Additional speakers will discuss cloud computing technologies such as: Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.

For more information, visit http://www.dayofcloud.com

About Chicago TechExpo

The Chicago TechExpo introduces and connects small business owners to technology solutions to grow and evolve their businesses. The one–day conference and exposition provides relevant, training and education, to allow business owners to learn how technology can improve operations, minimize time spent on administrative tasks, market their business and increase sales by using a very powerful tool: technology.

For more information, visit http://www.chicagotechexpo.net

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001gnjSEAQ

Marketing Lucidity’s Marketing Budget Management application for Salesforce CRM integrates seamlessly into the Salesforce Marketing suite, enabling marketing users to establish enterprise-class marketing budgets, expense tracking, and partner marketing funds.

Check out Marketing Budget Management today on the AppExchange:

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000001e80SEAQ

Michael W. Topalovich, CTO
Delivered Innovation

For years, the rallying cry for the CIO has been to align IT with “The Business.”  This presupposes that there is a wall between IT and other functions and processes within an organization, which of course we know to be the case. While nearly every business function that lives in its own silo has challenges integrating with other functions within the organization, IT has been particularly challenged because of the technology-centric reality of its world; while other functions may not necessarily have a direct impact on the value chain, IT is often viewed as being completely disconnected from it in many organizations.

Technology vendors have long targeted the CIO with messaging that implies an understanding of ITs alignment pain, and they have offered myriad remedies for closing the gap between IT and the underlying business processes that create value in an organization. Everything from enterprise applications to network management tools have promised to lead beleagured CIOs to the Shangri-La of “IT-Business-Alignment.”  Ironically, the technology with the most promise for bridging the IT-business divide has been right here under our noses, but only a relative handful of visionary organizations have embraced it to drive business value.

So if the technology is here, why haven’t the barriers between IT and value-creating business processes crumbled like the Berlin Wall?  The answer is simple: Technology without process is an empty proposition. Herein lies the key to bridging the divide between technology delivery and key business processes – stop viewing them as discrete entities. No single technology is going to magically run a business, and no business process can exist without technology. This is by no means a new idea, but in order to fully grasp the concept, one needs to embark on a journey of cognitive dissonance…forget everything you know about how IT and business have worked together in the past, because the traditional models of delivering technology services are dead.

Cloud computing presents a fundamental restructuring of the way technology services are delivered; in a way, cloud computing represents the technology manifestation of service-oriented design and delivery principles. Cloud computing does not create a bridge between technology and business processes – it goes far beyond that by obliterating the bridge and merging technology with process. The cloud computing service that best represents this unified technology and business process paradigm is the Force.com platform by salesforce.com.

By taking most of the variables out of the technology equation that have long been the domain of the CIO and the IT organization, Force.com gives those closest to business challenges the power to create their own situational solutions rapidly and effectively. This does not necessarily diminish the need for IT, as long as IT evolves to meet the challenges of managing the proliferation of cloud computing services throughout the organization; by undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis into a service and system management function that focuses on unlocking business value through governance and integration, IT can reinvent itself and retain its relevance within most organizations.

So what does this look like if IT is no longer the center of the corporate technology universe and business process owners have direct influence over the systems that enable the creation and optimization of value chains?  Simply stated, the role of the business analyst has just been elevated to the top of the system design and development hierarchy. Once relegated to the role of translating business requirements into pseudo-code and “throwing it over the fence” to a project manager or counterpart in the IT organization for further chunking and processing, the analyst has direct access to the technology systems and can implement or change functionality directly, providing immediate feedback and reducing cycle times dramatically.

