Hi Force.com Devs -

 

Looking for quotes on developing a new/customizing an existing Gantt style Resource/Project planner to replace the clunky IBM ILOG Elixir based version in FinancialForce PSA that we are currently stuck with.

 

Please email force@columnfivemedia.com with estimates, ideas, questions, hopes, dreams, etc.

 

Or - reply on the thread. 

 

Thank you!

 

Kaede

 

Background:

 

I am an admin for a really wonderful creative agency. We specialize in making information beautiful (data visualization, infographics, web-based interactive pieces, motion graphics, etc). For a little over two years, the agency's use of Salesforce was limited to our small sales/exec team (10 users), doing standard Salesforcey things like managing Leads and Opportunities. Don't let that fool you, though. We are big believers in the platform and have built-out our org to do all kinds of cool automatic robot stuff (I even dream about workflow rules). We know anything is possible.

 

This influenced our decision to implement FinancialForce PSA (Professional Service Automation) in order to bring our entire company (~50 users) onto the platform.

 

While this is proving to be a very powerful tool, the IBM ILOG Elixir Resource/Project Planner that comes out of the box with FinancialForce is causing serious frustration for our team of Producers. It is clunky, unintuitive, and unfortunately unattractive. It looks like 1997 and feels like trying to use a computer that got hit by a bus.

 

We design beautiful things that make sense! It is a form of torture for our creatives to fumble with this tool. It is also sad for me, as someone who genuinely appreciates the beauty and endless possibilities of Force.com, to watch our team's perception of the platform warp into disgust.

 

 

Project/Job Details:

 

We need help developing a Gantt chart style tool (or integrating/improving an existing tool) that will give our team the ability to do things that we cannot do (/cannot do with reasonable ease) using the current IBM ILOG Elixir Gantt chart planners.

 

 

Replace FFPSA “Resource Planner” Gantt Chart View:

 

This tool is primarily used by Producers to view and edit Assignments on their active Projects. Also used by Directors/Execs to gauge Producer bandwidth and get a high-level understanding of the agency's active Projects. We need the tool to help us with these things:

 

• Quickly view/edit Projects in a drag and drop Gantt chart view (timeline based on Project Start and End Dates
• Create/edit a Projects' related Assignments from the same Gantt chart view
• Adjust scheduled hours per day on related Assignments
• View/edit the Start and End Dates of Projects' related Project Phases on the same Gantt chart view
• Create/delete related Project Phases on the same Gantt chart view
• View weekend days in a shade different than weekdays
• Understand when TODAY is with the inclusion of a vertical line down the Gantt chart at TODAY (), a different color shade, or some other indication that makes sense.
• If current user is Producer Profile (the Owner of their Project records), the Planner will show them only the Projects that they own
• If current user is Director/Exec Profile, the Planner will show them all all Projects, grouped by Producer.
• Filterable by Producer (Project Owner), Practice (Every Project is related via lookup field to 1 of 5 Practices), Stage (picklist field), and more?

 

Replace FFPSA “Resource Planner” Gantt Chart View:

 

This tool is primarily used by Producers to gauge Resource availability when they are looking for a Designer to assign to one of their Projects. Also used by Directors to view Producer availability. 

 

This is basically the same thing as the above but with different criteria - we would love to use one tool to perform both functions. However, we don't want to compromise usability by introducing controls/filters that are only useful (but absolutely necessary) in a few circumstances.

 

 

Resources/Supporting Links:

 

Here is a link to an imgur album showing screenshots of our sad UX reality: Gantt Planner Screenshots

 

If you see things in the screenshots you don't think look like Salesforce: We are using SKUID to make our org more beautiful. We are using CalendarAnything to put a bandaid on the problems we face visualizing Project Start/End Dates and a Project's related Project phases.

 

Link Summary:

• IBM ILOG Elixir <- What the Planners are made out of
• Planner Guide PDFs and Planner screenshots collected in a Google Drive
• CalendarAnything <- What we thought we could replace the Planners with, but isn't cutting it
• SKUID <- The coolest thing ever/What we use to make our Salesforce a beautiful place to be
• imgur Album <- Marked up screenshots of Planners and Calendar Anything Gantt Views - with context

 

Assignment Rule for New Leads for Existing Accounts. How?

Hello,

I would like to write either a lead assignment rule, workflow rule or Apex Trigger to accomplish this.

We would like our lead assignment, trigger and/or workflow rules to check if the lead's COMPANY already exists as an ACCOUNT, and therefore assign the new lead to the proper ACCOUNT OWNER.

Is there a formula that anyone can provide me to make this happen?

It would be great if the formula would look for CONTAINS "ACCOUNT NAME" rather than a direct match, for cases where a new lead submits their company name in a format slightly different than our existing ACCOUNT NAME.

Thank you greatly for your help.

Hello,

 

I'm in charge of trying to put together an Internal Knowledge Base using Solutions.  (And using Knowledge is out of the question due to it costing $50/User/Month for a single piece of functionality).  So I have to find some way to work around the fact that one can't assign security restrictions to categories of Solutions, so only certain profiles have access to certain categories. 

 

One way I thought of doing this is to grab the relevant Category names themselves depending on the UserInfo.getProfileId() when the apex class is called, and then doing the search off of them. 

 

So can WITH DATA CATEGORY also be used for Solutions? 

 

Or, if anyone else has any other ideas to help solve this problem?

 

Has anyone else tried to do something like this?  Any advice whatsoever