What is Google Drive?

First and foremost Google Drive is a cloud storage and collaboration service.  New users get 5GB storage for free, which is a little more than Dropbox (2GB free) and a little less than Microsoft Skydrive (7GB or 25GB if you were lucky and got in early). You can access the service through a web browser from anywhere or on an Android device. At present there is no iPhone or iPad app however we are led to believe these are in the works, not at all surprising that Google would leave these until last!

For those who like to access drives the traditional way through Windows Explorer or Apple’s Finder, there will also be the option to integrate with these, presumably requiring a small software installation but no official details currently. We assume that Google will encourage users to access the service through a browser where possible.

In addition to the storage capabilities, Google being a search company have of course added some useful search capabilities to the product using OCR technology. This means that if you have a ton of scanned documents you’ll be able to search the text contained within without having to do a thing.

Taken directly from the Google Drive website (https://drive.google.com/):

Google Drive is everywhere you are – on the web, in your home, at the office and on the go. So wherever you are, your stuff is just…there. Ready to go, ready to share. Get started with 5 GB free.

When can I sign up to Google Drive?

The big question… when can we get it? Unfortunately we don’t have the answer at present but will update in due course, the website is currently showing “Your Google Drive is not ready yet” with the option to be notified once live, so if you’re keen we would recommend registering there to get in early.

I want to upgrade. How much will it cost?

You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month (~£1.55), 100GB for $4.99/month (~£3.10) or even 1TB for $49.99/month (~£31.00). When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Where can I get more information?

There’s plenty of information about Google Drive in the mainstream media right now, but hopefully the links below will be of some use:

Google Drive - https://drive.google.com
Official Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html
BBC News – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17831725

This resulted in a number of customer compliants stating that these features should be part of the standard offering (I have to agree) which in turn led to an internal re-think at Salesforce and todays decision to include the functionality for free (EE and UE only).

Analytics Edition
A very quck overview of the features in Analytics Edition coming Spring’12

• bucketing, a feature which lets you group data and place them in categories – buckets. For numeric data, you can say that deals under $1000 are small, and over that are large
• cross-filtering, that allows you to filter on related objects, for instance, in a report on accounts and contacts, to show all contacts in accounts that don’t have a closed opportunity.
• a new report format – joined reports – where you can join reports together, to report on multiple children of the same parent, for instance, meaning you can have a report showing the products, and team members on each opportunity in your team.
• higher limits on snapshots, scheduled reports and dashboards, and dynamic dashboards.

Original announcement
http://blogs.salesforce.com/product/2011/12/introducing-the-analytics-edition.html

Todays post
http://blogs.salesforce.com/product/2012/01/responding-to-customer-feedback.html

Executive Summary
At salesforce.com the trusted success of our customers is our top priority. We want to provide a further update on the CS3 and CS8 Sandbox service disruptions we experienced in August 2011.

We sincerely apologize for the impact that these incidents may have caused to your business. We have taken this issue very seriously and made the investigation into their root cause a top priority. The full root cause of both of these issues is outlined below.

Root Cause Analysis
On August 23, 2011 starting at 8:38 AM US/Pacific, customers residing on the CS3 sandbox instance experienced an inability to login while trying to access test.salesforce.com services. The salesforce.comTechnology Team performed systematic troubleshooting to isolate the cause and to restore services. On August 28, 2011 at 10:50 PM US/Pacific we restored service on CS3 for all customers with sandbox organizations that had been accessed within the past 90 days.

In the CS3 incident, one of the servers in our database tier experienced a fatal hardware error. This failure interrupted system I/O operations and corrupted files that are core to database functionality.

When our database prepares a block to be written to disk, it calculates a checksum value that is also stored in the block header, completes a sanity check, and sends the block to be written to disk. Just prior to the hardware failures, our database initiated two simultaneous but separate I/O operations to write the block to two key database files. Due to both files residing on the same database disk partition and the timing of the hardware failure, both I/O operations were interrupted and damaged the blocks on the disk. While the same block was corrupted in both files, they were corrupted in different ways. One file failed the checksum test on the block; on the other file, the block header was damaged and failed the sanity check.

