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Tuesday 3 November 2015

The Easy Way To Build Apps That Look Like The New Salesforce

Salesforce recently announced the new Salesforce Lightning Experience. It’s a completely re-imagined user experience designed to maximize sales rep productivity, and it is backed by a robust and flexible platform. While we are incredibly excited about this latest release of Salesforce, we are also very excited by what grew out of the Salesforce Lightning effort, specifically the Lightning Design System.


Salesforce has always been committed to customer success and that’s why we are the world’s leading CRM solution. We got here by listening to and responding to our customer’s needs. As a result, our teams were often optimized to meet those needs within specific product features and areas.

But in order for us to succeed in re-inventing our experience, we needed to look across product areas and business units. We needed to break the mold and create new, best-in-class experiences that could scale across the entire organization and beyond.

A platform for designing at scale


It’s important for my team to always remember that Salesforce is both an app and a platform. That means our approach to design needs to take into account not only what the best app experience is for a particular problem, but also how that experience can scale and be customized to solve other problems we haven’t even anticipated. This is where the Salesforce partner and developer community really shines.
With the Design System, we figured out a way to make it as easy as possible for our development teams to create modern, usable, scalable, accessible, and beautiful user experiences. The Design System is how we communicated effectively and created consistency around the new Lightning Experience. Instead of communicating our design through static documentation, we used living code.
The Design System is based on our four design principles:
Clarity
Eliminate ambiguity. Enable people to see, understand, and act with confidence.

Efficiency
Streamline and optimize workflows. Intelligently anticipate needs to help people work better, smarter, and faster.


Consistency
Create familiarity and strengthen intuition by applying the same solution to the same problem.
 

Beauty
Demonstrate respect for people’s time and attention through thoughtful and elegant craftsmanship.
 

All four of these design principles have been translated into extensible Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). And here’s the best part. We’re taking all this expertise and all the tools we used internally, and opening them up through our Design System so you can also have access to what we have inside Salesforce.

You can think of the Design System as a how-to manual that enables developers and partners to build beautiful components that work with Salesforce across devices and operating systems. It’s a living style guide and best practices, married to code.

The Design System will only get better


With the Design System, we’re making it easy for partners and ISVs to match Salesforce’s look and feel. What you’ll see is our UX broken down into easily consumable and reusable components. Those components can be taken and applied to your business cases to build your own custom solutions.
While style guides look backward and are out of date as soon as they are released, design systems look forward. When we update our UX, there is no need to worry about opening code and changing values by hand. Partners and ISVs can just point to the Design System. It is always current.
The Salesforce Lightning Design System is laying the foundation for continually improving our design and our processes. This is a different way for us to operate and no one else in the enterprise space is doing this. We think it’s going to be awesome, but we’re also learning and improving. We really want to know what works and what doesn’t work for you, so please give us feedback. The more feedback we get, the better it will become.
Create the world’s best enterprise app experiences with the Salesforce Lightning Design System



Reference: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/09/build-apps-look-like-new-salesforce.html

Monday 12 October 2015

'Performance cloning' techniques to boost computer chip memory systems design.


