JodieM.com.au

Thinking Like Salesforce

Jodie Miners — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:55:52 +0000

I’m a bit of a way on the path to becoming a Salesforce Consultant (not quite certified yet, but that’s just because I have to sit for the exam). I love Salesforce and what you can do with it, but then sometimes you just come unstuck over the smallest of details and think that it is the worst piece of software in the world.

I’m a database designer first and foremost, so I think in normalisation terms - I knew how to design databases before I even knew what normalisation was (“Oh, really, it has a name?”), and it irks me to de-normalise but I do understand that it is sometimes necessary for business reasons (yes, I’m not talking about data warehousing or noSQL data models either).

So when you come across something as simple as being able to report on every aspect of the data in your database, and find that it just can’t be done in Salesforce (and yet, it can be done quite easily in Access 2007+), then you need to re-think your design. (And while I’m in a ranty mood, I just can not believe that Salesforce have not even acknowledged this to be an issue let alone provided some options or even done anything to fix it!).

So, I’m coming to the conclusion that it just takes a bit of re-thinking about how you are going to achieve the requirements of your client in Salesforce and here are some tips I’ve thought about along the way:

Challenge the Requirement – yep, I said it – requirements are NOT set in stone. Sometimes people may think their requirements are absolutely necessary, but if you can discuss it, throw some ideas around and maybe think of another way around it, then there might just be another way to achieve what they want.
Look in the App Exchange – first up, see if someone else has had this problem and has done 90% of the work for you already. Even if it is paid app, it is probably going to be more robust than anything you can make and be more cost effective.
Create Procedures rather than Solutions - this is sort of the cheapskates way around things – can’t afford that fantastic app that does all the things that you want? OK, then if we have to replace that with 5 steps, that are documented well, that the user has to do each time they need to do this, is that OK? Sometimes the answer may be yes, and sometimes you can use that thinking to justify the ROI of the App purchase price per month.
Create a Formula Field - Formula fields in Salesforce are very powerful and can be used in many ways. Did you know that you can’t do a Global search for the text inside a lookup field (eg the Account Name on a Case)? No? Well it sucks that you can’t! So create a text formula field that references the Account.Name that is linked on the Case, make it not visible to the users, but it can still be used for search. I can also use a formula field for reporting – eg link the Account’s State field into the Case via a formula, so I can quickly summarise Cases by State.
Create a Workflow Rule – Similar to formula fields, create a text field that is updated by a Field Update workflow to put data where you want it to be. Eg, you can’t do field level auditing on long text fields (it will tell you when the field changed and who changed it but not what it was changed from or to). So create a Audit field and populate it each time the long text field is changed. I have documented a solution on this blog.
Create a Button or a Link – A lot can be accomplished with a button or a link. Yes, you could write a trigger to create a new record in Object X, but then you have to code it, write test classes for it and maintain it. If it’s not that critical to the process, that it requires all that coding, then just create a button with a URL to prepopulate the fields on Object X. I even put things in the pre-population data that will cause an error so that the users need to stop and think about what they are creating this record for, and what else do they need to update. Other great links you can create are a link to Google Maps with a search query or a link to look up the ABR website based on the Account Name or ABN
Add a Visualforce Page to a Standard Form – Creating Visualforce pages is easy and is not a big maintenance headache like coding is. Where I used this to great success is on a child detail record form – I wanted to show some of the field values from the header record (this is one of those infuriating things that should be easy out of the box, but it’s not). Create a simple visualforce page containing just those few fields, and style it to look like the regular detail page, and then add that visualforce page as a section in the standard form. You could even embed details from an external website into a Visualforce page (eg an image of the product the client has purchased from your web site).
De-normalise – Yes, when it comes to the crunch, throw all your instincts out and de-normalise. I’m going to use this idea to get around the issue with reporting on multi select picklists. I have a picklist with 50 values in it, all that need to be reported on. Based on the historic data most Cases only choose 2 or 3 of the available options, so I will create 3 fields, each based on a lookup to the list of options and then report on ‘Field1=XYZ or Field2=XYZ or Field3=XYZ’ to show all Cases that have chosen that option (using URLs to pre-populate the report parameters really helps with this too).
Use External Systems – You know what? Salesforce is not perfect and may not be the one and only one system that you use. If I do want to do the reporting the way it has previously been done, I know that Access can do it, so I can just export the data to Access when that report needs to be done, and run the report in Access. Yes, it’s a bit more fiddly but there are some great export tools to make it easier.
Change the Process – Yes, I know, quite unthinkable to have to change your processes to work with software – but this is not bespoke software designed especially for you. You will get 95% of the benefit out of using Salesforce so it’s OK to challenge the other 5% and possibly change your processes. It would be a shame to walk away from a Salesforce implementation because it just can’t do a few minor things in your procedures.
“Suck it and See” – You might come up with a solution that is not 100% the way you want it to work but maybe it will be OK. Flag it as something to come back to in 6 or 12 months to see if it is still a major headache for the client or it is just something they have learned to live with or have even forgotten about. Sometimes a requirement that is thought to be a “must have” at the beginning could have come about due to a poorly designed old system or a lack of understanding of how Salesforce works – and by the time Salesforce is bedded into the organisation that requirement may not be as important as it was before. Just don’t forget to re-visit it and ask the question in 6 months time.

