Glen Mazza's Weblog

On the surface, the Salesforce IdeaExchange sounds great: If you see a problem with certain functionality, or missing functionality, type it up, persuade others to vote for it, and three times per year (as they release that often), Salesforce will prioritize the most popular issues and fix/implement them. And the winners are indeed popular ideas that will make a lot of users happy.

Problem is, seemingly all improvements are related to the UI, as that is where the bulk of the users are, so naturally those get an overwhelming number of votes. Shortcomings in the API tend to be left out, but those are important matters to individual users using the API. I submitted a couple of ideas (here and here) based on shortcomings I found with the SOAP API. I realized they had zero chance of "winning", and of course, they didn't, but I still felt it proper for me to do my half, independent of what they would do with their half.

Then again, perhaps I did waste my time in informing Salesforce about the problems I found. Further, why bother informing them about other problems I later find, given that they won't act on it unless say 1,000 people vote for it? The problem with implying to customers that you won't fix or improve something unless thousands vote for the issue, is that people stop telling you about problems if they suspect it won't get that many votes. But you want people to be bringing you those issues. Termites, in sufficient number, can cause a giant tree to collapse.

To be sure, I did see in one or two cases Salesforce product managers closing ideas as "now fixed" even though just a few had voted for them. If I had looked further, good chance I would have found more examples. Meaning, that at least some of them are lurking for things that need patching. Good for them. But Salesforce should be more aggressive in its IdeaExchange FAQ that it wants to see the suggestions even if they don't have a realistic chance of "winning", that things that indeed need fixing will get fixed even if they come up short in the vote count. This is especially the case for companies like Salesforce that maintain both a UI and a (critical) API, because the latter is almost always going to get clobbered at the ballot box.