Or maybe you’ve had this moment, “Why haven’t I done this yet?”. Marshall Lager, founder of
Third Idea Consulting, former Senior Editor of CRM Media, did have that moment recently while
talking with Connection Cloud executives. From that discussion came his latest insightful and
provocative article A Simple But Brilliant Plan.
Don’t miss this read. Marshall has an interesting perspective that he talks about… “I am very
enthusiastic about Connection Cloud, which is strange because my focus is usually on customer
experience and the use of social media, not running reports. The fact is, though, businesses
run on information. They need to understand more than just what’s happening at the point of
service, and that means detailed reporting of operational data. Anything that provides more
access and easier management to that data makes it easier for businesses to operate with
confidence, and without fear that working with a SaaS provider is a one-way street.”
We applaud our partner MicroStrategy who introduced MicroStrategy 9.3.1 to the market today. This ground-breaking release provides revolutionary analytics for business users with enhanced UI, upgraded mobile features, more powerful advanced analytics, and improved big data connectivity.
We couldn’t be more proud to be highlighted in this important announcement as a key technology delivering connectivity and real-time integration to a variety of the most common cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for their users.
Hats off to MicroStrategy. They clearly understand their customers and have risen to the occasion, as a good leader does. Users today struggle with accessing and managing the data they need for real-time reporting, analytics and dashboarding. And this pain is growing at a time when data is doubling at a staggering pace, and more and more data, including financial data, is disparately hidden in hundreds of SaaS applications behind proprietary APIs. Traditional integration solutions just don’t fit the bill any longer. They are too expensive and slow to build. Quick, light, economical, and standards-based is the order of the day.
Now, with the Connection Cloud, MicroStrategy customers have real-time access to their virtual cloud and SaaS data within minutes from their beloved MicroStrategy solution. This real-time integration is available to a variety of the most common software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, such as Salesforce, Intacct, NetSuite, Zuora, Zendesk, Google, Facebook, Eloqua, and many more.
Congratulations to MicroStrategy who continue to lead the BI industry with innovative, comprehensive solutions!
The Connection Cloud Team is having a great time at SugarCRM’s annual conference, SugarCon 2013, which is being held this week at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. Thousands of customers are in attendance and many are stopping by to see how the Connection Cloud can help them access their SugarCRM and other SaaS data for advanced reporting.
Murray Dunn, our VP of Business Development presented today at SugarCon Creating Insightful Reports with Data from Sugar and Other Critical SaaS Sources. Within the week we’ll post the video for that session on The Connection Cloud YouTube Channel. Stay tuned…
The SugarCRM folks have been an enthusiastic group to work with over the last few days. Last week we announced our partnership with SugarCRM and our excitement and commitment to working with Sugar customers is put best by Anshu Agarwal, VP of Marketing for SugarCRM:
“SugarCRM is committed to providing our customers a complete, accurate and integrated view of customers to improve satisfaction and retention. Our partnership with Connection Cloud will enable our customers to more easily access SaaS data from different sources, providing additional insights into customer engagement and supporting our mission to provide a 360-degree view of the customer.”
To learn more about accessing SugarCRM on the ConnectionCloud and to get your free trial please visit: http://www.connectioncloud.com
Connection Cloud in the news! We’re pleased that Virtual Strategy published our 2012 progess which started us off in 2013 with 2,000-Plus Companies Using our virtual SaaS data platform. Our users are quickly finding that they can access their SaaS data, trapped in silos of one or multiple applications, easily in real-time to do their advanced reporting. Top applications accessed are Salesforce, Intacct, Netsuite, Zendesk, Zuora and Google Docs.
Eric Blaettler, CFO, Delta Car Trade SA says it best: “The Connection Cloud helped us streamline and enhance our Excel and PowerPivot analysis of Salesforce.com data. Using the Connection Cloud to directly access the data saved us from the tedious and repetitive processes and limitations that increased as our amount of data grew. We now have direct, real-time access to our data that is far more simple and economic and has reduced the growing IT burden of data movement and analysis. As our SaaS application data expands, we look forward to the Connection Cloud providing easy access to the data we need, when we need it.”
In the course of creating queries for your user base, it may become necessary to restrict some queries so that not all users can see them. The way that we do this within an account is to create a group, add users to the group, and give the group access permissions to the query.
So, the first thing we will do is to create a group to hide our query. Let’s call this the HiddenQueryGroup.
Create a Group for the Users Who can Access the Query
Log in as the administrator of your tenant.
