Flickr/Salesforce Smashup?
During
my chef days, less refined and French-influenced food started becoming
fashionable in the high-end culinary world - or at least, being fairly
unrefined myself, I became drawn to the movement in American cooking.
American chefs began to incorporate local/regional methods and
ingredients into traditional cookery - what has become known as
American Regionalism. So instead of a smooth, creamy, speck-less (and
if done right...not gummy) Mashed Potato side dish next to your
Wood-Fired Grilled Chili-Spiced Rubbed Rack of Lamb you'd find a lumpy
and skin-laden, yet surprisingly delicious, pile of Smashed Potatoes
(hopefully with some Roasted Garlic infused). Throw on a little oven
roasted Broccoli Rabe...and I'm there.
Ok...back to things geeky. I don't know if this is a mashup per se, because its not very slick or dynamic, but its cool nonetheless- and more importantly mission driven and useful...so I'm calling it a Smashup instead.
I've created a module (custom object) in Salesforce that embeds a
hyperlinked thumbnail of a Flickr photo into a record. This is great
for reviewing the artwork and emergency documentation of our
beneficiaries. Additionally, it gives us the ability to organize and
associate photos with events and people outside of our direct service
programs.
I'm a late comer to Flickr; until recently, I just didn't get it.
The beautiful thing I discovered about Flickr is that anyone, without much tech-savvy can painlessly upload photos to the service using the
Flickr client-side loadr tool. The tool re-sizes large resolution photo
for web readiness (800 x 600) and automatically creates a thumbnail.
After uploading a set of pictures to Flickr (which are private for the confidentiality of our beneficiaries), there are two fields in Salesforce to input: The URL of the photo and URL of the thumbnail. After saving the photo record, a custom formula embeds the thumbnail into the record with a hyperlink to a popup full resolution photo (see the attached screen shot). Its not revolutionary, but it incredibly helpful in our application process: If for nothing else, it's enabling our over-extended application committee members to easily scan photos during a post-Katrina period where we are seeing triple the number of applications).
Web apps and web services continue to enable us to do things we never imagined possible only a year or so ago.
