Friday, December 31, 2010

Salesforce acquires Etacts - about time.


I'm happy to see that salesforce acquired Etacts, because, I hope, it means that Salesforce should be refreshing its support & integration with Google Apps. Etacts has a browser plugin for Firefox and Google Chrome, which adds functionality to the gmail web interface.

Salesforce has always been good about bridging the gap between enterprise messaging apps, for example, Outlook and Lotus Notes. That strategy is crucial in providing a path to enterprise users into the SFDC cloud eco-system. It's well over due that Salesforce pays proper credence to integration with other Cloud players, such as Gmail/Apps. The balance is tipping from on-prem to in-cloud, which doesn't make their Outlook/Notes connectors irrelevant by any stretch of the imagination, but they have to better embrace their neighbouring cloud peers. I hope, this latest purchase is just that.

I'm curious if gmail has a set interface to allow for this integration, or if the Etacts plug in lives and dies by the Gmail upgrade cycle. I imagine the Etacts plugin model works similar to any old grease monkey script. I'm hoping that this little plug in will be retrofitted to work with Salesforce allowing users to display some Contact/Account info directly in gmail, as well as pushing emails into their SFDC org and associating said emails with Contacts/Ops/Cases/Custom objects.

Lets just hope the Salesforce/Etacts team can retrofit and roll this out in short order. I'm hoping they do some pilots, so us plebeians can get some hands on early on.

#Update#

I have found the GMail gadgets API here: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/gadgets/ which is what Etacts must be using. It's the same API that tools like Rapportive also use. Rapportive is a similar product to Etacts, but it does not support Salesforce.com, despit seeing some comments from last year stating that they would support Salesforce.com in the future.


The Coroners Toolkit from ten years past.

I randomly found something I wrote ten years ago now; "An Introduction to The Coroners Toolkit". Fun for me, probably not so fun for any readers here.

The TCT project, authored by Wietse Venema, still appears to be semi-alive here.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

ETL - Pentaho and Salesforce.com


I'm blown away every time that I use Kettle, especially with Salesforce.

The power and utility of this ETL tool is just brilliant, and the pain threshold to get running with this tool is actually really low.

I have been working on migrating my companies contract records off the Salesforce standard Contract record and over to the newer "Service Contract" object which supports the use of product line items.

The data I'm dealing with is not well structured. We have 30+ custom fields on the Contract object, typically service quantity and service price pairs, and some extra fields that all relate together in non-obvious ways. The idea is to do move to Service Contracts, and use product line items to quantify what services a client is entitled to, the price and the quantity.

The mapping of this is non-trivial, and one of those things that if you don't automate, you will have to scrap your work several times and start over.

The Kettle ETL tool let me create one bog ugly transformation, and re-peat the job again and again until I had incrementally built the whole thing out, and iron the bugs out.

I also use this same tool extract data from various source in the business, correlate and load (insert/update) those records into Salesforce.

Every time I mention ETL in the context of salesforce, people instantly say "Oh, so your using Informatica?". I have never used Informatica, and I know nothing about it, I have little interest in even looking because Kettle is one of the most solid items in my data toolkit, and it's free!

Unfortunately, Pentaho's other reporting tools do not seem to meet the same standard as Kettle has set.

If your doing ETL, and especially if it involves Salesforce, go check this out; http://kettle.pentaho.com/ Also known as PDI - Pentaho Data Integration

#Edit; fixed typos.