Educational Weather Forecast - Episode #12 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:09 Jason Atwood: This is the twelfth episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first week of October 2010. This episode is titled Educational Weather Forecast. CloudFocus Weekly sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me on the twelfth time, my co-host, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you?

Justin Edelstein: Doing great. It's a wonderful morning. The weather is lovely outside, not so cloudy. Thanks for dressing up. You're welcome.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty. We've got a big agenda today. We're talking about your podcast. My podcast? You're sorry, your blog post, we're all podcasting. Thank you. All right. On Chatter 2, there's some news about New York City and Google, and we'll talk about that. And then we're going to talk about cloud computing's impact on education, because we actually have a lot of clients who are from the educational space. It's becoming a big sort of hit with this new movie, Waiting for Superman, which you've seen, I have not seen, but I've heard about. So I think it's an interesting topic that we could cover and give some insight into, because we work with a lot of educational institutions. And you actually came from one, sort of nonprofit slash education. So I think that would be interesting. And then we'll do our Cloud Focus app pick of the week to round it out. So to get us started, why don't you kick us off and tell us about your blog post this week.

Justin Edelstein: Sure, I'd be happy to. So I wrote a blog post, as we do every so often, about this week's topic was about Chatter 2 and how it's now ready for prime time it comes out of the general release and the beta mode and it actually added a whole slew of features that make chatter really much more useful in the winter 11 release I know our org flipped over our Salesforce or flipped over over the last weekend some of them are flipping over over this coming weekend so we've had the ability to play with chatter in our production org now for a couple days and I'm pretty impressed with some of the new features.

Jason Atwood: Give me a couple things you like and because in your podcast you kind of name a couple things you like. So name me one thing you like or two things you like and one thing you don't like.

Justin Edelstein: You mean my blog post.

Jason Atwood: Well yeah but don't have to read the whole thing. Just give us a taste. A taste. Taste the menu.

Justin Edelstein: So I do like the Chatter central tab. It is a nice home tab. gives Chatter a home, a place to be, not just sort of tacked onto all the pages where Chatter is enabled. It now has a place where you can go and see all of your Chatters, so you don't have to be on the home page and hit the Show Chatter thing and have it slide down and hit more and more. Now you can just go to the Chatter Central tab, or I think it's just called Chatter, and you have all your Chatter there with some filters on the left that allow to filter down by accounts or opportunities or just things that people have chatted or said to you which is a really nice little feature. I also like that on that page it has suggestions or recommendations much like a Facebook or a Twitter feature where they have you know people you might want to follow. Well this has people and groups that you might want to follow based on maybe you have similar people that you follow but you don't follow each other that kind of

03:24 Justin Edelstein: Same with groups. And I also really love search. Search has changed quite a bit in the Winter 11 release from just the aesthetics of it moving to the top of the screen, and it also searches across everything, including chatter. And with that search capability comes topics. So you can sort of hashtag, just like Twitter, you can put a little hash or a number sign before a word, word and it creates an instant search for that word or that topic and it really helps to bring together pieces of data that otherwise would never have intersected. You know, you're out there talking about a competitor and I'm out there talking about a competitor and we otherwise wouldn't have known that these two things are happening because they're happening in their own little silos. It connects them through these