Not to put too fine a point on this concept, but empowering those with the deepest of domain expertise to manage process-focused technology services and situational applications is game changing. Take a step back and look at a typical system development lifecycle process in a typical midsized or large organization:

1. A business need is identified within a functional area of the organization
2. The business need is validated by an analyst
3. A business case is developed to justify the cost and effort to engage the IT organization to design and implement a technology to address the business need
4. A business project manager is assigned to manage administrative overhead and the relationship with IT
5. An executive sponsor from the business function is assigned to provide leadership guidance and political capital to the effort
6. A business architect is engaged to design and integrate a functional solution with current business processes, independent of technology
7. The business analyst breaks down the architectural, functional, and feature requirements and writes a voluminous requirements document
8. The project manager initiates the process of engaging IT
9. IT tells the business project manager that it is too overwhelmed to take on any new projects
10. The business executive sponsor exerts political influence with a counterpart in the IT organization, and the project gets prioritization and traction
11. The business and IT project manager organize a project kickoff meeting that promises great fanfare and a pizza lunch
12. A clever name or acronym is assigned to the project
13. The business project manager presents the business case and the project requirements to IT
14. An IT analyst interprets the business requirements and translates them into IT-centric terminology
15. An IT architect takes the interpreted business and technology requirements and designs the network, server, platform, database, application, presentation, and security architectures for the proposed IT solution
16. The architect presents the solution architecture to the business stakeholders, and they nod their heads in polite agreement despite having little comprehension of what is being proposed
17. The architect engages functional architects to design the specific components of the proposed solution
18. IT project managers from each of the impacted functional areas are assigned to the project to manage Gantt charts and status reports
19. The IT project managers assemble teams of the appropriate technical subject matter experts, all of whom are currently assigned to a minimum of ten other projects and have little available focus or bandwidth
20. Internal IT project kickoff meetings are held, with pizza but slightly less bravado
21. After 6-9 months, if the entire effort has not died on the vine, a preliminary system is presented to the business for usability testing
22. The business stakeholders test the system and find that it bears little resemblance to what was originally envisioned
23. The entire project team is pulled into an all-day offsite meeting at a local hotel with catered snacks and delicious coffee to figure out what went wrong
24. It is determined that certain assumptions that were made at some point in the process were not valid, and the project regresses to mitigate the faulty decision logic
25. 15-18 months after the initial launch, the project is re-lauched with a clever new name and another pizza kickoff meeting, and the cycle is repeated until the project is either cancelled or a system is delivered that meets roughly 20% of the originial business requirements.

Now look at an analyst-driven situational development process, enabled by Force.com:

1. A business need is identified within a functional area of the organization
2. The business need is validated by an analyst
3. The analyst plans and designs a solution to address the business need
4. The analyst configures Salesforce or builds a custom Force.com app in a development instance of the platform
5. For any advanced design or development work, the analyst calls a trusted partner such as Delivered Innovation or SilverTree Systems to provide on-demand Force.com expertise
6. The analyst presents the new system to the business stakeholders
7. Having direct access to the new solution, business stakeholders provide instant feedback to the analyst, which is then incorporated into the solution design
8. This iterative process is repeated two or three times until the system is refined to the point where the business stakeholders are thrilled with the results
9. 6-8 weeks after the launch of the initiative, the new app is approved for production rollout, users are trained, and the business rapidly incorporates the new functionality into its processes
10. The business stakeholders take the analyst out for pizza to celebrate.

By empowering those closest to business challenges to create their own situational applications and solutions, organizations put themselves in a position of competitive strength by focusing on agility and rapid delivery of business outcomes rather than adhering to cumbersome and outdated technology implementation methodologies. Force.com and other cloud computing technology enables this transformation, and organizations that embrace this evolution and structure IT and business processes to leverage the game-changing potential of the cloud will find the rewards to be orders of magnitude beyond what was possible with traditional IT service delivery processes.

When I first read the OpSource Cloud announcement, I can’t say that the concept moved me to want to shout it from the rooftops; part of the reason is that I spent the first 10 years of my career managing IT infrastructure and I lost my passion for it long ago.  Another reason is that my company, Delivered Innovation, lives in a different part of the cloud “stack” and we leave the management of platforms and databases to our partners such as salesforce.com.  But I’ve followed Treb for the past few years, and I knew that someone with his vision had a grander plan than just building a better Amazon EC2.

