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The Importance of Defining and Documenting Business Needs

Ted Husted — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:25:22 GMT

[Networking, Dinner, Program] Before the project ever arrives at the desk of a project BA or System Designer, there is someone in the company that has a business need and must make a Business Case to get the project funded. Join us as we explore the importance of defining business requirements in the initial stages of Enterprise Analysis.

Meet the speaker: Nuri has been employed at Discover Student Loans since April 1989 in a variety of roles within Finance, Credit and Product Development. Nuri is currently a Project Manager for Product and Customer Engagement and is responsible for analyzing business needs and developing or modifying products and processes to meet those needs. Her role also involves monitoring current products to ensure they align with business profitably and are competitive in the market. Her experience includes developing and presenting business cases and proposals for project consideration and overseeing activities on projects to ensure that the solution ultimately meets the business needs. Her role allows her to work closely with Business Analysts to co-author proposals as well as define, assess and allocate business requirements.

When: Wednesday, May 2, 2012 @ 5:30

Cost: $10 Chapter Members $15 Non-Members and you can bring a friend at the member price!

Where: NimbleUser 656 Kreag Rd. Pittsford, (behind Tim Horton’s in Bushnell’s Basin)

2012 Take Your Child to Work Day

Beth Farrar — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:16:51 GMT

On April 26th NimbleUser hosted “Take Your Child to Work Day.” Many of the staff’s children attended the event and learned about cloud computing, teamwork and got to see where their parents work.

The crew broke into groups for various activities. The younger kids enjoyed a scavenger hunt throughout the office while the older kids filmed interviews with the NimbleUser staff. The kids also got to enjoy a lunch of Peanut Butter & Fluff sandwiches (fluffy just like clouds of course) and made their own icecream sundaes.

While the kids were learning about NimbleUser and teamwork, our staff were reminded of the things kids teach us: Dive right in, have fun and always learn and ask questions.

View the photos on our Facebook Page.

NimblerUser wins its 10th Customer Service Award

Sig VanDamme — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:10:45 GMT

Last week NimbleUser received two awards at the recent ASI Innovation Conference in Las Vegas. This is the annual conference of Authorized iMIS Solution Providers where Advanced Solutions outlines their technology roadmap, provides a deep dive into their solutions and recognizes partner success.

NimbleUser was awarded its 10th Customer Service Award. To us at NimbleUser this is the ultimate recognition to our core company value of providing an Outstanding Customer Experience. This award is customer driven and is the result of extensive customer surveys conducted by ASI.

An outstanding customer experience is the output of a partnership between NimbleUser, ASI and, most importantly, the customer working together. Thanks ASI! Thanks Customers! Here is to another great year!

NimbleUser also received its 8th Chairman's circle award and we are very proud to be recognized this way.

The only issue may be that we will soon need a bigger awards shelf!

Salesforce - Open Source Pioneer

Ted Husted — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:14:29 GMT

Before joining NimbleUser, I spent a decade working with open source software and participating in open source communities. Being part of an open source community, and helping to improve tools we use every day, is an enlightening experience, outside the scope of simple blog entry.

And I miss it. I've tried to stay involved with new projects like Vosao CMS, I answer mail sent to human-response at apache-dot-org, I speak at ApacheCon when I can, and I'm trying to bootstrap an advocacy site with Tim O'Brien. But, it's a struggle to keep up with other projects when I'm still learning so much every day about the Salesforce CRM platform.

One consolation is that Salesforce is built with many products I touched during my open source decade. I worked with Doug Cutter and Jon Stevens to migrate Lucene to Apache Jakarta. Salesforce uses several Apache Commons products that I helped create (along with the Commons itself). So, although I don't get to work on open source projects as much as I used to, I am grateful to be working with a solid, thoughtful product built on a backbone of truly awesome open source components.