North Carolina State University researchers have developed software using two new techniques to help computer chip designers improve memory systems. The techniques rely on "performance cloning," which can assess the behavior of software without compromising privileged data or proprietary computer code.
Computer chip manufacturers try to design their chips to provide the best possible performance. But to find the most effective designs, manufacturers need to know what sort of software their clients will be using.
"For example, programs that model protein folding use a lot of computing power, but very little data -- so manufacturers know to design chips with lots of central processing units (CPUs), but significantly less memory storage than would be found on other chips," says Yan Solihin, an associate professor of computer engineering at NC State and an author of two papers describing the new techniques.
However, many large customers -- from major corporations to Wall Street firms -- don't want to share their code with outsiders. And that makes it tough for chip manufacturers to develop the best possible chip designs.
One way to address this problem is through performance cloning. The concept behind performance cloning is that a chip manufacturer would give profiler software to a client. The client would use the profiler to assess its proprietary software, and the profiler would then generate a statistical report on the proprietary software's performance. That report could be given to the chip manufacturer without compromising the client's data or code.
The profiler report would then be fed into generator software, which can develop a synthetic program that mimics the performance characteristics of the client's software. This synthetic program would then serve as the basis for designing chips that will better meet the client's needs.
Previous work at Ghent University and the University of Texas at Austin has used performance cloning to address issues related to CPU design -- but those initiatives did not focus on memory systems, which are an important element of overall chip design.
Researchers have now developed software using two new techniques to help optimize memory systems.
The first technique, called MEMST (Memory EMulation using Stochastic Traces), assesses memory in a synthetic program by focusing on the amount of memory a program uses, the location of the data being retrieved and the pattern of retrieval.
For example, MEMST looks at how often a program retrieves data from the same location in a short period of time, and at how likely a program is to retrieve data from a location that is near other data that's been retrieved recently. Both of these variables affect how quickly the program can retrieve data.
The second technique, called MeToo, focuses on memory timing behavior -- how often the program retrieves data and whether the program has periods in which it makes many memory requests in a short time. Memory timing behavior can have a significant impact on how a system's memory system is designed.
For example, if you think of memory requests as cars, you don't want to have a traffic jam -- so you may want to be sure there are enough lanes for the traffic. These traffic lanes equate to memory bandwidth; the broader the bandwidth, the more lanes there are.
"Both MEMST and MeToo are useful for chip designers, particularly for designers who work on memory components, such as DRAM, memory controllers and memory buses," Solihin says.
The new techniques expand on previous work done by Solihin that used performance cloning to look at cache memory.
"Our next step is to take MEMST and MeToo, as well as our work on cache memory, and develop an integrated program that we can commercialize," says Solihin, author of the forthcoming Fundamentals of Parallel Multicore Architecture, which addresses memory hierarchy design.


Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150930140337.htm

Friday 4 September 2015

Pointing the Way: 3D Computer Cursors Could Navigate Virtual Worlds




Forget everything you thought you knew about computer cursors. Researchers have come up with a way to turn cursors into a tool that can navigate around 3D space.
Conventional pointers that are controlled with a trackpad and show up as a tiny arrow on a screen will soon be outdated, according to scientists at the University of Montreal in Canada. They have created a way to turn smartphones, tablets or anything with an interactive surface, into a translucent so-called "controlling plane" to select and manipulate objects in a 3D world.
This futuristic technology could play an integral role in how virtual reality software responds to how users move in real life.

Traditionally, a mouse and a cursor are confined to a screen "like a jail," said study lead researcher Tomás Dorta, a professor at the University of Montreal's School of Design. "It's the kind of interaction which has to evolve," he told Live Science.
The high-tech cursor developed by Dorta and his colleagues can select objects in the 3D virtual world. Instead of clicking on icons to select things with a trackpad or mouse, the screen of a smartphone or tablet becomes the trackpad itself and produces a translucent plane on the screen that responds to all kinds of movements.
"If I have this cup," Dorta said, picking up a coffee mug. "When it's selected, it's like I have it in my hand."
The controlling plane appears on the screen, which can enlarge or decrease an object when the user pinches or expands it using their fingers. It twists and tilts when the device does and users can also copy and paste with it. In tests so far, the researchers were able to select chairs and tables in a building and organs inside a large, to-scaleskeleton image on the screen.
At the moment, the cursor technology can be demonstrated using Hyve3D technology, which is an immersive design system that visualizes 3D sketches on a screen in front of the user. The screen is also collaborative, so people can link their devices to the same software and work together on a project. Contributors can look at the same space from different angles using their various devices, each accessing and manipulating it separately. 
"You can navigate together … working together in the same computer," Dorta said. "Everything 3D, everything collaborative, because the 3D cursor becomes our avatar."
Dorta said potential uses for a collaborative, 3D technology range from interior and architectural design to the development of virtual reality computer games. If phones or a tablets can become 3D cursors, then the ultimate goal is for users to access the same program or desktop as their colleagues, wherever they are, he said.
Eventually, this type of cursor technology could be available for operating systems like Windows and Mac OS, Dorta said. This could enable people to access each other’s desktops and see the files and applications on there in 3D, rather than through a window. Dorta thinks people are currently restricted by the window format on computers, and a 3D version of a desktop would make people’s computer interactions easier. Sending a file also won't require a USB or an online folder — you would just need to swoop at it with your phone to "grab" it and it'll be saved to your device, Dorta said.

