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Tuesday 23 December 2014

10 Tips for Getting Out of a Slump

12 Days of Salesforce: 10 Tips for Getting Out of a Slump

By the time the holidays have concluded, people have a mountain of work that they've fallen behind on, which does little to alleviate the stress of slumping. 
Often the most difficult parts of being in a slump is the ability to get out of it. That's why, for this 10th day in our 12 Days of Salesforce series, we decided to feature some tips for getting out of a slump you may have fallen into this December.


Here are the 10 tips: 

1. Acknowledge that You're Only Human

The holiday season especially can put too much on your plate (and we're not talking about too many servings of Christmas ham and cookies). The "life" portion of work-life balance becomes front-and-center, but that doesn't mean that work demands have diminished.
You cannot maintain energy and focus if you're trying to accomplish too many goals at once, like connecting with family, throwing a rockin' holiday party, and finishing up on your end-of-year planning for work. Take some time to write down what your priorities are and then re-evaluate them. Are you obsessing a bit too much over holiday party decor? Serve enough spiked eggnog, and people will hardly notice the decor! Does that work project need to get done by a certain date, or are you setting unrealistic expectations? Take a look at the list and then re-prioritize if applicable.

2. Get Excited

When you're in a slump, it's easy to look at things from a glass half-empty perspective. That party that should be really fun to attend just ends up being another slot occupied on your calendar that is causing you stress. When you find yourself spiraling into the "everything just being another item on your to-do list" mindset, try to take a step back and realize that the holiday season is supposed to be FUN!

3. Get Support

Often these insights are difficult to discover on your own, which is why it's important to find someone to vent with, but also someone who is willing to speak up and let you know when you're being a little ridiculous. This could be a spouse, a trusted friend, or even a licensed professional — whoever helps you take inventory of your priorities and make changes when necessary. 

4. Start Small 

You won't be able to upend your to-do list and start fresh overnight, so starting small is key. Whether this means RSVPing to some parties or spending an afternoon gift shopping, there's no reason that everything needs to get done all at once — even if it may feel that way. Little successes become bigger ones when you put them all together. 

5. And Then Build on the Small Successes

Keep the momentum going by building on each of these little accomplishments. You may write one thank you note on Monday, two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, and so on. Little by little, you're slowly building towards getting yourself back on track with a clear mind. 

6. Make an "I Did" Instead of a "To-Do" List

To-do lists can be amazing for keeping yourself on-task; but when you're in a slump, often there's nothing more daunting than a list that feels like it's growing by the second. Instead, take a more positive approach and list things that you've accomplished throughout the day: responded to that important email, nailed a presentation, took out the trash. 

7. Focus on the Benefits, Not the Difficulties

Do you see a theme here? When it comes to a slump, the most crucial element of turning the tables is sparking some positivity — even when that's the last thing you may feel like doing. Rather than focusing on how visiting family is going to be a pain because of the two-hour drive in bad weather, think about the benefits: spending time with the people you love. Write it down if necessary as a little reminder to stay positive!

8. Make Small Changes to Your Routine

A slump can often come from the monotony of routine. By making small changes and mixing it up, you'll feel better and more energized. This could mean going for a jog after work, meditating a few minutes before bedtime, cooking something instead of picking up dinner from your usual spot, or even just getting coffee from a different coffee shop (maybe one that requires a bit of a walk). 

9. Read 

Sitting down with a good book, perhaps with some tea and a fuzzy blanket, can have amazing calming effect. You can also read material that relates to your specific goal, like a book on being a better manager or a blog post about work-life balance

10. Ban Your Biggest Time-Waster

When a person is stressed out and in a slump, often we take comfort in our little time-wasters — scrolling through Facebook, a favorite video game, etc. But these time-wasters are more detrimental than usual when a person is in a slump and they can be a black hole where all of your motivation and productivity disappears. So set some boundaries and ban these time-wasters, even if it's just for a day or a week.  
The holidays have gotten a bit of a reputation for being bittersweet — there's lots of fun to be had, but with that comes a lot of stress and sometimes a work slump. Being able to recognize when you're in a slump is the key, and then use these ten tips to turn the tables.

Reference:

                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Monday 15 December 2014

    A New Salesforce E-Book

    Accelerate Your Sales Performance: A New Salesforce E-Book
    Some of the best sales professionals are those who have created the right strategies and applied the right techniques to take some of the chill out of cold calling. Handled correctly, cold calling can not only be a more pleasant activity, but a far more effective one as well.


