Force.com Dev 501 Class

Posted on October 17, 2011 by mwparks

The week of October 10th I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Force.com’s Dev 501 class in Atlanta. This class went beyond the declarative capabilities of Force.com covered in Dev 401 and expanded into APEX and Visualforce controllers.

Apex is an object oriented programming language, similar to Java and C#, for building software as a service (SaaS) applications on top of Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) functionality. Apex gives developers access to Salesforce.com’s back-end database and metadata objects to create third-party SaaS applications. These 3rd party applications are offered for sale or free of charge in the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, similar to the Apple and Android app stores.

Visualforce is a framework that includes a tag-based markup language, similar to HTML or ASP.Net.

In the Visualforce markup language, each Visualforce tag corresponds to a user interface component, such as a section of a page or a field. The behavior of Visualforce components can be controlled by the same logic used in standard Salesforce pages, or developers can create their own logic with controller classes written in Apex.

The Dev 501 class covers an amazing array of topics…just a few of which are APEX triggers, Force.com IDE Eclipse plugin, development sandboxes, SOQL queries, DML (data modeling language), deployment from sandbox to production organizations, consuming web services, and unit testing Apex classes.

Format of the class was lecture mixed with hands on exercises reinforced by formal questions answered out loud by attendees at the end of every lecture and exercise. This was actually the most challenging formal training class I have attended since college…and also one of the best.

August Salesforce Meetup was the best one yet!

Posted on August 27, 2011 by mwparks

I’ve attended a few Salesforce User Group meetups in Atlanta over the past couple of years and being a big fan of Salesforce enjoyed each one. First unlike most other local technology meetup groups they are held in the morning not the evening. Second meetings are held at different venues around Atlanta…places like Home Depot, St Joseph Hospital, and Manhattan Associates. It’s interesting to get a glimpse inside all these different organizations. Third they normally have a sponsor who provides breakfast and most important…coffee! Last but not least and the main reason I go to these meetings is the learning experience from 2-3 speakers on a wide variety of Salesforce and Force.com subjects. Talks are typically short 15-30 minutes each with demonstrations and time for questions. I always learn something new at each meetup but this August meeting was the best so far. The very first talk was by a pre-sales consultant (sorry can’t remember his name) from Informatica who walked us through a demonstration integrating two end points…Salesforce and an on-premise Oracle database. Coincidentally I’m starting a new project where I need to connect Salesforce to an on-premise Microsoft SQL Server and so needless to say I was transfixed by what I was seeing…the perfect solution to my current biggest problem! After the meeting upon returning to my office at Georgia Tech I immediately signed up for an account at Informatica, downloaded and installed the free lite version of their small footprint “agent” onto my local Windows 2003 server where my SQL Server database is running. And by the end of that day I was syncing my Salesforce org with my local SQL Server…whoohoooo! Now that’s what I call getting value from a user group meetup!

Two 0ther presentations at the meetup covered exception reporting by James Martucci an instructor at Salesforce, and the Salesforce partner portal by Venkat Polisetti, Senior Applications Developer at Fiserv Bank Intelligence Solutions. Both presentations contained useful information that I should be able to apply at work over the next few weeks.

Props to Venkat Polisetti who runs these meetings and always does a great job lining up speakers, coordinating with event sponsors, and communicating the specifics out to group members.

Learning to build apps in the Cloud with Force.com

Posted on August 21, 2011 by mwparks

Just got home after a great week attending a Salesforce class, Building Applications Using Force.com and Visualforce. The class was held at MicroTek training center located at 230 Monroe street downtown Chicago. This is first of two main dev classes for Force.com covering mostly the declarative aspects of Force as well as Visualforce pages. By declarative I mean “point and click.” While Force.com contains a full blown object oriented programming language, APEX, and follows the MVC (model, view, controller) software architecture…this class didn’t cover programming…although we did get a good introduction to Visualforce pages. Visualforce pages are a combination of html, javascript, and APEX tags that enable the creation of custom pages (views) that utilize standard Force.com controllers. What we didn’t cover in this class was creating custom controllers with the APEX language.

For learning to develop custom controllers using APEX Salesforce offers another 5 day class, Dev-501 – Apex and Visualforce Controllers…which hopefully I’ll get to experience sooner rather than later.

So now I’ve got a week of in depth training…a Salesforce account with 10 seats…a couple of big projects on the horizon at work where I can apply my newly learned Force.com skills…which makes me all set for an interesting Fall I think.

I stayed at the Hampton Magestic 22 West Monroe…a short walk from where my class was held at Microtek. (see photos below). This was an outstanding place to stay…conveniently located in the middle of the Theater and Financial districts and only a couple of blocks away from Grant Park and the lake. Clean, reasonably priced…great breakfasts every morning too! I’m staying here every time I’m in Chicago from now on!