Core infrastructure

Salesforce.com pioneered cloud computing. Its combined Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offering handles 100,000+ customers, over 2.1 million users, 30+ million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data, running on its own blend of open source, proprietary, and custom code. [Wikipedia]

While the Salesforce platform uses the Oracle Database system as the basis as its backend data store, the web infrastructure is powered by several open source products, like Caucho Resin. The Resin Application Server is a high-performance XML application server for use with JSPs, servlets, JavaBeans, XML, and a host of other technologies. [Hurwitz]
Fulltext search

To help users find data quickly and easily, in 2002, Salesforce.com added the open source Apache Lucene search engine to its technology stack. Today, Lucene to manages an eight terabyte index of about twenty billion documents on the Salesforce platform. The Salesforce/Lucene cluster consists of roughly sixteen machines, which in turn contain many small (sharded) Lucene indexes. The system handles roughly 4000 queries per second, and it provides an incremental indexing model where the new Salesforce user data is searchable within approximately three minutes, through use of a custom optimizer. [Igvita]

Quality assurance

Salesforce.com brings out three major releases a year, and to keep development on track, their quality assurance team runs 50,000 tests a day. About 20,000 of those tests run under the open source Selenium web application testing system. Selenium supports exporting tests to native application languages, like Java and C#, and a Salesforce.com engineer open sourced an extension for its own language, Apex. [Porro, Nagata]

User-facing tools

Several of the Salesforce external data manipulation tools are built with open source components or are themselves open source. The indispensible Salesforce IDE is an Eclipse plugin. The popular Force.com Excel Connector is hosted at code.google.com. Responses to Outbound Messages are handled by the Apache Commons Connection Pool. The very useful Apex Data Loader is powered by the Spring Framework and Apache Commons BeanUtils. Since the Data Loader is open source, an OSX version sprang up (LexiLoader), and there is also an open source wizard (DataLoaderCliq) to help with Data Loader automation.
Advocacy

At its 2011 Dreamforce Conference, Salesforce.com offered an entire track of presentations that encouraged users to adopt other open source tools, including a developer session entitled “Build Better Apps with Open Source”. On an ongoing basis, Salesforce.com hosts an Open Source forum as part of its support site. [SFDC]

By leveraging a solid core of open source packages, and mixing in its own proprietary customizations, Salesforce is able to deliver a robust, configurable platform, upon which millions of business users rely every day.

Products mentioned

References

[Hurwitz] Is there beef behind SalesForce.Com?
[Wikipedia] Salesforce.com.
[Igvita] Lucene in the wild: Salesforce, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al.
[Porro, Nagata] How to test Salesforce Apps with Selenium.
[SFDC] Apex Data Loader, Build Better Apps Using Open Source, Open Source Labs tract, Open Source Forum.

Introducing Business Analysis to your Organization

Ted Husted — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:16:55 GMT

April 4, 2012 at 5: 30 PM - 8:30 PM
NimbleUser, Pittsford

As organizations grow and evolve, many discover that they need to take a more disciplined approach to software development than they did in the past.

When end-user satisfaction is low and/or support needs for existing systems are higher than the organization can support, it's time to rethink processes for developing software. Introducing a business analysis process to the organization can yield tremendous benefits in terms of quality, user satisfaction, and repeatable success, but these benefits may not be fully realized and may not be long-lived if not implemented appropriately and without the full support of the IT management team.

This presentation will guide attendees through key concepts, steps, and success factors to move an organization into disciplined business analysis processes.

To RSVP, visit http://iibarochester.org/

Cloud Survives Nova

Ted Husted — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:27:01 GMT

The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear holocaust, but no one expected to find social media networks still available after the Sun's surprise flare-up on Saturday.

"While we talk about the bits being in the cloud, most of the Internet is actually underground," explained Internet Guru Nick Francesco. "Although the solar flare burned off the ozone, condemning us all to a slow painful death, the good news is that we can still tweet about it."

