Here Comes Winter - Episode #10 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.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 10th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the fourth week of September 2010. This episode is titled, Here Comes Winter. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. Joining me for the 10th time is my co-host, my co-founder, my buddy, Justin. How are you doing, Justin? I'm alright. I thought you were going to call me your partner in life. That would not be appropriate for this podcast. Here comes winter. Yeah. In the fall. So this is the podcast we talked about, right? Last week we had, you know, Justin actually posted a blog post about his favorite features coming in, I think 13?

Justin Edelstein: 13 features, the lucky number 13.

Jason Atwood: Lucky 13 features coming in the winter release of Salesforce. And so this is gonna be an entire, probably long, but episode just about the winter release and what we like about it. What maybe we don't like about it. I know you've studied the notes. I know if you've watched the videos. I know I've studied the notes. I know I've watched the videos. I've also gone into some dev orgs and played around. So I'm ready to go. So let's kick it off. Let's talk, let's I guess first talk about when it's coming out. So why don't you tell the people, the fine people at home when Salesforce release. Maybe back up a little bit since we don't know how everybody thought. Salesforce is a CRM, cloud computing, software as a service thing. They release three times a year.

Justin Edelstein: Thing, well done, sorry.

Jason Atwood: Software. They release three times a year and they usually name their releases after the seasons and the year. So we had spring 2010, summer 2010, and then since winter is coming out sort of October-ish, they call it winter 2011 or winter 11. Usually the biggest release I think is winter, just because it's for probably two reasons. One is, it's the most time between releases. So between June and October, it's the most time they can put into their development cycles, And then I also think it's because they have Dreamforce, which comes up in December or usually in the fall. So we're showing that's the main reason. That might be the main reason. Yeah. And so they can sort of pack in all these features and then they release it. I'm always interested that they actually released it so far in advance of Dreamforce because it kind of takes some of the, you know, the PR out of Dreamforce. If you're going to go up and show stuff that's been just released.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they don't always show stuff that's been released. they show stuff that's coming down the pipe with Safe Harbor attached.

Jason Atwood: And sometimes they show stuff that's not coming for six months.

Justin Edelstein: Sometimes they show stuff that still hasn't been released from last Dreamforce. Like what? Well, every time you see Chatter up on a board with Mark Benny off demoing it, it's in real time and things just show up, sort of like a Twitter feed. And that doesn't really exist.

Jason Atwood: We haven't even gotten into it, and you're already getting to your bummers.

Justin Edelstein: That's my bummer, but I'll get to it later. But anyway, let's talk about the release dates. So anyone who uses Salesforce knows that there are different pods or instances of Salesforce. It's up in your URL bar. Generally, it'll be like na1.salesforce.com.

03:13 Jason Atwood: They're called pods.

Justin Edelstein: na6.salesforce.com or something like that.

Jason Atwood: Interesting, now with the personalized URLs, actually, we use the personalized URLs. Yes, we do. So we're argus.mine.salesforce.com. So actually, I know from before, I think we're in 6. I think we're in 6.

Justin Edelstein: But if you go to trust.salesforce.com, there's a little look up search thing at the top, and if you type in your domain, it'll tell you which pod you're on so that you know. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. It's kinda cool. We are on six. I looked at it today. So the first wave, we're in it. It's for NA1, NA6, and NA7. On Friday, October 1st at eight o'clock Pacific, that'll be 11 o'clock at night, on the east until early in the wee hours on the second at 2 a.m. Pacific which would be I guess 5 a.m. on the east so it's a good chunk of hours there it's about 7 hours where the service will be will be being upgraded so it just won't be available it'll go from from your current release which is summer to winter and you'll get all the new features that's Friday October 1st and for all the other pods na0 and a2 and a3 and a4 and na5 you'll go a week later so October 8th same time schedule but you'll go the next week and then when you log in on you know presumably that Monday which would be October 10th or in In our case, October 4th, you'll have a new Salesforce, new look and feel.

Jason Atwood: Best way to do this though, besides listening to Justin, if you wrote that all down, which I hope you did, is go to trust.salesforce.com. All the information is there.

Justin Edelstein: In the system status tab at the top, if you click it, you scroll down to the bottom and it has all of the release dates for which pod you're in. If you're using a custom domain like we use, which came out in the last release, then you You can type in your domain at the top, see which pod you're in. They even explain the notion of pods on the website. So if you have any questions about that, go to trust.sales.com.

Jason Atwood: So we already know this is going to be long, so let's try to get into the actual.

Justin Edelstein: So I think there's ... Get into the meat and potatoes. Get the meat.

Jason Atwood: There's sort of ... In traditional fashion, and I've been through many, many, many releases, way too many to count. I think it's going on 16 or 17. I should probably figure it out at some point. They kind of hit areas, right? They go after these sort of areas and they put their development time and energy into certain things. This time, the sort of big areas they're putting their time and energy in. And the first area, and we're going to kind of break them down by area. The first area is definitely chatter. You could call this the chatter release. Sure it came out a while ago and sure you could opt into it. You know, you could get into a beta before the summer release, then summer release became generally available but you had to turn it on, you had to turn on the new interface, but now it's actually going to be an opt out. So if you don't want Chatter, you better go opt out of it, because it's coming, you're getting Chatter. Why don't you describe a little bit of Chatter, what it is, for, again, first-time listeners, and then maybe talk a little bit about some of the features and we'll go with that.

