Requirements

This page lists the present set of planned features for Thunderforce.

Note that none of these features are actually implemented yet. These are the planned features.

Account Type

Present Salesforce.com as a Thunderbird account type

Mock-up of the main window showing Salesforce.com folders that can contain email attachments

• Account creation wizard tie-in
• Account properties page for Salesforce.com accounts
• Folder views for each entity type that supports email attachments
  • Entity types, whose presences can be toggled in the account properties (only those that the user has access to can be shown)
    • Accounts, Campaigns, Cases, Contacts, Contracts, Opportunities, Products, Solutions
  • Matches emails to their entity rows automatically using case number, subject, In-Reply-To (needs investigation), References, or hidden Salesforce object id in a <div> HTML tag
  • When an email cannot be matched, it's added as a new entity of the type that the message was copied into
  • Entity columns are eligible to be shown as columns in each entity type's folder. Important columns for each entity type are shown by default
  • Record types appear as subfolders of an entity when access to more than one exists on an entity
• Email template folders are shown as subfolders to a "Templates" folder
• Attachments to objects are stored as .eml files, which can be opened in Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, and other clients
• Drafts are stored in the user's personal folder as .eml documents and differentiated from other emails in a user's document folder by the X-Mozilla-Draft-Info header
• Document folders that the user has access to are shown as subfolders to a "Documents" folder
  • The list view shows documents that are .eml files along with their message details
  • This can be used to share important emails between teams using Salesforce.com as a shared mail server, analogous to Microsoft Exchange's public folders
• Add each Salesforce.com account as an outgoing mail server
• Use Salesforce.com as the default outgoing mail server to contacts, leads, and users
• Use the default outgoing mail server for other mail, though this is configurable

Address Book

Present Salesforce.com as a Thunderbird address book data source for each Salesforce.com account

• Support the following objects in an account's address book as cards. By default, all are on. Only those that the user has access to will show up
  • Contacts, Leads, People (person accounts), Campaigns (not a list because that could potentially create a huge list), Users
• Support the following objects in an account's address book as lists. These can be enabled or disabled in the configuration. By default, all are on. Only those that the user has access to will show up
  • Accounts, Cases, Opportunities, Contracts, Roles, Profiles, Solutions, Products, Custom Objects
• Add "Salesforce.com Account:" and an account drop-down box into Thunderbird's "Address Autocompletion" preferences after "Directory Server" and enable by default. This is both for global and for the Salesforce account preferences
• Support address autocompletion using one Salesforce.com account, though limit the query rate to once every three seconds and at least one second after the last character was typed
• Using a Salesforce.com address book entry will automatically associate an outgoing message with the associated entity. If a contact or individual, however, the user is asked if the email should be associated with the contact/individual, their account (contact), a contract, an opportunity, a case, or some other object

Composition

Add Salesforce.com convenience buttons to the message composition screen

Mock-up of the Compose window showing objects that can be contacted

• more to be written up...

Localization

Both Thunderbird and Salesforce.com support localization. Thunderforce will leverage Thunderbird's build-in localization capabilities and Salesforce.com's labels to make Thunderforce available in many languages.

The following languages presently have translators. Please let me know if you want to help out with localization.

• en-US: United States English
• vi: Vietnamese

Thunderforce will use the entity and field labels from Salesforce.com, enabling automatic use of language preferences and entity names from Salesforce.com within Thunderforce.