Saturday's Twitter volume during the flare eclipsed the recent record set during the season finale of Pretty Little Liars. The light from the flare made earthfall at 7:48a EST, had its own Twitter account (@SunFlare) by 7:50a, and 439,624 followers by 8:15a. By noon, over 700,000 tweets referenced the flare, including choice nuggets like

@Ecc19 "Wow! Something new over the earth."
@SmileKid13 "#WorstDayEver #SunGoesViral."
@Groupon "Designer Sunglasses - B1G1 - Today Only!"
@JStorm "Flame On!"

Elsewhere, Facebook exploded with blurry iPhone photos of a dilating ball of light, and most LinkedIn statuses changed to "Ready to move. Call me.". The flare passed through Google+ without a ripple, since most of the plussies were busy updating their last known address on Plaxo.

Salesforce expects Chatter volume to soar on Monday, as burn-outs return to work after a long, hairy weekend. "The flare is a real opportunity for growth," blogged founder Marc Benioff. "Nothing brings out net-new leads like a good fire sale."

PS: Enjoy this special day.

Facebook for the 45+ Crowd, Take 5

Ted Husted — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:26:43 GMT

Nimblers Janan Compitello and Ted Husted hosted their fifth 'Facebook for the 45+ Crowd' workshop on March 27 and 29, 2012, introducing twelve eager pupils to the world's most popular online destination.

In the workshop, participants get hands on with Facebook and learn to connect with family and friends through the world's most popular online social network. Over the two sessions of this hands-on seminar, Janan and Ted help seniors set up a profile, connect, start sharing, and learn what all the social networking fuss is about.

The Facebook workshop is held by TechAge of Rochester NY. Techage is a group of dedicated volunteers interested in passing on our computer skills to senior citizens 45 years old and older, in association with the Learning Center at JCC Rochester.

Most TechAge courses are held quarterly and include: Introduction to Computers, Microsoft Word, Introduction to Digital Photography, Taking Control of Windows, Digital Photo Editing, Using Microsoft Excel, Internet and Email, Digital Photo Products, Google, Enjoy More of the Web. TechAge also has drop-in hours, daily from 12-2p, where any 45+ person can stop by for help with their technology questions.

Salesforce Certification - A Win/Win

Ted Husted — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:45:21 GMT

General knowledge of database or website technologies is invaluable, but at the the end of the day, we implement projects in specific products. A Ph.D. in computer science doesn't mean someone is a SQL Server 2008 rock star.

A key benefit of working with Salesforce CRM is a top-knotch professional certification program that recognizes individuals who have passed detailed proficiency exams. Salesforce.com offers two distinct certification paths, Administrator and Developer.

Certified Administrators employ broad knowledge of the Salesforce CRM platform. Administrators provide first-tier support for other users, create reports and dashboards, define validations, construct workflows and approval processes, and handle the day-to-day oversight of a Salesforce organization.

Certified Developers evince comprehensive knowledge of the Force.com development platform. Developers create custom objects, database triggers, Visualforce pages, and other custom components. Developers may also work with the web services API to integrate Salesforce CRM with other products.

To prove higher levels of proficiency, Certified Administrators may earn additional credentials as Sales or Service Cloud Implementation Experts, and Certified Developers can go on to earn a Technical Architect credential. For the overachiever, there are also Advanced Administrator and Advanced Developer certifications.

Since Salesforce.com releases significant new enhancements to the platform every four months, like clockwork, we all have to maintain our certifications by taking release-specific exams, for each certification. The maintenance exams are not as grueling as the initial exams, but earning and keeping certifications demonstrates commitment to the Salesforce platform.

At NimbleUser, our Salesforce implementation teams include a mix of Certified Administrators and Certified Developers. Having certified consultants on board helps us provide our customers with the highest possible level of service.

Visit certification.salesforce.com to learn more, or visit our web site to find out more about the NimbleUser peeps.

Increasing the Perceived Value of Business Analysis Activities

Ted Husted — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:31:31 GMT

Presented by: Laura Brandenburg, is a business analyst consultant, author, and mentor.