06:31 Justin Edelstein: If you've listened to the podcast before, you're well aware of, we've talked about Chatter many times, but for those new listeners out there, particularly trying to catch up on the Winter 11 release, Chatter is essentially Salesforce's internal social network. They sort of call it a mix between a Facebook and a Twitter. You can follow people. You can follow groups of people that are self-organizing. You can follow records within Salesforce. So if you want to just follow certain opportunities that you're interested in and you have visibility to, you can follow them at any time. Some fields that an admin decides change, you get a little notification that says, oh, this big opportunity XYZ, the stage went from proposal to negotiation review or something of that along those lines.

Jason Atwood: You also get a profile page where you can upload your pictures and your info and stuff like that. You also get, you also can post statuses. So right on the main page there's a big thing that says, I think it's what are you up to, something like that. Whatever the little...

Justin Edelstein: What are you working on or something like that. It's Facebook for the workplace.

Jason Atwood: And it's definitely meant to be that. But in the last release, they actually just released the groups in summer, so before that they didn't even have groups. It was very basic. I mean, I think it's great for a lot of reasons, but now is coming a slew of features we've asked for. A lot have actually been released as packages you can install. The first one, I guess the big one is really is Chatter Central. It's an entire tab called Chatter that now has sort of all the new features in it. It has filters in it. It has the ability to, it has recommendations in it. It has, so filters, you can filter on the different objects. So I can say, show me all the opportunities that have been chatting, the accounts. And actually, anything that you follow, that filter then shows up in that Chatter Center. So it's a really nice way, and I'm actually going to go a little bit now.

Justin Edelstein: My favorite filter that they're reviewing, or that they're releasing, is the At Me filter. So a lot of times, they're trying to have Chatter replace one-way conversations that are happening in email, so other people can perhaps have visibility to it and add some commentary to it. So if I go to your Chatter page, Jason, and say, hey, Jason, this is ready for your review, or I need something on this account, it might get lost in your Chatter stream, but if you go to your Chatter Central, hit the filter for at me, you can see things that are specifically posted to your wall, so to say. I see.

Jason Atwood: So it's sort of showing you your wall, but then filtering out everything else. That's right. That's it. It's interesting because I actually thought it was using the at symbol of Twitter, so I was testing it this morning by trying at, at, at, all these ... I was trying the community nickname, I was trying the username, I was trying everything I could, even the email address, and it wasn't working, and I was like, oh, well, that's a fail, but you're telling me now that it's only going to filter if someone goes to my wall. Right.

09:32 Justin Edelstein: your wall and say, hey, Jason, I need this from you. It's that type of filter. So you could filter out all the stuff and, potentially, noise that is happening within records that you're following to just things that people are saying to you that they need. That's great. That's great.

Jason Atwood: I know that in the App Exchange, or in the IDA Exchange, they've already said they're looking at, or is coming next release, the ability to do the at symbol. So that actually brings us to another feature that's coming out, is the hash tag. If you are a Twitter person or if you're on Facebook and you kept seeing all these hashtags, you know, the little number sign before like a word or two and you're like, why do I keep seeing that? That's people who are connecting their Facebook and Twitter together and they're basically tweeting and then pushing it to their Facebook status. But a hashtag is basically a search term and the hash just says this is something that should be searched on and then in Twitter land and now in face, sorry, in chatter, it's clickable as a search. So it's a great way of kind of, again, a perfect example is when people are tweeting about Winter 11, this release, they're telling you, and they told a bunch of times in the videos this morning, they're like, use hashtag, hash, winter 11, one word. And that way when you see someone, you see a tweet like that, you go, oh, that's an interesting topic I want to follow. Let me click on the hashtag and then it'll show you everybody who's posted with that hashtag. It's an organized filter search.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's an interesting notion of how to sort of follow things and how to organize things in a sort of a taggy way. You're not hierarchically organizing it. You're just saying, this is about this. And if you want to see anything else that anyone else has said about it, click it.

Jason Atwood: They become very powerful in Twitter because people start using them as a way of collecting the ideas and showing popularity. And even in Twitter, they say the most popular hashtags for the day are we. DANNY HERMES-DAYERU. Trending topics.

Justin Edelstein: And it might even lend to, I don't know how the recommendation engine is working, just to hop onto another topic of chatter. But I can only imagine that when you're building a recommendation algorithm and engine, that it's going to look at things that you perhaps hashtag or click. If you click specific hashtags, maybe that person who chatted that thing and you clicked it, it's going to recommend other things around that topic that other people are putting hashtags on, or other people clicked that hashtag. Just knowing how search works, it's sort of like a black box of all sorts of fun stuff. And I can only imagine that the recommendation engine goes into some pieces of how hashtags work and people.

Jason Atwood: You can imagine I would put a large, if I were in Vegas, which I was just with this last weekend, I would put a large bet that has nothing to do with hashtags. That's all about similar object following and similar people following and similar group following. So if I follow you and you follow these three objects and we follow two objects in common that it might suggest to me, and I have visibility of that, which I think is a great thing about Chatter. It's still in the visibility model of Salesforce, which is very robust. And it would only say, hey, would you want to do that? Or if you follow three people.

12:56 Justin Edelstein: Well, it should use hashtags.

