Salesforce Ninja: An Elite Blog about Salesforce.com

Zoho creator is an online database system which allows users to create application by dragging and dropping things into place. It also supports importing databases like Ms. Access, Excel etc. It also supports variety of export types as XLS, CSV, TSV, HTML, PDF, JSON, RSS. All this is Googled, yes it is, but I am really looking for here is can Zoho be used to replace Force.com application? Why? A person is always lookout for a cheaper alternative for a custom solution, a penny saved is a penny earned. The two systems were tested for the Model- View- Controller pattern and score accordingly. Model The things tested in the two system with respect to data model where, Does it support real-world relationships? Can we set up validation rules Like Force.com Zoho Creator can create fields and forms using drag and drop functionality. One of the good thing about this is we can add validation rules using drag and drop. Lookup functionality also exists for relationship between two ob...

In the past few days the computer science world lost two of the most valuable gems, Steve Jobs and Denise Ritchie. While Steve jobs was the people hero, Denise Ritchie was a computer science hero. While the two did the things they did decades apart, there was one common trait shared by both of them, they both worked hard to make things simpler and build a platform for others to take charge. Looking at C programming language no one will say its simpler but if you compare with the assembly language before C you will know the simplicity of it. Looking at Steve Jobs inventions right from the Mac to the iPad, they also tell similar story, the inventions were made for simplicity. An ad for iPhone simply states, what do you want to do with this phone? No jargons, no complexities. The c language had similar concept, what do you want to do? Printf? Scanf? getCh? Computer engineers will know these keywords, for others they are part of c programming language. Only the ones who have worked or ta...

Humanity has moved social, hands down. Yup, the war is won people are comfortable sharing their relationships on cloud. But the current social networks are simply relationships on cloud, what we need right now, is something more. Facebook was the game changer, it brought relationships on the cloud. It got better viewing of photos, it now includes video chatting etc. Google Plus started relatively (or rather exponentially) slower, while most of the world was slowly opening of on Facebook, google joined the race and tried to change the arena. Nothing happened, because Google Plus, even though came in fancy packet, it offered nothing different that what facebook offered or could offer. It was same old mumbo jumbo crap of relationships, chatting etc. Twitter always was a home-ground of misfits, the geeks, the marketing guys, celebrities and the journalists. The people in short who enjoy creating things and the 140 char space of twitter status was enough for them to ...

Ancient Egypt was the worlds most flourishing culture. They build structure which have dazzled the world at large for millions of years. But when we look at those giant towering structures called pyramids, we fail to overlook few things. 1. All of them are tombs of pharaohs of Egypt. 2. All of them follow same dimensions and stand similar way. 3. The people who build these structures are nowhere acknowledged. Any historian studying Egyptian would tell you that in ancient Egypt, the citizens used to devout their time farming. When the land was ready to harvest, the system would assign them to build the kings pyramid. There was no room for individual innovation and hence, despite being engineering marvels of the time, the pyramids era died down with the rise of prophets and modern religion. During the era, Moses stepped forward and offered freedom to the peasants. Moses came up to these people who never knew the taste of freedom and offered them, wh...

There was a time when I used to flash my light saber in a cool Jedi style writing code, customizing things. I used to attend every release and even predict things that would come. I used to proudly tell people, 'Aah that can be done, oh no this is a workaround,' and other flashy things. But, all good things come to an end. With so many features coming in with Winter 12, I have no idea which way I should begin with. Now, I am looking for Sensei. I have to learn Chatter, Ruby, Heroku, Mobile Apps, Rest API. Sigh, this is a general cribbing as I open the long length of document to plumb through the Winter 12 release note. Chatter will be over in a jiffy, Ruby book is purchased, I love Android and REST all is fine. So let me fold my sleeves and get into the release notes and as the tradition older than S-controls, will come up with the geeky my favorite winter 12 feature blog post next. Hopefully will do it before the next release. Vallah. Thanks for listening.

You may despise it, you may hate it, you may say its a fad or a fashion trend. But whatever you may do, you cannot ignore it. For the first time in the history of human civilization has the top few, who believed in controlling the system through devious means of information contro l, are running for cover. If you scan the daily news papers, there are paragraphs written over a single 140 characters line by some celebrity. The bottom line, we are changing the way we look at things due to these hammering of social media. Social media is no different that word of mouth, there were countless email forwards back in the old Yahoo days. However, email was a private affair the spread of information was linear, however in social media, the spread of information is cumulative making it more effective and blown up exponentially. This pattern can be shown in a graph as below Ideally both email and social media reached the same number of users but unlike in email, in social media you can track t...

Did you see the tweets of #DF11 in your timeline? Did you happen to see large posters of Microsoft, balloons of Oracle floating around in Sfo? If you still didn't know what was going on, it was Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce conference, which this year saw nearly 45,000 people registering for the event from over 60 countries, according to a Salesforce media statement. This turned to be the largest conference in the software industry. Obviously, if you have anything to do with Salesforce, you would know all this. If you are not, you have definitely heard of it. It was a futuristic step to deploy a enterprise based CRM on Cloud and yet even after a decade, Salesforce keeps itself way way ahead of the competitors (are there any left now?) in again releasing a futuristic enterprise application. The key take away from the entire Dreamforce 2011 conference was social and mobile. Salesforce opening the gates for a full fledged enterprise SCRM, where conversation and your lea...