While OpSource Cloud will of course be widely compared to Amazon and RackSpace at a technical level, what I was looking for from Treb during his demo was whether he attacked the major concerns, real and otherwise, that enterprises have about moving IT resources beyond the walls of their corporate data centers.  The web-based management and provisioning interface had a clean look and feel, the process of setting up an account and system users was straightforward enough, and getting up and running with a standard Red Hat image took all of a few clicks and about 8 minutes of processing on the back-end.  I was extremely impressed, although admittedly I don’t have enough experience with other services to provide any type of competitive benchmark.  But what I did come away with was a sense of Treb’s laser-like focus on the key barriers to enterprise adoption that have caused cloud computing services to be regarded more as curious novelties than real drivers of value in the corporate IT world: security, performance, and management control.  And it was this focus that got me excited about OpSource Cloud, because I see this service offering as being a key step forward in driving the legitimacy and acceptance of cloud computing in the enterprise.

My key takeaways from the demo and my discussion with Treb:

1. OpSource isn’t reinventing the wheel here – rather than using a proprietary virtualization technology, they are leveraging VMWare, which already has a significant foothold in the enterprise.  This has its pros – namely that IT organizations are already familiar with VMWare and OpSource Cloud gains instant credibility by leveraging the VMWare brand equity.  It also has its cons – Oracle, for example, has chosen not to embrace VMWare and does not openly support its products when installed on the platform.
2. The user security appears to provide granularity and control far beyond what Amazon provides.  While I don’t think many IT folks would run off and “spend all the money on XBoxes and flat screen TV’s” as Treb joked about, the enterprise IT market demands the same type of access control that it has for its in-house platforms.
3. When I pressed Treb about my concern that despite the 100% uptime SLA and the guaranteed latency between systems, we were still talking about the same public Internet and OpSource would be in the position of having to defend itself from user dissatisfaction over any performance degredation regardless of the location or source of the issue, he laid out a very compelling vision of leveraging MPLS between the corporate site and the OpSource Cloud to provide quality of service over the public network.  I’ll leave this up to folks smarter than myself to determine the feasibility of this, but I like that there was a solution in mind even though the problem may not necessarily be within the sphere of OpSource’s control.
4. Customers have complete control of private VLAN’s and network address translation (NAT), allowing them to determine which servers can be accessed over the public Internet, and which ones stay completely private.
5. A complementary storage offering is in the works, and is expected to be released in about two months.
6. OpSource Cloud will provide burstable CPU, allowing enterprises to scale computing capacity on demand.
7. Customers will be able to leverage dedicated firewall options.
8. The service touts SAS-70 compliance.
9. VMWare images will be portable between customer on-premise systems and OpSource Cloud instances.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the OpSource Cloud.  It’s a step in the right direction from the perspective of addressing core concerns that have dogged enterprise adoption of cloud computing services. We’ll definitely keep an eye on it and the press reaction over the coming days and months.

You’ve probably come across this before…you need to create a custom VisualForce page for a specific Record Type, but overriding the ‘New’ or ‘Edit’ button seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition (i.e. you can do a single VisualForce page and embed the Page Layout using Apex:Detail, but you can’t mix custom pages with standard Page Layouts). We came across this recently at Delivered Innovation, and we want to share our solution with the community. This specific example involves the Saleforce Case object, but can be applied to any Standard or Custom Object.

Use Case: Client has multiple call centers supporting various product lines; support team ‘A’ requires a custom Wizard to rapidly search for and collect details for the Case record that the standard Salesforce search interface cannot provide.

Solution: While you can assign a specific Page Layout to a specific Record Type and embed VisualForce pages in the object Detail view, currently salesforce.com does not support embedded VisualForce Pages in the Edit view of a Page Layout; likewise, salesforce.com does not support custom VisualForce pages for specific Record Types.  The solution is to “intercept” the command to create a new record in an Object before Salesforce processes it, and this is accomplished with a 1-line VisualForce page and a StandardController extension that pulls and analyzes certain URL parameters to enhance the out-of-the-box process routing capabilities of Salesforce.