You may have noticed that none of these solutions involve coding. Yes coding is one way to tackle the problem, but hopefully it’s the last resort. It’s not that I don’t advocate coding as a solution, it is just expensive, time consuming and difficult to maintain. It is great if you are a large organisation and have an in-house team of developers who are going to maintain it and tweak it as your requirements change, but if that is the case, why are you using Salesforce?

Actually I think these ideas would work with any “platform” product that you evaluate for you or your client’s organisation, whether it be Microsoft CRM, SharePoint, Confluence or any ERP system. These systems will get you to a point – where you take it from there is up to you.

I might add some more things to this post in the comments as I think of them.

2011 in review

Jodie Miners — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:23:09 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Since I have not blogged much lately I thought it would be nice to have some new content on my site. These stats show that I was not really active in posting in 2011, I would like to improve on that this year.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

WordPress.com for Community Groups – Notes from Word Camp Gold Coast #wcgold

Jodie Miners — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 03:26:39 +0000

I did a talk at the Word Camp Gold Coast held at Bond University on 5 and 6 November 2011. The topic of my talk was the blog post series that I’ve done on Building a Web Presence for your Community Group using free or very low cost tools.

Most people belong to some form of community or sporting group – what is their website like? Do they have a domain, with email addresses like president@mycommunitygroup.org.au? Do they have a central location for all the documents required for the efficient running of the group? There are so many reasons to have a Web Presences, the question should be why they don’t want one. Too expensive? Too difficult? The great thing is that these two excuses are now just that – excuses. Cost and “tech savvyness” are not an impediment to setting up a cool looking web site, a domain and email accounts.

So here are the things you need:

1. A Domain – eg a .com.au or .org.au or .asn.au name that has the name of your community group. There are a few rules to getting a domain name ending in .au so have a look at my post on Domains for Community Groups.

2. A WordPress.com Website – this is a breeze to set up and get going – the hardest thing is choosing the theme to represent your community group. See my post on Websites for Community Groups. This also shows how to link your Domain name to your WordPress.com website. This bit costs US$12/year.

3. Google Apps for Your Domain – This handles all the back end functionality like Email, Documents, Calendar etc as well as the logins for your committee members. See this post on Email for Community Groups. This also shows how to link Google Apps to your WordPress.com site. Google Apps is also where the events Calendar for your community group lives. You then show that calendar on your WordPress.com website by embedding it in a page or a widget on the sidebar.

4. Mailchimp – this not only a fantastic tool for sending out email marketing, it is also a tool to keep your membership database – and it’s all for free if you have under 2000 members or list subscribers (+ email limits). See this post on Event Management and Emails for Community Groups. This post also covers off using Eventbrite for events and CRM systems if you need more for member management than Mailchimp offers.

As an aside, if you are running a Not for Profit community group, then also consider going the whole hog and getting Salesforce for your CRM and back end systems (it can probably handle most things except accounts). Salesforce gives licences for 10 users for free. You will of course need to invest some time, money and effort to set it up, and you can contact me to help with this.

And whilst we are on the topic of back end systems, one thing that I did not include in my talk is the wonderful Saasu – a full Cloud based Australian Accounting system, that is free for up to 20 transactions per month, or very reasonably priced for larger businesses, and is just far superior to MYOB in every way, in my opinion.

Some of the other tools mentioned in my talk are Wufoo forms, and I’ve written a post about the minor issues with using Wufoo together with Mailchimp and WordPress, especially for Member details forms. For simple forms like sign up for a newsletter, the combination of the three tools is great.

