www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeETChBCqyM

This application is specially designed for the small and midsize companies in online advertising industry. It empowers marketer to create and manage customer campaigns with associated products and placements, generate quotes with all relevant (discount) calculation. Additionally you have the possibility to connect your own ad-server with ADvendio. Chosing this automated process of adserver integration you are able to import your existing products, check your ad-server’s inventory and much more.

Customers will need no further IT infrastructure as ADvendio is based completely on the force.com cloud infrastructure. All integration will be done on Avendio’s proofed and certified middleware. We will start with supporting Doubleclicks DART and will add further ad servers depending on demand.

A thirty days trial will be offered so decision makers can fully test if the application fits their requirements. Parallel to the publishing of ADvendio on AppExchange we will rebuild this page and provide further information.

Our vision is to democratize online advertising sales as salesforce.com did it for CRM globally!

From ERP perspective the complex requirements in media business used to be solved in the past mainly by two different scenarios:

• Upgrading your ERP system with a vertical solution that handles all the calculation, provisioning and invoicing issues. SAP IS-M/AM is a good example for this vertical ERP add on
• Implementing a hybrid solution that is either used to fulfill basic sales and marketing requirements as well as the calculation and invoicing. In the German market Mueller-Pranges Verlagsmanager is a good example.

Today cloud technology offers a more efficient solution. A sophistacted ERP Integration enables not just time advantages but also cost advantages. Since many companies and businesses have to deal with an enormous amount of data, managing it requires too much time and may cause mistakes. Especially in online advertising sales and with predicted shift from traditional media to digital selling (IPTV, Ipad, …) integration demand in order to succeed with requirements will increase. By the means of the ERP Integration there will be no need spending to much time transferring data and the error rate will be minimized.

The whole process can be fully automated as we experienced even for cross media. Salesforce.com calculates all relevant prices/discounts and sends them to the ERP in a complete set. As a result the ERP system creates an order and later an invoice which include all this based data. In return salesforce.com gets information on the payment status or the status of the overdue notice of the customer.

As the online business is much more earlier in the product life cycle it is usually much more easier to set up the above mentioned process because of not having to consider too many infrastructure interactions from the past. Nevertheless it seems to work even for print business, respectively cross media no matter if there is a pure ERP environment or an ERP vertical like SAP IS-M/AM. We are pretty confident to have a cross media reference project integrated with SAP IS-M/AM by the end of the year 2010 with one of Germany’s major publishers.

By creating the link between salesforce.com and your adserver system you have all necessary information and functionality within salesforce.com to setup an easy-to-use but powerful portal to let customers and agencies book their own campaigns.

Creating campaigns in your adserver is a time-consuming and difficult process, nothing you would like to burden your customer with. But with salesforce.com it is easy as 1, 2, 3

1. Login and Add Products
2. Check Availability and Book
3. Upload Creatives

Login and Add Products

All logins of your customers and agencies are handled by salesforce.com. You can use the salesforce.com Partner Portal to give companies access to the Portal, so security is handled by salesforce.com

With our enhanced product search for salesforce.com you can define for every customer or for the portal which products can be added and which additional criteria (e.g. targeting, discounts) are allowed.

Check Availability and Book

After adding products to the campaign the user can check availability. This requests goes through salesforce to the adserver and gives exact numbers back. After checking the inventory the user can book this campaign. Whether he is allowed to book without prior availability check or with unsufficient inventory can be defined by you.

The portal will then create an opportunity in salesforce.com and transmit it to the adserver. The opportunity will make it easy for you to track all bookings that are done through the Self Service Portal.

Upload Creatives

After booking the campaign the next step is to upload creatives. All creatives will be checked on their technical specifications. The creatives will be uploaded to the adserver where they can be reviewed for subjective reasons and activated.

Today Tomorrow Focus, one of the biggest European marketer of online advertising announced the availability of their Self Service Portal to the public. As the press release is in German try the translation with Google – we will post a detailed description of the features and functions in the next couple of days. Nevertheless it seems to be a smart solution in order to manage smaller online campaigns where the complete and complex process with lots of manual process steps would otherwise be too cost-intensive. With a Self Service Portal the marketer is able to keep the turnover profitable.

Starting this month TOMORROW FOCUS Portal GmbH announced the availability of their Self Service Portal (the Self Service Portal was developed jointly with Avendio). The Self Service Portal give their clients the opportunity to book house advertising, counter trades and self-acquired campaigns in three t steps by themselves.

Stay tuned…

This complex incorporation enforces in three steps and leads to better and more adopted work flows in business.

Lets have a close view on these steps.

Salesforce.com – one of the biggest On-Demand solution suppliers – provides pragmatic access to your organization’s information using a simple, powerful and secure application programming interfaces, the force.com web services API. This API provides a facility to use all your existing applications with a seamless integration in salesforce.com. By means with this interfaces your work flows will be moreflexible and transparent. As a result our AdServer Integration enables you to work cross-departmental and more efficiently.

All systems are combined to one solution and a comprehensive integration. This solution is particularly made for all customers who want to improve their business work flows and involves many advantages:

A: You neither have an API integration nor a process integration. Therefore you may have issues with agencies, high manual effort, high error rate and almost no workflows.

B: Your business is just process integrated. You do have great work flows but a high manual effort with slow internal progressing.

C: Your business is fully API integrated but does not have a process integration.

D: This is the ideal solution we can provide and build in for you. With an API and process integration your business is able to reach

• Business Development (consistent)
• High self reliance
• Quality Management (you can focus on the quality of your business)
• Flexibility (you can react quickly to all recent changes happened)
• Efficiency (you can be more productive by focussing on the main workflow)
• Transparency (all your work flow is easily understandable)
• Low error rate
• High qualitative output

This full integration of your systems is mapping all your processes in one solution which guides you to a market leadership.