    What the E-Book Is About 
    Created from the teachings of the best frontline Salesforce managers, this book will tell you:
    •  Best practices to prepare for a call
    •  How to efficiently organize your sales team
    •  Tips on how to make a connection every time
    •  Why the phone beats email
    •  Great tools to measure yourself and stay organized.
    •  A list of external resources for further study
    Take advantage of this e-book, created from the experience of the best front-line salesforce.com managers. Among many others, you'll learn actionable tips that will help you:
    • Increase outbound sales effectiveness
    • Make lasting connections with your prospects
    • Improve your ability to sell as a team
    Reference:


                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Monday 8 December 2014

    Solving Java Memory Regressions with Zero Overhead and High Accuracy

    Customer trust is Salesforce’s highest priority. Our customers trust us with their data and that our software platform will perform reliably. They also trust that our applications and architecture will be the fastest and most responsive user experience. That’s why performance is at the top of our priorities.
    The Salesforce Performance Engineering team is tasked with ensuring that the platform and SaaS applications perform at the highest level.  Our team conducts extensive performance tests continually. We monitor and analyze the results and resolve any regressions that are found. Even a few percentage points degradation in performance is not allowed to go into production.
    The performance testing is done in the form of workloads. A workload is a repeatable load test consisting of a set of user requests that exercise specific features or functionalities (Apex cache, Visualforce pages, or Chatter feeds for example). A given workload is run periodically, usually daily, on the latest code version at that time. We achieve repeatability and high accuracy of the test through full automation of the run, data collection, and data analysis.  The performance engineering team relies mostly on open source tools (e.g., JMeter for generating load) and tools developed in-house (e.g., test automation orchestration, data collection, and results processing).

    Memory Allocations Heavily Influence Application Performance

    Application performance depends on many factors, including: the architecture of the system,  algorithms used to achieve given functionality, efficiencies of the code and database queries, cache system, the database, and so on. Among these factors, object allocations play an important role in Java application performance, or any other application utilizing a VM that manages application memory. An increase in the number and/or size of objects allocated may take more operations by the application code.  Also, a higher object allocation rate usually leads to an increase in the overhead of memory management by the host VM.

    Solving Memory Regressions in a Complex Application

    While detecting memory regressions is a relatively easy task, finding the root cause of the increase in memory allocations is usually a very hard problem to tackle. A number of commercial and open source tools exist that aim to help in solving this problem. Commercial tools like YourKit can track object allocations by instrumenting bytecode of the application. Instrumentation is done by an agent attached to the JVM at startup. Another approach to solve memory regressions are heap dumps taken at runtime of the app and inspected later with tools like Eclipse Memory Analyser (MAT), YourKit, etc. In addition to that, ThreadMXBean which is part of JMX MBeans can be used to estimate amount of memory allocated in a given transaction. This usually requires embedding an instrumentation framework in the application that collects and records this data in the logs for every transaction executed by the application.

    Collecting Information About Allocated Objects with Zero Overhead

    If these approaches do not help, what can we do to solve memory allocation regressions? Let’s summarize what we need to succeed:
    1. We want to record all object allocations and associated parameters (e.g. object type and amount of bytes allocated) during the run of our workload.
    2. We do not want our workload to be impaired by overhead either caused by bytecode instrumentation, or overhead associated with collecting the data about allocated objects by the profiling agent.
    3. We need to ensure high accuracy of the results collected in test experiments.

    Illustartion:

    A simple Java application that allocates double arrays wrapped in class MyDoubleArray. In the base run, the application allocates 2000 MyDoubleArray objects each containing adouble[102400] array. The regressed version of the code allocates the same number of MyDoubleArray objects, but with the double array larger by 100 elements (i.e., double[102500]). Comparison of heap dumps produced as the result of the algorithm we discussed show this difference in the amount of memory occupied by double[] (see the below image). Note that other objects have the same count and occupy the same space in the 2 heap dumps.







    Reference:


                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd
                                                                    

    Monday 1 December 2014

    7 Key takeaways from Dreamforce 2014

    A compelling list of takeaways is evidence of a great conference. Those who attended Dreamforce 2014 f put together a list of the lessons that have stuck with them through all the post-event madness. We’re sure you have your own list of ideas that resonated with the attendees from your organization, but we want to share our top seven with you





    Reference:



    Monday 24 November 2014

    Salesforce Launches Desk.com App Hub, Empowering Fast-Growing SMBs to Leverage Customer Service ...

    Salesforce  launched the Desk.com App Hub. The company calls it a “one-stop shop to easily deploy partner apps that extend [the use of] Desk.com.”

    The new Desk.com App Hub is a one-stop shop for SMBs to easily access more than 50 partner apps that help them enhance the customer service experience and accelerate growth.Utilizing partner apps that manage everything from e-commerce and email marketing, to telephony and text messaging support, Desk.com customers can now deliver greater levels of customer engagement and have a single, comprehensive view of the customer

    Desk.com, the all-in-one customer support app, allows fast-growing companies such as HotelTonight, SoundCloud and ZenPayroll to deliver awesome customer support and connect with customers in a whole new way.