The other great tool I mentioned is Screen Steps. This is a great tool to create structured help content for your end users. Use this in conjunction with links to the great content in the WordPress.com support website to create some great help documents.

If you have any ides for other free or very cheap tools to use for getting an Web Presence for your community or sporting groups, then please add a comment. Or if there is anything I have not mentioned then please ask in the comments also.

Mailchimp plus Wufoo plus WordPress.com – it’s almost great

Jodie Miners — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 06:13:43 +0000

You want a form on your website, right? The form is to enable members of your community group to sign up to become a member or sign up for a newsletter. Most websites will allow you to embed a form into your website, however WordPress.com has some limitations on embedding codes and only allows code from a few sites to be embedded. One of those sites is Wufoo.

Wufoo is the master of online forms – if you want to create fantastic looking forms then go no further than wufoo, and you can create three forms for free. Wufoo handles the collection of data and has a great range of APIs to link to other web apps.

Mailchimp is the master of email marketing, plus they have fantastic tools for profile and list management that makes it the ideal choice for maintaining your members list for your community group. You can create a custom signup form with all the required details and Members can use the mailchimp forms to update their own details. Oh, and they enable you to do great looking emails to your members, and it’s all for free!

So, you can’t embed a Mailchimp form into your WordPress.com website, but you can put a link on your website to go to the Mailchimp form. You can embed a Wufoo form on your WordPress.com website, and set it up so that every time someone fills in the form, the details automatically get passed across to Mailchimp. This way you have a great looking form, embeded on your website, and the data gets stored in Mailchimp where you can use it for communicating with your members. Sounds great, doesn’t it.

Well, there is just one small catch, and unfortunately it’s a big enough issue for me to not recommend using embeded Wufoo forms on your WordPress.com website. Here’s the deal:

Mailchimp forms have this brilliant feature in-built into them. If someone has already registered and fills in their details again, it recognises that you already have that email address recorded and asks the user if they want to update their details instead. When using the Wufoo form on your website, this smart behaviour doesn’t happen. Therefore if I’m a member, have added my name, address and all my membership details into the Wufoo form, then come along and fill in the form again, this time with only my email address, Wufoo just updates mailchimp with the new details, and therefore deletes my address and membership details. (eg, it could do this if someone entered an incorrect email address and it happened to be the same as a subscriber in Mailchimp already, potentially deleting records you have stored in Mailchimp.

I checked with Wufoo support about this and they said there is no way around this, it’s how the Wufoo to Mailchim integration works. Wufoo’s response was:

Unfortunately, the Wufoo integration with Mailchimp only works in an ‘update’ function. This means that it will only update lists with either new addresses, or current addresses with the new information.

I understand this, and it is one of the limitations of working with APIs, but it’s a bit disappointing. Therefore I will recommend, if you want to put a form on your website to manage members details, then just link to the Mailchimp form from your site, and style the Mailchimp form to look nice, like your website does.

The Wufoo form integration works great for simple forms, like a newsletter signup that can be displayed in a widget on the sidebar.

Creating Word Documents from Confluence

Jodie Miners — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:53:25 +0000

Expanding on from my One thing in One Place, Once post on reusing Confluence content, the next step is to export that content from Confluence into Word and or PDF to produce printable manuals from your content. Yes, I know, I have that thought too, why would you need to print something when it’s on Confluence and readable on the screen and directly linkable to the content. Well, sometimes I just have to lose that battle and understand that people do in fact like to have a paper copy of documents to read. So the important thing here is to ensure that the Word document or PDF content comes directly from your Confluence content so that you minimise the versioning issues. If you do a major update to your Confluence content, it’s a relatively straightforward matter of exporting and releasing a new version of your Word or PDF document.

To export from Confluence to Word I use Scroll Office from K15t. I have tried the Scroll Wiki exporter to export directly to PDF but it was an early version and I had some issues with it, and I prefer to tweak the export in Word first before doing the PDF output so I will focus on Scroll Office here. (There is also the Confluence PDF Export option if you want to play around with customising it to work for you). Scroll Office is a great product. There are some tricks to getting it working well, and there is still a little bit of tweaking required in the final Word document, but overall it is great – have a look at the documentationto get started with using it. And I must say that the guys from k15t have been very helpful in getting a few bug fixes done whilst I’ve been setting up this export process.My Confluence instance is a help system for a software product. The pages in Confluence are structured in a particular way:

Each screen in the software has a page in Confluence (this helps if we want to add som screen level context specific links to the app at a later date).
The hierarchy of pages in Confluence is set up exactly the same way as the menu structure in the software, that way people can navigate to the page that describes the screen they need some help about.
Each page describes what the screen does and also has a Navigation section that tells the user how would they get to this screen in the software. This is useful if they have come to this page via the search or via a hyperlink.
Each page also has links to the next most relevant topic, or the next screen that the user would use if they were on that screen.

