Spanning Salesforce Blog

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.

Added Support for Older Browsers

I tend to use the most modern browsers—Safari 2.0, IE 7, and Firefox 1.5—which all support RSS. I therefore never run into the situation where clicking on an RSS links brings up a raw XML document. But lots of people use IE 6 and a surprising number use even older browsers, so I've made the Spanning Salesforce feeds more friendly to browsers that don't support RSS.

Using a very simple XSLT file, these older browsers now get a formatted view of the data in the feed. I'll get my web designer to work on making it prettier, but it's already a big improvement over raw XML.

Blog/Site Integration Underway

I'm working on integrating the SSF site with this blog, and have taken the first step toward that goal by adding a "blog" item to the site's navigation. I still need to switch the blog's look-and-feel from that of the Spanning Partners site to that of the SSF site. Hopefully I'll find time this week to make those changes, and a few others that have been on my to-do list way too long.