    “Desk.com has a good feel for fast-growing SMBs that have a ‘service-first’ mentality,” said CRM industry analyst Brent Leary. “Because of this, Desk.com is able to help these high-growth companies handle their rapid growth, but not drop the ball on customer experience.”

    Saturday 15 November 2014

    Salesforce Winter ’15 Release---Deploy Your Components in Less Time (Pilot)

    You can now deploy components to production by skipping the execution of all Apex tests for components that have been validated within the last four days. With Quick Deploy, you no longer have to wait for all tests to run for your deployment to complete in production, and your deployment will likely finish in less than 30 minutes.












    As part of a deployment to production, all Apex tests are run in the production organization. If the organization contains a large number of Apex tests, the execution of all tests can be time-consuming and can delay your deployment. To reduce deployment time to production, you can perform a quick deployment by skipping the execution of all tests. Quick deployments are available only for validations with test runs that have passed in the last four days (96 hours) and that meet the code coverage requirements: the overall code coverage in the organization must be at least 75%, and Apex triggers must have some coverage.

    You can start a quick deployment only through the Salesforce user interface. Quick Deploy is available for change sets and Metadata API-based deployments that appear in the user interface.


    Reference:
    Deploy Your Components in Less Time (Pilot)


    Thursday 6 November 2014

    Building Apps Fast With Salesforce1 Lightning

    Most CIOs, business leaders, and admins have a vision for how technology can transform their companies. They recognize that applications have redefined innovation and that the secret to being the most innovative in the enterprise is speed.Even with this knowledge, many companies struggle to find a way to build apps fast. Less than half of those that want to release mobile apps have actually deployed them. Limiting factors include a lack of resources and tools to get the job done.

    The Salesforce1 Platform has already set the pace for business innovation. Its next generation,Salesforce1 Lightning, raises the bar so anyone can build customer and employee apps quickly, and improve upon them often.

    Check out the following insider tips on how to get the most out of Salesforce1 Lighting at your company and be sure to register for the free webinar, An Insider’s Discussion with the Creators of Salesforce1 Lightning.







    Saturday 1 November 2014

    Microsoft unveils Fitness Band

    Microsoft Band, the first device powered by Microsoft Health, helps you achieve your wellness goals by tracking your heart rate, steps, calorie burn, and sleep quality. It also helps you be more productive with email previews and calendar alerts - right on your wrist.
    Microsoft  releasing fitness band that helps you to look up your health and wellness goals . 

    Microsoft Band comes with features that are not restricted just to health. The Microsoft band will notify you about your social network updates, mails, events and other app notifications without needing to pull out your phone. It comes with company's virtual voice assistant. 

    You can set an alarm, keep reminders and monitor your email using the wearable device. Windows Phone users can also make use of the voice-assistant Cortana for giving voice commands to the Microsoft Band. 

    In addition to being a timepiece, the Microsoft Band will offer health-related functions such as 24-hour heart monitoring, GPS distance measurement, step counting, calorie counting and sleep monitoring. The Microsoft Band app will also show the user a graph of their sleep, displaying how much was restful, light and how many times the user was woken up – indicating it’s designed to be worn overnight. The watch will also measure UV light exposure.
    Finally, the Microsoft Health app will collect data from the fitness band and will work on iPhones and Android smartphones, as well as its own Windows Phone.

    Download Microsoft Health App:

    By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Sunday 26 October 2014

    INBOX by Gmail

    Gmail has introduced an all new revamped function called the Inbox. 


    The first thing to understand about the new Inbox by Gmail (or just Inbox) is that it is not just a new user-interface slapped on top of the old Gmail.  It is a completely different way to manage one's e-mail account.  It is not intended to be equivalent to Gmail.  It is simpler, with less configurable options, and provides a more consistent look-and-feel across all supported browsers and mobile devices. But it also maintains the core functionality needed by an e-mail client. 


    Inbox,  delivers a new take on email. It aims to make your inbox more useful — and more organized — by turning your emails into more then just plain old messages.


    You can snooze messages for later so that you don’t forget to act on them, pin the ones that are really important to you, and archive everything you’re done with. You can also have a to-do list right inside your inbox so that your messages and tasks can be found in one place.



    Inbox also categorizes mail for you automatically, a lot like Gmail, to keep it more organized. Those from Facebook or Twitter fall into the Social category, for example, while offers, discounts, and coupons go into Promos. You can also sort mail into categories like Travel, Purchases, and Finance.



    The main interface for Inbox is the message list, sectioned into Today, Yesterday, This Month, and so on. Messages with attachments are listed with thumbnails, not just a paperclip icon, so it’s easier to find, Preview and download them. If a message, conversation or bundle contains multiple attachments, left and right arrows will appear, turning the thumbnails into a carousel for easy viewing and selection.





