Just for the record, I am not recommending this as a solution.  This decreases the security of your Salesforce org, and is generally against best practices.  If you don’t fully understand the implications I would definitely not recommend this solution.  That said, I saw a client that did exactly this and thought I would share:

Turn off identity confirmation entirely: trust all IP addresses.  This way the connecting IP address is always trusted, and therefore identity confirmation is always bypassed.  Likewise, you will never need a security token for any connection.

This also means that if someone gets a Salesforce username/password combo from any user with API access, they can login and extract your entire database without a security token or email address verification from anywhere in the world.  Use with caution!

Cheers,

John

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion surround the maintenance fees for certified professionals.  I was having a hard time understanding the fee schedule myself, so I asked for clarification.  Here’s what I learned:

You will be charged $100 per year per certification track you maintain.  Maintenance fees start one year (or 3 releases) after your first achieved certification within that track.  There are 2 tracks:

Administrator (entails Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Consultant)

Developer (entails Developer, Advanced Developer)

In short, the maximum amount you will be charged per year is $200 for certification maintenance, although each track may be billed at different periods.

Hope this clarifies for those with any remaining questions.  Cheers,

John

Even when I remember specifically where each submenu lives within the Salesforce setup, searching for me is more intuitive and faster, which is why I was super excited to read this post from Jeff Grosse (@CRMFYI).  This Greasemonkey script adds a search menu to the Salesforce setup window and filters the setup menu on the fly:

What you need:

FF 3.5+

Greasemonkey

Setup Enhancer Greasmonkey Script

Notes:

Make sure that Greasemonkey is installed and you’ve restarted Firefox before attempting to install the Setup Enhancer script.

You can post enhancement requests to the discussion board of the script.

I’ve been playing with VOIP products a lot recently.  For instance, I learned you can make VOIP calls through Gizmo5 [registration currently closed] using your Google Voice number.  That’s pretty handy when you’re in another country – so long as you’ve got wifi, you’ve got a US phone number.  For free.  Since Google purchased Gizmo5, I expect we’ll see some interesting offerings when the product is re-launched.

But I digress.  As great as the above combo is, I still often connect with others using Skype.  This lead me to start collecting their IDs on the contact record.  From there it is pretty simple to create a URL to dial them through Skype directly.

Skype ID is a text field.  Skype URL is a formula field using the following:

IF( LEN(Skype_ID__c) > 0, HYPERLINK("skype:" & Skype_ID__c & "?call", "Skype " & Skype_ID__c ), "No Skype ID")

This can also be implemented as a button using this code:

skype:{!Contact.Skype_ID__c}?call

Happy dialing.  Cheers,

John

I am typically not doing a ton of programming, but when I do I like to use meaningful (long) variable names, and frequently mistype them.  Woe was me, until…

I type: pb# and the code is translated automatically.

The configuration is really simple:

So far I have used this mostly for shortening email addresses, company names, and URLs.  But when I fired up a DE tonight for some light code testing it hit me that this could be a huge time/pain saver for you heavy coders out there.

PhraseExpress is Windows only (Mac users can try TextExpander), free for non-commercial use, $49.95 otherwise. 

Note: PhraseExpress v7 was recently released, includes Windows 7 support and new features.