News and tidbits about Eustace Consulting, salesforce.com and Cloud Computing

Salesforce CEO Named Co-Chairman for Obama Campaign

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was named one of Obama’s 35 co-chairs for his re-election campaign. The responsibility of co-chairs is to help him raise money for the campaign fund.

Benioff holds a special place in Obama’s co-chairs because he is the only tech CEO to have received this honor. Of Obama’s political campaign, Benioff has said recently, “The president must stay focused on jobs and the economy … That’s job number one.”

Last year, Benioff famously hosted a $35,800-per-plate fundraiser at his home in San Francisco with Obama in attendance.

Some other well-known co-chairs? “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, former White House Chief ...

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22
FEB
0

inbound.org – a collection of inbound marketing tips, tricks, and todos.

inbound.org, a website founded by the founders of Hubspot.com, is a new tool released just about a week ago. Inbound.org organizes and collects articles submitted by the community for best practice SEO and inbound marketing. We have found several useful tips and tricks just by looking at the first few articles. Feel free to take a look, and register!

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22
FEB
0

Using the new Enterprise Analytics – Bucketing and Joined Reports in salesforce.com Spring ’12

Over the weekend, salesforce.com rolled out the new Enterprise Analytics and Reporting with salesforce.com on Enterprise and Unlimited Editions. The Enterprise Analytics allows for 2 new types of reporting, Joined Reports and Bucketing.

We find that bucketing can be useful, but can also be accomplished by creating custom formula fields on the different objects. Still, not having to create those fields will save us time. See the video below on Report Bucketing overview:
Report Bucketing

Joined reports in our opinion offer some much needed functionality in salesforce.com. Follow the link below for a tutorial video on Joined Reports:
Joined Reports

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13
FEB
0

Assistly becomes Salesforce’s Desk.com

Way back in September, Salesforce announced that they acquired Assistly, a cloud-based customer service product for $50 million. This week, Salesforce announced that they are launching their newest application, Desk.com, which is Assistly fully integrated with Salesforce software, including Salesforce Chatter.

Desk.com is targeted towards small to medium sized businesses and helps them to target leads from social media sites- Twitter, Facebook, etc. According to Desk.com VP Alex Bard, after interviewing various businesses about their customer-service needs, “businesses want a customer service platform that is social, mobile, and simple.”

A great thing about this new application is that it’s completely mobile- you can access it ...

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4
FEB
0

Eustace Consulting now hiring – actively seeking salesforce.com certified experts

Given the rapid expansion we’ve had in the last year, we are looking to grow our team. We are looking for an experienced Apex developer/admin.
Qualifications: Apex, Visual Force, Workflow/Approvals, solid understanding of business acronyms and terminology, salesforce.com Certified Developer and Certified Administrator preferred
Nice-to-have: Outgoing, team-player, thrives in a fast-pace environment, passionate about salesforce.com as a company and technology platform
Looking for both contract or full-time
Compensation will be dependent upon experience
Send resume and information about yourself to chris at eustaceconsulting dot com

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27
JAN
0

How to build an all-star social media team

Salesforce.com has released a great article in regards to building a social media team, setting up a strategy, and executing the strategy.

If you’re involved at all in twitter, you may have heard about the huge failure by McDonald’s poorly executing a social media marketing campaign. McDonald’s created a twitter hashtag #McDStories in order for people to share their stories about McDonald’s. This turned into people writing about their horrific experiences with McDonald’s. Some of the highlighted tweets are:
@Cate_Storm: “I just read that McDonalds chicken nuggets have a foaming agent in them, similar to products used for building materials.”
@vegan: “My memories of walking into ...

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26
JAN
0

Eustace Consulting Featured on Fresh Thinking

Freshbooks, the awesome invoicing and time tracking tool that we run our operation on has featured us on their blog!

Feel free to read the interview.  Comments are appreciated.