Jason Atwood: I totally agree. My guess is, and we could probably- It's my imagination running wild. Yeah, we could probably find out. But so recommendations is another. There's another, well, let's stay with, I guess, other things that you can follow. I mean, we used to only follow people, accounts, objects, custom objects and sort of objects within Salesforce, sort of the basic ones, or sort of the prime objects. But now you can follow dashboards, you can follow reports, you can follow events. So actually that'll bring me to my first test and fail of Chatter, I went into the Devorg today, I spent, I'm looking at you and getting all excited because I'm like, I can follow events. Events have people accepting the event. I can then have it show up in my Chatter feed if someone's accepted an event. Huge fail on Salesforce part. It doesn't actually send you, someone accepts an event that you send out to Salesforce, it doesn't tell you that they accepted or declined. So I'm thinking this will solve it. Chatter will help me. Because chatter will, if someone declines it, I'll put that as one of the things I can, that will chat it. So the event will chat. No, that's not to work. So I went in, you cannot say-

Justin Edelstein: You should go to the Idea Exchange and put that up there.

Jason Atwood: I will be on the Idea Exchange, making sure that's there. But that would have been a great solve for one of the issues that we have, which is that, again, someone, You send out an event through Salesforce, great feature to do, it sends out this branded email, you see it within Salesforce. But if someone declines, you don't see that decline until you go back in and look at the event. You can't even put workflow on it or alerts on it to send out something. So it's kind of a full fail. But anyway, that was I'm happy that we can follow events. I'm unhappy that it doesn't at least take in people accepting.

Justin Edelstein: I'm not sure I'm gonna be following reports or dashboards.

Jason Atwood: I absolutely could because I can see someone going this... Yeah, I mean...

Justin Edelstein: I don't know if I'll be following those types of things. I mean, I don't know. I mean, what's the use case for it? I don't know if I'll be following it. Maybe putting some chatter on it, like to say, hey, that little graphic doesn't look good. Right. Go sell something. Right. You know? But I don't know if I'll be following the dashboard.

Jason Atwood: It's a great example. Oh, I'll tell you, just so we back up to talk about how we use chatter, We actually use Chatter in a couple ways. Obviously, the way to communicate at Arcus. We have many ways of communicating. Instant Messenger is almost dead to us at this point. Google Wave, as we've talked about way too many times, is a huge communication standard. But Chatter is becoming more and more. And one of the things we do is on our project updates, we run our projects out of Salesforce, we actually go in and one of the rules is when the project's been updated and ready for it to be sent out to the client, we say, chat it. Chat it up, or whatever. still have a problem with that chat. But anyway, so either chat it as yourself and say, all these things are ready to go, or I actually put it on the project itself. So, just to tell people how to use it, it is great for opportunities and things and accounts, but it's also great for custom things and for projects, it's actually nice to be able to go up there and go, chat it up. So another new feature, which actually was a AppExchange product that we installed quickly, because one of the things about Chatter was,

16:07 Jason Atwood: while I live in Salesforce, I might not live in Salesforce all the time, and I don't want to miss anything. So we installed the daily digest, which Salesforce took and is now put into the product. So there's actually email settings, and you can email not only when someone-

Justin Edelstein: There was always email settings.

Jason Atwood: Email alerts if someone chatted or followed or on your homepage, but you couldn't get to see like digests of stuff that happened.

Justin Edelstein: A daily log. Right.

Jason Atwood: And so now you can get that by group, and you can break it out by group and then by frequency. So you could say, I built a group called, I built a group called, you know, fun things to do in San Francisco at Dreamforce. And I want, but I only want to see when someone posts in there once a week, because I don't want to get a daily, so you can get daily, weekly, I think, or monthly. So nice, great, you know, good settings, good features. What do you, I mean, do you like it, don't like it?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I mean, we already use it, so I clearly like it. Because I already use it. I'm not sure it's like the biggest release. I think there are two things that we still have yet to talk about Chatter, and we've spent some time on Chatter, that are actually really, really big pieces of the puzzle. One is search. You're going to be able to sort of universally search through Chatter and other things all from one search box, which perhaps we'll cover in the UI enhancements piece. So I'll just say search chatter, equal good. And then the other big one is a new tab, a files tab, which is essentially a way to any, chatter is great. You can write things, but you can also upload files to objects or records. So if you're working on an opportunity to sell a widget to a manufacturing company and there's a pitch deck that you use to get the executive on board and it's the one that's the killer deck. You can upload it through a Chatter feed and it will attach itself to the record in Chatter. Now it will also go into a files tab and it will also go into the notes and attachments related list on that record. That's nice. So it does a whole lot of things with content integration, file integration, integration with the records themselves. It will really start to tie the content and collaboration features of Chatter all together into one place. It does get a little confusing though, I think, and I wrote this in my blog post, where does files overlap with documents, overlap with work groups, overlap with content? Those are four different tabs that could all sort of be misconstrued as one thing.

Justin Edelstein: Right.

Jason Atwood: And I think this is probably, if I'm going to put the second sort of bummer on this release, is that I think this furthers, by putting this files tab, this furthers that distinction. And so now all those things, documents I kind of get, because documents is going away, right? So don't, you don't need to-

19:20 Justin Edelstein: We get it, but a typical end user doesn't.

