To quickly wrap it up: It was a good decision. I have built 9 Business Objects in the meanwhile of which the first one was the most difficult obviously. The others quite naturally follow. These are as of now: Workitem, Sprint, Book, Attachment, Note, Payment, Regular Payment, Statement, Transaction. Furthermore I have added Analytical Objects for the purpose of analyzing the Business Objects. I will explain by and by what they do. I will not explain the programming model and architecture of Microsoft Windows Azure in detail. You can inform yourself in public sources, if you want. The UI is HTML – so it’s not worse than salesforce.com. Plus I have added some diagrams in Microsoft Silverlight.

I was able to quickly implement the business logic, that I wanted to have. The programming language I use is C#, which I like. After implementation you press a button (ok, three, four) and then the application is running live in the cloud. It’s just so easy, lean and clean.

So the first Business Object I implemented is the Workitem. In salesforce.com I called it Goal – I am still a little bit indecisive how to call it. I can say so far that it is different from all other Workitems or Tasks that I happen to know. I asked myself what I need for my daily work. My work is that of a Knowledge Worker. It is in good part unpredictable, but not unrelated. Also it is not unplanned. And it has clear goals and a clear purpose. So for this requirement I tailored this Business Object Workitem and I worked with it for many weeks now. I have worked now with at least 3000 instances of it and I am more happy with it than with any other task or project tool that I used so far. I have my work under control now, notwithstanding the fact that many unpredicted events occurred and adaptations of the plan were either necessary or chosen by me.

And: It is served in the cloud. Obviously this means that I can access it from every computer with a browser, which I regularly do. Recently I was in a shop and wanted to buy a memory extension. I did not remember the model. So I asked, if I could quickly use the computer, logged into my Platform and looked it up. Just as easy. In other instances I just pulled out my iPhone, logged into my Platform – using the standard browser, and edited some workitems. I did not even have to write an iPhone App for this. Although I might in the future.

What did I do with the old workitems/goal instances that I had already created in salesforce.com including attachments and notes? Within two days I migrated them completely into my Azure Workstream Platform. How? Salesforce.com offers web services to read the content. So I pulled out the Web Service Description (WSDL) from my salesforce application – which as we remember were custom objects – into Microsoft Visual Studio, generated WebService Proxies for that, mapped them into my Business Object Structure and then pulled the content over. That’s it. From that point on I as productive in my own Azure Workstream Platform. And I am until today.

I will explain more about the functionality of the Business Objects, that I created, soon.

Well – I thought I would go to the cloud. I logged in force.com and defined my own Business Object “Goal”. That for me was the better term than Workitem, because I think it is more important what to reach instead of what to do (and probably reach nothing at all). That helps me to keep focus. It is a constant reminder to me not just to do things, but always to ask: Why? What do I want to reach, if I am doing this and that – or just not do it.

I defined the “Goal” Business Object. I wanted to make it hierarchical with subgoals. However this is not possible with force.com. You can only have a two level hierarchy  of business object – like invoice header and invoice item. And you can not define the hierarchy within the same object (goal – subgoal = goal). Strange. What you can do however is to define a relationship of a goal to another goal and call it “subgoal”. This still gives me the usability I need. I get a subgoal create partition in the goal screen and I can navigate to the supergoal (after I have defined the field). So all seems fine? No. If I delete a supergoal I would expect, that subgoals are also deleted. Not so with that type of relationship.But in practice I can live with it, because I am not deleting Goals so often anyway, because I work with a status which is manually set. I keep the completed goals for reference purposes. More than once it happend to me that I asked myself: How did I do that three weeks ago? This and that proceture (e.g. installation of something – to a second computer). Then I was happy that I could just select the old goal and look into the detailed descriptions. The only thing that I am missing here is the same thing as with the missing deletion function: The deep copy is also not possible – i.e. to copy a goal with all of its subgoals, so that I can use it with a fresh status. For this coding  would have to be done – and I was not willing to learn APEX – the force.com programming language – at this stage. I’d rather live with the compromise.

So after a little bit of trying I was able to create my goals and subgoals, attach notes, attach files, attach tasks (which I did not really use), manage the status of them, prioritize them, even create relationships to other force.com business objects like opportunity, and search and create my own selections and reports. That was better than any tool that I had used before. And I could access it from everywhere – which I actually needed. I can access it with iPhone as well, even though the salesforce client does not support custom business objects (like my “Goal”). So I have to use the browser. This is not so user friendly, but possible.

In the meanwhile I created about 1.500 goals all in all, most of them subgoals and sub-sub goals. I could work quite well until I thought: How much work do I actually have to do? So I added the field “Remaining Days” and “Remaining Hours” for the Remaining Effort (I tend to keep it simple). This is an absolutely great feature: Add a field on the fly with an existing database and use it right away. However what I wanted of course was to aggregate the effort of subgoals and sub-sub goals to the supergoal – but depending on the status (not count completed ones). So I was at the point again of learning APEX or not. I had a look over it, but I thought: Why should I learn the proprietary APEX and then live with the limitations of the platform (e.g. only two level business objects)? How I resolved this situation I will report in another post.

Therefore I quickly extended Salesforce with what I wanted.

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It is a lightweight integration with minimum data redundancy. Within a matter of one hour I added four links into my Lead.

1. Link to XING Profile
2. Link to XING Group Membership
3. Link to XING Messages – Inbox
4. Link to XING Messages – Outbox

These Links are calculated from the Name of the Lead, so I do not need to enter them. The only thing I need to enter is the profile name in itself – in my example FrankMichael_Kraft. Probably this can be calculated as well – if I can confirm if they are constructed.

The resulting page is displayed within the salesforce Lead. I can interact with that page as well.

So I have minimum data redundancy: I need not to copy the correspondence into the lead for example. I just use Salesforce mainly to maintain the status of the Lead.

So what I like about the Salesforce approach to CRM is:

• There are ready-to-use Business Objects – I can start in a matter of minutes.
• It is relatively easy to add new fields and links.
• The new fields and links are operative immediately. No deployment, whatever. Just run.

What I do not like so much about the Salesforce approach to CRM (as of my knowledge of today):

• I’d prefer more a social approach to CRM. I disregard mass email production. This is my preference.
• It is not clear to me how Lead Activities integrate with Email outside of Salesforce CRM.
• To add a Link you have to manually add it to every (in my example 4) layouts to be complete.
• I first missed the link construction syntax. However there was no errormessage. Just no page displayed.
• In the customization of Leads it promises to be able to change the Lead Process. But all you can do is to remove one or more of the 4 predefined statuses. This is much less than I expected.

However I am quite happy about this lean solution, that I can use right away.