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2012/01/24/customer-portrait-lessons-in-building-relationships-with-chris-eustace/

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24
JAN
0

Salesforce #27 on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work for List

Fortune released the list of  2012′s 100 Best Companies to Work For and Salesforce ranks #27, which is a huge 25-spot jump from last year! They beat out some big, well-known companies like Microsoft and Intel. It’s great to see Salesforce climb in the ranks and being regarded as a cool, unique place to work. Kaplan’s “Salesforce’s Happy Workforce” explains the forward-thinking nature of the company very well, ”Salesforce has reinvented how companies get the software they use to handle ordinary but critical tasks like customer relations, sales, accounting, and internal communications.” It’s no surprise that Salesforce is moving up in the ranks, though. They’ve had a great 2011- acquiring Rypple, hosting ...

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20
JAN
0

Censoring The Internet: PIPA and SOPA- What Does This Mean?

Today, all across the internet, people are voicing their concerns about two government bills Protect IP Act, (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA), which the Senate will begin voting over on January 24th.So, what does this mean, really? Is it a big deal?Many big internet companies tend to think so! If you’ve checked out Google today, it’s been blacked out or censored. At the bottom of the screen it says, “Tell Congress: Please Don’t Censor the Web!”If you click on the blackened-out logo, it brings up an online petition to ...

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18
JAN
0

Welcome to Salesforce, Kundra!

 Salesforce announced today that they have hired Vivek Kundra as the executive vice president of emerging markets.Kundra served as the Chief Information Officer for the United States under the Obama administration from March 2009- August 2011. Basically, his job was to manage government IT- an $80 billion infrastructure! One of his biggest projects was to move the government’s IT infrastructure to the cloud.  He launched the Federal Government strategy and cloud computing portal Apps.gov.  He also launched Data.gov, “a site for providing access to raw government data.”Basically, this guy’s resume really speaks for itself!Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says, “Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of ...

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16
JAN
0

Creative Ways IT and Hardware Companies are Helping Customers Get on the Cloud

Cloud computing really exploded this past year, which may create some fear for new business in the hardware industry. After all, the biggest appeal of cloud computing is the lack of hardware to worry about replacing, right? What are these big hardware sellers going to do to stay competitive?I’ve found that many IT and cloud companies are teaming up to give an extra push with added incentives to join Cloud-mania.One example is HP and  Box. On Dec 5, they announced that if you purchase a  HP Compaq 6200 or 6005 Pro Series PC, you will get a free Box account ...

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15
JAN
0

salesforce Spring ’12 release highlights and videos

Although we’re just in January, us here in the northeast are freezing our butts off and ready for Spring.  Why?  Well the spring ’12 salesforce releases of course!Here is a video highlighting approval processes in chatter feeds:Chatter FeedsSales Cloud Changes:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ISj-nnXdz4Service Cloud Changes:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFslg1Ad7FQ

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14
JAN
0

THREE Benefits of Cloud Computing for ONLY Big Businesses

 Am I the only one who thinks bigger businesses seem to be left out in all of this cloud-talk? The cloud, to me, seems to be marketed towards smaller and medium-sized businesses only. A quick Google search of “cloud benefits” reaps hundreds of articles slanted towards the small-to-medium sized businesses and leaves the big guys out completely. Why are we forgetting about them? Can’t the cloud be good for everyone?Maybe moving to the cloud seems to be a bigger risk, possibly even inconceivable to big businesses. I mean, you can’t deny that they will be investing much more money in taking this step, don’t you agree? Yet, it’s not ...

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11
JAN
0

Five Cloud Predictions for 2012

 We’re only at day 10 in 2012, so I’d like to know what’s in store for the next 356. What can we predict about the cloud in the new year? Are there any guarantees for 2012?I’ve noticed a trend with some predictions being mentioned in several articles, blogs, videos etc about cloud computing predictions in 2012. Here are the five most popular:1. Cost of the cloud vs cost of paper. Smaller organizations may begin to find that the cloud can be more of a benefit than a risk. According to an Information Weekly article,

We criticize the cloud, but we don’t compare apples to apples. We don’t really understand ...