When preparing the Word manual for the software there are a few differences with the way the content needs to be structured. As the document is in a linear form, and most users will be seeing the manual in their training course, we don’t really need all the navigation instructions or the links to the next topic, as the next topic is right below it on the page. There may also be some text that is specifically in the manuals such as training exercises or introductory comments. So there is a little bit of tweaking required in Confluence to be able to produce the ideal Word export.The first thing to understand when using Scroll Office is how Scroll Office handles headings – that will help you work out the way that the content for export should be structured. Basically the heading levels that have been used in Confluence are ignored and it all works on a hierarchy. Page Names are Headings in Word, then the h1. to h3. etc become headings under that heading. Pages in the hierarchy under that page also become headings, so depending on your hierarchy of your pages in Confluence you could have a very nested heading structure in Word. This is not ideal. So the trick (for me) is to create new pages in Confluence that will be my pages to export. I then include the content from my regular Confleunce pages into these pages and set up these export pages to have a much flatter hierarchy and heading structure (eg by including multiple pages into the one).

As mentioned above, I also want to exclude some of the content from my main pages in the export, so this is where the wonderful {builder-show} macro comes into it’s own. In the Base Page (the page where the content is edited), I wrap different content sections in the builder-show macro to show only certain parts of the page in the Base Page or the Manual Page. In the Manual page I use the {import}Macro to import the contents from the Base Page. See the example content below.

Page Setup in Confluence for Word Export

This way I have two pages of content but only one page that I need to maintain. The next step is to import two or more pages into my manual page, separated by headings. It does not matter that these manual pages are quite long, because I hide them from the main navigation menu – the users who come via the navigation only see the Base Page.

Another trick I use is the {scroll-pagetitle} macro. I want the headings on the Word document to be the same as the headings on my Confluence content, but as I’m creating new pages to export the content, I can’t have the same page names in Confluence. So I just add the word Manual to the end of my page name for my manual pages and then use the pagetitle macro to revert back to the same title on the Word export.

Word Tweaks

Of course the best export from Confluence only happens if the Word Template is set up well with good heading styles (down to about heading level 6), bullets, numbering, headers, footers, page numbers, title pages etc. Spend some time tweaking your Word Template along with your export pages in Confluence to get the best results. There are some tweaks I do in Word, for which I use Macros (these are for things that are specific to my Confluence instance so I won’t bore you with the details). It is great that Scroll Office allows the document template to be a macro enabled template, so the macros are already built into the document when the document is exported.I do suggest that you do a thorough check over your Word document once it has been exported and tweak the content looking out for the following:

Update the Table of Contents.
Remove additional paragraph returns after images (k15t said they plan to fix this in an upcoming release).
Adjust page breaks.
Check spelling again (yes, it is amazing how many spelling errors you pick up seeing it in a different format).
Resize images or adjust formatting if it helps to get things to fit on the pages better.

The less you need to do with final tweaking in Word the easier it is to re-export the content next time.

The final step is to save the Word document as a PDF file, which of course Word 2010 does out of the box. After you have created this PDF file it may even be worthwhile adding these documents to a page in your Confluence site so that users can download the completed PDF file.

Using these steps I have been able to create 3, 150 page word manuals and a few smaller quick guides on how to use the software – all based on the base content pages.

I hope this helps you, but if you have any tips or other suggestions on how to get great looking printed manuals from your Confluence content then please let me know in the comments.

Making an Audit Tracking Field in Salesforce

Jodie Miners — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:17 +0000

This is a quick post to share a tip that I found to create a field to track changes to another field. Sure you can do it with a trigger and some code, but this is a no-code work-around.

I found this idea on Salesforce Idea Exchange here and modified it as I needed to. The reason to use this idea is that the History Tracking feature only tells you that the field has changed, rather than the field value has changed from x to y.