The VisualForce Page code:

<apex:page standardController="Case" extensions="caseRedirect" tabStyle="Case" showheader="true" action="{!redirect}" />

The Apex controller extension:

public with sharing class caseRedirect {

private ApexPages.StandardController controller;
public String retURL {get; set;}
public String saveNewURL {get; set;}
public String rType {get; set;}
public String cancelURL {get; set;}
public String ent {get; set;}
public String confirmationToken {get; set;}
public String accountID {get; set;}
public String contactID {get; set;}

public caseRedirect(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {

this.controller = controller;

}

Original code (prior to refactoring):

public with sharing class caseRedirect {

private ApexPages.StandardController controller;
public String retURL {get; set;}
public String rType {get; set;}
public String cancelURL {get; set;}
public String ent {get; set;}
public String confirmationToken {get; set;}

public caseRedirect(ApexPages.StandardController controller) {

this.controller = controller;

retURL = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('retURL');
rType = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('RecordType');
cancelURL = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('cancelURL');
ent = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('ent');
confirmationToken = ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('_CONFIRMATIONTOKEN');

}

public PageReference redirect(){

PageReference returnURL;

// Redirect if the Record Type with custom VF page has been selected

// Note, rType represents 15-charater ID for Record Type

IF(rType == 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'){

returnURL = new PageReference('/apex/(insert VF page here)' + '?' + 'retURL=' + retURL + '&' + 'RecordType=' + rType + '&' + 'cancelURL=' + cancelURL + '&' +
'ent=' + ent + '&' + 'nooverride=1' + '&' + '_CONFIRMATIONTOKEN=' + confirmationToken);

}

// Now we need to tell Salesforce what to do in the event that this is not the Record Type we're looking for

ELSE{

returnURL = new PageReference('/500/e' + '?' + 'retURL=' + retURL + '&' + 'RecordType=' + rType + '&' + 'cancelURL=' + cancelURL + '&' +
'ent=' + ent + '&' + 'nooverride=1' + '&' + '_CONFIRMATIONTOKEN=' + confirmationToken);

}

returnURL.setRedirect(true);
return returnURL;

}

}

Now for the important part – in order for this to work when Salesforce users create new Case records, you need to override the ‘New’ button for the ‘Case’ Standard Object.  This can be accomplished by selecting ‘Setup / Customize / Cases / Buttons and Links / ‘Override’ on ‘New’.  Select ‘VisualForce Page’ for “Content Type,” and then select the VisualForce page you created using your modification of the code above in the “Content Name” dropdown list, and you’re set.  The “Comment” area is optional. Don’t forget to set the security for this VisualForce page to provide the required Profiles with access.

Jeff Douglas has provided another method for achieving automated redirection to VisualForce pages on his blog.  You can find the link here.

Questions? Suggestions? Leave us a comment, or email me directly at blog[at]deliveredinnovation.com.

Mike Topalovich, CTO
Delivered Innovation

Kathy addresses a tectonic shift in project planning and business case development that we are seeing with our own clients – designing systems for the long-term or even for the enterprise as a whole may be a losing proposition in an era of rapid change and innovation. Read between the lines and she is making a very strong case for Situational Applications.

Three key points:

With many emerging techniques and technologies, the pace and nature of innovation is accelerating; thus, the time horizon in which we can take advantage of the opportunity is decreasing.

In a time of rapid innovation, if we always invest for the long term, then we miss many short term improvements that can make a significant difference in productivity, cost and even the happiness of the people whose problems you solve.

Thinking back on this [enterprise-wide] approach, I believe we wound up with bigger projects, more risk, more complexity, more people, more requirements, and often, a far bigger solution than was really needed.