Pick up any dime store counseling book. Listen to any celebrity psychologist on television. Call Dr. Phil personally. You'll find out the same thing: excellent communication is the foundation of any good relationship. With the latest release of Non-Profit Soapbox, we're guaranteeing the relationship between Soapbox and Salesforce is solid as a rock.

Soapbox and Salesforce were already tight but now they're sharing intimate details in all sorts of new ways to make your website more dynamic and your job even easier and more efficient. Here's what all these sweet nothings whispered in the cloud get you.

Salesforce Search: The sweet nothings Salesforce tells Soapbox

The way Salesforce shares what's going on in its world with Soapbox is through Salesforce Search. With this tool in Soapbox, you choose an object in Salesforce you wish to pull data from. You decide if you'll define the search criteria yourself in the administrator, allow visitors to search for their own criteria, or elect a combination of both. You build the form through a few mouse clicks with no code required. Salesforce gives that data to Soapbox and Soapbox shows it to your visitors.

With this release, Soapbox got a whole lot better at listening to what Salesforce has to say. Here's a little taste of what it means you can do:

1. Render the HTML of a rich text field in Salesforce: If you've got bullets in Salesforce, it shows bullets on Soapbox. If you hyperlink a bit of text in Salesforce, Soapbox hyperlinks it, too. They're on the same page, baby - and they show it.
2. Render the HTML of a formula field n Salesforce: This one is taking their relationship to a whole new level. Salesforce variables, conditional logic, and operators can be included in a formula field to influence the HTML rendered by Soapbox so it does back flips, somersaults, handstands - or plays videos, show images, changes text based on a formula field, all while keeping within your site's design.
3. Display the Name of a referenced record rather than the Record ID: Huh?, you ask? Let's say you've got an Opportunity record you're displaying in Salesforce Search. That Opportunity is associated with - or is a child of, to use database lingo - an Account or Organization record. The Opportunity has a reference field that contains the Account Id for that Account or Organization record - but that's just a random collection of letters that nobody is going to understand or care about. Soapbox now allows you to display the Account or Organization Name of the associated record in Salesforce Search with just one step rather than displaying that random collection of letters.
4. Populate image height and width dynamically for images uploaded through Soapbox to Salesforce: Did you know you can allow visitors to upload images through a Salesforce Submit form? Yep, you can. All day long and twice on Sunday. Why? Think avatars for user profiles, logos for member directories, or a searchable image library. These images get stored in Soapbox with a reference to them saved in a Salesforce record. With Salesforce Search, those cute little images can be displayed to visitors on Soapbox - and a maximum height or width can be set so, even if someone tries to upload some crazy big image, it will be constrained to the space it is meant to take up. A place for everything and everything in its place, my grandma used to say.
5. Alter the access level of a logged in user based on a field in Salesforce: Wait...I can do what to the who where? you ask? This is a very specific item for a very specific set of circumstances but it ends up being an itty bitty gem for the right person at the right time. If you want to grant edit or publishing access to logged in users on the front end of your site based on some rules in Salesforce, you can do so. If you want to revoke that access dynamically because their a membership expires in Salesforce or for some other reason, you can. Just leave it up to Soapbox and you don't need to lift a finger.
6. Create multiple Salesforce Search modules: Want to have Salesforce data popup in places all over your site? Maybe a list of your top ten donors? Or your five most recent gifts? Or your newest member? How about all of those things tucked into this and that spot on your site. Sure thing! Live it up!
7. Define the hyperlink text for a Url field from Salesforce: If you include a Url field from Salesforce, the value of the field is hyperlinked in the Salesforce Search view that shows the record. Now you can go a step further and choose what the hyperlink should say. So, if your Salesforce field has the value of http://www.benjerry.com/, you can choose to have Soapbox present it as Yum!
8. Define the separator when displaying multi-select picklist fields from Salesforce: If you have a mult-select picklist in Salesforce for our sweet tooth example above that has different flavors to choose from, you can define how those values are displayed in the Salesforce Search view. So, if a given record has three flavors selected, you could choose to have them appear as "Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, Americone Dream" or "Cherry Garcia + Chunky Monkey + Americone Dream" or "Cherry Garcia |Chunky Monkey | Americone Dream" or any little way you wish.

