Blogs

We were delighted to be able to promote our free trial to prospects in the US the other week. Given the complexity of finance applications set up, we were keen to find a way that prospects could get a good feel for the functionality without putting in any work up front. So we’ve created a fictitious company, Merlin Auto, which is completely self contained, has the chart of accounts pre-configured and is populated with data. This means that a prospect can start using it immediately to create invoices, credit notes, aged debt analysis etc.

Obviously the data is made up, but we think it’s a good starting point for prospects to understand whether the application will meet their requirements from a functionality standpoint. Once they are happy with this, we can then give them the opportunity to set up, or ‘provision’ CODA 2go into their own live Salesforce CRM and set up the accounts as they want to see them, also for a trial period.

We’ve put in place support specialists to help guide users through this second phase, so hopefully it will be relatively pain free! There are some pre-requisites for the second phase such as having multi-currency switched on, and we’re working with Salesforce to try to make this process as smooth as possible.

We’re now working on a VAT version of the Merlin Auto 30 day free trial, which will be ready very soon. I really hope you find this method of trialing worthwhile and would welcome any feedback around it.

Last week I was very pleased to have received the “Developer Hero” award at Dreamforce San Francisco for my contributions to Force.com and its community. Through feedback and ideas that have allowed us and Salesforce to push CODA 2go functionality further each passing month. They say “nothing worth doing is ever easy“, true to that saying this process has had its ups and downs from both sides. So I am partly left wondering if the award should be more aptly named “Biggest pain in the neck” award? ;-) I have also been lucky enough to be asked to get involved in authoring parts of Richard Greenwald’s upcoming Force.com book. In the form of Chapter 13 and the Voice of the Developer inserts throughout, once again thanks to Richard for this opportunity. The SaaS world is currently ripe with a level of innovation, I’ve personally not seen in the 20 years I’ve been in this business. So I better get back to my Google and CODA 2go integration work… Thanks from Andy