As a follow-up to my "what's new with Salesforce PFG Adapter (i.e. Plone/Salesforce.com integration as made possible by PloneFormGen)" entry and screencast, I also needed to make some video on a newer project called RSVP For Salesforce for Jon's use at the latest Plone Symposium. I think the aforementioned project page on Plone.org provides a decent overview of its current features and limitations, but of course a screencast is always more indicative of how it's used. 

Hope you enjoy:

NB: While not quite as mature as our PloneFormGen integration code, RSVP for Salesforce has happily pulled in a bunch of online registrations for an upcoming workshop ONE/Northwest is hosting called Strategy and Best Practices for Action Alerts and Other Email Communications.  I'm hoping to improve the ease of configuration before we use this more widely.

On a final note, this is an interesting problem space because, as mentioned in the video, the promotion of an event, capture of participants, and ongoing interaction with attendees required by event registration really weaves back and forth between tools for managing content and for managing constituents.  An aim to solve this with one tool seems a recipe for an inflexible monolith, which will lead to an inevitable compromise in features and functionality.  Having such capable systems as Plone serving as the CMS and Salesforce.com the CRM seems like such a natural separation of concerns where the sum is so much greater than the parts.  Marrying the tools together took a fraction of the time and effort required to build even a subset of the functionality from the ground up.  That is something I find endlessly exciting.

It's been a while since I've written an update on the progress that's occurred leveraging the fantastic PloneFormGen to save form responses directly within Salesforce.com and the aforementioned article (though still a good source of background information now has several factual inaccuracies.

The 1.5 branch of the code base has seen a couple of initial releases and offers the following features, which I've enjoyed using on some of the sites we've deployed:

• "Parent"/"Chained" adapters - There's now a simple UI and functionality for related record creation within Salesforce.com.
  
• Support for file uploads (typically stored as an Attachment record related to some other record within the CRM system)
  
• Better handling of dates
  
• A whole host of other minor bug fixes
  

Of course, it's always better to see, rather than read what I'm talking about.  The following screencast consists of a pretty advanced example that demonstrates all of the aforementioned features and then some:

Thanks to Jon Stahl, who presented on the above at the latest NOLA Plone Symposium.  Without his refusal to demo this live, creating these videos would likely still be on my todo list.  Hope you enjoy!