Salesforce Customization - Enabling UI Settings

Every organization wants customized applications for their business. Organizations using Salesforce CRM want their Salesforce-CRM to be customized so that it best fits their business processes, their scenarios, and their users. Although advanced Salesforce customization requires code changes involving Apex and Visualforce (and typically help of a Salesforce development services provider), most basic configuration and customization can be done through Salesforce-CRM's intuitive point-and-click admin interface.

A Salesforce Administrator has the required permissions and privilege to configure and customize to fulfill many common needs. Through "Personal Setup", all users can update their personal information like My Personal Information, Email, Import, Desktop Integration, and My Chatter Settings. However, if you are a Salesforce Administrator, you have many additional options at your disposal to configure and customize Application Setup and Administration setup.

App Setup:
App Setup is your doorway to Customize, Create, Develop, Deploy, Installed Packages, AppExchange Marketplace, and Critical Updates. You can customize a lot of things. One Salesforce Administrator may have the following Customize options in their Salesforce CRM: Tab Names & Labels, Home, Activities, Campaigns, Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Quotes, Forecasts, Cases, Self-Service, Call Center, Contracts, Solutions, Products, Partners, Ideas, Answers, Assets, Users, Console, Content Deliveries, Tags, Reports & Dashboards, Search, Chatter, and User Interface. For example, if you wanted to customize user interface for your organization's Salesforce users, you can get started from Admin User > Setup > App Setup > Customize > User Interface > ... you get the idea, right?

Administration Setup:
Similarly, Administration Setup provides a host of options. One may find options to Manage Users (Users, Roles, Profiles, Public Groups, Login History, etc), Company Profile, Security Controls, Communication Templates, Translation Workbench, Data Management, Monitoring, Mobile Administration, Desktop Administration, Email Administration, Google Apps, etc.in a typical organization's Administration Setup.

Enabling User Interface Settings:
The following are some common Salesforce customization (user interface) done by an Administrator:

• User Interface Node: This enables or disables features for all users. You may want to enable Hover Details to pop open a small balloon containing the most important information while hovering over links of records. You may to allows users to collapse or expand sections containing fields relevant to them through Collapsible Sections. You may want to allows users to double click on to a field and change the information contained therein instead of editing the whole page through Inline Editing. Or you may want to allows users, through Enhanced Lists, to change multiple records at once, to change columns, to see how many pages of records we have, etc.

• Profile Permissions: This determines how one sees Salesforce and what they can do in Salesforce. Not all profiles are created alike. You can control Tab visibility, Page layouts, and System permissions (like Report Builder) through Profile permissions.

• Chatter: Enabling feed tracking will place a Chatter feed at the top of an object page. Some of the fields (account name, account owner, opportunity name, etc) are automatically enabled when you turn on Chatter, but as an Admin you can add additional fields, too.


The above are simple examples of enabling user interface settings. Real-life Salesforce crm customization goes much beyond adjusting layouts. Expert Salesforce development service providers can help you customize and/or extend almost every aspect of your Salesforce-CRM to make it fit your way of doing business.

Mindfire Offshore Salesforce Development Services
Mindfire Solutions is a top offshore Salesforce development services provider with a fully-certified Salesforce development team and a strong track record of serving customers across diverse industries and business needs.

If you need to hire salesforce developers or you are interested to know more about our Salesforce salesforce development services, please contact us at sales[@]mindfiresolutions.com or call 1-248-686-1424. We will be glad to help you.

Salesforce.com: Top Dreamforce 2012 Takeaways

Dreamforce 2012 – Salesforce.com’s 10th annual user conference – was held in San Francisco from Sep 18-21, 2012. Referred to as “The Cloud Computing Industry Event of the Year”, this spectacle of a conference had around 750 informative sessions with more than 350 partner companies and 90,000 attendees. Bigger than ever before and possibly the largest user conference organized by any IT company in history!

Going by the response of participants sampled from across the web, many of the attendees came away feeling very satisfied and positive about Salesforce.com innovations and its future direction. Some of the key takeaways to have grabbed the most attention include the following:
1) Work.com: Salesforce.com’s re-branding of Rypple as Work.com and making it a key investment area signals the transformative effect it will have on how work is organized and managed in organizations of the future. Work.com, already adopted by Salesforce.com itself among its 7000+ workforce, will result in more flexible, network-based (and less hierarchical) organizations that sell, service, and market better.
2) Community: A new Chatter-based product called Community is going to be launched in the summer of 2013 for Salesforce.com customers and partners. Chatter, initially targeting internal collaboration, is being broad-based in significant ways to eventually become the bedrock of external facing customer and partner communities. Community will entirely replace old customer/partner portal products, make the CRM experience more social for all stakeholders, and unlock possibilities of new revenue streams for businesses.
3) Marketing Cloud: Salesforce.com’s marketing cloud – a unified social marketing suite covering social listening, social content, engagement, social ads, measurement, workflow and automation – is getting immensely powerful and becoming a well-differentiated product. This comprehensive end-to-end solution – with Buddy Media, Radian6, and CRM platform integration – will enable organizations to listen, connect, and align better.
4) Salesforce Touch: Salesforce Touch – in keeping with Salesforce’s early recognition of a multi-device and multi-context future – uses HTML5 to make its mobile strategy cross-platform. Salesforce Data.com Social Key, which unites enterprise and external contact data into a more meaningful global, is set to usher in a brand new paradigm.
5) Service Cloud Adoption: Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud is maturing into a great product (through multi-channel integration, third party app integration flexibility, social & mobile dimensions). With Service Cloud adoption steadily rising, it is well placed to gather further momentum and develop into a mega business.