While our database solution provides scalability and a high degree of availability, it was not able to protect against this type of failure. The corruption impacted a critical function at the database level that caused an inability to perform a standard database recovery.

On September 4, 2011 starting at 3:58 PM US/Pacific, customers residing on the CS8 sandbox instance experienced an inability to login while trying to access test.salesforce.com services. The salesforce.comTechnology Team performed systematic troubleshooting to isolate the cause and to restore services. On September 7, at 2:32 AM US/Pacific we restored service on CS8 for all customers with sandbox organizations. We were able to restore the sandbox to a recovery point around 3:43 PM US/Pacific on September 4, 2011.

In the CS8 incident, a system driver bug caused the database server to crash and key database files were again corrupted. This issue was similar to the incident that CS3 experienced, but the root cause was a different underlying bug.

Action Plan
As a result of our in-depth root cause analysis of these incidents, we have taken the following actions:

• Deployed a new operating system version and system firmware to resolve the issues experienced on CS3 and CS8;
• Deployed a third level of resiliency in our production environment that will minimize the duration of any restoration efforts and protect us from corrupt data being replicated to our DR data centers. We believe this will enable us to restore the system from a data corruption in well under 24 hours;
• Enhanced our incident management and triage process to confirm that logs are adequately reviewed; and
• Diversified copies of key database files across multiple database disk partitions, instead of on the same database partition, to mitigate severe corruption on all critical database files.

Based on our investigations and subsequent preventative actions, we are confident that we are in a much stronger position to recover from a similar incident in the future.

Our goal is to provide world-class service to our customers. We are continuously reviewing, revising, and improving our tools, processes, and architecture in order to provide customers with the best service possible. We sincerely apologize for any impact these service disruptions may have caused to your business, and appreciate your continued trust as we continue to improve our processes and services.

Best regards,
salesforce.com Customer Support

Rypple was founded in 2008 by Daniel Debow, David Stein and George Babu “We started Rypple because people kept telling us how much they disliked their performance reviews. Everything else we do these days is immediate and social. But work – and particularly performance management – is lagging behind. So we set out to build a solution that people would actually find useful.” Rypple has offices in Toronto, San Franciso and Atlanta and their existing customer base includes businesses such as facebook.com and Spotify (as well as numerous other recognisable brands).

According to salesforce, Rypple’s next generation social performance management app is to be re-launched as “Successforce” and the new business unit is to be run by John Wookey, previously an employee of SAP. Click here for the Rypple website.

I checked out the community boards and found several posts ranging for full-on Apex code solutions to a variety of formulas. After check them all out I found this example below to be the most effective and also one of the easiest to implement – just create a new formula field (type = number) and try the following where Date__c is the custom date field you want to convert to a week number:

Case(
MOD( DATE(YEAR(Date__c), 1, 1) - DATE (1900, 1, 7), 7),
0, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 3) /7, 
1, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 4) /7, 
2, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 5) /7, 
3, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 6) /7, 
4, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 7) /7, 
5, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 1) /7, 
6, ( Date__c- DATE(YEAR(Date__c),1,1) + 2) /7, 
99)

Good luck and feel free to add any comments below!

The thread id is actually a combination of your salesforce org Id and the case record Id. If you’d like to create the thread id for custom objects or any other reason, you can use the following formula:

"ref:00D"&MID(Id,4,1)&RIGHT($Organization.Id, 4) &"."& LEFT(Id,4)&RIGHT(Id,5) &":ref"

This problem has now been resolved with the Force.com Quick Access Menu. The Force.com quick access menu offers handy shortcuts to customization features. When you’re working on apps or objects, use this menu to jump to relevant app customization features. It’s available from object list view pages and record detail pages (see expanded view below):

This feature allows us to quickly view the most commonly used attributes of an object and also provides links for the Editing of Apps and Data Import. The menu can be expanded and collapsed by clicking the cog icon which appears on the right hand side of the screen or by using the shortcode “ALT + ;”. By hovering over the top 4 options in the quick access bar, a “New” option will appear to the right of the menu – by clicking this link you’re able to create new fields / objects etc.. almost instantly.