The AdServer Integration includes all functions you need in order to reach the perfect absorption of your tasks combined to a unique package:

• Availability Forecast/ Share Of Voice information
• Reservation
• Booking
• Delivery reporting

Example:

A sales person wants to put in an advertisement in order to reach more customer’s and company’s recognition. Because he doesn’t really know where he can put in his advertisement he contacts his agency and presents all his desire. In order to fulfill all wishes the whole process has to run through many sections to find the perfect solution. All this requires too much time which most business people don’t have. The business is a fast growing one and it might happen that another agency is much faster to fulfill its customers wishes.

To prevent this fluctuation of customers we offer a quick solution for your business which makes it possible to review all important data by just clicking one button “Request Inventory”. By adding our AdServer Integration you will be able to have more precise operating principles at the minimum effort but with maximum results. The semi-automatic process – which can be extended to a full automatic process – will complete its tasks within few seconds while you get the chance to focus on your main process: selling.

To give an even better understanding of the process we would like to present it in a few steps.

• To get to know what is on stock before selling products our ”Availability Forecast“ represents the inventory status.

• Within a few seconds you will get an accurate result by just clicking on the button „Request Inventory“. Concerning this you will be sure how much of your stock is available and how much you have already sold. Additional to requesting the inventory we provide you „Share of Voice (SOV)“ which reveals the percentage ratio of the booked products and the free objects. This shows you immediately the overall availability. Further than that you get the chance to analyze in what stadium you are in concerning the advertisement.

• By the AdServer Integration it will also be able to make reservations and booking. At this process all information saved on the salesforce.com account will be transferred safely to the AdServer.

• An additional function is our “Click Rate” which shows how often your advert was clicked and therefore how much recognition it gets.

Our AdServer Integration solution combines all important work processes to just one and only function which will ease your working schedule to have a more efficient and transparent workflows.

We as a consultancy are using specific languages and frameworks to implement and customize your salesforce.com. To get a better understanding how we are working and how you can improve working with your salesforce.com account we have created the Underlying Technique. It shows you in a quick overview where and what you can use for specific applications or functions.

The salesforce.com prebuilt applications provide powerful CRM functionality. In addition, salesforce.com provides the ability to customize the prebuilt applications to fit your organization. However, your organization may have complex business processes that are unsupported by the existing functionality. When this is the case, the Force.com platform includes a number of ways for advanced administrators and developers to implement custom functionality. These include the Force.com Web Services API, Apex, and Visualforce.

Force.com Web Services API

Use standard Force.com Web Services API calls if you add functionality to a composite application that processes only one type of record at a time and does not require any transactional control (such as setting a Savepoint or rolling back changes).

Use Apex if you:

• create Web services
• create email services
• perform complex validation over multiple objects
• create complex business processes that are not supported by workflow
• create custom transactional logic (logic that occurs over the entire transaction, not just with a single record or object)
• attach custom logic to another operation, such as saving a record, so that it occurs whenever the operation is executed, regardless of whether it originates in the user interface, a Visualforce page, or from the Web Services API

For more information, see the Force.com Apex Code Developer’s Guide.

Visualforce consists of a tag-based markup language that gives developers a more powerful way of building applications and customizing the salesforce.com user interface. With Visualforce you can:

• Build wizards and other multistep processes
• Create your own custom flow control through an application
• Define navigation patterns and data-specific rules for optimal, efficient application interaction

For more information, see the Visualforce Developer’s Guide.

Functions of Salesforce.com and Force.com

The Force.com platform allows you to customize, integrate, and extend your salesforce.com organization using the language and platform of your choice:

• Customize Salesforce with custom fields, links, objects, page layouts, buttons, record types, s-controls, and tabs to meet specific business requirements.
• Integrate Salesforce with your organization’s ERP and finance systems, deliver real-time sales and support information to company portals, and populate critical business systems with customer information.
• Extend Salesforce in presentation, business logic, and data services with new functionality that reflects the business requirements of your organization.

For more information about Force.com solutions, developer resources, and community resources, go to Developer Force.

Backward Compatibility

Salesforce.com strives to make backward compatibility easy when using the Force.com platform.

Each new Salesforce release consists of two components:

• A new release of platform software that resides on salesforce.com systems
• A new version of the API

We maintain support for each API version across releases of the platform software. The API is backward compatible in that an application created to work with a given API version will continue to work with that same API version in future platform software releases.

Salesforce.com does not guarantee that an application written against one API version will work with future API versions: Changes in method signatures and data representations are often required as we continue to enhance the API. However, we strive to keep the APIconsistent from version to version with minimal if any changes required to port applications to newer API versions.

API End-of-Life

Salesforce.com is committed to supporting each API version for a minimum of three years from the date of first release. In order to improve the quality and performance of the API, versions that are more than three years old may cease to be supported.

When an API version is scheduled to be unsupported, an advance end-of-life notice will be given at least one year before support for theAPI version is ended. Salesforce.com will directly notify customers using API versions scheduled for end of life.

All information adopted from salesforce.com.

Workflow

A work flow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Work flow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated in work share, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, work flow may be a view on real work under a chosen aspect, thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another.

A work flow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a work flow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Work flows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

Work flow concepts are closely related to other concepts used to describe organizational structure, such as silos, functions, teams, projects, policies and hierarchies. Work flows may be viewed as one primitive building block of organizations. The relationships among these concepts are described later in this entry.

The term work flow is used in computer programming to capture and develop human-to-machine interaction. Workflow (management) software aims to provide end users with an easier way to orchestrate or describe complex processing of data in a visual form, much like flow charts but without the need to understand computers or programming.

All information adopted from wikipedia.org.