Continue reading »]]> I have been watching the concept of Chatter for a while now. On the one hand, I could kick myself for not making more hype out of Sugar Feeds, the exact same functionality Sugar has had in its product for more than a year prior to availability of Chatter. My bad.

On the other hand, I think Chatter has been over-hyped in a dangerous way, one that will lead to failure for Chatter as a product line for Salesforce.com.

And since I’m feeling particularly snarky on this pre-Labor Day Friday, I thought I’d jot down a “top 5″ list of reasons why I think Chatter will prove yet another one of Salesforce.com’s interesting, but ultimately unprofitable ventures.

Here we go…

1. Chatter is only an internal collaboration tool. There are many of these available, but more important is the fact that if Chatter is the lynch pin of Salesforce.com’s “social” strategy it is missing one very important thing – customer engagement. Unless Chatter “opens up” and becomes a true community/social engagement tools for users to collabroate and engage with real customers in real time, it is going nowhere in my opinion.

2. Chatter is not enough to unite departments and override data and people silos. I get that millions of users are on salesforce – but they are all ONE department inside an organization. To really benefit from the tenets of Enterprise 2.0 – all departments need to be on the same page – and I simply do not feel Chatter is equipped at this stage to be a unifying app to make an externally hosted system THE main collaboration platform. Not yet at least.

3. Chatter (and Salesforce.com) costs too much to have wide appeal. At $15 per non-CRM user, Chatter’s pricing will creep on a large organization. And smaller firms can simply collaborate in person or using IM or other tools – and resist adding even more fees to an overpriced CRM bill. I think Salesforce.com has some cool ideas around Jigsaw and adding data updates to the CRM and alerts to new data changes via Chatter – but at that rate we are looking at $45 per user, per month for someone using Chatter with Jigsaw alerts – and they get ZERO CRM capabilities to boot! If a user was using Salesforce’s Enterprise edition and Jigsaw they could be paying nearly $2000 per user per year!!!! Compare this with SugarCRM which gives you all this stuff for $30 per user.  Yes, there really is the opportunity to cut your CRM and collaboration costs SEVEN TIMES with SugarCRM versus Salesforce.

4. (Do I really need to keep going after pointing out how ridiculously expensive this stuff will be for a company?  Ok, I’ll go on…) Salesforce.com’s outdated multi-tenant model will hold Chatter back. Look, Salesforce has a lot of cool ideas for Chatter and its web site shows some suggestions for use – document sharing, etc. But is there a Chatter developer kit?  can there be one?  Will salesforce.com let people really take Chatter and run with it to create collaboration engines that integrate between applications, departments, inside and outside multiple firewalls, leverage Oauth to activate engagements through multiple social networks? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Chatter seems like a great idea locked inside a limiting architecture – yearning to break free.

5. Adoption will be underwhelming. CRM vendors sell into sales and marketing and support departments. These guys have a lot on their plates, and most have no “social agenda.”  Salesforce.com in my opinion would be better off simply selling the value of its core solutions, which are solid well-built apps, instead of branching off into these new areas where it has no domain expertise. I toyed with #5 being “Salesforce has lost its focus” but I think that happened years ago. But seriously, as noted in #2, I think there are way too many barriers to success for a concept like Chatter as a paid-for tool. I am not saying Chatter doesn’t do what it says it does 9for the most part it does) but I think that Salesforce.com must leverage Chatter as a “cool add-on” or value-add rather than expecting this to be a profit center, because I think they are too far ahead of the pace considering their true target market.

…OK, those are just a few of my thoughts around Chatter. Ultimately, I think Chatter is cool, but underwhelming as a standalone product line. Maybe that is why I did not make more hype around Sugar Feeds – I simply see that most companies are wrestling with getting core CRM right, social-collaboration is rocket science to them – foreign and scary. Being asked to pay extra for these kinds of features must feel like a slap in the face.

Maybe I’m wrong. I mean, the Jigsaw capabilities could be really hot for Salesforce. Or, maybe the majority of small businesses are still learning to walk with CRM and getting social…paying a ton of additional money with no clear ROI path to start running with social and CRM might not make sense for a lot of companies right now.

