It's really sad to think of scheduled reporting as the cutting edge of a major CRM application and yet... so it seems that it exceeds the core functionality of salesforce.com.  You may remember that I have an Enterprise version of salesforce.com.  After spending a fair amount of time trying to find the function that allows me to automatically run a pre-defined report on a scheduled date and time (e.g. every Friday night at midnight) I am convinced that its not available. 

Fortunately, a third party company, AppExtremes! has written an application called Conga Courier that does provide this capability.  I'm grateful that they have because I come out of an old IT experience consisting of the IBM 360, the VAX and Unix where scheduled jobs is just taken for granted.

Why do I care?  Well, you see, salesforce.com only lets you export data up to one time per week, although not on a scheduled basis.  I can manually go into the app and export data - but only one time.  Mind you, I have an Enterprise license.  The purpose of course is to provide me with a secure backup option.  Now everyone with an IT background knows that backups also tend to be highly automated and scheduled and have been for decades.

Now, in fairness to salesforce.com, it does appear that they are creating a platform for development more so than an application that meets all needs, but scheduled jobs seems like a fairly basic requirement if you want my opinion.

Anyway, AppExtremes! provides a reasonable solution that automates the running of reports, which in this instance will allow me to automate a portion of the marketing process we are redefining.  Once the csv file format becomes available in Conga Courier, it will be much, much easier and we'll have a fully automated communications stream that flows from the marketing department through salesforce.com, onto a digital press and into the mail stream for weekly demand generation.

Now that will be sweet!  And highly efficient...

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