Jason Atwood: No, I mean, I get why not to put any more effort into it. Sure. It's basically a done thing. place documents, but I'm sort of disconcerted by the disconnect between content, which was their brand new hot feature of the world, which I'm not even sure what even content gets in terms of chatter features. I don't know. But this definitely separates out content from chatter files. And I like that, because again, as we've discussed and as we struggled as we were building more content, where do you put your content? Do I put it in chatter? Do I put it in files? Do I put it in content? Do I put it on the land? Do I put it on the Wave? I mean, there's just so many places to put. Do I put in Google Docs? So many places to put content. I would like Salesforce to have come up with a great place to put everything. And then I'd kind of more trend to using it. But now it's like, I think files is going to be great. And it has the filters. And it has all this stuff. But it then, to me, kind of abandons content a little bit.

Justin Edelstein: The way I understand it is that it's just like a shortcut to your content library that's specific to your Chatter content. You can load content and it goes into your... When you load something into Chatter, it goes into your content folder or library that is specific to Chatter, your Chatter library or your Chatter workspace. So I think what Files does is just create sort of a shortcut to that by creating a tab. But again, it's a little more confusing than it has to be, I think, but it is a new feature that's coming. And I'm sure people will enjoy the fact that if they do load a piece of content into their Chatter feed, they can easily go get it in the Files tab. So for that reason, it's pretty good. It's a great feature.

Jason Atwood: I just went from, in the test environment, I went from the files tab over to content to see if I could see the file that uploaded the file showed up in content. No, it doesn't. So I'm a little bit again. I'm just I just think they've here I'll go into workspaces and see, you know, upload something into workspaces and then see if it shows up in the other side. I don't think it's going to. I can almost guarantee it won't. So I think they're completely separate and and confusing. I just don't you know, what's what's the I don't want to put up my salesforce notes. I don't want to put up my bank account statement. But again, I think it more confuses the issue. Again, what is content? What is files? What is documents? They've almost now created another category. Whereas documents and content, we're struggling. This is even struggling more. So back to good stuff. Let's see, what else? Oh, and then lastly, on sort of the big stuff. And there's a lot of stuff. Again, huge release is the mobile.

Jason Atwood: And they showed it. You can't see it and play with it yet because it's going to release to, I guess, whatever stores – I think mainly Apple Store because it looks like it's iPad and iPhone. I think there's a Blackberry, but it looks like they're really pushing the iPhone and iPad versions. So, they're actually building a – I don't know if it's universal, but they're building a Chatter app, which is something that's going to – it's not Salesforce Mobile. It's a different application and it's just meant for Chatter. I assume you'll start it up. You'll log into your org. You have to be enabled for some sort of ability, maybe not. They've sometimes in the past, like in the Salesforce mobile, when they went to Salesforce mobile light, it was just enabled. People could just log in without being told they could. So then you're gonna get all this chatter stuff. And since chatter actually talks to objects, you're gonna be able to look at profiles, you're gonna be able to upload data. I think it's good. Again, I'm a little bit, I struggle with, I love the idea that you're putting a lot of effort Chatter, but I still think that Salesforce Mobile is sort of taking a step or two back

23:20 Jason Atwood: in the sort of people paying attention to it. What are you, I mean, are you excited for, like you're a big iPad user, you have an iPhone, we both have, do you like it? I mean, do you go into Salesforce Mobile now and chat? I do. Yeah, okay.

Justin Edelstein: When I'm on the road, when I'm at a client, I might say I'm here. I think people have asked for it, so it's great that they're giving it to them. It might make Chatter even more sticky and more fun, because it has its own little place and space for people to play with. Sort of neither here nor there on it, I'm sure I'll use it if it's easier to get into than regular Salesforce mobile. If it's faster or if it's just easier to get into, then great. I will use it. All right.

Jason Atwood: Well, I'll go back and answer my own question.

Justin Edelstein: Go ahead, answer your own question.

Jason Atwood: I did upload to content into a workspace, in my personal workspace, and it did show up under files. So I take some of that back, the same document that I uploaded showed up. I would've uploaded it both to files, the files tab, and then I uploaded to content, and it shows up as both. Strike, that's good, I take it off the list. Chalk that off. Chalk that off to a good thing, very good. So let's go on to, oh, one last thing on, They're actually building an Air application. So Adobe Air can run on any platform other than iOS 4. But it can run on your Mac or PC, even Linux, I think. And it's a Chatter app. So it'll sit in your dock or in your whatever. And if something chits or chats, you'll be able to see it, it'll pop up. It even looks like they had drag and drop file upload. So I think that's a great start to also getting people to have files on my desktop. I don't like the idea of getting them up by going to a screen and clicking on a button and going to a tab, logging in, going to a tab, going to a screen, going to a button, clicking, and it's like six clicks.

Jason Atwood: This is, if I have an Air app that's sitting there and I can just go drag it on there, I'm much more, I think I'm going to use Chatter a lot. And files then becomes much more important.

Justin Edelstein: You would think that something like Google Gears would have been able to handle something along those lines of being able to do multiple type of things. But I think Google's getting away from Gears anyway, because it's built into Chrome. But Salesforce doesn't support Chrome, which they need to start doing. And there's a lot of people use Chrome.

Jason Atwood: It's like two things that don't work, right?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work that I've noticed. There's even some Safari stuff that doesn't work really well. If you're a developer, I've noticed many times trying to edit Visualforce pages or Apex code within the user interface, if you're using Safari, it is not doable.

Jason Atwood: No, it's cool because it looks 3D. Yeah, it's three dimensional. You put it on 3D.

Justin Edelstein: It just doesn't work.