Continue reading »]]> When it comes to social media, Salesforce.com leads rivals like Oracle and SAP — and its success could help your company reach customers. Case in point: Salesforce.com apps now work with social networking services like Twitter and Facebook.
By C.G. Lynch
Thu, March 26, 2009
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CIO — At a time when many companies still struggle to manage the rise of social networks and understand what the trend means to their organizations, Salesforce.com has begun tailoring its business software to help people harness the power of social media. During the past year, the company has taken several steps to make its core products work alongside popular consumer applications like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

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While analysts say Salesforce.com’s efforts to make its business applications more social and consumer-oriented will further bolster its ongoing efforts to uproot old school rivals like Oracle and SAP, the strategy also shows a forward-thinking view in how business technology has changed: The traditional tendency to separate business and consumer technologies is not only unrealistic, it misses an opportunity to interact with current and prospective customers.

“They’re the only enterprise vendor that has really embraced the social side of the Web,” says Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone. “Everyone can spend their time on Twitter, but this enables some collaboration with customers because of it.”

They’ve Got a Friend in the Consumer Web

Salesforce.com’s latest foray into the consumer Web happened earlier this week. The San Francisco-based vendor announced that organizations using its customer service application (dubbed Service Cloud) would be able to connect it to Twitter, the social networking service where users post short messages.

It works something like this: a customer service rep can monitor conversations occurring over Twitter, while, at the same time, analyzing data in their Salesforce.com app to help answer questions about a product. The answers to those questions can be posted to Twitter by the rep, or, provided the technology is in place, to the frequently asked questions section of a company website.

The Service Cloud product already has such a feature for Facebook conversations, so the emergence of businesses building a marketing and customer service presence on Twitter made sense to Salesforce.com executives as a next logical step in helping companies figure out how to utilize social media outlets.

“Companies are wrestling with social media,” says Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce.com’s vice president of product marketing. “Many don’t know how to interact with these sites yet, and as a result, they’re losing touch with their customers. Today, it’s not a matter of investing in the call center. They need to expand customer service to where they’re communities are now living, which is places like Twitter, Facebook and Google.”

A symbiotic relationship with the latter company began years ago, establishing Salesforce.com’s first significant step in partnering with powerhouses on the consumer Web. In June 2007, Salesforce.com announced that its core customer relationship management (CRM) software, which is used by sales and marketing people to track their clients’ information, could be used alongside Google Ad Words, which allows companies to advertise their products on Google by associating them with specific keywords.

In April 2008, the two companies announced that any customer of Salesforce.com could add Google Apps to their existing CRM software for free. Google Apps is Google’s Web-based software for businesses (a competitive product to Microsoft Office) that includes Gmail and instant messaging, as well as basic productivity apps like Documents & Spreadsheets.

After its Google alignment, Salesforce.com felt emboldened to push further into the consumer Web. In November 2008, at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco, the company’s CEO Marc Benioff shared a stage with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, unveiling a product that allowed developers to build enterprise applications for Facebook using Salesforce.com technology.

While Facebook leaders remain consumer focused (and will for a long time), they welcomed the partnership as an acknowledgment that social technologies will change the way people consume and use technology at work. Because Salesforce.com was a pioneer of the idea that people could access business applications on the Web instead of installing them on their company’s machines — a process often referred to as software as a service or cloud computing — its products became a logical fit for emerging technologies on the Web like Facebook.

“The reason we partnered with Salesforce.com is we believe by working with the business community, by working with CIOs and people who run businesses, we can help understand the needs of their users,” noted Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager, during an interview with CIO at Facebook’s headquarters back in January. “Salesforce.com has really been pushing the limits in delivering software as a service and they have a great cloud computing platform that makes cool apps.”
Salesforce.com, for its part, holds a definition of cloud computing that isn’t limited to the enterprise-focused software market it competes in along with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. In many ways, Salesforce.com’s strategy seems to include all the moving parts of the Web — search, social networks, instant messaging — as coming together in one unified view for workers.

“It’s not only the movement for companies to subscribe to services like ours, but all of them, whether it be Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or Google,” Salesforce.com’s Swensrud says. “It’s about making all these services work together so we can collaborate and communicate.”
Similar to this Article

Analysis: Salesforce’s Addition of Google Apps Shows Google’s Intent to Enter Business Software Market
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Beating the Old Guys

The efforts by Salesforce.com’s competitors to make their products more social and Web-friendly have either been speculative or half-baked in their conception. Oracle hinted that its newest package of software, called Fusion Applications, would include social networking and “Web 2.0-like” features, but customers will have to wait to see them. Fusion won’t hit the market until 2010 at the earliest. In February, SAP launched its “Business Suite 7″ software product, in which SAP executives, with a mouth-full of jargon, alluded to “Twitter-like” functionality in parts of the next-generation software suite,” but that won’t be ready until late 2009.