Salesforce Submit: The sweet nothings Soapbox shares with Salesforce

The way Soapbox shares every little thing with Salesforce is through Salesforce Submit. With this tool in Soapbox, you choose an object in Salesforce you wish to push data to or edit data in. You build the form through a few mouse clicks. Your visitors give you data. Soapbox gives that data to Salesforce. Everybody's a winner.

With this release, you can now do the following to make the process even more powerful:

1. Pre-populate a Default Value in Salesforce Submit with data for the logged in end user: You've always been able to enter a Default Value for a Salesforce Element on a Salesforce Submit form - and even toss in the IP Address of the visitor. We've expanded this now to include variables specific to the logged in user's Soapbox account or any field on their Contact record in Salesforce.
2. Display the Edit button in more places so your visitors can easily access it: You can choose to allow visitors to edit a record in your Salesforce account through Soapbox. Prior to this release, the Edit button only appeared on the full Record Display view of Salesforce Search. Now you can choose to show it on the List Display view where the initial results are shown, making it easier for visitors to edit records they have permissions to edit - and less work for you since they're able to update data themselves.
3. Reset the values in a Salesforce Search form to the administrator-defined defaults: If you have a Salesforce Search form enabled that allows visitors to search fields you've chosen for values they're after, you have the ability to define some default parameters for that search. With this release, a visitor who has made changes to those defaults can easily return to those default parameters with one click.
4. Create a Salesforce Submit module: Have a little form you want to show on each and every page of your site? Maybe a newsletter sign up form so people can join your mailing list that you'll use Soapbox Mailer for Salesforce to write to? Or a little survey you want to tuck into the right column of your site? Yeah, you can do that now. Ain't it grand?
5. Reduce spam with a honeypot: No one likes spam. We're not talking Spam spam because we know plenty of Pacific island communities that dig the stuff. We're talking ugly internet spam. Nobody likes that. And you don't want your Salesforce account getting bloated from it. With the simple flip of a switch, say goodbye to spam without forcing your visitors to fill out those little CAPTCHA forms - all through some hidden fields that are sweet as honey to spam bots and allow your form to ignore the fictitious submissions from the little buggers. 
6. Customize tooltips: Give pointers to your visitors when filling out a Salesforce Submit form by defining tooltips simply and easily.
7. Follow maximum lengths for fields as defined in Salesforce: Soapbox knows when to shut up. If Salesforce only wants to hear something 15 characters long for a field, it only allows the visitor to enter 15 characters - all without you needing to think one whit a bit about it.

Bugs that met their match

In addition to new features, we've also squashed some pesky bugs that the Soapbox user community found and brought to our attention:

• We resolved issues that prevented images or documents being uploaded properly on a Salesforce Submit form under very specific conditions. Many thanks to the good folks over at Active Minds for pointing out those very specific conditions!
• The Country drop down available on the registration form for Soapbox Events is now populated with actual countries - tada! Hat tip to Christian Community Development Association for highlighting that!
• For event registrations, if a visitor entered an ampersand (&) in the Organization field - like Bread & Hope - the registration wouldn't create a record in Salesforce like it should. Many thanks to the good folks at CORE Group for alerting us to the issue so we could get to the bottom of it.
• That pesky ampersand was also causing issues for RSS feeds from until the champs at Great Place to Work tipped us off to those bad ways and we set Soapbox on the straight and narrow.
• Embedded videos set to appear on Taxonomy views weren't playing properly - that is, until ERASE Racism pointed out the goof and we shook it like a bad habit.

Thanks to all our eagle-eyed Soapbox users for helping us make the platform mo' betta!

Adding Salesforce connectivity to your site

Interested in learning more about all this Salesforce connectivity stuff? Just curious about Salesforce in general and how it can be the CRM to meet your organization's needs? Let us know!