Jason Atwood: It pops out at you. So that's all Chatter. There's, again, lots of Chatter. Lots of Chatter. If you want to learn more about it, go to Salesman.com and click on any link. Because it'll pop up. There's Chatter everywhere. There's Chatter everywhere. So another big one is UI enhancement. So the UI, which has been going through many iterations, the first shot of this was two releases ago where they did a, I guess after two weeks ago, they did an opt-in for the UI. The new skin. The new skin. And it was massive. And there's a lot to come. Actually, we'll be talking about some things that are coming up that's kind of interesting, because there's part of the new UI that hit something that wasn't supposed to hit first. And so I'm kind of fascinated. They kind of stepped away from one thing, came back to it. But let's just talk about the big stuff. They changed the top bar. They put search up in the top to unify search. That's great. It's great. They put, they change the sort of setup and applications. They're no longer like, they're no longer form elements.

27:14 Jason Atwood: They're now like DHTML dropdowns. I like the look of them. It's a little bit, you know, web-free.

Justin Edelstein: I like the app picker one. App picker's nice, but. I don't like the name one. And I'll tell you why. Go ahead. Well, we've discussed this. We're admins and we use the setup link more than, I imagine if you did stats on which links we click Salesforce setup is about 50%. Yeah. And when you're working on an

Jason Atwood: actual implementation you click on it 99%. Yeah. And they hit it. They put it

Justin Edelstein: under the name. But I'm sure that they did it for chatter, you know, more for chatter adoption. Like this name is huge and you're you and it's like a big element of the page. But for us, for us admins, us lowly admins, That setup link is very important and it is now two clicks away where it used to be one

Jason Atwood: and you know likey. Something you do 20 or 30 times an hour, right? That's now two clicks versus one. So it's not really a small issue. I know it's already blowing up on the Idea Exchange. I'm sure it'll blow up even more. Here's my suggestion for all you Salesforce people listening. I know at least one. The setup should be, I don't mind it being hidden under the name for setup for people because you only go to your setup as a user of Salesforce once a month, maybe, I mean really, there's nothing to do there.

Justin Edelstein: There's email setup and personal settings which nobody touches.

Jason Atwood: Right, it's not something you update all the time. But as an admin, so I would say, my suggestion is, leave the setup there for people, then put another one back up where it used to exist called System Setup, make it only show up if you have the access to that permission, whether it be whatever it be, and then make it show up as a real link I can click on and bring you right into the admin. Speaking of which, admin now gets updated to the new UI. Looks good, not really much to say about it. It looks pretty much the same, it has just better colors and it has the new user interface. You know, I wish they'd built in more features into it, just less the UI. I wish they'd built more, there's a couple things, just like vlog viewers and stuff like that that have come out, but basically it's just the new skin. It's nice because when you jump between, you don't get this harsh, old UI, new UI look, which is good.

Justin Edelstein: Well, I mean, just jumping back to the last, for any admins out there, just a quick, something I'll probably do in our org is likely create a little custom link on the left for setup and just have that always available in the left navigation. And you can put it on a profile and hide it if you want. That's likely what we'll do as a quick workaround, because we do want it to be only one click away. But it is sort of what it is. And I thought that there was one other enhancement within the actual setup area with the new user interface. I could have sworn that I read this, that within the customized section that they were going to start to alphabetize things, but maybe that didn't actually make it. T-H-A-C-L-A-C-O-Q-F-C-S.

30:35 Jason Atwood: I thought they were going to start doing that.

Justin Edelstein: I had read it somewhere, but I guess that that didn't actually make it.

Jason Atwood: Have we looked at this, is unified search truly unified? Can I search for profiles? That's the type of stuff that as an admin too, if you're going to say unified search, it's got to search everything. I want to be able to search a user, which I know you could in the last release. That was actually a big thing.

Justin Edelstein: You could always search a user.

Jason Atwood: Well, they'll now show up in your side links, as I never did before. But how about a profile? Let me search profiles to search. Again, these are things that, if you're not going to do that, then put it onto the admin. So standard. Should get me something. Oh, and the search has a new chatter feed result, so you can kind of flip back and forth between regular results and chatter feed results. That's cool. Again, the hashtags works in search now. Again, I think it's great. There's definitely a step towards, but as someone who's worked on search ...

Justin Edelstein: Their search hasn't been really upgraded in a while. Right. This is a good step in the right direction. It is a good step.

Jason Atwood: Another big focus, and we're not going to spend too much time on it, A, because we're not big users of this, but we'll say that a lot of the effort's going into Outlook and Outlook synchronization. your top one that's gonna be an Outlook that you like to discuss. My top feature?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah. It's just the fact that the plugin goes away. There you go. Any admin that has worked with users who like to use the Outlook plugin, and Outlook plugin has a lot of good functionality. Tons. Being able to log incoming emails, being able to, you know, have events scheduled in your Outlook and then sync them to Salesforce and relating them to the right things, being able to associate things within Outlook, syncing tasks, syncing contacts, et cetera. Those types of things, while really great functionality, were sometimes a little clunky within Outlook, you also, as an admin, didn't have a whole lot of oversight onto the configuration of the actual tool. So the tool itself was installed on the Outlook client. in the new release there's going to be a little ap that runs in the system tray of your windows machine uh... sorry mac users and we are back users so well

Jason Atwood: that's my bomber for this day and i will be able to buy a few for a lifetime in the outlook he still lets he still at one guy santa felt lovey simon uh... who basically does all the maxed out and he's you know he just can't one-liners probably you know to agree to retreat scum t yet so

