RSVP for Salesforce (1.3)

Using Plone's Archetypes system and archetypes.schemaextender, the Salesforce RSVP add-on product enables a mechanism for "marking" pieces of content as eligible to accept RSVPs (i.e. registrations) from site visitors. The act of "marking" content extends the existing piece of content with several additional fields for custom RSVP behaviors.

However, this is not a generic RSVP/registration system, but as the name suggests, is optimized to work with the Salesforce.com Customer Relationship Management system, which is a generic system that can be used to manage Leads, Contacts, Campaigns, and Events. By default, registrants are stored as Lead objects with an associated CampaignMember object serving as the "junction" between an organization's configured "Campaign" and those interested in participating. This can be useful in cases of in person and/or virtual events (i.e. a training, a conference, a political rally, etc.) and online campaigns allowing participant sign-on (signature drives, pledge drives, etc.). The default behavior of creating a Lead and CampaignMember associated with the configured Campaign can be fully customized with the optional add-on Plone products PloneFormGen (and dependencies) and Salesforce PFG Adapter.

Features of Salesforce RSVP include:

• Complete integration with the robust and powerful CRM system Salesforce.com
• Ability to mark and configure any Archetypes content object as RSVP-aware
• Default registration form requiring minimal attendee information and completely free of complex configuration demands.
• Optional maximum capacity for RSVP-enabled activities
• Optional acceptance of "waitlist" registrations in the event of cancellations
• Optional expiration date for the automatic disabling of RSVP
• Ability to model "first come first served" or "apply for acceptance after further consideration" type events. This can be done by setting the default signup "status" from within Salesforce.com for the RSVP-enabled event (i.e. the status for a newly created CampaignMember could be "sent", "applied", "responded", etc. depending upon how event attendance is modeled in each case.
• Optional Add-on Capability: Using PloneFormGen with Salesforce PFG Adapter create enhanced and completely customizable registration forms requesting and/or requiring arbitrary sign-up data that can be mapped to arbitrary Salesforce.com objects. The referring "RSVP" accepting Salesforce.com object id is passed to the custom form for appropriate association.

What this isn't...

... and may or may not ever be:

• A general, feature complete ticketing, online registration system. This is simple and optimized to integrate well with Salesforce.com and is optimized towards events with a flexible amount of capacity. While one can certainly use this to lock down capacity a bit more tightly, the burden is upon a correct configuration of the capacity related fields.
• A system for accepting online payment to secure event attendance -- though we're placing bets internally on how long it will be until this feature is requested.
• A fail safe system for absolutely capping attendance at a hard capacity. Because a greater than max capacity # of participants could load a custom PloneFormGen-based registration form (or the default registration form for that matter) that suggests available capacity, we advise you to set expectations appropriately during the signup process and via any auto-response emails that are sent. In other words, text like the following goes a long way towards expectation management: "Thanks for expressing your interest in attending our event. A follow-up email will be sent within 24 hours confirming your space for the event.