If there are just a few key fields that you need to do full audit tracking on, then this may be an option. I have set this up on Cases for the custom Case Response field – the field that contains the information as to what was done to resolve this Case.

Steps:

In Cases, Add a new long text formula field called Case Response History.
Create a new Workflow Rule called Append Case Response History or similar to do a Field Update on the Case Response History field
The formula for the Worflow is something along the lines of this:

"Last Modified: " + LastModifiedBy.FirstName & ' ' & LastModifiedBy.LastName + TEXT(LastModifiedDate + 0.4167) + BR() + "------" + BR() + PRIORVALUE( CaseResponse__c ) + BR() + CaseResponseHistory__c

You can play around with this formula, but I found this layout was good. The main components are that we are updating the Case Response History field with the previous value of the Case Response field, along with all the previous history that is already in the Case Response History field, then tagging it with the name and date of the update. I also have a line to divide each entry.
The 0.4167 in the date formula converts UTC time to Sydney timezone. The default date format is a bit ugly, so you may want to do a lot more tweaking of this date field to change the format.
The current value is in the Case Response field – this field only shows us what the previous value(s) were. The way I have set this up is that it shows the date that the current value was updated with the date/time and who updated it, in the history field. That way the next time the field is updated, that value will be listed with the date/time record of when it was updated. You need to test this out with a few updates to the field to see what I mean here (it makes sense to me, at least). If you don’t like this, then just modify the formula.

Add the Case Response History field to the Cases Page Layout so you can see the audit history on the Case Record.

Notes:

Beware: This is not entirely foolproof. The System Administrator or anyone with Modify All Data can edit the Audit field.
This would probably be better as a hidden field that doesn’t take up space on the Cases form.

Supporting a different country on your Adobe Business Catalyst Site

Jodie Miners — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:52:20 +0000

This is more of a post for me in case I ever need to do this again. I look after and have created a few Adobe Business Catalyst websites. This was back when they were a cool Aussie Startup called GoodBarry. Now they are part of the behemoth that is Adobe. I probably would not recommend Adobe Business Catalyst to many people now. Even though they now have the power and might of Adobe behind them, they not put out that many fixes this year, and there is a major bug in my site that they have said they will fix “in an upcoming release”. This is really not good enough. There are dozens of features that just don’t work well (eg the whole Email Marketing tool), and the whole system is feeling a bit tired and dated. I really really hope that Adobe does good things with it, and that the upcoming version 3 is great, but I don’t hold much hope.

So I have to add support for another country for one of the sites that I look after. Here is the list of things that I need to do in order to make the new country functioning. To see some great multi currency sites in Adobe BC head over to www.apresvelo.com, www.explanar.com or www.bollorethinpapers.com. I have borrowed some javascript hints from a few of these pages, plus I got some great help from the LinkedIn Group and from the BC Support team also.

Domains

modify the Admin > Manage Domain Name setting to add the ‘A’ record for the sub domain for the new country, and choose the Start Page. I don’t make many changes for each country, and don’t have a separate start page for each country, but if you did need a different page for each country then you would set it here.
Note: I’m not doing anything with language and translations, but look at the www.bollorethinpapers.com to see what can be achieved with translations. I have set up usa. and uk. as my sub domains.

Templates

Modify the Default Template (Admin > Manage Site-Wide Templates) to include the JavaScript to change to the correct sub domain based on the users’ IP address which is converted to a country code using the {module_visitorcountrycode} tag. Note, that you can do this by using a manual drop down list, but I found that it was important for the affiliates page to have the right sub domain there, or the affiliate link went to the wrong sub domain, so I have decided that it is best to automate the sub domain setting based on IP address. Here is my JavaScript code:

CSS

The site has some products that are only sold in Australia, so with the help of the BC support team they came up with this suggestion. Add a custom code to the Australian only products, (using the Unit Type field – eg PR-AU) then hide those products from the international sites using some simple CSS. Modify the ModuleStylesheets.css to include the following code in the part of the CSS file where the other Shopping items are:

.USPR-AU { display: none; }

To make this CSS work, wrap the contents of the Individual Product – Small in a Div with the following class description.

class="{module_visitorcountrycode}{tag_unittype}"

E-Commerce

Add the pricing for the new currency – Go to Add Prices to this Product in each individual Product’s page.
Set up any Tax Codes applicable to the new country.
Add Shipping Options for the new country.
Add Gift Vouchers for the new country (if you use them).
Add your Payment Gateway for the new country (This site uses Paypal, so it’s just a matter of copying the details over from the existing country).

