The first thing you'll notice about Powerplay is that it's very "grid centric". In fact, all reports feel a lot like Excel because they're completely dynamic and editable. You can also make inline mass edits, an extremely powerful feature. All of this makes it incredibly easy to edit or view lots of data at once, right from Salesforce.
CRM is all about viewing the relationships between your data, and that's what separates it from a simple spreadsheet. This is the data you use to plan your day and log activity so a record's history can always be up to date. We understand this, so we provide a robust context view and a task list that's always available while you're viewing your reports. Because it's all dynamic--no waiting for page loads--you don't have to navigate between several screens every time you want to do something.
Because logging activity and managing a to-do list are important parts of anyone's day, we wanted to make it as easy as possible. So with our task list, you can complete an activity by simply checking it off. You can log a call simply by dragging the line item that represents the person you called and dropping it into your task list. It all gets logged directly to Salesforce. Did we mention it's easy?
Have you ever wanted to login to Salesforce and immediately have it bring up whatever you were last working on? Maybe a list of opportunities you didn't finish updating or a list of leads that still need to be qualified? We certainly have, so we built that into Powerplay. Powerplay remembers your preferences so when you return, everything will be just as you left it. The best part: it's all automatic.
iTunes has a cool feature where you can just start typing a search and it will narrow down your list of songs. Why doesn't Salesforce have that for your CRM data? We're not sure, but we went ahead and built it into Powerplay anyway. Search as you type is fast, easy, and convenient. Did we mention it's fast and easy? And convenient?
Sometimes when you're looking at a report, you need to save it as a PDF to print or e-mail to a colleague. Or, you might want to export some data as a CSV so you can import directly into Excel or another database. Powerplay makes all of this really, really easy.
Salesforce allows you to group reports by certain fields, but we thought it should be faster. Let's face it, sometimes you want to move groups around in your report, and it's annoying to have to jump into and out of the report builder and the report itself. So we made it possible to group fields in a report with just 2 clicks, without having to leave the report. Boom.
At Blackcloud, we live in Salesforce. So do our customers. But we wanted Powerplay to make Salesforce feel more like "an operating system for the Internet", so we added virtual workspaces to allow us to spread our work across fully interactive, completely dynamic desktops. It makes Powerplay truly amazing.
Every organization is different. They have different needs, different processes, and they want Salesforce to work the way they do. Because there is no "one size fits all" solution for business software, we made Powerplay highly customizable. Our reps will work with you to ensure that your Powerplay installation fits all of your needs and truly increases the ROI you see from Salesforce.
No credit card required. Did we mention it's easy?
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I have 1000 Salesforce users. Do I have to buy licenses for all of them?
No, you can buy licenses for only the users who will be using Powerplay
Is my data secure or at risk in any way?
Yes it’s secure, and no, it is not at risk in any way. All your data is stored on Salesforce.com’s servers and subject to their security measures. Our app runs in your web browser. The only communication with our servers involves validating that you are indeed one of our customers (or on a free trial).
How does the ...
Blackcloud Business Solutions Group is a Salesforce.com software vendor and consultancy. We truly believe in the power of data driven organizations. But we'll also be the first to admit that many BI and CRM initiatives fail. Why is that? ...
If you've just heard of Powerplay and have watched the demo video, you might be thinking to yourself: Cool, it's a neat new user interface that increases Salesforce.com user adoption, but is that something I really need? And what kind of ROI can I expect? ...
Blackcloud BSG started as a software consulting company, specializing in Salesforce.com integrations. After working with various clients, and being longtime users of Salesforce ourselves, it became clear that there were real problems with Salesforce. It does many things well--it's secure, it provides a scalable platform for cloud applications, it's fast, and Salesforce as a company is constantly innovating on their product while at the same time, making sure that existing customizations stay compatible. This is a difficult balancing act from a technical standpoint. So what's the problem? The problem is user adoption. More specifically, the Salesforce user interface and user experience sucks. Sorry, but it just does.
The Django Web Framework & Python:
Python is a programming language and Django is a web framework written in Python. A web framework is simply a set of tools that allow you to create web applications (like facebook or salesforce.com or gmail). Django is nice because it allows developers to work quickly and it supplies most of the tools you need. Python is great because it has such a huge community. Because Django is written in Python, you can take advantage of many other Python components not included with Django and they tend to work seamlessly. Python is also what we use for machine learning tasks, system automation, scraping websites, and just about anything else we want to do quickly. Further adding to Python's appeal is that it is a tried and true system with a track record of success. It's used by everyone from Google to NASA, and is a solid component for just about any project.
Salesforce.com:
Salesforce began as a CRM delivered through the internet and has developed into a whole platform for building cloud enabled applications. Out of the box, it provides a web interface where users can track leads, accounts, contacts, and opportunities. You can also create "custom objects" to track anything from job applications to internal projects. It also provides a force.com IDE built on Eclipse that allows you to add custom business logic using Salesforce's apex programming language. Salesforce is a perfect fit for any small to medium sized business that needs a stable, secure web-enabled operations platform. Powerplay, of course, makes Salesforce even better by streamlining common tasks.
Amazon Web Services (AWS):
AWS is one of the most interesting services to come about in the last few years. At a high level it's basically a service that lets you rent virtual servers and pay for only what you use. The power comes in the flexibility it provides. Let's say, for instance, you're an e-commerce retailer and you experience extra demand during the holiday season. You could buy more servers and have them sit idle for most of the year, or you can lose sales during the holiday season due to slow servers. OR you can setup autoscaling so when your site starts to respond slowly, it automatically spins up another AWS server and sends traffic that way. You only pay for the actual excess capacity you use.
Adobe Flex:
Flex is a framework built on top of Adobe's Flash player. It provides a set of ready made and extendable components that give web applications a fully skinnable, cross system, cross browser look and feel. It makes it reasonably straightforward to pull business data from a variety of sources, manipulate it, and display it to the user in a way that makes it easy to make decisions and get work done. Flash seems to be getting a lot of bad press these days with many saying flash is terrible and everyone should be using html5 or javascript. The truth is a little more complex then that, but fundamentally breaks down to this: a Flex equivelent for javascript or HTML5 does not currently exist, and it will take several years for one to emerge. In the meantime, for people with deadlines, Flex is the way to go for business apps delivered through a browser, the exception being apps which need to be used on apple mobile devices as apple has chosen to not support Flash (android does).
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