Jason Atwood: topics. Very much like what Twitter does with trending topics. That's right. Right. I mean, what I think that's interesting about Chatter is that they didn't try to reinvent the wheel. They said, let's just use all the stuff that's really working out there, Facebook statuses, hashtags, search, groups, membering, like, following, and just move it into this product. And so I have an interesting story. I was at a client yesterday doing training and, you know, And when I logged into their org, they gave me permission to do, we were doing some other work as well, reports and dashboard work. So before I was training yesterday, I logged in and we were all sitting around and talking about it. And I commented on their profile pictures because they had chatter enabled. Someone had just gone in and enabled it before the release. And all the profile pictures were these famous pictures of like celebrities and R2D2 and no one had used their own picture. And what I thought was interesting is while they didn't know the details of chatter because Because I was showing them things they didn't even know you could go to another object and follow it or turn on following for another object. I mean, it was sort of, they didn't know this deep functionality, but they were using it. And I logged in the morning to check to see if my login would work because I was going to do some training with them. And I just logged in. The first thing that popped up was someone said, I'm coming to flying in today for JFK. I'm going to be late, but I'll be there in time. Someone have a Diet Coke for me, ready for the training that I was going to do. So I think that's the genius. And I've said this a few times. I think that's the genius behind Chatter is that it's nothing new in terms of the use case, the usability, all that, for the user, for the end user. Yes, there's new features in it. Yes, it does stuff because it integrates with your back end system, but it was really interesting watching clients it without any training on it and they were just using it naturally. You know, were they using it 100% right? Oh, it's up to them. But anyway, so good stuff. I like the blog post and hopefully we'll go out there and read it.

Jason Atwood: That's at blog.arkusinc.com. I'm going to go read those and more blog posts. So let's talk about something came out yesterday actually, or maybe two days ago, that it's been happening across the country. I think California did it a while ago. I've heard of other cities sort of going to Google. But this is big news. A, we're based in New York. B, we actually do a lot with educational institutions. And so, you know, New York going Google and they basically signed a deal with Google for, was it every public school?

07:00 Justin Edelstein: 3.1 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers across the states, not the city, but the states, 697 public school districts. That's a lot. That is a whole lot.

Jason Atwood: Using Google Apps for Education and having access to that, what has really become a very powerful toolset, is it the same toolset that you get sort of, is it the exact same as Excel? If you're a big Excel person, we have other people in our company who are mega Excel people and when they go into Google Apps to try to use that they just, they throw up their hands because it doesn't have the full power yet. But it does enough, and it does a lot.

Justin Edelstein: It's fine for students and teachers to be able to collaborate on work. And I think just being able to have email, being able to have sites. A class can have their own site. Being able to have a calendar, those types of things, chat. It really brings a level of collaboration and technology that schools just don't have and could never build for themselves at a statewide level to support all of these schools across the state and have them on one system and potentially being able to connect them. You don't have to, but you can, right? And they can all be on the same domain if they want. I don't know the exact details if they'll be on, you know, nystate.edu or whatever it might be, or .gov or whatever. But just the fact that they're all on the same platform, they can collaborate with each other in ways that they definitely couldn't before. and students and teachers can interact in different ways than they've been able to before. So you could do your homework in a Google Doc, and that's it. It's done. Share it with your teacher, right? That is really nice. That is the way that students should be working now. Because when they get to the workplace, you're not handing in paper to a teacher. You're doing work on a computer.

Jason Atwood: And I think the thing that sort of sets with me is that I always found education. I have a kid in school, and I look in their classrooms, and they've got the older Macs and the older stuff in there. Most organizations, whether it be education, nonprofit, for-profit, whatever, government struggle with keeping up to date. And what Google Apps, I think, is going to bring, it brings organization but also brings to this type of education is they're always going to be on the same version and so it's gonna be the best and newest version and that's amazingly powerful. I mean again it's it's not something we think about but really being on the same version of something and not not saying oh I'm on Outlook 2000 what are you on you know oh we have to do a massive migration that's going to cost us you know two years of technology time and millions of dollars to upgrade. Every new kid that comes into the school if they If they get their Gmail account, it'll be the Gmail account that everybody else has.

10:04 Jason Atwood: And when it gets a new feature, everybody will get that new feature. I think that's really, really powerful. And it talks to cloud computing. I think this segues into a really good discussion, which we talked about doing last week, which is talking about cloud computing in education. So I'd like to kick it off with you talking about Waiting for Superman, because it actually has two of our clients in the movie, which is exciting for us. So could you just talk about the movie a little bit, and then maybe we'll spin it into how education and cloud computing are getting along. Sure.

