New Year's resolutions - share your list

2011 was an amazing year for CloudSpokes, almost unbelievable. The site launched on Valentine's day, and every day since has exceeded our wildest expectations for this community. We couldn't be more proud of what this community has done, and more excited for what the future holds.

To recap this inaugural year, here are a few of the key milestones we hit along the way:

1. March: First CloudSpokes winner - fractastical
2. March: First international CloudSpokes winner - shanmuk1729
3. March: 2,000 members in 6 weeks
4. May: First CloudSpokes guest blogger - knthornt
5. May: CloudSpokes scores its first hackathon - DocuSign's E-summit
6. May: First sponsored badges - Cloud Foundry
7. May: First Cloudspokes challenge sponsor - Twilio
8. June: 10,000 members in 100 days
9. August: First broadly adopted publicly available app - Dreamforce Party App
10. September: 20,000 members in 6 months
11. September: First CloudSpoke member to achieve 10 wins - Kenji776
12. September: Announcement of CloudSpokes site re-platforming

And as of this weekend - we're now at 30,000 members, and have just announced that the site is now rebuilt on Heroku and Database.com - completely rebuilt by the community itself! Two huge milestones for CloudSpokes back-to-back.

Given that CloudSpokes is getting what's on its list, it's time for you to share what you want! Using the comments below, tell us what's on your wish list to make CloudSpokes better, to help CloudSpokes be a better developer community. Items that would make this ecosystem even more awesome. This is your community after all.

Have a great new year, everyone!

DocuSign joins as a CloudSpokes partner, with a new OS X challenge!

We are ever so proud to announce that our excellent friends over at DocuSign are now our newest CloudSpokes partners! Accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device, the DocuSign Global Network connects companies to their customers, partners, suppliers and employees where they can transact business with confidence. Customers of all sizes solve their paper problems by easily replacing manual, paper-based methods to decrease contract cycle times, reduce costs, improve visibility and control, and enhance customer satisfaction.

We originally began working with DocuSign way back in May, when we teamed up for DocuSign's E-Sign Hackathon, part of their 2011 Summit. Since then we've been meaning to team up again to host some challenges using the DocuSign API, and that time has finally come.

As part of a bigger theme, the first DocuSign challenge simply calls for a Mac OS X application that runs in the menu bar and allows a user to upload documents to DocuSign. Simple enough, right? $2,000 to the winner, so get cracking!

We are live!

Like Number 5, CloudSpokes is alive and running on Heroku and Database.com.  It has been a great experience rebuilding CloudSpokes with the entire community.  If you have ANY issues please report them to support@cloudspokes.com.  Most of the site is the same as the original site, but there are a few minor enhancements especially in the account section.  You are now able to track your payments and how you'd like to get paid.

The new site is going to allow us to respond your requests and suggestions much faster than before. We are really exciting about the new platform and what it means.  We are targeting monthly releases and you'll be seeing the release notes published to the CloudSpokes website.  More on this to come soon!

We couldn't have gotten the site redesigned without the community!  Specifically, I'd like to thank these members for contributing code used in our new website in no particular order:

• mural
• plcgi1
• HomeroCarvalho
• wcheung
• akkishore
• dineshdhoom
• ghanshyamyadav
• helperyadav
• jazzyrocksr
• ppandhi
• romin
• sgurumurthy
• sindujaramaraj
• xavieremerson
• kzer95
• abhartiya
• eadlam
• gackerjr
• Kenji776
• mbleigh
• mwaheed23
• nwhitney
• raygao
• sbfaulkner
• jacobdam

Some other cool stats:

• 8 countries participated in the rewrite.
• The site was built using 22 different challenges!

Cloud Foundry - Office Relocator App Winners

We're overdue to announce the results of our most recent Cloud Foundry challenge - the Office Relocator App, but it was such a fun challenge that we just couldn't let this one slip by without calling it out.

