Salesforce.com frustration

We are nearing our limit of 1GB storage space in salesforce.com. I emailed my sales rep about increasing storage and his reply was $1500 for an additional 1GB. After some frantic screaming (by me) he said he had made a mistake and new pricing was actually$750. Anyway it sent me on a tyraid because I feel such a sense of vendor lockin with salesforce and such a prisoner to their EXPENSIVE product line that I did some research on alternatives. My post to a blog that sums up my problems very well eplains my thoughts pretty good. We are currently at 95% usage. See image below for our actual usage right now.

Blog Post: http://forcemonkey.blogspot.com/2009/08/salesforcecom-data-storage-space.html

My Comments:

Great post. This is exactly the problem we have and our stats look exactly like yours. 61% used up in tasks, and our usage grows about 5-7 % per month. Problem is that 15 of our users are sales people who call, email and do stuff all day long. So 50 - 80 tasks is nothing when you consider, emails, calls etc..

It is pretty scary the strangle hold salesforce is applying to my company. The quoted price for more data was at first $1500 per year for 500 meg, but after screaming loud enough he told me he made a mistake and the new pricing was $750. We have 30 users and pay approx $36,000 per year for salesforce. In a world where google gives me 17 GB free, salesforce should be a little more liberal with their storage space. They aren't the only kid on the block any more either.

I could save 70% with sugarcrm and 88% with zoho. Admittedly, especially since we are so comfortable with it, salesforce is still top dog (in my opinion) and worth some extra bucks. But at some point you break the camels back. Then you give up a few features (increasingly fewer) to save $25 to $30 K per year.

Using IIF with ColdFusion Report Builder

I was trying to do some conditional logic in coldfusion report builder and having some problems. Evidently the problem was with my misunderstanding of IIF. I was trying the following:

IIF (len(myvar), myVar, myVar2)

The way IIF works is that it expects strings, indicating variables, which to me is counterintuitive. But the solution that worked was:

IIF (len(myvar), 'myVar', 'MyVar2')

This evaluated to the correct values of those variables and works great.

Inserting a Line Break in ColdFusion Report Builder

I had a field that I wanted to insert a line break. This field needed to be dynamic in it's sizing and it is very possible that it will have to wrap. So It was not an option to just place another field box or textbox below the current one, because if it wrapped and expanded, then the text would flow over the box below.

So I needed a way to force a line break inside the expression builder.

Turns out I just needed to insert a "Chr(10)". More detail: query.fieldname & Chr(10) & ' more text here if you want'

That worked great and now the size of the text in query.fieldname doesn't matter. If it wraps everything is just pushed down, as I wanted.

Screen Capture and Screen Recording Free Software

Ray Camden posted to his blog using a demo he recorded using the following software to record his screen: http://www.jingproject.com/.

Recording is capped at 5 minutes in both the free and pro version. The pro version is only $14.95 per year. Since it is capped it won't work for long demos. But for short instruction clips or demos of individual items it looks like a great tool, and such a good price.

Displaying the Copyright Symbol &copy in Coldfusion Report Builder

I wanted to display the copyright symbol in coldfusion report builder. We put that at the bottom of each page in our report to state our copyright protection of our content. This took me a while to find, but it is simple. I created a query field and added the following to that field:

chr(169) & ' Copyright 2009 Companyname'

The chr(169) was the trick.