Justin Edelstein: I'll talk about the movie. The movie, Waiting for Superman, while it doesn't mention cloud computing at all and has nothing to do with cloud computing, but we'll spin it that way, is about the state of education and public education in America, particularly in urban areas, urban centers like Los Angeles and Washington DC and New York City and those are some of the main areas that are featured in the film and it talks about how the public education system today is sort of failing kids and particularly in these urban areas where graduation rates from the beginning when you start in elementary school till you get to high school, I mean only like some of the stats were astounding like 10% of kids actually graduate and they're not even ready to go to college. The actual statistic is not do they graduate but really are they college ready because kids have to go to college these days as opposed to 50, 60 years ago where high schools could train kids, you know, some kids go to college and they become doctors and lawyers and some kids go to trade and, you know, they graduate high school and they go work on the farm or they go work at a factory. Well that doesn't happen today. We don't really have a whole lot of farming and factory workers

Jason Atwood: these days. We're moving to a service industry, not an industrial industry. That's right, we're

Justin Edelstein: moving to more knowledge worker type of situation. So the training that has to happen at schools needs to change and some schools although they're still graduating people at a decent rate they're graduating them at at the level that they were still graduating them 50 years ago and spending has gone up and up and up and up and up over the last 50 years but all the stats and rates of student achievement have stayed flat and why is that happening? The movie tries to answer some of those questions and certainly pokes and prods and asks a lot of those questions and puts a lot of the onus on us, people, like to care about these things and to think about different ways to do it and it talks about charter schools and how they can operate sort of outside of the district boundaries and outside of some of the rules that are placed on public schools and they can do things a little differently and are held to hold

13:21 Justin Edelstein: their students to different levels of accountability and hold their teachers to different levels of accountability and I thought it was really good movie really interesting I would recommend for anyone I believe it comes out nationally this Friday. I was able to see it because we're in New York City and it was released a little early here, but I believe it is nationally released this Friday, so this Friday being the 10th, so check it out. I strongly

Jason Atwood: recommend it. Five stars? Two thumbs up? Out of five, sure. And so I think now a good spin because there were two of our customers who were in, who were not highlighted, but talked about in the movie. And both of them obviously are moving, or have, and are moving their stuff into the cloud. They're using cloud computing services, like Salesforce, like Google, to help them build out their infrastructure to better education. And we have other clients who are doing it in a big, big way. So I think it's really fascinating. Again, it kind of goes right into what we were talking but with Google, this is what we talk about cloud computing in terms of ROI and what we can do for a company and customer relationship management and sort of things that are very business-like and for-profit companies. And we've worked at mega, mega companies and now do both for smaller companies and bigger companies.

Jason Atwood: But I think the educational space is something that's really taking off using cloud computing for a couple of reasons. and I'd love you to chime in with what you think after that. But clearly, you know, speed to market, right? We've been able to build out systems for people that would years ago, take in six months, a year maybe to build out. And with these institutions, they want and need to move fast. They're trying to change things fast. They can't wait for two years to get a human resource system up and running, right? They need to get it up and running in a matter of months before school starts. That's one. Certainly a lot of these institutions like Google and like companies like Salesforce have now implemented pricing that is very nonprofit friendly. And a lot of this education, whether it be a school, whether it be a nonprofit institution trying to help out schools with leadership or something, they're nonprofits, they get the nonprofit pricing and it's very heavily discounted. So I think it's good for them to get pricing. What else do you mean? What are the things that are outside the normal things we talk about that are really that they're moving to cloud computing for?