In addition to the above, enhancements like Salesforce Chatterbox, Salesforce Identity, etc. seem to set the stage for great new possibilities.

We at Mindfire Solutions – a top Salesforce development services provider with a fully-certified Salesforce development team and a strong track record of serving Salesforce customers across diverse industries and business needs – are excited about the way Salesforce.com is transforming customer relationship management landscape to become the “enterprise nerve center”. If you want to customize and/or extend Salesforce Customization Services help, get in touch with Mindfire today – call 1-248-686-1424 or email sales[@]mindfiresolutions.com – to leverage the solid experience of Mindfire’s trusted Salesforce Application development team to personalize and extend capabilities and build cloud apps.

How to Sell Your App on Salesforce AppExchange?

What is Salesforce AppExchange?
AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud computing applications and consulting partners. Launched in 2005, Salesforce-AppExchange is credited to be the world’s first and largest online cloud computing applications and services marketplace. Applications sold or distributed on the exchange have been built by Salesforce.com partners or third-party developers for the community. Users can browse, test drive, and install (from over a thousand apps) to add to their Salesforce.com environment including apps for sales, customer service, marketing, IT & administration, human resources, finance, enterprise resource planning, and collaboration.

Advantages
Whether you are a Salesforce.com user or an independent software vendor (ISV), Salesforce-AppExchange can be immensely useful to you.

If you fall into the first category - users, AppExchange can let you extend Force.com to more departments and functions easily. Through AppExchange you can leverage the power of the Salesforce community to find best solutions to your business needs. You can instantly choose from a large pool of well-thought-out apps for common needs (without having to reinvent the wheel investing a lot of time and effort). Moreover, Salesforce-AppExchange lets you test drive your chosen app by letting you interact with it to your satisfaction in a sample instance or your production environment sandbox.

If you are an independent software vendor (ISV) into cloud apps development, AppExchange listing can be your gateway to millions of potential customers. By letting you make your app publicly available on AppExchange to 100,000+ customers, AppExchange listing dramatically improves the odds of your app’s success. The listing provides app providers with one of the fastest ways to take their applications to market, showcase those to a world-wide target audience of millions of users, and helps build rapport with potential customers.

How to List Your App on it?
Selling on AppExchange is easy: become a Salesforce.com partner & publish your app. For becoming a partner, first select the Program Model (ISVforce or Force.com Embedded) that best suits your business. ISVforce lets you build, market, and sell your app to Salesforce.com customers. Force.com Embedded lets you build, market, and sell your app to any customer. After choosing the best AppExchange Partner Program Model for your context, you can submit your registration and accept terms of agreement. For publishing your app, set up your Salesforce-Partner Portal, create and list your app, pass a security review, and go public to millions of potential customers. For a step-by-step summary of listing your app on the exchange, you can refer Mindfire's "Sell Your App on AppExchange" guide.

Need Some Help?
Expert development service providers like Mindfire Solutions, backed by years of experience in Salesforce customization and Force.com development for global clients across industry domains, can help you create engaging cloud apps and get those listed on the exchange. The fully-certified Offshore Salesforce development team of Mindfire's can also powerfully customize and/or extend your Salesforce.com CRM to help you leverage its true power for your business. If you want to customize or Hire AppExchange product developer and need some development help, get in touch with Mindfire today – call 1-248-686-1424 or email sales[@]mindfiresolutions[.]com – to leverage the strong track record and solid experience of Mindfire’s Salesforce Application development to personalize and extend capabilities and build cloud apps.

Top Reasons Why You Salesforce CRM Customization Is Easy

Each business has certain things unique about the way it does business. Your business may be different from your competitors in terms of your business model, business processes, product or service differentiators, etc. Customizing your CRM to embrace this uniqueness is essential to your success.

You will of course want your CRM solution to adapt to this uniqueness inherent in the way you do business (and not the other way round). A good CRM is designed with the above in mind. Salesforce CRM is hence immensely flexible by design and can be made to perfectly fit the contours of your unique business needs. You can powerfully customize and extend Salesforce development India the way you like depending on your evolving business needs.

If there is anything worse than an un-customized CRM, it is a CRM incorrectly customized for your business. Limited customization options offered by some CRMs can prove to be a severe handicap. One may have to settle for mismatched functionality leading to confusion and impaired productivity. Thankfully, with Salesforce, an ill-customized system is a thing of the past. Powered by Force.com platform, it offers you virtually limitless ways to customize and extend your Salesforce-CRM to suit your current and evolving needs.