Online Shop Layouts

Go to Admin > More Customization Options > Online Shop Layouts. For the templates in Customize Check-Out Process Experience, each country has its own page layout. Copy the page from the existing country and modify it to suit the new country. See my examples below:

Shopping Cart

One thing that really bugs me about online shopping is the assumption that most sites make about currency – they assume you know what currency you are buying in, and they assume that you will assume it’s USD. So, on the total line, I include the words “in Pounds (GBP)” or “in Australian Dollars (AUD)” or “in US Dollars (USD)” after the total.

Ensure there is code to show the tax settings and shipping options for the new country. I don’t have gift vouchers, but if you do, ensure the code for Gift vouchers for the new country are here also.

Currency Exchange

I have a simple currency exchange popup so I need to change the JavaScript that calls that. Here is my JavaScript function:

function newPopup() { var sTotal=document.getElementById("invTotal").innerHTML; sTotal = sTotal.replace("$","") url = "http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=" +sTotal+ "&from=AUD&to=GBP" popupWindow = window.open( url,'popUpWindow','height=150,width=400,left=10,top=10,resizable=no,scrollbars=no,toolbar=no,menubar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no') }

The html code that calls this popup is a hyperlink after the Total in the local currency.,

Convert Currency

Registration – Buy

This site has a different set of “how did you hear about us” options for each country which is a custom field I have set up. I modify the Option Values for the drop down list on this layout.
I also add the text after the amount to show what currency this transaction will be in.
This site has some payment options that are only available in Australia (eg EFT), so I have some Javascript that disables that payment method if any other country is selected.
This site only uses paypal, but if you have different payment gateway options for each country, or use Credit Card payments you modify them here.

Registration – Receipt

This site does not have any different requirements but if you have any changes to make, so them here, but remember to copy over your standard receipt layout anyway.
If you use Quotes, also modify the Registration – Quote and Receipt – Quote templates or Gift Voucher template if you use Gift Vouchers.

Web Pages

This site does not have many changes for each country, but if you did need a different web page for each country then you would need to set them up, and set up a different start page for each country.
I just use some JavaScript to change one div on my page depending on the country.

System Messages

These are country specific also, so go through every message in Admin > More Customization Options > System Messages and copy your customised ones over to the new country. The only one this site had customised was the 404 Page Not Found.

System Emails

Check your system emails to see if there is anything that needs to be specifically changed for the new country – go to Admin > More Customization Options > System Emails.
Eg, again I had the text to show what currency this transaction was in on the Invoice. However as there is no separate Invoice for each country, and you can’t use JavaScript on emails, there is not really much that you can do with the invoice except make it very generic.
If you use Quotes or Gift Vouchers, remember to check the text in the emails for each of these.

Testing

Once you have done all the customisations you need for your new country, you will need to test it – and test it as if you are a user that is coming from an IP address inside that country. To do this you will need a VPN. A VPN channels all the web traffic from your computer through a server in a specific country to provide the websites you are visiting, an IP address from that country – it effectively looks to the website you are visiting like you are really coming to the seite from that country.

I have used Always VPN for a US VPN server previously and it is a great service and pay as you go. They unfortunately don’t have a server in the UK.
I found TunnelBear that can switch between UK and US effortlessly and they have 500MB free per month – which should be plenty to test your website.

Just remember to turn off your VPN service when you have finished testing.

Well I hope this post helps if you ever have to set up another country in Business Catalyst. If you have any more ideas for cool things to do with multi-national sites, or any ways that I can improve my Javascript Code (I am not a coder, so it can probably do with some improvement) then please add a comment below.

Building a Glossary in Confluence

Jodie Miners — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:00:14 +0000

When building a Confluence site, or any Help documentation, it is very important to have a Glossary to help explain some of the terms that will be used in the documentation.

Confluence has a few examples of glossaries in their own help system, but of course I wanted to take it a step further – I wanted my glossary terms to have hover text in the main body of the help system, then with a hyperlink to the full glossary text. Also, the glossary should be on one Glossary page and be able to be included in the printed documents.

So, of course, it’s User Macros to the rescue – that along with a lot of help from the Confluence support forum, here’s what I came up with:

The Glossary Macro

{anchor:$ParamName}
h3. $ParamPhrase
{cloak:id=$ParamName}
{multi-excerpt:name=$ParamName}{html}$ParamPhrase{html}{multi-excerpt}
{cloak}
$Body

Create the macro to “Convert wiki markup to HTML”.

