Soapbox Engage Blog

In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for Joomla and Salesforce.com users. We're a bunch of regular matchmakers.

Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive.

I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

When I had a chance to demo what we've already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin's tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.

Readers of our blog have probably seem our use-cases before, so I won't dive into them here, other than to see we're about at a point that we'll be releasing the open source version of this code to the community in early January 2007.

Meanwhile, I've got some reading to do thanks to Meghan's gift of The Business of Changing the World (guess who wrote it), and some grassroots efforts. We'll soon have the Joomla component up on the AppExchange, and are eager to start building some really cool applications around it, such as:

• member directories
• online donations
• mini-Salesforce dashboards via Joomla administrator
• ...and plenty more!

As everyone knows, we're rather agnostic when it comes to CRM tools. Pick the best tool for the job and move forward. So our goal at PICnet is to build bridges from your organization's Joomla CMS to your CRM system. DIA, Salesforce, and CiviCRM are all great tools we have connections that make life easier for non-profits. Now it's time drill deep, and really give these users some powerful applications that sit on top of their CRM of choice.