It’s Not About Technology, It’s About Ideas
The Ideas platform provides a method to collect feedback from end users, consumers, and other influencers of a product or service. The goal of ideas is to create a collaboration platform to prioritize requests and highlight delivery of past requests.
Examples of this platform in action:
http://ideas.salesforce.com
http://www.mystarbucksidea.com/
You could use this platform in any number of ways; here are a few examples:
- A suggestion box for your company
- Prioritize software feature requests from your end users
- Use customer/partner portals to collect and prioritize product feedback from outside of your company
Technical Details:
- Ideas
- Ideas support custom fields.
- Validation rules can take place on the idea or on idea comments.
- Ideas does not have a traditional page layout. The fields layout determines the order in which custom fields are presented under additional information.
- Categories is a standard multi-picklist field. New categories are added on the fields page; categories are disabled through idea settings.
- Idea Communities
- Limit of 1 internal idea community for professional orgs. Max of 50 for EE/UE/DE, can be linked to portals.
- Determine which picklist values are present.
- Determine which portals users can access this particular community (can be all portals or a single portal type).
- Determines the Experts Group.
- Cannot specify which fields are displayed (this is universal). Potential work-arounds include using VF or setting field-level security to hidden on a profile-basis.
- Experts Group
- An experts group denotes a community expert – it gives them a star.
Expert:
Non-Expert:
- The experts group selection points to a public group. Each member of that public group will be listed as a community expert.
- An experts group denotes a community expert – it gives them a star.
- Additional Notes
- Half-Life (in Days) determines how quickly old ideas drop in rankings on the Popular Ideas subtab.
- Delegated Data Administration is not available for Ideas.
- Ideas does not appear to be available for platform licenses.
- Half-Life (in Days) determines how quickly old ideas drop in rankings on the Popular Ideas subtab.
Wes
// Dec 2, 2009 at 3:04 am
Good article:) I’ve just implemented a bespoke pilot version of Ideas at my company (over 2000 people) and it has been a great success so far.
There is a lack of documentation for those wanting to customised the application heavily, but then again, most things worth doing are tough to do;) I seriously think crowdsourcing is going to be huge in the next few months, and that niche of app dev hasn’t yet been filled.
John Coppedge
// Dec 2, 2009 at 6:19 am
Thanks Wes- I assumed that heavily customized platforms like Starbucks ideas were created using VF. Did you guys take that route?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see crowd sourcing take off either- you can see many trends in the marketplace towards this end today. It would be neat to see an ideas platform that could be extended to include this functionality.
Cheers,
John