Stories by David Taber

Best Practices for Salesforce.com Administrators

The lists below summarize which tasks need to be done at standard intervals, including a pro-forma time budget. While the terminology and specifics focus on Salesforce.com specifically, the general administrative principles apply to any modern CRM system.

Don't Let CRM Data Make MIS Into Misinformation

Even if you have high-quality customer relationship management data, there's a hidden monster that can gobble up management information system credibility. It's time to reign in user-generated CRM reports.

Are Purchasing Practices Killing Your Software Projects?

Alan Shepard famously said, 'It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.' Don't let the purchasing department determine the success of your software project.

DreamForce's Big Idea: Smartphones as an Enterprise App Platform

At a conference as big and boisterous as Dreamforce, you hear a relentless stream of ideas. Some are good, but most are bad. At Dreamforce 2013, there was only one idea that really mattered: Whether smartphones are the future client for enterprise apps.

Why CRM Financial Analysis Always Fails

A smart person once said, 'As long as you're asking the wrong questions, it doesn't matter what answers you come up with.' When it comes to making the business case for CRM, the CFO is likely to ask too many of the wrong questions.

3 Ways CRM Improves Your Business Processes

Everybody knows that the use case for CRM. It's in its name, after all: Customer relationship management. But how does that really improve the way your company does business?

What to Do When Your CRM Project Fails

There are at least a dozen oft-quoted industry analyst reports that estimate the failure rate of CRM projects. The analysts' methodologies and standards vary, so the resulting failure numbers are all over the place -- between 18 percent and 69 percent.

The trouble with coding across the Clouds, part 2

The best cloud applications have development (or at least scripting) capabilities for creating and extending the platform's database and computational capabilities. But even the best of the cloud applications must put in limiters for their platform/development environments: an app isn't a general purpose run-time or generic object container. For example, the development language must be made safe for a multi-tenant deployment, and must be well-behaved so that user code can't take down the virtual machine, database, or overall application.

How secure is that Cloud vendor? Part two

Last week, we explored the 7 basics of cloud computing vendor security, including identity, authentication, encryption, ILP/DLP and audit trails. Now here comes the deep dive: access control.

How Secure is that Cloud Vendor? 7 Basics

Cloud computing security is an incredibly broad (and deep) topic, so I can only scratch the surface in a short article. Even so, let's try to get the basics under control.

[]