Justin Edelstein: Well, they do it for a couple reasons. And the total cost of ownership is really a big piece, and I know you mentioned we talk about ROI, we talk about this, we talk about that. But when you think about a nonprofit organization that's mission is to reform education or a school or a charter school network or a district, their missions are not let's get the best technology and hire a bunch of developers and get them in a room and build the best technology ever. That's not their mission. That's not where funders want to give them. That's not what funders want to give them money for. They want to fund programs that make education better, or innovative programs that are not baked in technology. When we think about innovation, we think about technology, right? Chatter is very innovative. But to an education reform organization, that's not what they're talking about when they're

17:09 Justin Edelstein: talking about innovation. They're talking about programs that happen within a school that are innovative, things that people haven't thought of that they could perhaps do with students or with teachers or with principals or data collection techniques, but they don't really think about the technology. It's sort of an afterthought. They don't often have more than a few people that can work on these things. That's where cloud computing comes in because you don't have to have the team of people, the database administrator, the front-end designer, the front-end developer, the Java developer, the this, the that, the infrastructure, the networking. You sort of can do it with a smaller team and just subscribe to these services that can adhere to what you are trying to do, whether it be data collection or whether it be recruitment and admissions or whether it be some sort of tracking of student data. You can bake a program innovation onto an innovative technology and then you sort of have a good mix, a good flow to actually make things happen. So these organizations don't want to spend a whole lot of money or time on technology, even though they understand that technology can help them, they're more focused on their core mission, which is generally to increase student achievement or get students to graduate at a higher level or faster or whatever, right? Increase attendance. They don't think about having to have some sort of technologist. So that's where it really comes into play and helps.

Jason Atwood: And I'm newer to this than you are in terms of dealing with these types of institutions. The challenge that I'm seeing is the mix between, and this is I guess sort of we'll wrap up this segment and get onto our cloud focus at the end of the week. But the challenge that I'm seeing is that cloud computing brings a lot of things that are positive. I think one of the negative things to it is its ease of entry. Because you can get in very quickly and very easily with a credit card or with a 501c3 form and you get your 10 licenses. But we're seeing more and more people who have done that but then end up sort of creating something or building something and then needing to back out of it later. And that's a waste of not only money because they did it one way and they have to back out, but time. So if you talk about, if your focus is your mission or you're going towards your mission to do whatever your educational institution was supposed to set up to do. If you don't do it correctly the first time, that means you're just going to waste more and more time in just kind of coming back and doing it again. So that's the challenge, I think, what we're trying to help with is say, yes, you can do things very cheap. And yes, you can get up and running very fast. And yes, you can just go into Salesforce or set up a Google account, but if you don't do it right, and if you don't think through some of the things that we used to scoff at a little bit, the architecture and the data design and all that. That stuff still matters. It still matters in the cloud. And it doesn't matter just because the cloud makes things easier in some ways. That stuff still matters. Putting the right processes around, putting the right workflows, putting the right data collection, making the user interface easy enough for people to enter in data but without having to be overly burdensome.

20:35 Justin Edelstein: And the service providers themselves, the sales forces, the Googles of the world will tell you, yes, we'll provide this service for you for either free or very, very low cost, but it behooves you. You should work with a partner to get it up and running the right way from the start. Just because you're getting 10 free licenses, they have the stats, Salesforce in particular. They know when they just give you the licenses and you go off and do something, the adoption rates and the impact are very low. When you work with a partner to make it right and go through your process and actually configure the system to work for you, the adoption rates and the impact go way, way up. So that's a little commercial for Arcus there.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's a commercial for Arcus, although again, we're one company. It's a real statistic, though. It's a real statistic. It's real. that it's a commercial for more partners of Salesforce and Google and it's more of, it's better to pay a little bit more on top of your ice to get someone to help you do it than to suffer through bad adoption or not using the system or having the system be so cumbersome that it doesn't help you in your mission. So yeah, so let's wrap that up. Thank you very much. I kind of wanted to hit that last week week and we just added some good conversation to it. So let's go to our Cloud Focus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: Rolls right off the tongue.