Other options worth noting about the quick access menu:

• To remove the menu from all list views and record pages, click Turn off menu.
• To restore the menu, click Your Name | Setup | My Personal Information | Personal Information. On the user detail page, click Edit, select Force.com Quick Access Menu, then click Save

For anyone who attended Cloudforce last year, your first thoughts were probably something like mine… “wow, there are a lot more people this year!” which was really encouraging to see. There were also more vendor booths and more salesforce staff on hand to help out than ever before. Still nothing on Dreamforce but nonetheless impressive!

This years keynote was heavily focused on one theme which was the “social enterprise” and making “businesses social” with a number of different speakers and great demo’s of Chatter enhancements as well as other new features throughout the product range. The fact is that many organisations, both big and small are way off the mark when it comes to interacting with their customers. Hopefully these new tools will allow them to engage more effectively and provide a better experience to their clients – if that happens then we will all be happier!

As there is way too much to cover from the days event, and much of it has been or will be covered in depth elsewhere I have chosen a few of my own highlights from the day as follows…

Data Residency Option (DRO)
This is a new feature that I can see many banks and governments being interested in (along with many others) as it allows for sensitive client data to be stored locally rather than out in a salesforce.com data centre. Fields are configured through the common salesforce setup area familiar already to most admins, and the great thing about this tool is that it allows customers to choose which data to store locally and which they are happy to store in “The Cloud”… it is not an all or nothing approach.

The one downside to this solution is that it does require the installation of software at the client site which clearly goes against the “No Software” ethos of salesforce – that said it would be a one-off server installation rather than anything an end-user would be required to perform so is unlikely to be an issue for most businesses.

The feature is the result of the aquisition of a company called Navajo Systems which should really add value. There are still many businesses out there that have been unable/chosen not to use salesforce due to security concerns, compliance and/or general paranoia however the DRO option now gives them one less reason to go without.

Marc Benioff Interviews Michael Dell
In the afternoon I went back into the auditorium along with most other atendees to join Marc and Michael Dell having an open discussion on the tech industry (past, present and future) along with more general topics including politics. The informal tone of the conversation was great and it was fascinating to see these guys sitting in London having a chat! All they were missing were the cigars and brandy.

In closing Michael Dell refers to politicians in Washington DC “Their not talking about the five year plan their talking about the five minute plan”.

Siteforce
Dave Carroll gave a demo of the new Siteforce product during one of the deveoper sessions, providing a quick overview of the product. Siteforce provides a very slick UI for building both static and data driven web pages using “clicks not code”. There is no HTML or Visualforce coding required or knowledge of CSS etc.. the Siteforce product does all that stuff behind the scenes so you don’t have to. In addition to page design, Siteforce also provides CMS functionality allowing users throughout the business to publish/edit content as required.

Siteforce is also unique in that the sites/pages published through the system are not subjected to the same scheduled maintainence as regular salesforce sites would be, although I cannot quote actual availability figures I would imagine this to be as close to 100% as possible.

European Data Centre 2012
One thing that got missed altogether from the conference was a follow up on last years announcement that salesforce are bringing a data centre to Europe (which was planned for London). Like others I had hoped this would at least be mentioned if not formally announced during the event but it never got a mention. I’m happy to say, that through the power of social media (!!) Mr Benioff himself has confirmed on twitter that it will be going ahead as planned some time next year. Great news for the European salesforce community!

…more about Cloudforce London 2011
If you want to learn more about this event please check out the following links below:
www.salesforce.com/uk/events/
www.facebook.com/salesforce
www.youtube.com/salesforce
www.edocr.com/cloudforce2011london

• Image formulas
• Visualforce Pages
• New Tabs

The images are available in a variety of sizes, including 16×16 and 32×32 pixels (32×32 pixel images can be used for tabs and in Visualforce pages, 16×16 for image formula fields). Image categories include animals, sports, finance, vacation, monsters, robots, halloween and desktop icons.

Click on the link to view the listing for more details and to install: https://sites.secure.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000004cfIcEAI