Click on the Setting link on the upper right of the main Connection Cloud page.
Click on the Groups entry.
Click on Add Group.
Enter HiddenQueryGroup in the Group Name
Add Users to the group
Still on the same window for creating the group, click Add Group Member.
Select the check box for each user that you would like to add to the group.
Click the Add button.
Click the Save button on the right side to save the group.
At this point we have created the group and added the users to the group. Next we need to give the group permissions on the query that we would like to hide. For this example, we will create a query called HiddenQuery and we will save it in the Shared query area.
Create the query
Create a query through the normal means in the connection cloud.
Save the query in the Shared queries area by clicking on the save symbol (Looks like a floppy disk).
Enter HiddenQuery in the Name field.
Select Shared for the Catalog field.
We will use the default Queries schema for the location. To put the query in a different Schema location, press the Add Schema button. This creates a directory under /Catalogs with the name of the schema that you select. For this example, we will just use the default of Queries.
Click on the Save button.
Set the Permissions on the Query for Group Access
In the Repository, navigate to /Catalogs/Queries.
Click the symbol to the right of HiddenQuery.
On the menu that pops up, select Edit Access Control Rules.
Highlight Users and click Remove.
Click Add.
Make sure Grant access for: is set to Groups and Users.
Under Name: type HiddenQueryGroup and press Find.
In the Results: pane highlight HiddenQueryGroup and press OK.
Press OK on the Resource Access Rights dialog.
That’s it! At this point we are finished. If you need to add or remove the ability of your users to see the query, then simple add or remove them from the HiddenQueryGroup.
Now, when we log in as cs_user1 we will be able to see the query under the Tables & Queries link. If we log in as another user that is not a member of the group, we will not be able to see the query. This powerful technique can be used to selectively allow access to your queries.
Register for this exclusive Webinar event to find out how to easily access your SaaS data in the Cloud for advanced reporting, from any source, in real-time.
You’ll learn how to:
•Combine data from separate SaaS-based data sources to create BI reports in real-time
•Save time and money previously spent on complex data integration or ETL processes
•Achieve deeper, timelier insight across their entire organization
Join us and Frontera Consulting next Tuesday, February 12 to learn about new, advanced reporting capabilities using Zuora data.
It’s not always easy to get the data you need, how you need it, for reporting from your Zuora application. Using Data Sources to export data to Excel and downloading or loading files is time consuming and when data changes, you need to re-export and reload rather than refresh. If you have calculations on your data, they need to be checked or even re-built! Sign-Up now for our interactive webcast.
If you missed it, you’ll want to check out our January enewsletter, with a feature story from Computer Technology Review on Liberating SaaS Data in the Cloud. Neil Blumenfield, our SVP of Operations and Customer Success is interviewed about how companies are solving the issue of data access in their SaaS applications at a time when those applications seem to multiply all on their own! Also, featured is Taking Cloud Financials Beyond Anytime, Anywhere from BusinessFinance, and Some CFOs Still Find Cloud Ominous from CFO Magazine. Lastly, an insightful Forrester article, SaaS a Data-Drive “Smart” Apps Fueling Worldwide Software
A quick shout out to Zendesk and Jaspersoft, our partners and winners of the Infoworld 2013 Technology of the Year Award.
And new this month, is the Top 5 Trending Queries on the Connection Cloud, Jan 2013.
A popular query that Intacct users love is getting the customer revenue out of Salesforce.com by the customer account within Intacct. That’s why this particular query is the most popular Intacct query in January. The Connection Cloud gives an Intacct user an easy and straight forward way do to access this data from two SaaS applications.
You can get this query into Excel, Tableau or any ODBC/JDBC compatible reporting or BI tool by subscribing to the Connection Cloud. I’d be happy to give you a demo.
How many times have you wanted to create a report out of Salesforce that shows you leads and contacts. We’ve even seen it mentioned regularly in Salesforce user group posts.
‘Hford’ posts: “Would like to see a Salesforce report that would allow you to have both leads and contacts in the same report so you could see all your records at once”. ‘stevedrek responds promptly to the post “I desperately need this probably two or three times per month. It is ridiculous there is no way to create a single joined report from the Leads table and the Contacts table.”
It’s absolutely true.. There was no easy way, until now.
I guess this is why extracting Leads and Contacts by Company is our 2nd most popular Salesforce query on the Connection Cloud.
Here’s how it looks:
Get it now by subscribing to the Connection Cloud or check it out first with the free trial. I can even show you how to get the specific query you want with a quick demo. Just check the box in the form.