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10
JAN
0

IdeaExchange for Salesforce: You Can Get Involved

Did you know that Salesforce.com has a service enabling customers to post ideas for new products?If you have an idea to share, get to know IdeaExchange! According to the Salesforce.com website, you can “suggest new products, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and customers, and preview upcoming releases!”I like seeing Salesforce getting their customers involved in helping them improve their products and IdeaExchange is a quick and easy way for users to share their new ideas.The site uses a point system to promote different ideas. Any user can vote an idea up or down, which adds or subtracts points. The posts with the highest number of points are under the status of “Coming in the Next Release.” The statuses ...

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5
JAN
0

Invest in the Cloud: Cloud Stocks Rose 13 Percent in 2011

The numbers are in and things look good for the cloud! According to the “Talkin’ Cloud Index,” which tracks twenty cloud computing stocks, the stock value rose 13.64 percent in 2011. This beats out S&P with 0 percent and the Dow Jones which rose only 5.56 percent this year.Of the twenty stocks being watched on the “Talkin’ Cloud Index,” thirteen reported an increase in value, while seven reported a decrease. Guess you can’t win ‘em all! Here are the biggest players:

  1. RightNow Technologies (RNOW, +80.52 percent)
  2. NetSuite (N, +62.20 percent)
  3. Taleo Corp. (TLEO, +39.93 percent)
  4. SuccessFactors (SFSF, +37.67 percent)
  5. RackSpace Hosting (RAX, +36.93)
Watch out for these in 2012:
  • VM Ware (VMW)
  • Google (GOOG)
  • Cisco Systems, Inc (CSCO)
  • Amazon.com, ...

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3
JAN
0

Top Five Cloud Computing Stories from 2011

2011 seems to be the year of the cloud. Sure, it’s been around for over a decade, but this year was the year that it exploded into the general public. Here are our top five cloud computing stories from 2011: 5. The government gets on the cloud to cut spending. To learn more, read one of our earlier blog posts here. 4. Office365 is released June 28, 2011. Although not as popular as other cloud storage services such as iCloud or DropBox, Office365 was designed for businesses to get on ...

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29
DEC
2

Salesforce.com: Born Cloud, Reborn Social

Welcome to new, huge change!In a Cloudforce Japan 2011, Benioff talked about social revolution inspired by technology.One of the many examples he uses is a tweet by Google exec and Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim saying, “A call to all well-educated Egyptians around the world, come back as soon as possible to build our nation,” inspiring a revolution and government changes in Egypt. How is it possible that the use of a simple sentence under 140 characters can inspire the way we communicate and reach millions of people? People are doing it every day.Technology is a common theme to social change- from the riots in Egypt to the Occupy protests. It is the platform for social reform and Benioff ...

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16
DEC
0

Can the Cloud= Economic Boom?

 Because of the lower start-up cost, the explosion of cloud computing offers another benefit: economic boom. High unemployment with low startup cost for new industry is creating incentive for entrepreneurs to start their own business by getting on the cloud. Cloud computing requires less hardware and less data storage costs, while also offering cheap opportunities for small startups to store data and manage client bases. Instead of investing in thousands of dollars’ worth of hardware and server installations, cloud computing stores data remotely for solid and consistent monthly rates. According to Forbes.com, this new entrepreneurial boom will most likely be made up of college students or recent ...

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23
NOV
0

LinkedIn for More Leads

I’ve always been an advocate for using social networking sites to promote business- twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc. It’s a free way to generate hits and market your company. However, are we using these free resources to their potential?I came across an article the other day called, “11 Reasons Your LinkedIn Company Page Sucks” and it made some great points. I’ll highlight a few here:

  • No followers: This is a big one. You should be following others to build up a core following for yourself.
  • It’s bare: A bare, boring LinkedIn page could actually hurt your company’s presence. No one is going to be interested in following it and it could ...