Justin Edelstein: But the two things are this app is going to be sitting and running in the app tray and essentially logging things if you want it to log them sort of in the background. Syncing in the background, you don't have to think about it. It's just going to do it. I haven't seen it work because I don't have PC, and I don't have Outlook on a PC. So I'd love to have given you firsthand knowledge of how this thing is going to work and how good or bad or different it is. I'm hoping that it's a big step forward. It's something I wrote about in the blog post and saying, these are really cool features. And the other big feature with it is the setup of it. So you can, as an administrator, create settings in the cloud. So you're going to create the Outlook sync settings for users and assign users to this sort of Outlook setting profile. And no more dealing with calls from users, I'm having trouble

34:22 Justin Edelstein: with my Outlook sync, and you have to go figure something out in Outlook that might have nothing to do with you as a Salesforce administrator. It might have something to do with their PC. It might have something to do with Outlook. It might have something to do with the plug-in. It might have something to do with their log-in. All sorts of different variables. You can make that a whole lot easier.

Jason Atwood: Two quick things, because we don't use Outlook, but everybody should love it if you're using Outlook. two great things, or three actually. One is that when you set up Salesforce Outlook connection now, it chats it. Kind of like, that's kind of funny. You know, so it says, Jason Atwood has set up his Outlook. Two is you have control over what contacts sync down. Much more granular control. This is huge. People have real issues about, am I syncing my contacts, all contacts, all people, you know. It's much more granular control. That's great. And the third, Outlook 2007 support. Huge. No, not Outlook 2007, sorry. Windows 7 support.

Justin Edelstein: Right, that was a big one.

Jason Atwood: That's huge because we've already had clients who have been like Outlook fail. I'm like not Outlook fail, Outlook bug-in fail. All right, so let's go to the sort of, let's hit a quick one and then we'll go down to, we'll go to the sort of the big one, which I think has been buried in this release. I got to it and the amount of time they spent on in sort of in the release notes and in the videos, I thought was tiny, comparatively to what I think is a massive release. So let's start with a quick thing. You can now edit your quote templates. Okay, great. But the massive one is actually called, it's called the Service Cloud Console.

Justin Edelstein: This is like console version two.

Jason Atwood: And they actually said right in the video, this is not the console version two. This is a whole new paradigm.

Justin Edelstein: Right, so it's.

Jason Atwood: I would say it's three.

Justin Edelstein: It takes the console, which is a service, essentially the ability to see multiple things on one screen and blows it out of the water.

Jason Atwood: It was literally a bunch of iframes. It was basically framed at one point. Maybe they went to iframes, but I think it was actually frame-framed. And you would have your list at top. And it was meant for people in call centers who don't need to bounce between screen, screen, screen. So I could see a list up top quickly. It would fill a half screen below this. I clicked that, filled another little quarter screen. Great. really liked it, but it started to show its age. Certainly, when the new UI came out, it didn't get a new UI. And they've been working on this thing, which is, again, it's hard. You have to go look at it to get the gist of it. But basically, it goes to this concept of working spaces. And it does a couple things that I think are very cool. One is that it's an application, not a tab. So it used to be a tab, and then you jump from that. You could stay within that tab. And now it's an application. And then as you work on things, if you go to work on an account and a contact, it does the same sort of thing. It pulls things down into, not frames this time, but you know, overlays. It will then kind of build tabs along the top, which are individual. So you can have, so imagine you're a Salesforce user and you have your Service Cloud tab open, but then I'm working on three different accounts and all those accounts are open as tabs a lot along the top. So it kind of creates its own tab set as you work. That's one very cool thing. The second very cool thing is it tracks your save. So I'm hoping they move this back into the rest of the world in Salesforce and enable for objects and things. But basically, if you start to type in something, it puts a little thing saying, you haven't saved this yet, which is great, because how many times do you shut down a browser and it's gone? You know, the browser's actually checked for it now, but sometimes, but it'd be nice if Salesforce said, you know, you filled out this huge document, you haven't saved, it doesn't exist in Salesforce yet. So it's actually built into Service Cloud. And then the third thing that I noticed was they basically jumped the gun. So someone in the Service Cloud scrum team decided to take all the work that they were doing in the new UI for opportunities and go, yeah, we're going to do that first. Because they basically built the new opportunity view,

38:24 Jason Atwood: which allows for basically these big panes along the top that you can customize. And they built it into maybe just accounts. But they built it into the Service Cloud. So it's kind of interesting to watch, and I guess we're Salesforce geeks, and that's why we notice these things. But I've been seeing this iteration of this new design for two years, something like that. I don't know how to talk about it a year of it. But for the last two years, I've been seeing it. And this is the first time we're seeing the opportunity new layout's been in preview, I think, as you can.

Justin Edelstein: I think you have to even ask for it.

Jason Atwood: Maybe it's a beta preview, alpha preview, ask, opt in. I don't know. But this is really amazing. What else did you see that you liked there?

Justin Edelstein: There was something buried in the notes about being able to bring in other apps, like third party type stuff, into the console. So other services, like pulling in maybe a mashup, like a Google Map or a Twitter feeder or something along those lines. Being able to connect the console to third party services out there. That seemed interesting. Again, it's hard to visualize because they didn't really show off too much of it. They almost now need three of these release videos, one for Sales Cloud, one for service, and one for developers. And I know we didn't even talk about any of the developer stuff that's coming out. And we're going to have to, because this is going a little long, we're going to have to maybe do that another time or skip over it.

