This is the second blog entry addressing the issues raised in the November 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review called “What Every CEO Needs to Know About The Cloud,” by Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Center for Digital Business. The article was organized into two main sections, The Benefits of the Cloud and The Skeptics’ Concerns. The Skeptics’ Concerns This blog entry will relate Salesforce.com to the cost, reliability, security, and regulation issues raised under The Skeptics’ Concerns section of the HBR article. This blog entry is not an argument that Salesforce.com is cheaper or better than anything else. It simply discusses the issues brought out by the article in the context of Salesforce.com. While the article certainly argues in favor of cloud computing, the...
Read moreThe November 2011 edition of the Harvard Business Review has an article entitled, “What Every CEO Needs to Know About The Cloud,” by Andrew McAfee of MIT. I am planning a couple or three blog entries about this article. This one will focus on who the article is targeted toward. The additional blogs will discuss how the insights in the article apply to Salesforce.com. The article is organized primarily into a benefits versus skeptics analysis. People already working with the cloud will probably not get any new insights, though. On the benefits side, it discusses the benefits to productivity, collaboration, data analysis, and developing applications. On the skeptics side, it...
Read moreIt is not possible to simply copy the selected values in a multi-select picklist with a formula field. Perhaps a multi-select picklist is defined on Account and a copy of all the selected values needs to be echoed on Opportunity so that the user does not have to flip to the Account to see it. Simply putting the picklist field in a formula generates an error, "Error: Field Multiselect_Picklist__c is a multi-select picklist field. Multi-select picklist fields are only supported in certain functions." One of the special functions such as ISPICKVAL or INCLUDES must be used. Here is one solution to this problem. SUBSTITUTE( TRIM( IF( INCLUDES( Account.Multiselect_Picklist__c , "Value 1" ) , "Value 1", "__") & IF( INCLUDES( Account.Multiselect_Picklist__c , "Value 2" ) , "Value...
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