Breaking down the macro:

We create an anchor to come back to this Glossary entry at any time from the main content.
The Parameter phrase is shown in a heading 3 style. The phrase can contain multiple words – eg “Glossary Entry” may be a phrase for a Glossary term.
There is a cloaked (hidden) section containing a multi-excerpt macro, which contains some HTML formatted text. The multi-excerpt macro will be used to display the Glossary term in our main content pages.
The HTML text has a dotted green underline and a hyperlink back to this page, it also has a “title”, which forms the hover text (or Tool Tip) of the Glossary term.
Finally the body of the macro is shown – this is the full text of the Glossary.

Glossary Macro Usage

We call the Glossary Macro on our Glossary Page with the following code entered into the Wiki Markup of the page.

{glossary:Name=MyName|Phrase=My Glossary Phrase|Tooltip=My Hover or Tool Tip Text}The main description of the Glossary term. 
This can contain as much information as needed.{glossary}

You end up writing the ToolTip again in the the body, but as both bits of content are stored in the same place, it is easy to update them.

This will display on the page as:

My Glossary Phrase

The main description of the Glossary term.

This can contain as much information as needed.

The rest of the content is hidden because it is inside the cloak macro.

The GL Macro

This is the macro that allows us to use the Glossary term in the main content of the Confluence site and link back to the Glossary page, as well as show the ToolTip on hover over the link.

The macro text is simply to use the multi-excerpt include macro to show the multi-excerpt text we set up on the Glossary page.

{multi-excerpt-include:pageTitle=Glossary|name=$paramName|nopanel=true}

This will display our Glossary phrase as such:

This is My Glossary Phrase used in a sentence.

When you hover over My Glossary Phrase the text “Hover or Tool Tip Text” will be shown
When you click on the phrase it takes you straight to that anchor on the Glossary page.

GL Macro Usage

The GL macro is simply called by entering the following text in Wiki Markup mode.

This is {gl:MyName} Phrase used in a sentence.

(macro names are always lower case).

Overall Glossary Page

See the content on the Confluence documentation that I wrote about creating a great looking Confluence Glossary page with an alphabetic index at the top of the page.

So it’s very simple to include Glossary words in the body of your Confluence document, the overall Glossary page looks good, and all of the glossary content is maintained and updated in One Place, Once.

I would love to see if you have any ideas for any improvements in this user macro, or if you have a great Confluence glossary page to show off.

The “One Thing, in One Place, Once” Rule using Confluence

Jodie Miners — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 10:51:19 +0000

As a database designer, I am a huge believer in the “One Thing, in One Place, Once” rule (aka Normalization, in database speak).

As I’m currently building a full enterprise help system in Confluence, of course I’m going to extend that rule to my help content also.

I started with the ideas of Re-Using Content in Confluence and Building an Inclusions Library as written by Sarah Maddox from Atlassian, then as I started to need more features, I moved on to some of the other methods for content re-use, so I thought I would summarise them.

There are 4 ways that I use to re-use Content. The {include} macro, {excerpt} macro, the {multi-excerpt} macro and the {builder-show} macro. The {include} macro is the simplest and the {builder-show} is the most complex and most powerful.

I’m mainly using these features to produce a printable version of the help content, which is a bit different than the Wiki content, as it is presented in a linear fashion, and doesn’t have as many links to content unrelated to the narrative of the document.

Have a look at the following diagram, it shows some examples of the 4 macros that I regularly use. The first box is the base page, where the content is originally created. The second box is the wiki markup mode of the page where the content is included. The third box is what will show in the final layout of the page.

(click to enlarge)

Include Macro

The {include} macro simply includes the full content of the base page into the display page.

I use this macro for small notes and info panels that are used in multiple places.

On the display page enter the following in wiki markup mode:

{include:Base Page}

The {include} Macro is a bit limiting as most of my main pages has a section at the top that shows how you navigate to this screen – I don’t need that in my printed document.

The {include} Macro can be used from other spaces with the following syntax {include:SPACEKEY:Page name}. (Also see the Perimeter Plugin from CustomWare for the {secure-include} macro, which is useful for including from spaces that the user does not have access to).