Jason Atwood: If this podcast becomes the biggest podcast we've ever done, we'll do another one. I'm talking about developer stuff. Anyway, I think it's an amazing leap, because it really is changing their UI and how people work. Note this, write it down, go to Vegas, bet on it. What you see in that service console will then work its way back. So all this idea of working spaces and having multiple tabs within Salesforce open and having unsafe change and having to be able to work on four or five different objects on the same screen, that's all going to come back to Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: Because it creates more of a, you're not in a browser, you're in an app.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, you're in an app within a browser. And I think, and amazing, it's really well done. I'm very impressed. I actually want to get my hands on that. I guess I have to enable it in the org and play with it. So that's basically it. I mean, we talked about some of the good stuff, some of the bad stuff. Those are the main things. Just want to talk over one thing, because sort of a share and help, which is sort of the testing for these releases. We've gone through many releases. We've been responsible for many orgs as they've gone through many releases. And as software usually gets updated, it's usually a nightmare. My personal experience is that while there have been many, many changes coming out, the amount of breakage is very small. I think I've found two or three bugs in my lifetime of, again, many, many releases. And they were small, but they got fixed. as an admin or if you're a Salesforce administrator or you're even someone who's interested, you should very much be paying attention to these release dates. And when you get access to the sandbox,

41:34 Jason Atwood: if you have a full sandbox, that's really time to test. If you don't, it's time to go and poke around. But it is one of the things that it's the pro and the con of sales of cloud computing, which is you have a, you don't have a choice of a lot of stuff, like in terms of upgrades. So some of this stuff is just gonna happen like this new setup stuff, right? Maybe if this were software on premise, we would say, I'm not going to that because it's gonna create 500 more clicks for me a day. But this is cloud computing, so I don't have that choice. I think Salesforce does a great job of giving you that time period, right? To really go in and look and play, and they give you a good window. There's even a pre-pre-release window if you're an enterprise class customer. But the other thing to really think about is how do you, as, maybe you're not the admin, but maybe you're someone who's a business owner, you gotta think about how you communicate to your users, Because they're going to go home on Friday, they're going to click out of this thing. Oh, there's my Salesforce. And I'm going to come in on Monday. And that's going to change. If you're in the new UI, their UI is going to change on Monday. If you don't opt out of Chatter, it's really going to change.

Justin Edelstein: I wonder what will happen to users who log in in IE6.

Jason Atwood: When they're told they can't?

Justin Edelstein: What do you mean they're told they can't?

Jason Atwood: Well, it doesn't fail completely. I haven't logged in IE6 in a long time. But I remember.

Justin Edelstein: You can't do that if you're Salesforce. you can't just say, no, you can't log in using this browser.

Jason Atwood: It says a lot of these functions will not work properly, something like that.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but if the UI is just going to change, because if Chatter is just going to turn on, then the UI has to change. The UI doesn't work in IE6.

Jason Atwood: It's interesting. I think it's a gutsy move. I know they want to push Chatter. They love Chatter. They think Chatter is the future. I don't think it's the future of the company, but they're betting a lot on it. I don't know. I think it takes some chutzpah to turn on everybody's UI, especially when it's not supported by IE6. Maybe it's better supported by IE6 now, but I don't think so.

Justin Edelstein: Because there are huge customers, financial services institutions that we used to work for, and others that are standardized on IE6,

Jason Atwood: and aren't moving, and can't move. Right, aren't and can't, can't and aren't. Right. Or they're gonna try, but it's gonna be in those six years. They'll get on to IE7 when IE11's out.

Justin Edelstein: Because they have all these proprietary apps that only work in IE7.

Jason Atwood: So again, what we used to do, and for clients and things like that, is to say familiarize yourself with what is going to be turned on by default. And then pick the things you want to turn on, and then get some sort of communication about that and get it out to your users. However, in advance, we like to do it about a week in advance and say, OK, next Monday you're going to be logged in, and you're going to see these things. Maybe you get a webinar together, but maybe you point them to the videos. But that's sort of the things you should think about when these releases are coming out. All right. It is time for Cloud Focus App Pick of the Week. And this week we're going to pick kind of two weird picks. I'm actually going to pick five things. Whoa. Five little things that are coming out in Winter 11 that we haven't discussed. Tiny little things that I like. Those are my little apps. And you're going to pick something else. Why don't you go first and tell me what they are. I'll go first.

44:50 Justin Edelstein: pick the Dreamforce app. Again, not really even an app. It's an app. It's a

Jason Atwood: Salesforce app. So this is what you only get to see if you're one of the 1735 people who are logged into the Dreamforce portal. Well, if you're one of the

Justin Edelstein: 18 to 20 thousand people who are gonna end up at Dreamforce, then you've had to register it online and you can log into this Dreamforce app. Tell me about it. Very likely the people that are listening are some of those people. The The Dreamforce app has been totally revamped from years past. Just to give a little background, in years past you'd log into the portal, it was a customer portal, and you would be able to choose your sessions and events and have a little calendar and things like that. This year you're logging into a whole new experience where you're logging into the chatter-enabled Dreamforce conference application. And for those who don't know, I'm sure everyone who's listening knows, Dreamforce is Salesforce's yearly user and developer conference in San Francisco. It is the first week of December this year, where they put on a big, big show all about Salesforce for geeks like us and users like you.