Every day after class I went for a run along the shore of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River (see pics below). Even though it’s August the temp each day was pleasant with a cool breeze blowing in from the lake…pure heaven coming from Hotlanta…especially this Summer one of the hottest on record. And I wasn’t alone there were hundreds of other runners, walkers, and bikers on the same paths with me…very cool!

I tried to sample some traditional Chicago food…a slice of pizza and a hot dog…other than these two “samples” I went with fish and chips every evening. It wasn’t the healthiest week of my diet this year that’s for sure but I survived!

One observation about Chicago I have to mention…NO SMOKING inside any building…not a bar or pub or anywhere! And no smoking within 15 feet of any entrance either so you weren’t forced to hold your breath as you entered buildings. What a great idea! Who knows maybe Atlanta will get up to speed on eliminating this health risk one of these days too! But I doubt it.

Last but not least (well maybe so I gained two Foursquare mayor ships in Chicago…Microtek and a small French restaurant along the Chicago river running path. It was a good week!

The "Bean" in Millenium Park was very cool!

The CTA blue line took me from O'Hare almost to my hotel door for only $2.25!!!

Street scene from the Microtek building at 230 Monroe Street

Fish and chips from Millers pub was absolutely yummy

The water fountains at millenium park were something different for sure!

Running path along the Chicago River

Cyrano's on the river along the running trail...I became mayor of this place!

Scene along the Chicago river running trail

Running path along Lake Michigan...cool breeze even in August.

Another scene along the Chicago River running path

Fantastic hot dog (Chicago Red Hot) at Halsted Street Deli

The "Bean" at millenium park

Everyone takes their pic in front of the Bean!

Atlanta CloudForce 2011

Posted on May 19, 2011 by mwparks

On May 19th CloudForce 2011 Atlanta was held at the downtown Hyatt. As always this event was outstanding with an informative keynote and interesting breakout sessions throughout the afternoon lasting until 5:30. Registration began at noon and a nice lunch was provided in the exhibitor area up until 1pm when the keynote began. This year I had to come and go as I had meetings back at Georgia Tech I couldn’t miss. Good exercise as I walked the 1.5 miles back and forth to Tech Square several times this day. As you see in the photos I made sure I was there in the afternoon in time for the evening reception!

Keynote at Cloudforce Atlanta 2011

Registration area at the Atlanta downtown Hyatt

Salesforce Cloud projected onto the walls

Free beer and wine!

There were bars setup out doors too!

Last shot of the reception on my way out the door.

: Out door patio at the Hyatt

Atlanta Salesforce User Group Meetup September 2010

Posted on September 28, 2010 by mwparks

This morning I made it to the September Atlanta Salesforce User Group meetup. The September meetup was held at Manhattan Associates on Windy Hill Road in Marietta. I have to compliment Manhattan Associates on the quality of the facility…it was very nice to say the least. And I so appreciated not having to hassle with security to get into the building…just walked right in. Once I discovered there was free and open WIFI, I settled in for what I anticipated would be an enjoyable meetup.

The presentations were great…focusing mostly on sales automation, lead strategy, and tools/resources for force.com developers…I took lots of notes….signed up for a free sales automation account at LoopFuse…and came away with tons of links to development tools that I will need to research. Some of the more interesting tools mentioned were Jitterbit and Talend, both of which are free open source data and application integration platforms. Oh and I learned a new technical term, “dirt bound,” as in “dirt bound system” or “dirt bound database.” Dirt bound is opposite from ”Cloud Based” of course

Props to the presenters, Roy Russo co-founder of LoopFuse; Ernie Megazzini, founder and CEO of Redxlerant; and Bill McGinnis of Astadia Inc.

The whole meetup experience was very good. I attend a lot of meetups around Atlanta and this is one of the best.

Finally I have to mention the refreshments were outstanding…an amazing array of bagels, pastries, fruit, coffee, juice, etc. I was a little overwhelmed by the variety and quantity actually…felt like being a kid in front of a huge candy counter

I think I will be attending many future Salesforce User Group meetups!

Thanks to Venkat Polisetti for organizing and running the group.

SaaS Based Electronic Health Record System (and it’s free)

Posted on June 7, 2010 by mwparks

I’m pretty excited to find out about a SaaS based EHR system, Practice Fusion, that is also free…completely free including support. And unlike most “free” SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions they don’t have a “lite” version that’s free while trying to up-sell you to the “professional” version for a fee. According to their website “There are no hidden charges, consultant fees, software costs or support subscriptions. Licensing, hosting, training and support are all included. Your practice always retains ownership of its data and you can export any time if needed.”