What: Networking, light dinner, remotely delivered program

Earn: 1 CDU

When: Wednesday, March 7, 2012 @ 5:30

Where: Nimble User, 656 Kreag Rd, Pittsford, (behind Tim Horton’s in Bushnell’s Basin)

Cost: $10 IIBA Rochester Chapter Members; $15 Non-Members and you can bring a friend at the member price!

Program Synopsis: Do you find yourself investing a lot of effort in requirements only to be asked “why is this taking so long”? Maybe you are hearing “let’s skip that and just get the requirements”? Do you feel there is a tension between producing quality deliverables and meeting employer demands? Do your stakeholders skip meetings, bypass reviews, and otherwise make it difficult to do quality work? Business analysis, at its core, is about creating alignment and clarity to drive positive change in our organizations. If you are having the troubles above, it may be that your definition of successful business analysis and your employer’s perception of value are out of sync. After this presentation, you’ll be better prepared to frame your business analyst activities in value terms your stakeholders understand – and will act on. We’ll help you compare your principles of success to those of your employer and stakeholders. We will provide practical ways you can increase your perceived value of common BA practices such as templates, meetings, and reviews.

Prepare for the session and leave comments here:

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/iiba-rochester-how-to-increase-your-perceived-value-as-a-ba/

Attendees will learn:

Models for evaluating how your organization and stakeholders perceive value and how to frame business analysis activities within that framework;
Techniques for increasing the value generated from your business analyst activities and, just as importantly, the perception of value by your organization;
Tactics for delivering on the core principles of business analysis when practices are challenged.

Meet the speaker: Laura Brandenburg is a business analyst consultant, author, and mentor. She has 9 years of experience across technology leadership, analysis, project management, and QA. She volunteers for IIBA as Career Center Product Manager and VP, Marketing of the Denver Chapter. She hosts Bridging the Gap, a blog about business analyst practices. She authored How to Start a Business Analyst Career and Professional Development for Business Analysts.

Visit her blog at http://www.bridging-the-gap.com

Uniting Salesforce CRM and Andar/360

Ted Husted — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:15:25 GMT

Many United Way organizations are adopting Salesforce CRM as their core business process and collaboration tool, including the national United Way organization. Salesforce offers United Way users instant access to the system over a secure Internet connection, an easy and intuitive interface, improved interaction with members and donors, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

A missing piece for many local United Way organizations is easy access to donor information. Among United Way organizations, Andar/360 is the "goto" system for workplace donor management. Every year, Andar helps hundreds of United Way organizations raise billions of dollars that further the “Live United” mission of improving education, promoting healthy lives, and helping people achieve financial stability.

To put Andar data at users’ fingertips, NimbleUser developed an Andar/360 to Salesforce data integration. The custom integration pulls backbone Andar data into Salesforce, including Organization and Individual contact information, Demographics, Affiliations, Relationships, Campaign and Donation History, and Leadership records.

The integration allows Salesforce users to view key details maintained in Andar, and access CRM features like Tasks and Activities, as well as Chatter. Users can also combine Salesforce and Andar data into custom reports and dashboards.

The Salesforce/Andar integration addresses several issues, including:

Secure, streamlined system access, from conventional and mobile devices.
Ease of use
Data visibility and consolidation
Scalable foundation for growth
Enhanced reporting capabilities
Microsoft Outlook integration

Under the hood, the integration uses a flexible and powerful data sync tool, developed by NimbleUser. The tool uses standard SQL Server queries and stored procedures to flatten and transform Andar data so that it is easier to use with Salesforce. The system automatically pulls updates from Andar several times a day, providing Salesforce users with current information.

Together, Salesforce CRM and Andar/360 give a United Way organization a "best of breed" customer collaboration and donor management system, to help staff become more effective, and increase donations to worthy causes.

NimbleUser offers many Salesforce support services to non-profits and associations, including a full-featured Association Management System. Visit our website or contact us for details.