Justin Edelstein: And prospects. And prospects. Current customers. We've been going for years.

Jason Atwood: We've spoken to them each. It's a massive conference. It's gone from something that was, I think when we first went, what, three years ago, it was 11,000 people, 10,000 people, something like 9,000. I think it was under 10. Last year it was 20. So it's certainly, it's busting through the roof. It's great. It's a lot of fun. Great speakers. So OK, so the Dreamforce app. Dreamforce app.

Justin Edelstein: They pretty much put out a chatter enabled application around Dreamforce. So you have people, you have groups, you have the social aspects. So they, in essence, created a little social network all around Dreamforce. And you can follow people, you can follow sessions, so if there's a session that's going on, they have two to three hundred sessions, breakout sessions at Dreamforce where you can go and learn things about specific topics. You can follow those sessions and people can ask questions about them or post little things or when they change you can get notified. There are calendars in there, so you can, not yet, but I imagine in the future, you can choose sessions to add to your calendar and say, put this on my calendar, and then you sort of build your agenda as you go. You can sign up for networking sessions. You can see your event registration, your hotel, et cetera, all in this little app. You could create your own groups or join other groups or chat on groups.

Jason Atwood: You can have a full chatter profile. Here's how, now I'm not going to go too far into this because I'll be in the midst of writing a blog post about it for next week. So come back to blog.archessync.com next week to read what I think, how this is gonna change. Two things I think would be interesting and nice about it. One is, the session should have, the people who are speaking in the sessions should be attached to the sessions. So then if I go to the session on formulas, I can see that Justin Edelstein's speaking at that session and follow them. I think this changes the way we connect to sessions and we go up after and we talk to the person. If I already know I'm following them and have their contact information before I even get there. And there was something else that I totally forgot. But I think it's not a full game changer. Oh, I think they're using Chatter licenses. So I think this is the Chatter only license that you're allowed to, for I think it's $35 a user, but it's an interesting use of it to say, it's only meant for people to go in and do Chatter stuff. So if you are going to Dreamforce, go in there.

48:29 Jason Atwood: We're in there.

Justin Edelstein: Just go to dreamforce.com. There's a login button. You can find Jason Alward and Justin Edelstein

Jason Atwood: in the paper tab. Follow us.

Justin Edelstein: We'll follow you back, we promise. Yeah. Auto follow. And we can have some conversations around the podcast.

Jason Atwood: Good pick. I'm going to actually pick, so five things. One, two, three. Four things.

Justin Edelstein: Not three, not five, but four. Four things.

Jason Atwood: This is my cloud focus app pick of the week. I'm going to pick four features. It does every week, 10 times now. Four things that are coming out in the next weeks that you probably didn't read about or know about, but you know. Little hidden gems. Yeah, hidden gems. One, Safari 5 is supported. Yay. So you won't need to.

Justin Edelstein: Do you think that all that developer stuff will?

Jason Atwood: I think it has to if you're going to say Safari. You can now refresh your Sandboxes daily, and you can delete them. Not your full ones. Not your full ones, sorry. Full ones are still 30 days, although I've known people have gotten it down to a week. But it's 30 days for full sandboxes, but your configuration and development you can do daily. You can also delete them, which is huge. That's why it's five. Web2Case, one of our first implementations. We used Web2Case many, many years ago. It was a limit of 500 Web2Cases a day was the limit. It's now been up to 5,000.

Justin Edelstein: MALE SPEAKER 1 That's for Web2Case or Email2Case?

Jason Atwood: MALE SPEAKER 2 Web2Case and Email2Case was up. was thrown up too as a different thing. And then the other thing, it's one of those kind of it's an aha slash duh moment. That was French. Is in dashboards, if you see a record in a dashboard and you click on it, you don't go to the report underneath that has the report of the record, you go right to the record. That's nice. That's hot. That's for tables.

Justin Edelstein: So if you're in a dashboard table, you see like the record, the opportunity name, the sum of whatever, you can click and it goes right to the record. Very cool.

Jason Atwood: that shows also up in the email. So I hope that follows all the way through the email. Ah, that'd be nice. That'd be nice. Right? Because then you can click on it. You're right. Go right in. And that's it. So... Wow. End of a very long... Out of breath. Whew! A 50-minute podcast there. So...

Justin Edelstein: 50 minutes of winter fun.

Jason Atwood: Winter fun. Here comes winter. So as always, you can follow us... Recorded on the snowball. On the snowball. A black snowball. It's kind of... It's all very ironic. On Twitter you can find us, the company, at twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. I'm at twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. And Justin's at twitter.com slash Just Edelstein. This is also on the blog. If you go to blog.arcusinc.com. Also, remember, if you like the podcast and want to get the updates, we record at different times during the week. Sorry, it's around our schedule and our clients. We'd love to make it all just a podcast, but we have to do other things. So if you want to make sure you get it when we've done it, and don't have to wait, the best way is really through iTunes. Go to iTunes, type in Cloud Focus Weekly, hit subscribe, and then as soon as we pop it up, I think almost within 10 minutes, it'll come down. So you don't even have to think about it, it'll show up on your iPad, your iPod Touch, your Nano, or your Zoom player. So that's it. So thank you for joining us this week on Cloud Focus Weekly.

51:50 Jason Atwood: Until next week, really enjoy those cloudy days.