This challenge revolved around the following hypothetical situation:

"A company is deciding to move offices. Build a web application on Cloud Foundry allowing a user to enter the potential new address for corporate headquarters. The app will then display a Google map with a pinpoint for the new office and pinpoints for each employee. The employee information will be retrieved from a flat file stored with your application. The file is located in the assets on the right hand side of this page. Additionally the app will display a grid of all the employees, their distance of the commute and the difference between the new location and the old location."

Here are a few of the winning submissions - congrats to all the winners on this one!

ckeene came in first place with his app, "commutewave":

akkishore placed second with his entry, "officereloc":

Congrats to romin, sgurumurthy, and prashanthreddy who all also placed second in this challenge!

How to use the Database.com Ruby Gem

The new Ruby Gem for Database.com was released at Dreamforce last fall with much fanfare.  The gem is a Ruby wrapper for the Salesforce REST APIs and it covers both the Sobject API and the Chatter API. Salesforce-based OAuth is baked into the gem, so your data is secure and access privileges are controlled by the org.

The new gem is great but it’s so new that there’s not much documentation or sample code for it right now. This makes it hard for Force.com developers to get started using Ruby. We wanted to make it easier for Force.com developers to ramp us so we put our money where our mouth is and ponied up some cash to build a demo app as a tutorial. The results of our Databasedotcom Ruby Gem Tutorial is final and everyone can rejoice.

Raygao takes home $500 for his efforts and the world gets a sample Ruby app that everyone can can use as reference for their next database.com project. Raygao's code is available on the databasedotcom-tutorial github repo for your forking pleasure.

He also put together a nice video demonstrating the functionality of the app, "Fitness Tracker".

Salesforce Quick Links

How often do you find yourself navigating to the same record, report, etc. in Salesforce.com on a daily basis?

While the Recent Items feature is nice (unless it is the last category in your left navigation and you have 10 other groups above it), and bookmarking URL’s in your favorite browser works, they are not the best answer.

What we really need is a way to identify “Favorites”, “Quick Links” or whatever you want to call them to provide one-click access to your most frequented Salesforce.com information.

Well, now we have an answer, thanks to Kenji776 and his winning submission for our Salesforce Quick Links challenge.  Full screen video here.

Be a hero. Save a Gmail Attachment.

Gmail attachments are fragile, fleeting things. Often misaligned and abused, and always in need of a good rescue.

Hence why we launched our recent Save Gmail Attachments challenge.  The motto?  "No attachment left behind..."  The mission? "Create a Google Chrome Extension or Gadget that allows a user to save attachments for multiple emails in their Gmail inbox to a local directory."

And now it's time to announce the winners.

PaulKolbovich hauled in second place with his entry.  Paul used a google gadget to place an actual "attachments" button on the gmail UI that donwloaded the files - slick:

akkishore rescued first place with a google chrome extension that selected the messages and then used heroku to actually save the attachments.  Gotta love the use of heroku here:



Congrats to both of these winners heros!

Stop Bad Chatter Photos!

There's an epidemic set to explode in Corporate America.... bad Chatter photos! As larger enterprises increase their use of Chatter for collaboration, there is an increasing desire and/or concern for consistent, professional photos.

You know what I'm talking about! We've all seen the bad Chatter photos. There's the silly holiday party photos, that one of the lady and her cats and this guy here. With the control of Chatter photos in the hands of the users, we think there should be some way to provide some degree of control at a corporate level by providing for mass updates of photos by HR.

We came to the rescue of Corporate America by launching our Chatter Photos Bulk Importer challenge to help rid Chatter of these offensive images. Apparently our CloudSpokes member, avidev9, hates these images as much as we do. He created a kick ass Java app that allows for the bulk updating of photos in Chatter. He even won $750 for his effort to stamp out this Chatter injustice.

We think the app is worth $1M at least. Check out his video ... and congrats avidev9!

Our Newest Challenge Sponsor: FullContact

Ladies and gentlemen, we couldn't be happier to announce our latest CloudSpokes sponsor to join the ranks: FullContact!  FullContact is the API for keeping contact information current.  Bart and Robbie and the rest of the crew over in Colorado are simply fantastic.

