Why limit AppExchange applications to Professional and above? Some applications like MintFly, Vertical Response, and Jigsaw would be a great help to the Group edition customers.

Please allow AppExchange and other partner applications to work with Group Edition.

Interestingly enough, I would expect the message to say something like “Sorry, we still have our web development team from 1990 who is really good at Visual Basic.”  Instead, they’re taking the “act natural” approach, as if this is something you should expect from using the internet.VistaPrint seems to be at least mostly in touch with this whole “internet thing”.  They require at least Firefox:

Does anyone know of good print shops online that let you use Safari? 

We are putting the finishing touches on MintFly.com - a system that creates iPhone friendly pages from your Salesforce.com account.  This way, we can look up an address, update a record, or search our database within seconds instead of minutes.

The fact that one person took so long to build it is a testament that open source projects are in fact very similar to our businesses.  Someone out there is putting in a lot of effort, working toward a vision, and is dedicated to the goal.  Businesses aren’t an over-night success with a grand opening event, they are a consistent challenge to the owner to acquire customers and keep the bottom line low.

  code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

If you’re looking for advertising inspiration you should check out SkaryIdeas.com:

ajaxload.info

The site gives you a lot of different styles of moving gifs and then lets you assign colors (or transparency) to the indicator and then you can download it for use in your site. Awesome little tool site!

Solution: Validation Rules to the rescue!

I originally searched Google / SFDC Help for validation rules and triggers for delete but didn’t find any articles that made it apparent. A validation rule is executed any time a record is saved either through the Salesforce.com Application or through the API (including Outlook, Excel Connector, and custom code). In our case, Opportunities are only allowed to be deleted by Admin role (me). This means that they can only be edited (1/2 the battle).

This means we need two Validation rules…

1. Disallow editing of an Opportunity once the stage is “Closed Won”: and(PRIORVALUE(StageName) = “Closed Won”, not( $UserRole.Name = “Finance”))
2. Disallow editing of Opportunity Products once the Opportunity Stage is “Closed Won”:  AND( NOT($UserRole.Name = “Finance”), ISPICKVAL( Opportunity.StageName , “Closed Won” ))

Now, when someone (sales, support, whoever) tries to edit the Opportunity to change the date, they will receive the error message from validation rule 1, hopefully stating they need to go to finance to make changes.  If someone tries to update an Opportunity Product amount, description, or custom field they will receive an error from validation rule 2.  In this example, only Finance can edit your Closed Won Opportunities but you could also unlock it for Admin or other roles depending on the size of your organization.

This was implemented for use in a close process where Salesforce.com is tied out completely to contract values so we can use Lucidera and Salesforce.com reports for real business decisions as we are completely confident the data is correct.  What do you think?

To make it more intuitive to the salespeople, we wanted to have a link or button at the top of the Opportunity titled “Convert to Order” which would kick off the approval process. Here is a picture of it in action, a button that submits for approval:

Want to do the same thing?
Navigate To: Setup > Customize > Opportunities > Buttons and Links
Press the “New” button and use these details:
Label: Convert to Order
Name: Convert_to_Order
Display Type: Detail Page Button
Behavior: Execute JavaScript
OnClick JavaScript: if ((Modal.confirm && Modal.confirm(’Once you submit this record for approval, you might not be able to edit it or recall it from the approval process depending on your settings. Continue?’)) || (!Modal.confirm && window.confirm(’Once you submit this record for approval, you might not be able to edit it or recall it from the approval process depending on your settings. Continue?’))) navigateToUrl(’/p/process/Submit?id={!Opportunity.Id}&retURL=%2F{!Opportunity.Id}’);

You can create a “Send an Email” button that pre-populates a specific template into the form. This means you could have your existing “Send an Email” button plus a “Send Reminder Email” and have the form automatically populated with the “reminder” template.

To start, pick a template that you would like to use. Navigate to Setup > Communication Templates > Email Templates and then open the template you would like to use. In the URL / Address bar locate the Salesforce.com ID of the template. In case you’re not familiar with the Salesforce.com IDs, it should be a 15 character ID that starts “00″ and ends with some alpha-numeric characters. Here is one of my template URLs with the Id underlined for illustration:
https://na4.salesforce.com/00D40000000yz5a?setupid=CommunicationTemplatesEmail

Once you have the ID, go to a Lead or Contact and click your old-fashioned “Send an Email” button:

Once the email composition page loads, copy the full URL of the page. It should look something like this:

https://na4.salesforce.com/email/author/emailauthor.jsp?p2_lkid=00Q6000000zzTI2&rtype=00Q&retURL=%2F00Q9000000DytI2

With both the template ID and the URL for the “Send an Email” page, we are ready to create our custom button. Navigate to Setup > Customize > Activities > Task Buttons and Links and press the “New” button to… create a new button.

The new button needs to be created specifically for the screen we will place it. In this example we will use a lead. Paste your “Send an Email” URL that you acquired in the previous step. Now, replace the two Salesforce.com IDs in the url with the string {Lead.ID}. When the button is placed on the screen, this will make it always link back to the lead screen from which you clicked the button. Append the string “&template=” and then the ID of your email template to the end of the URL. This will now default the button to that template which you picked before.
The full URL in my case now looks like this:

https://na4.salesforce.com/email/author/emailauthor.jsp?p2_lkid={!Lead.Id}&rtype=00Q&retURL=%2F{!Lead.Id}&template_id=00D40000000yz5a

Press the “Save” button to save your work and create your shiny new button.

Navigate to Setup > Customize > Leads > Page Layouts to add this new button to a page your user can see. Edit the layout where you want it placed. Click to select the related list at the bottom for “Activity History” and then click “Edit Properties” button. This will give you a pop-up configuration window where you can add your button to the header of that related list. At the bottom of the pop-up window is the section you need:

Move your new button into the “Selected Buttons” list, click “OK” on this window, and then save your page layout. You should have a button now on your Lead page that auto-populates with the template you desire.