News flash! If you have a medical practice that qualifies for $44,000 in economic stimulus incentives for adopting an EHR as specified in the HITECH Act…and you adopt a “free” EHR package…then obviously you get to pocket the entire $44,000.

Practice Fusion runs on Salesforce.com‘s cloud development platform, Force.com, the Cadillac of cloud app development platforms. And recently Dell, Inc. announced a partnership to bundle hardware with Practice Fusion’s SaaS solution including zero interest financing (for 3 months) for medical practices.

Unlike on premise client/server solutions a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution runs completely in the cloud. So you don’t have the expense of servers and even more importantly the people resources that are necessary to support the servers. Your annual savings with a SaaS solution can easily be 10′s of thousands of dollars over what you would pay for a solution requiring on premise hardware maintenance and support.

I took advantage of Practice Fusion’s academic program to signup for an account and have been reviewing their extensive library of youtube training videos. The availability of these videos make learning Practice Fusion’s features a snap.

So who’s using a SaaS EHR solution? On their website they claim that over 30,000 physicians and practice managers in 50 states currently use Practice Fusion’s Electronic Health Record which sounds pretty impressive to me.

So what’s the catch? How do these guys make money? Well Practice Fusion is an ad-supported product. On their website they say “medical advertising placements are non-intrusive, completely private and never pop-up.” And if you really can’t stand the ads then you can switch to an ad-free version for a $100 a month per practitioner at any time.

Given that the top driver for slow adoption of Electronic Health Records is misalignment of costs and benefits then Practice Fusion stands to make a significant impact in this market.

CloudForce 2010

Posted on March 3, 2010 by mwparks

A inventory application created in real time with Force.com in this breakout session

For the past few years I have attended this annual afternoon event by Salesforce.com which is usually held at the Buckhead Westin. As always this was an impressive first class event with food, drinks, give-aways, informative keynotes, and breakouts on the latest Salesforce technologies. Every year I learn something new and leave feeling freshly inspired and encouraged about cloud technology in general. As usual the event was packed with 300-400 attendees.

The keynote always starts out with a definition of cloud computing…(1) multi-tenant, (2) pay as you go, (3) realtime, and (4) auto upgrades and then provides an update on Salesforce statistics in terms of growth and customers. Salesforce now has grown to 72,500 paying customers, all without traditional marketing…basically word of mouth. Salesforce is ISO 27001 certified for those who worry about security in the cloud and boasts three global data centers…east coast, west coast, and Singapore.

Basically Salesforce wants to take the best of the consumer web and bring it to their customers. To meet this goal they are rolling out a new service called Chatter Collaboration Cloud, with a very facebook like feature set and designed into all of the Saleforce products. Like Facebook Chatter has a “wall” containing update posts from people, objects (like documents), events, and even Salesforce entities like Contacts. Chatter is currently in beta and will be available to all customers free of charge later in 2010.

Besides free food and beer/wine give-a-ways included three books, “Salesforce.com for Dummies“, “Service Cloud for Dummies”, and “Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.”

Ok this year I really am going to take my new found inspiration, along with my Force.com workbook, “Building your first cloud app in 30 minutes,” along with my free Force.com developers account, create a fantastic application, and add it to AppExchange, Salesforce.com’s online marketplace for applications built with Force.com. Or maybe I’ll just return to this same Salesforce.com event in 2011 who knows.

Salesforce.com Rocks

Posted on April 6, 2007 by mwparks

Yesterday (Thursday April 5th) I attended a nicely done seminar/reception at the Westin Buckhead by Salesforce.com. There must have been several hundred attendees at the 1:30pm keynote which provided a good overview of Salesforce, APEX, and AppExchange. After the keynote there were several breakout sessions; one for beginning/potential customers, one for experienced customers, and another for developers focused on the new on-demand (SaaS) APEX language. I attended the APEX seminar for 2.5 hours where I received a good introduction to Salesforce customization and programming techniques. Salesforce is like many of the new Web 2.0 companies offering a unique and innovative value proposition to customers and partners. It is more of a platform where many types of applications can be created by development partners and then offered to customers via AppExchange, an “eBay like” space for selling/exchanging applications. Of course most of the applications are functional extensions of Salesforce CRM or are complimentary to CRM in some fashion. But they don’t have to be. Since Salesforce offers a free developer account I have signed up and plan on trying my hand at creating an APEX application. I predict Salesforce could potentially dominate the CRM market, and apparently so do many large corporations such as DuPont, Cisco, Panasonic, Avis, and United Way just to name a few Salesforce customers.

All attendees received two books, “Salesforce for Dummies” and “AppExchange for Dummies.” And the reception with open bar and lots of munchies (butterfly shrimp, crab cakes, steak on a stick, etc.) was super nice.

Thanks Salesforce!

Michael W Parks

Category Archives: Salesforce.com