James R Sullivan

WebEx was acquired by Cisco. So, before they do their re-branding I’d like to offer an overview of their services:

• Service outages don’t happen often, only a few times per month!
• Customer support doesn’t speak English, so if you speak their language you’re in luck, you have a native speaker!
• If you like surprises you are in luck! Upgrades are completely unannounced!
• Intel Macs are not supported as a presenter so if you’re a Mac user you don’t have to worry about people asking you to present!
• The meeting invitation times are USUALLY correct… so you don’t usually have to tell people to ignore the WebEx stated time and use another time.

This post is technical in nature and may be unreadable by non-Salesforce.com-admin people.

Salesforce.com campaigns get a bad reputation regarding their functionality. I think it’s partly to blame on how the reports don’t allow enough joins (campaign-lead-opportunity) reporting and partly to blame on how the CampaignMember record is not available for inclusion in customization and workflow.

One of my regular blog reads, Gokubi, has a post about how difficult it is to use the Campaign object. Here are a couple tips that we compiled for making your experience with Salesforce.com Campaigns more bearable:

1. Look at campaign member details from within the campaign using a report:

Create this report:
Type: Campaigns > Campaigns with Leads (or contacts)
Filter: All Campaigns, and CampaignId equals “abcd”

Save the report in a folder that everyone can see (or at least marketing). You can override the report filters via the query-string. Here is my report URL:
https://na1.salesforce.com/00O60000001BzAf

Now, if you want to override a value in the filters, append this to the URL:

https://na1.salesforce.com/00O60000001BzAf?pv0={Campaign.Id}

The value to the right of “?pv0=” will be inserted into the first filter. If you take the URL you just made and use it as a custom link on a Campaign, you automatically have a campaign-specific report where you can drill into some information directly from the campaign detail screen.

I have one of those jobs that is just a blast. Have you had one of those jobs where you actually feel fulfilled, your work is taken seriously, and you get to have fun? If you’ve been in tech as long as I have, I guess you’d say no. Here, the people are good, the company’s mission is good, and I have a position where I enjoy what I am responsible to do. What’s the point of me droning on about a cool place to work? We have lots of openings throughout the company as we are growing… The company is Black Duck Software. If you like open source, or just want to sell a cool product you should check out what we do. Here is a link to the job openings page.