Salesforce Cross Queries = Awesome

Today I was working with a Salesforce customer on the Nonprofit Starter Pack and a formerly impossible requirement came up.  It went like this:

Show me every household that has one member that has their constituency equal to "Parent" (For reference, the constituency field was a custom field on the Contact object)

Back in the "Olden Days", being, the days before Cross Queries were available to us, that would have have been quite difficult.  With the advent of Salesforce Analytics Edition however, that is now done quite simply.

Step 1 - pick a report type

In this case, I picked simply "Households" since I just wanted a household driven mail list.

Step 2 - Define criteria.

Here's the magic.  First, add a cross query.  Choose "Households With Household Members"

Next, add a filter, and choose "Constituency Equals Parent".

The logic for this is fairly basic, I want only households with Contacts in them and out of those Contacts, I only want ones that are parents.  These requirements could be changed to anything though.  Another example "Only show households that have kids with blue eyes".  It could be anything based on a contact field now.

Step 3 - Run the report and enjoy the results of your hard labor.

The resultset from the report now shows household data, and only households that have contacts who are parents in them.  It's a great way to report on a higher level object, and filter out lower level data that should not be included in your final result set.

Your executive director will probably give you a ticker tape parade, and hopefully even the rest of the day off.

Rock on.  -Garry

AppExchange All-Star!

At Cloudforce a few weeks back I was asked to participate on a panel which discussed our favorite AppExchange apps.  I commented that my favories were all from Force.com Labs, because they were open source, free, and an easy way for Red Argyle customers to try out some new things.

Upon my return, I was asked to write a blog about it, that would be posting to the AppExchange newsletter.  So, I just wanted to share a link to the finished product here:  http://blogs.salesforce.com/community/2012/03/appexchange-all-star-garry-polmateer-red-argyle.html

In the post, I outline my favorite applications with some links and screenshots so you can consider them for your Salesforce instance today!

Thanks!  -Garry

4 Days of Argyle

Tom and I are excited to be spending the next four days in semi-seclusion with our team.  There has often been this romanticized thought of a "retreat" to make some great things happen.  While we've seen or heard of our fair share of mediocre retreats, we're going about it a different way.  We don't think that just by sharing a space for a few days that we're going to be enlightned with strokes of genius.  What we do think is that we'll sharpen and focus ideas that we have and get group buy-in.  We'll be able to deeply share information with the team and learn quite a bit.  A few things that I'm looking forward to:

Proximity - We work remotely.  It's sure going to be nice to get everyone together, even for a little while.  With the savings on office space rental, we were able to rent a nice private camp to relax and percolate ideas in.

Food - We're going to be cooking and eating some awesome food.  How can we possibly go wrong with this.

Fun - If we have a lot of fun and get a little bit of work done and return home refreshed and ready to hit the ground running, then we were successful!

Well that's it for now, time to go start packing!

Garry

Is Red Argyle Going to Cloudforce, San Francisco on 3/15?

Yuuuuuuppppp!  

(Garry will be attending)

If you want to go, FREE registration is available HERE.

:)

Ultralight Backpacking and The Cloud... Comparisons

I've done a lot of hiking in my day.  I remember a while back reading an allegory to why ultralight backpacking is better.  After adopting some of their core tenants, I was sold.  Ultralight backpacking enhances the part of the sport that I enjoy the most - Experiencing as much country as possible.  It left me more energetic, more agile, and less sore.  Less a slave to my equipment, and instead bending my equipment to my will.  Ultralight backpacking equpment is crafted for a specific function, often multi-function.  Try to make everything in your pack do two jobs and you only need half as much stuff.

Here's an interesting argument for ultralight backpacking.  Say you have a 50 mile trip ahead of you.  You can average 10 miles per day so you need 5 days of food.  Your food weighs 5 pounds a day, so that's 25 pounds of food.  Because your food weighs 25 pounds and is huge, you need a big pack.  The pack is heavier.  Because your pack is heavier, you need heavier boots to support your ankles.  You need trekking poles to aid your balance.  Your total gear weight is 65 pounds.

Now leg's go ultralight.  Say we shave down some equipment, and we can move 15 miles a day.  We only need 3 and a half days of food.  We need less food so we can carry a smaller pack.  Because we have a smaller pack, we don't need heavy clodhoppers or trekking poles.  We take our lightweight shoes.  Just by changing a few things, our gear weight goes from 65 to 30 pounds.

This is not scientific, but one pattern exists here.  By trimming down on one system (food), we are able to trim down multiple other systems (bag size, footwear, poles) and have a substantially greater benefit.  Let's apply this same thought process to information technology.

We need a file server, email server, database server, a web server, and 25 workstations for our office.  We need to buy the servers, we need to buy the software licenses, we need to buy 10MB of internet bandwidth.  We need antivirus for everything.  We need backup for everything.  We need to manager and maintain security for everything, upgrade everything.  We need to make everything connect to each other and we need to maintain all of the systems, so we hire a dedicated IT person to maintain it all.

Let's just say this company adopted cloud technology.  They no longer need a bunch of servers, racks, storage space.  They don't need to buy software licenses.  They don't need to upgrade them.  They don't spend money on expensive antivirus software.  They don't need a 5TB tape backup.  With every less server, not only is it one less box, but less IT.  Less backup, antivirus, service, power consumption.  Just like when backpacking, the return of having one less server is greater than just the removal of the server.

And think of the role of the IT person.  I used to be that IT person.  Do you know what my job was?  My job was to go to work and make sure that everything worked the same at the end of the day as it did at the start of the day.  My boss called it "spinning wheels", meaning, I was just keeping the machine running.  Now what could I have been doing in the cloud company?  Sure, maybe there's a little bit of administration to keep applications in order in the cloud, but I wouldn't spend my days spinning wheels.  I would be spending my days innovating.  I'd spend my days thinking of new ideas to help the company meet their business goals.  I'd spend more time with users.  I'd have specialized tools in the cloud to do each job and ample budget left over to buy them.

I know this is a bit allegorical, but the illustration is real.  Reduce systems complexity and have more room to innovate and enjoy the ride.  Instead of spending your money on hardware and all the requisite systems and labor to feed it, spend your money on innovation.  When Tom and I founded Red Argyle, we were commtted to not having any physical infrastructure.  Every one of our systems is born in the cloud.  Instead of hiring an IT person or spending siginficiant portions of our time managing systems, Tom and I are freed to spend our days pushing Red Argyle forward.

Do you have an allegory similar to this?  Cloud success story?  Particular tool that you love?  We'd love to hear it.  Post a comment below!