Jason Atwood: I struggled with it this week, but then all of a sudden it came to me. Boom. So I'm going to go first. You're going first? I'm going first. All right, go for it. So we were talking about let's make them educational, let's make them, you know. So here's a tool that not only that I use, but I love. Cloud computing, sure. It's a website. It's a website called One Cause, and one of the things that clearly all these schools, and certainly New York City schools, and any school really struggles with is fundraising. So there's all sorts of, they have alumni campaigns, they have big sales, our school does a spring and a fall fair, lots of different ways to raise money. One Cause is a website that allows you to go in, sign up for your school, find it, which will generally be there. You sign up for it, you choose it as your school, and then every time you go shopping, if you just start from One Cause, you go to OneCause.com first, and I have it bookmarked right in my Safari bookmarks right on the top. The trick is to think about it, and then go there and then click on the Amazon link, then Then click on the Apple link. Then click on the whatever link. You click on that. You then go do your shopping at Amazon, and I do a ton of shopping on Amazon for Apple, or they have like, I think they have like over a thousand merchants, online merchants. A percentage of what you buy then goes to the school. So it's a referral program really. It's 2%, 1%, 3%. One cause takes a cut, but then you can raise money. You think, well, if I buy something for $10, they're going to get a little, whatever, 10 or you know, but think about holiday shopping alone. Like how much do you spend in your holiday shopping and how much do you do online? Or think about computers. If you went and bought one computer through Apple store or the new Apple TV, you can, over time, throughout the year, you can really raise money. And that's one person. What happens if you got the whole neighborhood or one whole class to do all their online shopping or their grandparents?

24:09 Jason Atwood: So you can really do it. And there's some great stats on the site that talk about different schools. School's raising like $10,000 just to people online shopping. They're not doing anything, you know, they're not actually giving money, they're just shopping online. So that's my one cause is free, onecause.com. Go find your school. If you don't find a school, email me or Twitter, text me or Twitter me and I will give you my school too to raise money for you. All right.

Justin Edelstein: My pick of the week is a app called Fair Sale. FairSale is actually the name of the company. The product is FairSale Human Capital Management. They also have FairSale Recruit, but I'll talk about FairSale Human Capital Management, which is a product built on top of the Salesforce platform, or the force.com platform. If you already have Salesforce, you can go to the app exchange and install. Otherwise, they're an ISV built on top of the platform. And essentially, they do performance reviews. So they have objectives, targets, job description type things to manage talent within your organization based on skills, based on you can have a succession plan, et cetera. So it's a really very interesting product built on the force.com platform that can help your organization do performance reviews and management and goal setting. Pricing?

Justin Edelstein: You know, they don't list it on their website.

Jason Atwood: Are you ever going to pick something that actually has pricing?

Justin Edelstein: It's a 30-day free trial and once you get going, it's negotiable. They have discounts for non-profits, education organizations. So if you're an education organization and you want to do talent management, take a look at Fair Sale Capital Management. Great. And that's at? You can go to the AppExchange and search for fair sale or go to fairsale.com. F-A-I-R-S-A-I-L.

Jason Atwood: Alright, fair sale like a sail or sail like a boat? Like a boat. Like a boat. Well, thanks for joining us this week. If you want to follow the podcast, always go to, you can read all the blog posts and the podcasts are up on blog.arkusinc.com. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C dot com. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed if you do that. If you want to follow the company, it's twitter.com slash arcusinc. If you want to follow me, it's twitter.com slash jasonmatwood. If you want to follow Justin here, It's twitter.com slash justedelstein. And we're on Facebook, because who isn't? Could talk about social network. We didn't. I saw it. It was very good. Did you? I'm going to see it this weekend. It's great. Oh, I can't wait. Great movie. The TRS guys reviewed it very well. Another podcast. Shout out, Alex. Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc. We're there. Best way to do it, go to iTunes, type in CODFELX Weekly, subscribe to the podcast there. we post it on the link, there's a link on the blog post. It's really great, it comes down, because we were recording this on a different day today, so if you thought we were recording it on Thursday, it's now on a Wednesday, great way to do it, subscribe there. But as always, thank you for joining us this week, and until next week, enjoy those cloudy days.