Salesforce Heretic

In our 5th part of our 4,323,412 part series on building our own Mail Merge tool for Salesforce.com we take a look at downloading the mail merge template file, and getting Word to perform the merge. (more…)

If you haven’t read them, parts I, II, and III get into how were going to do the merge, as well as how we’re going to get the data. At this point we’ve settled on using the XML merge feed from the Salesforce.com UI, and we’re going to generate CSV data to get fed into Word. (more…)

So, in a quick recap, we’ve already laid down, in general terms anyway, why we’re doing this, and generally how we’re going to do the merge. Now it’s time to get the data.

So if you’re a Salesforce.com customer with access to the API you might think to yourself, “Oh, this is easy… Just query the object I need, wham boom bang, vola!”. Good luck with that. (more…)

This post best read with Twisted Sister, We’re Not Gonna Take It playing in the background…

Back in our introduction to this series, I elaborated on some of the issues surronding Mail Merges in Salesforce.com. In this part we’re going to look at how Word handles a Mail Merge, and figure out how we’ll get our data ready to be merged. (more…)

Mail Merge — What I’m sure is one of the most used extensions to Salesforce.com, is also one of my most hated things. In fact, every time I hear it come up I cringe, because I know it’s not going to be good. I’ve gone as far as to label it The Third Rail of Salesforce.com. (Ok, so I kinda stole the thrid rail bit from Social Secuirty and Politics, but it fits…)

When one of my clients was evaluating new CRM packages circa July/August 2004 we ran Salesforce.com through it’s paces. We tested the security model, custom fields, even ran a quick test mail merge… We knew we’d find some limitations, no surprise to anyone really, but everything seemed ok. The client migrated all his data and went live Oct 1st, 2004. And woah did we miss something with Mail Merge… (more…)