Analysts say Salesforce.com’s competitors have struggled to incorporate consumer Web applications due to their business models and technology foundations. Oracle and SAP garner the majority of their revenue from on-premise software (which customers install on their own servers and computers). Salesforce.com, on the other hand, runs purely on the Web. For customers of Oracle and SAP, this antiquated model presents technological challenges in hooking their on-premise software up to Web-based applications like a Facebook or Twitter.

“It’s just generally easier to do with Salesforce.com because [the software] is more open,” says the Yankee Group’s Kingstone.

Paul Greenberg, an analyst from the 56 group, says that Salesforce.com has not only been innovative in fashioning the proper technology, but smart in its approach to start with customer service (instead of sales) when it comes to connecting its products with social networks. Social networking users, especially on Twitter, don’t want to be sold to directly unless they ask for it. Instead, they want to have conversations with companies about their products.

“The Twitter-verse would not respond well to pushing sales down that channel,” he says. “When push comes to shove, the uber-benefit of dealing with these external social channels is customer service.”

Many companies have had success using social networking applications, specifically Twitter, to respond to customer inquiries. Frank Eliason, a customer service representative from Comcast who runs the Comcast Cares Twitter page, has become a notable figure in social media circles by responding to messages concerning the cable company’s products. He says he has been in discussions with Salesforce.com about its Cloud Services product, because, in addition to social networking add-ons, it works with core customer service technologies that have existed for years.

“We are not using it at this time, but we are working with them and sharing our expertise,” he says. “We would consider it. It is nice because it integrates the variety of communications channels a customer may choose such as phone, email, chat or social media, such as Twitter. It also helps to align the data from each method.”

Continue reading »]]> These enhancements will allow you to better integrate the payment form and receipt page to the look and feel of your merchants’ websites.

You can now customize the section heading text as well as the body text, including font type, style, size and color. You can select from a range of colors provided, or enter a color code to display a specific color.

To customize the payment form and receipt page using the new options:

1. Log into the Merchant Interface at https://account.authorize.net
2. Click Account from the main toolbar
3. Click Payment Form under Transaction Format Settings
4. Click Color and Font Settings
5. Make any necessary changes
6. Click Preview to see how your changes will look or click Submit to save your changes
7. If at any time you would like to revert to the default payment gateway settings, select Reset Defaults.

We hope these changes will help create a more seamless transaction experience for your merchants’ customers.

Continue reading »]]> Two new calls to the Transaction Details API, getUnsettledTransactionList and getBatchStatistics.

getUnsettledTransactionList returns up to 1,000 unsettled transactions per call, returning the most recent transactions. The information returned in the response will be the same as what’s returned in getTransactionList call.

getBatchStatistics returns the batch stats for a single batch like settlement state and time, charge count, decline count, etc.

For more info, check out the XML guide and the SOAP guide.

Retrieving transaction details through the Transaction Details API is Authorize.Net’s solution for developers looking to extract reporting and statistical data on existing transactions.

Gaining access to the details of previously processed transactions is important for reporting and reconciliation. The Transacton Details API allows merchants to retrieve the following sets of data:

• Batch settlement information, including statistics broken out by payment type.
• Limited transaction details for specific batch requests.
• Full transactional details for specific transaction IDs.
• Limited transaction details for unsettled transactions.
• Batch statistics by payment type for a specified batch ID.

Continue reading »]]> The hosted CIM option provides a way for you to establish a hosted connection with Authorize.Net that allows the exchange of sensitive cardholder data to happen on our secure servers instead of the merchants’ servers.

The hosted CIM is available to all developers now, however, the feature is not yet being publicly announced as it’s still officially in beta. For more information on the hosted CIM option, please see section two of the CIM XML Guide and the CIM SOAP Guide.
A hosted CIM solution was one of most-requested features from many of you, and we hope this release will help alleviate some of the scope and complexity of PCI DSS compliance.

Continue reading »]]> Our latest Developer Center release is now complete. Any of the bugs or errors reported to us concerning the SDKs should now be resolved.As part of the release, all of our SDKs now fully support CIM, ARB, eCheck.Net, Card Present and the Transaction Details API. To review the available SDKs, please visit http://developer.authorize.net/downloads/.

