from the current and previous quarters:

• My Opportunities Won This Quarter
• My Opportunities Lost This Quarter
• My Opportunities Won Last Quarter
• My Opportunities Lost Last Quarter

These should be especially useful for salespeople who are constantly nagged by their managers to complete a win/loss report for every closed opportunity.

Now you can see all of your wins and losses at a glance and easily see which ones need more descriptive information.

SSF Users by Industry

In order to get a better sense of who is currently using Spanning Salesforce, I did some analysis and matched companies to industries. I was at first surprised by the overwhelming predominance of software and professional services companies, which comprise 64% of the user base, but considering the technical savvy required to even think about using RSS for more than news maybe I shouldn't have been.

The complete results are as follows:

64% Software and Professional Services
25% Cable TV, Telcos, and Networking
11% Other

New Events and Tasks Feeds

I just added three new feeds:

• My Events Today
• My Events Tomorrow
• My Tasks Due Tomorrow

The SSF engine makes it almost trivial to add new feeds, but it takes a bit of manual work to integrate them into the web site. I plan to add some simple content management functionality that will let me do so more easily, but until I have time to do that I'm left hand-editing multiple HTML files and one OPML file.

Oops! Looking at these feeds, I see that I need to convert datetimes to the user's local timezone.

Interesting Tidbits from Yesterday's Seminar

I attended an AppExchange seminar yesterday, mainly to put some faces with names (like Ron Hess, Rob Lamb, and Jamie Grenney). I picked up some interesting bits during the sessions:

• Roughly 2/3 of Salesforce.com customers are licensed for Enterprise Edition, 1/3 for Professional Edition
• There are approximately 1,000 single-user Salesforce.com customers
• If a user exceeds the daily limit of 1,000 API calls, his entire organization is shut out of Salesforce.com for 24 hours (!)
• Mark Benioff's email address is ceo@salesforce.com
• Attendance at Dreamforce '06 is estimated to be around 4,000