Rakesh Gupta - Developing Applications with Salesforce Chatter

Rakesh Gupta is a Salesforce evangelist, trainer, blogger, and a Salesforce-certified professional. He is from Katihar, Bihar and lives in Mumbai. He has been working on the salesforce.com platform since 2011. Presently he works as a Salesforce consultant and is a regular contributor to the success of the Salesforce community. Rakesh is very passionate about salesforce.com and has been sharing information through various channels including his blog (http://rakeshistom.wordpress.com).

He has trained almost a hundred professionals around the globe. Rakesh works on all the aspects of Salesforce and is an expert in data migration, integration, configuration, and customization. He is the leader of Navi Mumbai and Nashik developer user groups in India. He is also the initiator of the Mumbai Salesforce user group. Rakesh has been organizing meet-ups at regular intervals for groups he runs. In his spare time, he contributes to Salesforce success community.

Rakesh can be reached at <>, and his Twitter handle is @rakeshistom.

I would like to thank my parents and my sister, Sarika Gupta, for supporting me through each stage of my life. I would like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this opportunity to share my knowledge through this book. Special thanks to my friend Meenakshi Kalra for taking care of me while I was writing this book. I would also like to thank Adam Seligman (Vice President, Developer and Partner Marketing, salesforce.com) for encouraging me. Many thanks to my friends Brendan Conroy (salesforce.com MVP), Matt Lacey (salesforce.com MVP), and Naveen Gabrani (CEO, Astrea IT Services) for reviewing the book and for providing valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Kundan Bendale (Salesforce Technical Architect) for his help and support.

Lastly, I would like to thank my good friend and co-author of this book, Sagar Pareek, for coming up with good ideas for this book; when I met with an accident while writing this book, his support was unforgettable. I'd like to thank him for spending many nights and weekends working on this book with me.

Sagar Pareek is a Salesforce enthusiast, blogger, and Salesforce-certified salesforce.com developer. He comes from Bikaner, Rajasthan and currently lives in Noida. Sagar has been working on the salesforce.com platform since his college days in 2012. Currently he works for Astrea IT Services, Noida, as a Salesforce developer, prior to which he worked as a PHP and Java Intern at Acme Embedded Technologies, Bikaner. He was featured by Salesforce in a webinar, Boost your career get cloud trained and certified . He won a prize in the Salesforce New Year Resolution 2013 challenge. Sagar actively participates on Salesforce discussion platforms such as user groups and organizing workshops. He has leadership of the India Salesforce student developer user group and is the co-leader of the Navi-Mumbai Salesforce developer user group. He spends spare time with his family and friends and exploring salesforce.com. You can follow Sagar on his blog at http://forceexperiment.wordpress.com, and his Twitter handle is @Sagarjaipareek.

I would like to thank my parents, Chanchal Pareek and Sushil Pareek, my siblings Dr. Sugita and Nikita, and my gurus, Manish Shandilya and Pankaj Pandey. I would also like to thank my mentors, Kavindra Patel (Director, Developer programs and Events, salesforce.com), and Paresh Gupta (Co-founder, Sharp Edge Learning). Special thanks to Naveen Gabrani (CEO, Astrea IT Services) and all the other reviewers for giving up their precious time to review our content. We would also like to thank Anil Bhargava for giving us his precious time working on the images used in this book.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my best friend and the co-author of this book, Rakesh Gupta, for his constant support and trust, which helped me reach the level of being able to write this book.

Brendan Conroy is a Salesforce MVP, currently working as the Manger of Sales at Market Metrix. He holds a Bachelors degree in Creative Writing. He has a total experience of five years in Advanced CRM implementation and manipulation across six different CRM platforms. In additon, he has an experience of 12 years in the fields of customer service and face-to-face sales.

Naveen Gabrani is a salesforce.com architect and founder/CEO of a Salesforce consulting company, Astrea IT Services. Astrea is the leading provider of salesforce.com services. It has four products on AppExchangeSmart vCard, Astrea Clone, Smart Calendar, and Object Hierarchythat were envisioned by Naveen. He has twenty years of experience in the IT Industry in various technical and management positions. He is passionate about making high-quality software deliveries that exceed customers' expectations and building teams of motivated and happy members.

Matt Lacey is a salesforce.com developer and blogger (www.laceysnr.com) and a salesforce.com MVP with a background in game development. Matt is also the co-founder of S. P. Keasey Trading Co., a salesforce.com ISV partner that builds salesforce.com applications, including ChattoMate, a tool for automating Chatter follows/unfollows to filter out the noise.

Mohith Shrivastava has two and a half years of experience working on the salesforce.com platform and Salesforce CRM with top consulting firms such as Deloitte and Price Waterhouse Coopers. He has been a key community contributor on salesforce.stackexchange.com, where he spends most of his leisure time answering and solving various challenges that salesforce.com developers face. Mohith holds six certifications in Salesforce, including advanced developer, advanced administrator, sales cloud, service cloud, developer, and administrator. He has been blogging on cloudyworlds.blogspot.in about salesforce.com and technologies such as Apex, Visualforce, and APIs. You can get in touch with Mohith through Twitter, his Twitter handle is