We have also added a page on the Developer Center for information on our Transaction Details API located at http://developer.authorize.net/api/transaction_details/. Here you can download the SDKs or review the XML and SOAP API guides.Our Test Account Error Generation Guide is now also available from our Troubleshooting Tools page at http://developer.authorize.net/tools/.

And last, if you need a Card Present test account, you can now request one from our test account page at https://developer.authorize.net/testaccount/. Just make sure that Card Present is checked.Thanks and we hope these updates will help you as you go about your integrations and testing.

Continue reading »]]> Welcome to the Authorize.Net Developer Community. The purpose of this community is to provide a peer-to-peer support and interaction channel for developers using Authorize.Net’s APIs, certification and affiliate programs.

To be part of our community, there are some guidelines to which we expect you to adhere. Nothing crazy – just the basic, should-go-without-saying kind of stuff that we actually do need to say.

Authorize.Net Developer Community Guidelines
First and foremost, to register for an account on the Developer Community, you will need to agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We strongly recommend that you read these thoroughly as your community membership is at all times contingent on your adhering to both of them.

The following community guidelines are intended to help foster helpful community interaction and in some cases are already covered in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. But because they are so important for a successful community, we’re listing them again:

• Be nice and courteous to everyone. Seriously. If you can’t play nice with the others, then you won’t be playing at all.
• Be professional and respectful. Everyone has something to offer. You may not agree with everyone or think every message adds value, but that doesn’t give you the right to start acting like a teenager. Any posts that contain profanity; material that is libelous, fraudulent, vulgar or obscene, indecent, lewd, harassing, pornographic, abusive, offensive, defamatory, threatening, hateful, inflammatory, or otherwise objectionable; or attacks on other users, will be removed and you run the risk of being banned from the community.
• Be relevant and concise. Stay on topic and add value. Don’t post just for the sake of posting. If you post, your comments should be relative to the topic at hand, and be straight and to the point. Those reading your posts shouldn’t be taken on a trip through la-la-land before finally figuring out what you’re talking about.
• Be careful. Remember, as a peer-to-peer community, this is user-generated content. You’ll find great advice here, but your particular integration probably varies a bit from those giving the advice. It’s even possible that some posts contain information that is flat-out wrong. Use the same good judgment in our community that you would use on information pulled from anywhere else on the Internet.
• Do not send SPAM or use the community for your personal commercial use. Don’t be that guy. No one likes him. Really, they don’t.
• Respect the moderators and the job they do. Every member of the Developer Community is responsible for doing their part to foster an open and inviting community. If you see inaccurate, off-topic, or disruptive posts, you should report them to the moderators.

And last but not least…

• Have fun. Sure, this may be “work” for all of us, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and entertaining at the same time. As your community administrators and moderators, we can assure you that we’re expecting to have some fun as well—or at the very least, not be bored to tears.

The Community Guidelines were created so that you know what is expected of you and what you can expect from other members. We want the community to be friendly, informative and fun for all. If at any time you have questions about the community, please ask! Our moderators and administrators are always happy to help.

And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we hope you’ll enjoy the community!

Continue reading »]]> Our latest Developer Center release is now complete. Any of the bugs or errors reported to us concerning the SDKs should now be resolved.

As part of the release, all of our SDKs now fully support CIM, ARB, eCheck.Net, Card Present and the Transaction Details API. To review the available SDKs, please visit http://developer.authorize.net/downloads/.

We have also added a page on the Developer Center for information on our Transaction Details API located at http://developer.authorize.net/api/transaction_details/. Here you can download the SDKs or review the XML and SOAP API guides.

Our Test Account Error Generation Guide is now also available from our Troubleshooting Tools page at http://developer.authorize.net/tools/. And last, if you need a Card Present test account, you can now request one from our test account page at https://developer.authorize.net/testaccount/. Just make sure that Card Present is checked.  Thanks and we hope these updates will help you as you go about your integrations and testing.

Continue reading »]]> In the past, when using a test environment account, transactions would only settle about every 10 minutes and settlement did not occur by default. Instead you had to email developer support with your test account Login ID asking that settlement be initiated.

This is no longer the case. With the changes that were recently implemented on the Developer Center, all test environment accounts are now automatically settling transactions without any action required on your part. There is no longer a need to request that settlement be enabled in order to refund transactions in your test account.

Also, transactions are now settling only once per day after the Transaction Cut-Off Time in the account. Please note that a settlement file will only run once per day. If you change the Transaction Cut-Off Time in the account to try to force a settlement to occur, this will likely only cause delays in your next 1-2 settlement files.