The Force.com platform provides the option of point-and-click configuration for basic customization needs and a full developer toolkit for more powerful custom application development and integration needs.

Salesforce Customization: Point-and-Click Configuration
If you are an administrator or power user with an understanding of CRM and the Salesforce system, you can make a wide range of preliminary customizations yourself using the point-and-click interface. You can configure the attributes or metadata associated with the application’s objects without programming. Since users cannot change core code and work within Salesforce CRM’s metadata framework, customization done this way doesn’t affect application integrity. Here are some samples of what you can do with point-and-click customization:

Add your organization logo.

• Customize your personal information; add, remove, or reorder application tabs.
• Customize CRM’s tabs and page layouts for everyone in your organization.
• Create custom fields to track information you deem necessary (e.g. a contact’s nickname, preferred mode of contact, etc.).
• Create custom web tabs to view web pages you use frequently without leaving Salesforce CRM (e.g. your company’s intranet or a wiki).
• Create custom object tabs to manage information that is important for your business (e.g. ad price records for an advertising business).
  

Salesforce Custom Development: Customization at Coding Level
If you want to take your CRM customization beyond adjusting layouts and creating fields, you can use Force.com, Apex, Visualforce, triggers, advanced workflows, etc. to powerfully customize and extend Salesforce CRM. You can customize and/or extend almost every aspect of your CRM to make it fit your way of doing business. Here expert development service providers can help you customize CRM for your unique business needs in the most optimal and powerful ways.

Salesforce Development Service Providers
Expert development service providers like Mindfire Solutions, backed by years of experience in Salesforce customization and Force.com development, can help you leverage CRM's true power for your business.

If you want to customize or Hire Salesforce developers and need some development help, get in touch with Mindfire today – call 1-248-686-1424 or email sales[@]mindfiresolutions[.]com – to leverage the strong track record and solid experience of Mindfire’s Salesforce Application development to personalize and extend capabilities and build cloud apps.

Customized Salesforce Helps Businesses Fine Tune Response Rates

Salesforce CRM
Salesforce.com’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are one of the most popular CRM solutions worldwide. Customer Relationship Management focuses on winning and keeping happy customers. Top CRM solutions such as Salesforce CRM help businesses achieve customer delight leading to lasting customer relationships and make it easy for them to acquire new customers. As a pioneer of cloud computing technologies, Salesforce CRM has been instrumental in leveling the CRM playing field. Salesforce CRM enables small and medium businesses, too, to leverage the benefits of CRM, which was earlier possible for large enterprises only because of the economically-prohibitive entry barrier associated with old on-premises CRM solutions.

Salesforce Development
Recognizing the fact that no two businesses are exactly alike, Salesforce CRM has been designed to be eminently customizable. You can customize and extend Salesforce CRM the way you like depending on your current and evolving business needs. A basic understanding of CRM and the Salesforce system is all that is needed to start making simple point-and-click customizations. More powerful Salesforce development would require knowledge of Apex programming language and Visualforce framework. Salesforce development service providers, owing to their specialized experience, can help you customize Salesforce CRM to your unique business needs in the most optimal and powerful ways using Apex and Visualforce. If you are an existing Salesforce CRM user who wants to extend its capabilities or are migrating from other technologies to Salesforce, endless possibilities await you. With expert Salesforce development services, you can customize and extend your Salesforce CRM to be a competitive advantage.

Mindfire Solutions
Mindfire Solutions is a top Salesforce development services provider with a strong track record of serving Salesforce customers across many industries and with diverse business needs. Mindfire provides a wide range of offshore Salesforce development services including Salesforce customization, Salesforce migration, Salesforce integration and Force.com development using Apex and Visualforce. Clients use our dedicated team of Salesforce developers to customize Salesforce functionality to suit their business workflows and to make their existing processes even more efficient. Mindfire’s expert Salesforce developers have made deep use of Salesforce.com, Force.com, Visualforce pages, Apex classes, S-controls, Triggers, Views, Page Layouts, Workflows, and have generated advanced reports and sophisticated dashboards.


If you are an existing Salesforce CRM user or a Salesforce service provider with Salesforce customization needs, our offshore Salesforce development services can help you. Our offshore Salesforce development services can also help you with migrating customer data from your other applications to Salesforce, integrating Salesforce with your organization's on-premise applications or external cloud services, and creating powerful custom applications on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service cloud platform.

Mindfire's Salesforce experience and flexible working model will result in significant cost reductions and decreased development time, which will greatly suit your budget and business needs. If you want to customize or Hire Salesforce developers and need some development help, get in touch with Mindfire today – call 1-248-686-1424 or email sales[@]mindfiresolutions[.]com – to leverage the strong track record and solid experience of Mindfire’s Salesforce Application development to personalize and extend capabilities and build cloud apps.