ifPeople Leads Salesforce User Group Sprint to a New Site

The January Salesforce User Group like many other meetings introduced some new ideas to our members. The focus for this meeting was on how to integrate an open source CMS system (Plone) with Salesforce. Chris demonstrated how simple it is in his presentation but invited the User Group members to take things a step further and actually implement what they learned at a "Sprint". Sprints are a common form of doing collaborative, rapid development where everyone is focused on an outcome. The challenge in this case was to build a functional website to be the "home" for the user group online and ease the user group administration that comes from having data in too many places. 

Since this is the sweet spot for ifPeople's work in integrating websites with Salesforce, we leveraged the venerable Plone CMS to build a new site from scratch. During the course of one evening, ifPeople's team led the group through the entire process of strategizing and building a website (in an accelerated fashion, of course). Equipped with beer, pizza, and an eager desire to meet the challenge at hand, the Salesforce User Group members dove into the process.

Everyone was split into three groups that were lead by one of three ifPeople staff. Josh managed the technical crew, who set up the server environment, configured a "buildout" and built the base site. They then gave users to the Content group, led by Tirza, who started with Information Architecture, goals, and audience analysis. As they worked there way through creating content pages, one participant shouted out "Wow, this is so much easier than Joomla!" With minimal training, the group was able to add events, forms, and exercised smart formatting that made information skimmable and easy to digest. Marty led a group in theme customization and design tweaks and then tackled the all-important part of the new site: forms and integration! 

Within a short while, users could RSVP on events that led to a record being recorded in Salesforce (where the User Group is managed) and could sign up for the group and its announcements. With everyone's effort and focus, we're glad to say that we sprinted across the finish line in time and Voila!: http://www.atlantasalesforce.org

In under three hours we successfully created a Plone site that has a snazzy theme, displays various forms of content, and is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce. Collaboration, enthusiasm, and an opportunity to put our knowledge to good use produced a fun and impressive outcome. We look forward to finding new ways of bringing people together around fun projects like these in the future!