Excerpt Macro

The {excerpt} macro allows for a defined section of the base page to be included in the display page. The content that is between the two {excerpt} tags can be included in the display page.

On the display page enter the following in wiki markup mode:

{excerpt-include:Base Page|nopanel=true}

I use this macro only occasionally for very simple pages as I find it a bit limiting as it can only be used for one continuous section of content.

The {excerpt-include} macro can only be used for content within the same space, similar to the {include} macro.

Multi Excerpt Macro

The {multi-excerpt} macro is part of the Multi-Excerpt Plugin. This is a very cool plugin, but it does cost – luckily it’s not that expensive.

This plugin allows you to have multiple excerpt sections in the base page appear in the display page – the cool thing is that the excerpts can be displayed in any order you want.

Each excerpt defined must have a unique name on the page.

On the display page enter the following in wiki markup mode:

{multi-excerpt-include:pageTitle=Base Page|name=excerpt1|nopanel=true}

The addition of the spacekey parameter allows the Multi-Excerpt macro to be used across spaces, so it is quite useful.

I use this quite a bit, but it still has one limitation – you can’t nest multi-excerpt macros – but I may be asking for a bit much there.

I use it to include the overall page description, then the screen shot, then the steps on how to use the screen, but exclude the navigation and the links to other pages, in my printed content.

Builder-Show Macro

The {builder-show} macro is part of the Adaptavist Theme Builder Plugin and is the coolest macro. The way I use it basically turns Confluence into a bit of database – yes it’s a bit complex to set up, but once it’s set up, the maintenance of the pages is going to be very easy.

Here’s how I use it – There are a number of fields on each screen. The same field can be used in multiple screens, and the same description is applicable to each screen. If I keep the description in one page, then I can use that description in multiple pages – but it only ever needs to be updated in the once place in future.

With the same field description being used on a few screen pages, and the printed manual for those screen pages, it can be used in up to 5 places – all based on the same source.

The main set-up for this macro is done on the base page, where we put in codes to say which pages the content will display on.

{builder-show:title=Display Page}
This is the first excerpt from my page
{builder-show}
{builder-show:title=Base Page}
This is the rest of my page
{builder-show}
{builder-show:title=Base Page, Display Page}
This is the second excerpt from my page
{builder-show}

The first and third sentences will be shown on the display page, and the second and third sentences will be shown on the base page. Sentence 3 will be show on both pages.

The display page contains the one macro – the {import} macro.

{import:Base Page}

And that’s all there is to it .

There is one small limitation with this macro – the content on the display page must be shown in the same order as it is on the base page.

I hope that has helped give you some ideas on how to re-use content in your Confluence site, and if you have any more cool macros to share, please leave a comment.

I’m a (Virtual) Resident Geek

Jodie Miners — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 07:25:12 +0000

The second round of particpants for the Geeks in Residence program from the Australia Council for the Arts was recently announced, and I am very pleased to say that I am now the Resident Geek for the Arts Law Centre of Australia – well virtually in residence anyway.

The Geeks in Residence program is a great program by Arts Digital Era, part of the Australia Council for the Arts, that pairs up Geeks with Arts organisations that need a bit of a helping hand to find their way in the online world. Whilst it is mainly focused around getting help around social media, and online presence, some organisations also need some help in the back office systems, and that is where I can help. For some more information about the Geek in Residence program, have a look at the application process and FAQs page. The program also has it’s own website.

ArtsLaw provides a great service to all forms of artists from around the country to provide legal advice and legal services such as reviewing a contract, or downloading a standard agreement. This is a great service and very much needed in the art community.

After recently launching a great new website, ArtsLaw now need some help in streamlining some of the back-end systems to more integrate the website with the internal business processes, and that is where I am helping out.

The Geek in Residence program is technically meant to be just that – in residence, but as I had already made plans to move to Melbourne when I was interviewed for the program, we were able to juggle it a bit and I am still able to help ArtsLaw, virtually, using a few great online collaboration tools and the good old telephone. (There will be some face to face time required in the Sydney office as we start to do some of the implementation and training). This also fits in quite nicely with the new systems and tools we will be implementing at ArtsLaw as it’s all about building on the success of their new website and moving to a more online way of working.

A big thanks to Fee Plumley, the woman behind Arts Digital Era and the Geeks in Residence Programe, and I wish her well in her new adventure. Also a big thanks to the team at ArtsLaw, as I am really enjoying working with you and I can’t wait to get these new systems and tools in place.