The traditional computer mouse was invented in 1964, Dorta said, and it's time for something new. The researchers were inspired by the way people interact with the world, and how a computer can seem limited with its 2D restrictions. 

                                  

"Let's do something in 3D, because we are in 3D," Dorta said.
He added that 3D cursors could open up new possibilities in the world of computing. For one, application windows won't need to "stack" or hide on top of each other on a screen because the cursor could move around in 3D space, Dorta said.
While people have become accustomed to desktops and laptops that present information in a 2D landscape, Dorta said, next-generation users will likely experience a different way of interacting with computers. The researchers have noticed that younger users already have more of a knack for using the 3D technology than adults who are "already contaminated with the cursor."
"When we see kids using the 3D cursor, they don't take time to learn," Dorta said. "They do it quickly because it is like mastering the movement of a hand."
Dorta said innovative cursor technologies will continue to evolve to keep up with ever more virtual lives. "It's not only a little arrow to click," he said. "We are 46 years later. We can do better, I think."


Resoruce: http://www.livescience.com/51997-3d-computer-cursors-navigate-virtual-reality.html

Saturday 13 June 2015

Why Salesforce Is Good For Your Career!!!

Salesforce offers an amazing set of Sales, Marketing, Service, Collaboration, Security, and Analytics Capabilities, as well as the ability to create your own solutions on the Salesforce1 Platform. Salesforce is used by a wide range of companies from small start-ups to large enterprise companies in various industries.


But did you also know that it’s good for your career?
When I attended Dreamforce last October, it was exceptionally clear that having knowledge and experience about how to use Salesforce is a plus on your resume because of the abundance of job opportunities associated with Salesforce. 

Here are four specific examples I observed:

1. There are close to 200,000 customer companies that use the Salesforce1 Platform. 

Each of these companies leverage Salesforce for critical business functions. In many cases, these customers are expanding their use of Salesforce and need experts to help determine how best to leverage the myriad of capabilities.

2. There are numerous Salesforce system integrators that help companies think of innovative way to use the Salesforce1 Platform. 

As an example, most of the larger system integrators have a team of Salesforce experts who work with companies that are starting to use Salesforce or expanding their use of Salesforce. These system integrators are focused on helping companies innovate with Salesforce.

3. There are close to 2000 companies that are built on top of the Salesforce1 Platform.

These companies can be found on the AppExchange and often need Salesforce experts as they continue to build out their specific capabilities. Some of the AppExchange solutions are built 100 percent natively on the Salesforce1 Platform.

4. CIOs that leverage Salesforce are seen as more innovative, more cloud leading, and typically want to maximize their INVESTMENT in Salesforce. 

And they are hiring Salesforce Admins, developers, and architects to implement business solutions and drive innovation.
For these reasons, Salesforce experts are in high demand.
In a recent Business Insider article titled “The Best Skills to Have on a Tech Resume," the number one most valued skill was “Salesforce Architect." In addition, according to the article, Salesforce Architect has the highest average salary across the most valuable JOB SKILLS.

Friday 15 May 2015

Is Your Website Like an Empty Easter Egg? 3 Essentials to Consider

On Easter, children everywhere hunt for shiny and bright eggs of different sizes that promise delicious treats inside. 
The curious look of anticipation on their faces might not be all that different from that of your prospects when they first discover your website.
As a good family member, you make sure that the kids will not be disappointed upon breaking the colorful outer shell — and discovering the good stuff inside. 

                             

But as an online business, how do you guarantee that your users will be excited and delighted when they crack the beautiful shell of your homepage? How do you ensure that your website is not just one big, beautiful — but empty — Easter egg?
By following these three essentials, you’ll be much more likely to convert your prospects and keep your existing customers engaged.

1. Make your website usable

The true test of beautiful web design is whether it helps users get to the information they want quickly and directly, rather than getting distracted or confused. Designing with the user in mind will help you maintain the sensitive balance between innovative design, your brand, and usability.INVESTING in solid information architecture will keep your users happy and your site scalable. Know what your users react to, what they like and dislike. Constantly fine-tune your website based on data-driven insights and strategic user-testing.