To kick off their first CloudSpokes challenge, the team has decided to see if the community can put together a FullContact Chrome Browser Extension for Salesforce.

This extension will allow Salesforce users to augment their Lead and Contact record pages with information from the FullContact API. The extension will extract the contact information of the current contact from the Lead page or Contact page, including email address, phone numbers, name, title and company name, and pass this data to the FullContact API, and populate a new region of the page with the FullContact response data.

Register for the challenge here, and stay tuned for more from the FullContact team!

Schedule & Email Salesforce Reports with Ease

He makes it look soo easy!

This guy is a top-notch saleforce.com admin and his life is a blast. He makes everything that he does look easy. Implementing salesforce.com security... easy. Rolling out new features to end-users... easy. Automating processes... easy.

However, life isn't so great when it comes to scheduling and emailing reports. It's not so easy to automate the process of sending reports to recipients outside of your org on a scheduled basis. We wanted to help this guy because we really like him and want to make his life easier.

So we spun up the Salesforce Auto Report Runner challenge with this guy in mind. Luckily andymahood likes this guy as well and came to his rescue with an awesome solution to make this guy's life easy. Check out his video below or in full screen here for details.

andymahood

1st Place - Salesforce Auto Report Runner challenge
Prize: $1200
First time winner bonus: $1200 (double the prize money)

Mobile Social Enterprise Toolkit for CloudForce

Appirio wanted a way to showcase their new Social Enterprise Toolkit for CloudForce NY so we spun up a challenge to build a mobile-friendly idea voting and submission app for them.

Kenji776 won the challenge with his jQuery Mobile entry hosted on Force.com.

Don't take our word for it, run the app for yourself on your mobile device:

http://m.socialenterprisetoolkit.com

Mail Merge for Google Docs and Salesforce.com

Google and salesforce.com are a match made in heaven. Who doesn't love the convenience of working in the cloud? However, there are still some processes that are just not "cloudy" yet. Once of them is doing mail merges. We've been trying for a couple of months now (this is our third try) to get a valid submission for our Cloud Merge for Google Docs challenge. We really wanted to build this!

The challenge was to build a mail merge feature from salesforce.com to Google Docs that would allow an administrator to set up document templates containing merge fields to populate salesforce.com data into a Google Doc. 

We finally found someone that wanted to accept the challenge and we can declare "victory"... for now. Elukaweski submitted the winning entry which we'll probably use as a base for future challenges to enhance the functionality. This was elukaweski's first win so he takes home double the $2000 prize money for the challenge! Congrats!

Check out the video that elukaweski submitted with his code.

Opportunity Product Selection Made Easy!

Everyone wants an easy way to select products in salesforce.com... even this chinchilla. For our Salesforce Product Selection Search Utility challenge, we wanted to "Sexify" the Salesforce.com Opportunity Product Selection screen with a VisualForce page that includes a Google-like type-ahead search.

We had 15 registrants and 5 quality submissions. In the end we only choose the top three and here they are! Congrats to all of the winners and there are definitely more Force.com and jQuery challenges to come.

1. Avidev9
2. Salesforcedeveloper
3. Lukeemberton

Here's avinava's submission video. You can view it full screen here. 

Cloning Made Easy with jQuery!

Who loves cloning records in salesforce.com? We do! However, there's one pesky little problem ... the cloning process doesn't always bring over related records. We decided to run a challenge to clone a record, bring over related items and easily drag and drop records to add them to the list of related items.

So the results of our Clone & Configure Salesforce Records with jQuery challenge can be announced with the appropriate fanfare. It seems that everyone loves jQuery as we had 18 registrants and 5 high-quality submissions to choose from.

In the end, our judges awarded first place ($2000) to avinava and second place ($1000) to jordanbaucke.  Both first time competitors! Congrats!

Avidev9 
1st Place

Video submission

Jordanbaucke
2nd Place

Video submission