Salesforce1 is Missing the Calendar!

With the release of Salesforce1, Salesforce.com has made it easy to write and extend Salesforce Visualforce pages to any mobile device. No doubt, Salesforce users will be doing more than ever on their mobile devices. But interestingly enough, Salesforce has decided not to place a user’s appointment calendar on the Salesforce1 application. 

There is a "Today" tab on my iphone, but it doesn't seem to pull all my events correctly or give me what I really need to manage my events and calendar. To solve this problem, we at Snapptraffic Consulting produced a Visualforce page for the calendar and enabled that for Salesforce1 and extended it to all the mobile devices associated with our org (which happens automatically, you just need to have installed the Salesforce1 enabled VF page into the org and the tab appears on any mobile device).

A New Mobile Application

Now we have a new "My Day" tab on the mobile device!

Application Capabilities

This is a fairly straightforward Salesforce1 Mobile Application Calendar system that won't need a lot of explanation. Touching the "My Day" tab takes you to a mobile page showing a list view calendar with selectable options of "Today", "Next 7 Days", "This Week", etc. Here is a screenshot of that:

Notice that we included on the Calendar:

- All Events on a given day grouped together

- The Event Start Time and End Time

- The Subject, a clickable link into a drill down page showing all details of the event

- The Name field, also a clickable link to the associated lead or contact record

- The "Related To" field which can also be clicked in order to see the associated record

- The Location and Comments fields

No "New Event" Functionality

Salesforce.com also neglected to provide the Salesforce1 user with a means to create a new event. This is probably my number one need for a mobile device - to create an event while out, away from my computer. We decided to add this to the application as well. So in addition to the items noted above, using this application, Salesforce1 can also create new events from the mobile device.

For now our application styling is patterned off the standard home page look and feel that salesforce.com  uses on their home page that you'd see in a typical browser on a computer. We'll be modifying the style of this page to make it look a little more "typical" for a mobile app as we play with the app and decide on the look that we want.

Get this Application

If you would like this application, we'd be happy to make it available and install it for you. We're offering it for a a one-time fee for installation and licensing. The setup fee is a flat fee of $250 and the licensing fee is $25 per user.

Modify this Application

If you like the idea, but have some changes in mind, we'd be happy to make any changes that you'd like to the application before installing it into your org. These can be handled at our standard hourly rate which you can see on our website referenced below.

Produce Another Salesforce Mobile Application that You Need?

Do you have another requirement that you want to extend to the mobile devices of your team? Not only can we develop salesforce visualforce pages that your internal users to salesforce are using, we can also extend these visualforce pages to their mobile devices as well. In addition, we can develop applications, based on your Salesforce org, as you've customized it,  and extend those to the mobile devices of your users. Contact us if you'd like to discuss and get an estimate for your idea. 

Contact Us

If you'd like to have us install this application in your org so that your team has access to their Events on their mobile devices, just contact us through our website at www.snapptraffic.com. We'd be happy to meet with you, install the application, and help you with any other Salesforce.com issues that you may have questions about. 

Introducing Salesforce1!

One of the major announcements at the 2013 Dreamforce was Salesforce1. Salesforce.com is powering ahead by adding capability to Salesforce that makes it possible to connect nearly any kind of device to the service. The service to the mobile device is getting better and better. Salesforce1 was previously called Salesforce Touch, which was only offered for the iPhone. Now Salesforce1 also supports Android and other mobile devices like the iPad.

This is an exciting development because we'll now be able to write one application in a Salesforce org and make that system available to any device that users in the org decide to carry.

Where I think we'll be helping our clients most with Salesforce1 is by writing visualforce pages to deploy custom functionality to IOS and Android mobile devices. Over the years we have written hundreds and hundreds of visualforce pages. Now we can deploy these pages to the mobile devices. Any visualforce pages deployed to a custom tab in the salesforce org can be enabled for a mobile device.

Example: A Mobile Quoting Tool

I'll give a simple example. Let's say we want to give a quoting tool to a sales rep in the field. The quote consists of a few details from the account, a few primary fields from a contact record, and the basic fields on the opportunity along with the product line items. The rep would like to be able to use one form to enter all the relevant details, have the system create the resulting Account, Contact, and Opportunity, and Product Line Item records, generate a PDF, save it against the opportunity, and email it to the client.

A visualforce page could be written, enabled for mobile devices, and deployed to a tab called "Mobile Quote". Then on the mobile device, the user simply selects that tab and they will see the form where they can conveniently enter all the relevant details. Since it is visualforce, we can also provide countless conveniences geared towards the client's business model. For example, rather than having to use a cumbersome lookup to find relevant products, those could be presented in a picklist or found by enter a couple letters from the product name, whatever the users think would be most convenient.

When finished filling out the form, in one click the PDF could be generated, saved against the opportunity, and emailed to the client.

The options really are endless. This will be a system that we put to great use for our clients. Salesforce1 is finally making mobile a reality for our clients.

If you have a project in mind or simply wonder if the idea you have is feasible, contact us through www.snapptraffic.com, we'd love to hear about your project and let you know what it might take to develop it for you.