Continue reading »]]> Hi again,

Today, we’re also pleased to announce that we now have an XML API for Transaction Processing. The API, createTransactionRequest, is available now. The guide is still being finalized, but you can review the XSD at https://api.authorize.net/xml/v1/schema/AnetApiSchema.xsd.

And of course, for your convenience, here are the XML examples for the request and response:
———————————————————————
The following is the XML sent for transactions.
———————————————————————

 

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<createTransactionRequest xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”

xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns=”AnetApi/xml/v1/schema/AnetApiSchema.xsd”>

<merchantAuthentication>

<name>hcwt42</name>

<transactionKey>123abc</transactionKey>

</merchantAuthentication>

<refId>123456</refId>

<transactionRequest>

<transactionType>authOnlyTransaction</transactionType>

<amount>5</amount>

<payment>

<creditCard>

<cardNumber>5424000000000015</cardNumber>

<expirationDate>1102</expirationDate>

<cardCode>999</cardCode>

</creditCard>

</payment>

<lineItems>

<lineItem>

<itemId>1</itemId>

<name>vase</name>

<description>Cannes logo </description>

<quantity>18</quantity>

<unitPrice>45.00</unitPrice>

</lineItem>

</lineItems>

<tax>

<amount>4.26</amount>

<name>level2 tax name</name>

<description>level2 tax</description>

</tax>

<duty>

<amount>8.55</amount>

<name>duty name</name>

<description>duty description</description>

</duty>

<shipping>

<amount>4.26</amount>

<name>level2 tax name</name>

<description>level2 tax</description>

</shipping>

<poNumber>456654</poNumber>

<customer>

<id>18</id>

<email>someone@blackhole.tv</email>

</customer>

<billTo>

<firstName>Ellen</firstName>

<lastName>Johnson</lastName>

<company>Souveniropolis</company>

<address>14 Main Street</address>

<city>Pecan Springs</city>

<state>TX</state>

<zip>44628</zip>

<country>USA</country>

</billTo>

<shipTo>

<firstName>China</firstName>

<lastName>Bayles</lastName>

<company>Thyme for Tea</company>

<address>12 Main Street</address>

<city>Pecan Springs</city>

<state>TX</state>

<zip>44628</zip>

<country>USA</country>

</shipTo>

<customerIP>192.168.1.1</customerIP>

<transactionSettings>

<setting>

<settingName>allowPartialAuth</settingName>

<settingValue>false</settingValue>

</setting>

<setting>

<settingName>duplicateWindow</settingName>

<settingValue>0</settingValue>

</setting>

<setting>

<settingName>emailCustomer</settingName>

<settingValue>false</settingValue>

</setting>

<setting>

<settingName>recurringBilling</settingName>

<settingValue>false</settingValue>

</setting>

<setting>

<settingName>testRequest</settingName>

<settingValue>false</settingValue>

</setting>

</transactionSettings>

<userFields>

<userField>

<name>MerchantDefinedFieldName1</name>

<value>MerchantDefinedFieldValue1</value>

</userField>

<userField>

<name>favorite_color</name>

<value>blue</value>

</userField>

</userFields>

</transactionRequest>

</createTransactionRequest>

—————————————————————————
The following is the XML response for transactions.
—————————————————————————-

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<createTransactionResponse xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”

xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns=”AnetApi/xml/v1/schema/AnetA

piSchema.xsd”>

<refId>123456</refId>

<messages>

<resultCode>Ok</resultCode>

<message>

<code>I00001</code>

<text>Successful.</text>

</message>

</messages>

<transactionResponse>

<responseCode>1</responseCode>

<authCode>UGELQC</authCode>

<avsResultCode>E</avsResultCode>

<cavvResultCode />

<transId>2148061808</transId>

<refTransID />

<transHash>0B428D8A928AAC61121AF2F6EAC5FF3F</transHash>

<testRequest>0</testRequest>

<accountNumber>XXXX0015</accountNumber>

<accountType>MasterCard</accountType>

<message>

<code>1</code>

<description>This transaction has been approved.</description>

</message>

<userFields>

<userField>

<name>MerchantDefinedFieldName1</name>

<value>MerchantDefinedFieldValue1</value>

</userField>

<userField>

<name>favorite_color</name>

<value>lavender</value>

</userField>

</userFields>

</transactionResponse>

</createTransactionResponse>

We hope this new method of submitting transactions is useful.