Innovations to improve SaaS platforms often come from people who use the technology every day. People need shortcuts or sometimes, ways to create a workaround for a change to the user interface.
Enter Greasemonkey scripts – those handy snippets of code that you can add to your Firefox or Chrome browser.
This is one of the beauties of Web-based services. The openness of Firefox and Chrome allows anyone to write code to improve the experience. That’s exactly what the following two people did for Salesforce.com.
Back to One Click
Jason Venable is a Salesforce.com developer. He started as an admin. He created a little hack for the Salesforce.com Winter 11 release.
He writes about an extra click that was driving him a bit nuts.
“To access the setup menu you must first click your name in the header and then click setup, system log, or log out. Why the extra click? I don’t know, it baffles me as they usually get the user interface and experience stuff right. Fear not for I provide a solution that will hopefully be included out of the box in the next release.”
Venable made a Greasemonkey script that allows you to hover your mouse over your name, showing the possible options, all in one click.
Venable said he tested it in both Firefox and Chrome.
Set Up Enhancer
Set Up Enhancer is another service for administrators. It makes it easier to navigate the “set up tree,” in Salesforce.com.
Features:
- Filter the setup tree by keystroke, matching on the first letters of each word in the label. If the filter matches a node with children, such as the standard object nodes, all child nodes are displayed.
- Expand or collapse all nodes in the setup tree.
- Collapse or expand the setup sidebar.
Greasemonkey scripts make it a bit easier to navigate Salesforce.com. Have a hack of your own? Leave a comment. We may feature it on ReadWriteHack.