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21
NOV
0

The Cloud vs On-Site Storage: The Environment

 There’s a lot of information out there about how cloud computing is better for the environment. A Microsoft,  Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy study compared the environmental effects of Microsoft cloud computing and traditional, on-premise IT and when it comes to CO2 emissions, cloud computing prevailsThe official report indicates that for the most part and in the majority of cases, CO2 emissions reductions by deployment size are:

  • 90+ percent for small (about 100 users)
  • 60 to 90 percent for medium-sized (1,000 user)
  • 30 to 60 percent for large (10,000 users)

For the smaller businesses, this data seems to make sense because the operation of individual servers for each individual small business will emit more CO2 than if a large number of small businesses ...

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19
NOV
1

CRM Gamification follow-up

Vincent Beerman, over at softwareadvice.com has taken the idea of CRM Gamification and expanded upon it in his latest article.  We found it to be a pretty interesting read.  You can read the original article here, and the new article here.

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3
MAY
0

Cloudforce Tour 2011 Announced for Boston

The salesforce.com cloudforce 2011 has been announced!  Marc Benioff will be in Boston for the event.  Follow the link below to register for this event!It is on June 16, 2011 at the Westin Boston Waterfront.https://www.salesforce.com/events/details/a1x300000004DW0AAM.jsp

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29
APR
0

The laptop is dead, long live the laptop.

Every road warrior needs a device to do certain tasks. Our trusty (sometimes) laptops have been there for decades, projecting PowerPoint presentations and giving demos. Are the days of the laptop at an end? Steve Jobs thinks so, and so do I. He calls it a post-pc event; I just call it a thin, light, sans-keyboard computer.Not just the iPad but a plethora of other tablets could spell the end of laptops as a whole. I heard that the Samsung Galaxy 2 is thinner than the iPad by the way.Salesforce.com asked and answered the question, why do you need a server when your business is run in the cloud?If a tablet is capable of presenting your PowerPoint, and giving your ...

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24
MAR
0

Chatter collaboration broken down

salesforce has put together a nice video on how you can use chatter.  Often, we find that users are a bit confused on how to best implement chatter.  This video is a good demonstration on how it can work for you and your company.

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17
FEB
0

salesforce.com to feature 2 chatter ads during the Super Bowl

salesforce.com is airing 2 ads during the superbowl this coming Sunday, February 2nd.  The ads will air 30 seconds before and 15 seconds after the halftime show put on by the Black Eyed Peas.  Will-I-Am has been known to be a supporter of chatter, as he’s been seen in several ads and articles about chatter.For anyone that may be looking around from the superbowl commericals and is wondering what chatter is and what salesforce is, click the links below to find out more!What is chatter?What is salesforce?

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5
FEB
0

salesforce Appexchange highlight: Activity Optimizer

Are your people spending time doing the right things? How do you know? Activity Optimizer gives you the ability to quickly evaluate the activities of your users and determine if they are spending their time doing the right things.Activity Optimizer allows you to create different systems for each role and different activity types for each role. Users are assigned to roles and the system automatically scores their performance based on the types of activities they are entering into the system.Points are given to each activity and can be calculated based on the amount of time the user spent on the activity or can be a flat value regardless of time.Assigning points to activities allows an employee or manager to easily ...

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8
JAN
0

How to auto populate an email with an email template from a button

Take a look at this blog entry from Jim Sullivan on how to auto populate an email using a template:http://jamesrsullivan.com/2007/09/auto-populate-email-template-on-send-an-email/

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11
JUN
0

Cloudforce Tour Boston – now open for Registration!

Cloudforce 2 Tour: Boston

Jun 8, 2010Westin Boston Waterfront425 Summer St.Boston, MA 02210(617) 532-4600Registration Link here:  https://www.salesforce.com/events/details/a1x300000004D32AAE.jsp

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12
MAY
0

VMForce Announced by salesforce.com

VM Force is a toolkit released by salesforce.com to run your native Java applications in the cloud.  Watch the video below to find out more:Link

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3
MAY
0
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