April 12, 2010
Rimini Street, Admob, and the confused FTC
As Ray Wang notes, customers should band together to support 3PM rights.
I'm wondering how the FTC could be so confused about true anticompetitive practices to miss what Oracle is doing while accusing Google of cornering the nascent and wide open mobile advertising market with the Admob deal.
January 25, 2010
Ensuring a sucessfull contact center deployment
Great post from InsideCTI. Fascinatingly low numbers on success of Contact Center projects. Thankfully I've had a string of successful ones, wouldn't have guessed the numbers were that low. But agree with all the major points... except maybe take the PBX out of it if you can.
January 17, 2010
Google Nexus for the Contact Center
Interesting article about the value of call centers for support. Google support for Nexus is mostly forum based. Apple I happen to know relies on Genesys and has a heavy call center presence. Amazon, has a call center, and the author speculates on their potential move into providing cloud based call center services.
Web strategies that help customers self help and deflect calls are critical. But they don't stand alone. A business with customers - you need to be able to answer calls to make customers happy.
December 05, 2009
Run Your Entire Call Center In The Cloud
Video presentation of "Run your Entire Call Center" in the Cloud I delivered at Dreamforce 2009. My part of the presentation starts about 31 minutes in.
October 13, 2009
Benioff at OpenWorld
Wish I could have attended this.
I heard a lot about this being a blow to Oracle, a threat etc. How did they get away with it?
But ask yourself: who is calling the shots on Salesforce.com being at OpenWorld? Oracle. 100%. So SFDC being at OpenWorld is 100% Oracle strategy. Of course Salesforce is going to show up there if allowed, but they are playing a known hand here.
The question is what is the Oracle strategy? A little more "Open" than anybody expected, if nothing else. Facinating.
I'd be shocked if SFDC has more than a year before the Enterprise Software DeathStar locks the 'ol gravity beam on 'em.
September 20, 2009
Apps.gov
Wow, the government has an "App store" - deployed in a more innovative fashion than 99% of large corporations provision IT Services. Pretty impressive...
I wonder when private industry will catch up with big government?? Never thought I'd ask that question.
Salesforce.com is clearly a leader here if you look through the apps available.
August 22, 2009
Updating Picklist (Multi-Select) fields via DataLoader
Goal: You need to update a Picklist (Multi-Select) field in Salesforce.com DataLoader and add a value to each field.
Problem: Using standard DataLoader features, if you add a new value to the DataLoader import file, it will overwrite all existing values in the Picklist (Multi-Select) field, instead of adding the new value to existing values. See a description here.
Solution: Use a script to update the import file to retain existing Picklist (Multi-Select) values and add the new value you want included.
Using Perl, of course! Thought about an Excel macro... But I hate writing macros, and love writing Perl. And, go install Perl anyway.
July 26, 2009
SOSL limitations
1. First, it is not SQL. It reallllly is not SQL.
2. For an example of non-sqlness: "you can't presently compare a field value to another field value in SOQL."
ouch.
Good APEX documentation
And good documentation in general: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/index.htm
Don't even bother with Help and Training in SFDC. Here is a particular example that works well.
June 12, 2009
Siebel's new project
Glad to see Tom Siebel has a new project, seems quite interesting, and some notes from a recent speech.
I thought a number of points from his speech are probably correct:
- 17% CAGR for tech for the last 30 years, vs 3% now (I'd say it will be higher than that)
- Resources, energy, and by 2030, peak oil, are major concerns.