Sendgrid: It Slices, It Dices (your data)
Pretty nifty analytics.
We’re definitely an iPhone and iPad kind of crowd.
Spot-Checking Record Type Agreement against Expectations
When we last left ZoHo’s cloud-based Business Intelligence tool
it was with the promise –or was it a threat? — of coming back to discuss matters honestly. To jar your memory, here is the screenshot of the counts of record types:
green is exactly or almost exactly as one would expect
yellow is pretty good
oh, provided you’re using a non-free account, it’s basically one-click publishing of your data. Take that, SharePoint 2013!
So, going row by row:
- University Alum Club has slightly more contacts than organizations — and that’s fine. From Columbia Business School (henceforth “CBS”) Club’s perspective, anyone in the file who’s an alum of another club is likely either a programming partner (in which case they should more likely be affiliated with that club’s Board – but that’s not universally true) or if not a subject matter expert helping us with programming development, s/he attended one of our events, we got some money from them, and aggregating those (relatively small) sums at their club level is as defensible a way as any — and might help us track who to be extra solicitous towards.
- Alumni Club Head Hierarchies are a placeholder mechanism meant to unify relationships among clubs as is seen here. These records don’t represent anything real in the world — they’re just a convenient way to encode a hierarchical relationship in the database.
- The other MBA clubs seem sound enough — (though truth be told there are a surprisingly large number of clubs, so I’ll have to go double check that with some troubleshooting). But logically those MBA club’s members/public would be the most likely of any alumni to attend my programming, so it would only stand to reason that they would be accumulating many more members with attendance and/or revenue association with them for each organization I tracked.
- The CBS Alumni case is actually the weakest – and that phenomenon has two causes. But I’ll return to that explanation, which is lengthier, after I finish up the other lines.
See Where They Live
Visalizing Geocoded Data is always so pretty.
The Clustering along the river isn’t terribly surprising.
Salesforce.com & Do: My Suspicions confirmed by TechCrunch
In this TechCrunch posting two day’s after the announcement that Do is closing (my snark is here in “Do is Done!”) they put more forcefully what I elected to leave as a skeptical question:
The Do.com closure raises questions about the Salesforce acquisition strategy. The company has bought several startups but has a spotty record. Manymoon was a great independent service but now looks like it has met its demise as part of Salesforce.com.
Show’em You Work: (Because it’s auditable in any case!)
There are many reasons to use a system as flexible and comprehensive as Salesforce.com is
In volunteer situations, it’s important to be able to convey that you’re pulling your weight.
If you configure Salesforce.com properly, all the efforts that you put in to meeting the expectations of your public are logged automatically, and can buy you much love and street cred when you publish the activity logs.
Using separate campaigns with diverse purposes, you can convince your constituents that you’re doing the job well
Club Data Hygiene — well, isn’t it obvious why that figures prominently in the efforts of a DBA?
Welcoming Alumni to DC — that’s how you slay’em and win them into the fold
Chair High Engagement is reaching out to alums to learn what we can do for them — and also as a prelude to asking for support. It’s a give-get, mutual world, you see.
This particularly robust stretch was in a period leading up to a White House tour for the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of MetroDC in 2011.
Nov 13 Social Media Power Panel in DC Hosted by Columbia & Chicago Booth
So here’s where my role as blogger blends into my role of booster-in-chief and board member of Columbia Business School Alumni of MetroDC.
So, adopting a tongue-in-cheek tone of voice,
We interrupt this blog to bring you a message from our sponsor…
Facebook. Living Social. Social@Ogilvy. Booz Allen.
These are the quality of mind and depth of experience you’ll get by attending this collaborative effort between the DC alumni clubs of Chicago Booth and Columbia Business School.
Currently scheduled to appear are:
- Facebook’s George Alafoginis
- Social@Ogilvy’s Rachel Kennedy Caggiano
- Motion Picture Association of Americal’s Kyle Scriven (Director, Social Media)
- Booz Allen Hamilton’s Jacquelyn Karpovich (Government Agency Social Strategy)
- Procured’s CEO, James Nichols
- Huge’s Megan Malli (Engagement Director, Digital Marketing)
You won’t want to miss this assemblage of expertise, so if you’re in DC, be sure to attend.
Wednesday November 13, 2013
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Crowell and Moring
1001 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC 20004
This event is open to the public, and is sponsored by the Columbia Business School and University of Chicago Booth School Alumni Clubs of DC. Come join us on November 13th this to learn, build relationships, network, and partake in some food and drink together!
Register here.
If you have questions about the evening’s panel, agenda or logistics, Please contact Ritija Gupta (rgupta10@gsb.columbia.edu)
Google Apps versus Office 365: Can you pre-date a WordPress Post?
forgive the verbatim repetition
[Here at Succellerator, we’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of the “Metro”/Office 2013 aesthetic on Microsoft’s flagship SaaS offering, Office 365. It’s not only visually elegant and appealing, which we knew from back in July 2012 when the beta dropped, but it’s also powerful and, with the exception of some of the metadata-driven backend components of the SharePoint 2013 publishing model, it’s very intuitive.]
To be sure, Google’s Google Apps for Enterprise and Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise edition are approaching the space and the tasks with different philosophies and historical strengths. I’ve been a Google Apps fanboy for a couple of years now, back when it was easy to favor one over the other. Honestly, I have to say, though the brands’ personalities are different, both are supremely competent and alluring, fun places to let your imagination wander.
To be sure, Google’s Google Apps for Enterprise and Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise edition are approaching the space and the tasks with different philosophies and historical strengths. I’ve been a Google Apps fanboy for a couple of years now, back when it was easy to favor one over the other. Honestly, I have to say, though the brands’ personalities are different, both are supremely competent and alluring, fun places to let your imagination wander.
Business Intelligence in the Cloud: Zoho Reports
I discovered today in the chrome webstore a nifty little business intelligence offering from Zoho.
Zoho Reports
So I uploaded some exports from Salesforce. First we’ll take a look at the login activity data, which begins to point towards how one audits things in the multidimensional space that is a database in the cloud, towards which lots of web services are making calls.
The summary function reporting of Zoho’s BI Tool is just like a SQL/MS Access GroupOn[Value] query. It enables us to take this table of 1,691 rows and look at the clustering of values. To tmake this interesting, I choose to Group On (and thereby collapse around) the LoginType field. And count the records to produce the following distribution histogram:
Distribution Histogram of Login Type: Humans aren’t even close!
Absolute Automation is the name of an app by IHance, and it’s an email matching app that takes all email to my address and tries to find a Salesforce record to attach them to — it makes for a very thorough approach to CRM, which is rather exactly what we’d expect from Salesforce.com
Cirrus Insight is an app that syncs Google Apps contact data with Salesforce — and enables creating new accounts & contacts & leads from within the Gmail interface.. Those 175 entries via the browser — that’s me as the admin: a living, breathing mortal who is a mere piker in comparison to the hard working apps Such is the beauty and power of Cloud computing
.
Record Type Agreement between Salesforce.ACCOUNT object and Salesforce.CONTACT.
Record type agreement — after all my bellyaching about the importance of a record type schema that can handle the complexity of the milieu in which an Ivy League Alum Club operates. Record type agreement is one way to track if one’s practice lives up to one’s theory. Furthermore, this little exercise is providng an awfully convenient excuse to dig deeper in Zoho Reports. Pretty nifty the way it’s just a few short clicks until you can make some interesting discoveries.
The image below shows a portion of the 1700 plus rows in the table. The grey shaded portion are SF.CONTACT object fields; the light blue are SF.ACCOUNT object fields. And the dark blue are redaction on my part to safeguard my alumni data.
When I was enthusing earlier about dataloader.io, this is why: if you don’t pull over related records’ actual fields, to look at a Salesforce export — well for a human, it’s often not an easy read: long strings of digits in which upper v. lowercase actually counts!
One nice diagnostic test to run is to compare counts of Salesforce CONTACT records, by record type, against the number of organizational ACCOUNT records, by record type. The logic of the nature of the relatioships that are to be expected helps one to ascertain how well the coding schema is working. So, again, using GroupOn ACCOUNT.Organization Record type: what inferences can we make about the SF.CONTACT records by type?
Take a look at the entires in the report and, as Linda Richmond would say: “discuss amongst yourselves.”
I’ll use non-Linda-Richmond diction by noting that I’ll return to this anon.
green is exactly or almost exactly as one would expect
yellow is pretty good
oh, provided you’re using a non-free account, it’s basically one-click publishing of your data. Take that, SharePoint 2013!
Do is Done!
No joke. Even the URL is cheeky: https://do.com/done.
The corporate product equivalent of going to spend more time with one’s family, no doubt.
Proof that the Salesforce.com juggernaut is not, in fact, fully invinciblw.
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