    All Inbox users now have three invites they can share. To give away yours, simply start a new email from within the Inbox app and tap the “Invite to Inbox” option that’s depicted by a golden ticket. You can then select the email address you’d like to send the invite to, and then tap the “Invite” button.


    Reference:




    By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Wednesday 15 October 2014

    OS X Yosemite


                        
    Apple's OS X Yosemite public Beta was released for its beta testers Monday after release of the fifth Yosemite public beta on Tuesday last week hand in hand with the second golden master candidate of OS X Yosemite.


    OS X Yosemite emanates a more modern flatter look to OS X
    with intricate details on translucency and redesigned dock, windows and others.
    A multitude of new features are composite to OS X Yosemite, i.e. improved integration with iOS 8 through Continuity.


    A new "Today" view in notification center that provides integration with third-party apps, a retooled spotlight search with new data sources, and new featured apps like Mail, Safari, and Messages.





       Apple says that new continuity features in Yosemite bring OS X and iOS closer together – 'perfect companions'. When your iPhone or iPad is near your Mac, a feature called Handsoff will let you start something on one device and then continue on another.



    SMS and MMS messages on your iPhone will now appear in Messages on all your devices. You can  also reply from, and have phone calls through your Mac.






    The new font loses a bit of elegance in its more jagged form, too. It's not hard to read, but it has definitely been designed with Retina in mind. Nothing here is so bad to be a show-stopper by any means, but there's no denying that OS X 10.10 is much more at home on Retina than not.
    The Dark Mode is a nice touch in theory, turning some white elements of the OS dark black to make thing easier on the eyes in lower light level, but it's kind of only half a feature. It makes the Menu bar and Dock darker, but that's it - all the shiny light grey and white windows are still bright.
    Another thing that can trip you up is that Apple has moved the 'fullscreen' button from the right-hand corner of a window to the green button on the top-left, which used to have the slightly nebulous function of fitting the window to the content. That functionality is still there if you hold alt and roll over the green button, though.
    iCloud Photo Library on iOS 8 will take advantage of iCloud Drive, storing all of a user's photos in the cloud. Apple is working on a similar solution for Macs called Photos, which it plans to debut next year. While little information was available on Photos for Mac, it may also integrate with iCloud.

    By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd
     

    Monday 13 October 2014

    Salesforce Hopes To Ride Analytics Wave With New Business Intelligence Service




     

    Salesforce will unveil a new analytics service tomorrow morning they have dubbed Wave. 
    The product will be introduced by CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco, but according to a Salesforce spokesperson, it is already available in the AppExchange now.
     
     
    It was one of the worst kept secrets in technology as just about everyone I talked to knew about this even before today’s release, but the general consensus is that this is something that Salesforce had to do, even though the market is crowded with competitors and they are very late to the game.

            As one CEO told me, it was a gaping hole in the Salesforce product family and they needed to fill it. All that said, Wave is a graphical tool for viewing business analytic s in an attractive and visual way on mobile devices and larger PC screens, but like many of Salesforce’s services it will be rolled out slowly over time, and according to Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson, while it’s impressive in its own way, it has ways to go before it can compete with established business intelligence vendors.

            Make no mistake, this is a big market and a company like Salesforce wants some of it, but how large that piece will be is going to depend on many factors including how well they actually implement the product. Pretty demos always look nice, but it really depends on what happens when the rubber meets the road. Salesforce claimed when they showed this tool to business users, they were giddy because it was so easy to use, but the competition is fierce and Salesforce is just getting started.

           Still, IDC analyst Dan Vesset says you can’t dismiss Salesforce easily in what he estimates is a $10B market. In a market that large, he says, there is certainly room for Salesforce. “I think it can compete. Obviously, first and foremost it’s for existing SF.com customers. They now have an option to get their BI/analytics needs met by the same vendor instead of having to seek out another product. That will be attractive to some (not all),” he wrote in an email.


        The company emphasized in the demo that they wanted to make this a consumer-like experience, and they actually brought in game designers to make it more fun to use the product. While they succeeded to an extent, it’s important to remember this is still 1.0 technology and it’s going to require refinement over time.

        They also brought up the slew of third-parties who could be involved in this analytics play with everyone from OEMs to consultants to third-party developers. For a product that’s supposed to be so easy to use, it seems as though they’ve lined up a lot of outside help. To be fair though, they say the third parties will help customers connect to external data sources in other systems inside and outside the company and build more complex apps on top of the platform.

        Salesforce obviously wants a piece of the BI market badly and they are going to make a strong push to get it, but just because Salesforce enters the market, doesn’t mean it can have its way with it. If you recall, everyone thought Salesforce would blow up the enterprise social market when they introduced Chatter a few years ago, and it never really happened. Like everyone else in this space, it will need to earn its marketshare and that will take work and commitment. Today’s announcement is just the first step.




    By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd