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:

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

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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.