2. Make your website accessible

Cutting-edge design and web technology will always wow you on your high-powered wide-screen desktop. But what does it look like on other, less powerful devices or browsers? Does it work on mobile? Web traffic is shifting away from desktop and laptop toward a wide and growing range of mostly mobile devices. And you want to allow your users the same great web experience, however they access your site. Make it responsive. Make it browser-optimized. Make it mobile.

3. Make your website you (message and brand)

Put an end to brochureware websites already! Content is the lifeblood of your website, and the essence of your business and brand in a nutshell. It needs to be precise and clear. It should inform, entertain at times, but always inspire and motivate to make the user act. Create a content strategy that ensures that your content stays readable and understandable, actionable and shareable.
This Easter season, take time to delight your prospects and customers. Help drive your online business to new heights by making your website more innovative and beautiful, useful and accessible. 

Wednesday 15 April 2015

5 Blueprints for Building Smarter Emails

Marketers have all the tools available to them to live up to these expectations. But taking an intellectually challenged email and transforming it into a genius message with heroic timing is a daunting task. The answer is to evolve your emails in several manageable steps rather than attempting to leap tall buildings in a single bound.



five different kinds of emails:
  1. Welcome Emails
  2. Promotional Emails
  3. Event Registration Emails
  4. Transactional Emails
  5. Cart Abandonment Emails

Wednesday 18 March 2015

Salesforce for Apple Watch: Inspired by the Consumer, Built for Business

Wearable devices present a tremendous opportunity for businesses to connect with customers, partners, employees and even products in a whole new way. In fact, 68 percent of executives call wearables a “priority” for their companies, according to Forrester Research (1).
That’s why we are so excited to announce Salesforce for Apple Watch, designed to bring the personal technology of wearables to you, the business user.

Salesforce Analytics Cloud for Apple Watch

Salesforce Analytics for Apple Watch is a personal way for you to explore data, uncover new insights and take action with dashboards and lenses. You will also be able to swipe to get a quick glance of your most recently viewed dashboard, or use Handoff to transition between an Apple Watch and an iPhone seamlessly.

                                                        
 In addition, you will be able to query via Voice Search to surface a report, view a dashboard or find other information. The app is free with a paid license of Analytics Cloud and is expected to be generally available in April 2015.

Salesforce1 for Apple Watch

The Salesforce1 Mobile App has already enabled all kinds of people to run their businesses from their phones. And Salesforce1 for Apple Watch represents the next step in our evolution to a truly mobile workforce.
                                                     

 Salesforce1 for Apple Watch delivers instant, personal notifications to salespeople, service agents, marketers and more, keeping them connected to the business priorities that matter most.

Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Apple Watch

Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Apple Watch, more than two million Salesforce1 developers can build enterprise apps for Apple Watch that connect directly to the Salesforce1 Platform. 
                                                      
With Wear for Apple Watch, developers can immediately focus on the most important element of building an app for a wearable—the user experience—and have the identity, security and other shared services of the Salesforce1 Platform from the first line of code..

Reference:

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd



Thursday 5 March 2015

Jon Sigler: Why the Salesforce1 Platform Is a Leader In Rapid App Dev

The Salesforce1 Platform is the world’s #1 enterprise cloud platform. With Force.com for building employee applications, and Heroku for creating amazing customer apps, the technology empowers developers to deliver solutions faster than ever before.

Jon Sigler is an expert in declarative development for all environments. After 13 years at Microsoft, and another eight years at Apple, he now runs visual design tools atSalesforce as SVP of Platform Product Management. Sigler sat down with us to give his take on what differentiates the Salesforce1 Platform and where the technology is headed.


Tell us about the new Salesforce1 Platform features.

In addition to recently redefining our visual tools -- Lightning Process Builder, Schema Builder, and App Builder -- we are entering the component model world. After all, component frameworks are the future of app development. This sustainable and efficient method is being used across the industry, with Salesforce the only company offering it in a scalable and secure fashion for the enterprise. Using our new Lightning App Builder, anyone can create pages with Lightning Components, which are built both by Salesforce and are open for custom development.

We also just launched a new Component Exchange, so third parties can create and deploy components to customers. The really great thing about the components themselves is that once they exist, we provide tools that let all users drag and drop them on a page, wherever they’d like. The model is out of the box and will work for any form factor.

What makes the Platform the undisputed leader in the cloud platform space?

In all of my years working with the enterprise, one of the things that people just despise is rolling out new software, because of upgrades and compatibility. So you roll out Access or Office or any new application, and every customer has to come back and see if everything still works. There’s just a ton of issues. People hate it and they don’t want to do it. The main thing the Platform brings to the enterprise is never having to worry about that. Salesforce runs a single code base so every customer is on the same version at the same time. And there are no concerns about compatibility or things breaking.

How does "cloud first" play into this?

Having the multitenancy, scalability, and security already existing, and not having to build tools for that, is awesome. Nobody else has done that and it will take anybody else a long time to build that. When you look at other desktop software companies, it’s hard for them to compete because their software was never engineered as a service. Salesforce is the exact opposite. It was always engineered to run as a cloud service that could be evolved into a platform other things could be built on. Today, not years in the future, we have a platform that’s not just for our apps, it’s for our apps that can be customized by anyone, as well as building completely customized apps.

Why is productivity so significant for enterprise developers?

There’s just too few developers to create the software solutions corporations worldwide now need. Too often someone in the enterprise wants a custom report, or page, or UI, and they call down to IT, and wait. They might wait a week, a month, six months, or be told “no.” Enabling developers to be more productive means they can build more solutions faster. And not only that, if you give developers a way to create functionality that can also be used by non-developers, it takes a lot of the work out of the hands of the developer.

We think it’s extremely important to make developers more productive with our toolset and component model, and while doing that, empower others -- knowledge workers, admins -- to create the solutions they want based off those components. That’s also the big advantage of Heroku. It frees developers from servers, scaling, and deployment, so they can focus entirely on writing codefor amazing consumer-facing apps.

What else makes the Salesforce1 Platform unique when it comes to rapid app dev?

A big thing is that the model inherently includes mobile. You can download the app, log into your org, and run your business. This new model is even more unique in that you don’t have to worry about managing pages and UIs for different devices, such as a tablet, a smartphone, or desktop computer, because you can simply create one page and it will display itself appropriately, on the appropriate device. The fact that this whole model is built-in is something that nobody else does.

Where is the Salesforce1 Platform headed?

We are expecting an explosion of custom applications. Say a company wants to build an internal meeting room registration system. Instead of peeling off and using another tool, they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve already got the Salesforce1 Platform, I can very easily set this up, create the components, drag and drop, and I’m done.” I think in five years we will see we’ve become much more of a Platform company, meaning that we will have a lot more custom apps built, by enterprises, by mid-markets, by customers in general. We have a huge head start in scalability and security in the cloud, and adding the Lightning Component Model and visual tools just means more and more people will be building custom apps.

Reference:

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

Thursday 19 February 2015

Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner

Salesforce has announced that we’ve joined Facebook’s® new Facebook Marketing Partner program.
The new program, launched today, replaces Facebook’s existing Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. We welcome this evolution in the program and hope it brings better recognition to the partner ecosystem across geographies, industries and product offerings.


Salesforce is recognized as a Partner in these areas:
Specialties: Ad Technology, Audience Onboarding, Content Marketing, Community Management
Countries: United States, Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom
Industries: Automotive, Consumer Packaged Goods, eCommerce, Entertainment, Financial Services, Gaming, Organizations & Associations, Professional Services, Retail, Technology, Telecom
Salesforce has a long-standing relationship with Facebook. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we have combined the pioneers and leaders of social marketing – Radian6 for social listening, Buddy Media for social publishing and Social.com for advertising – and have worked with Facebook to deliver amazing products and services for marketers. Some of our milestones include unveiling the next generation of Social Studio, which delivers unified social engagement for the Salesforce Customer Success Platform; launching an integration with Facebook Custom Audiences at Dreamforce; Winning the Facebook Innovation Award for our Active Audiences product; and Social.com expanding its partnership with the newly rebuilt Atlas.
For our customers, partners and potential customers, we want to let you know that nothing has changed. This is a partner program update from Facebook to add more clarity and make it easier for marketers to find partners based on their specific needs.

Reference:

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd