Take a Victory Lap - Episode #6 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 sixth episode of CloudFocus Weekly. This third week, I guess, now in August 2010. This episode is titled, Take a Victory Lap. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, Cloud Community Experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me for the sixth time, and hopefully for many more, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how you doing? I'm doing wonderful. I can't believe this is the sixth episode. So awesome. It is. We've had one of our listeners has contacted us and told us that he's He's very excited about future episodes and hoping that we'll be doing something live, or not live, but recorded from Dreamforce this year, which is the annual Salesforce conference.

Justin Edelstein: Let's not make any promises.

Jason Atwood: Let's promise that Justin will do 24-7 Dreamforce from there. You'll have a camera strapped to your head. You'll be iJustin. Justin.TV? No. TV. Not this time. It already exists. All right, so we're gonna talk today about some secure communications, your blog post, talking about CIO article. Basically talking about there's a lack of Salesforce developers or good ones. Come up with a couple questions like are we coders? And then of course the cloud focus app pick of the week to land it off so let's start with your blog post as anybody's paying attention at this point you and I are altering blog posting weeks so next week would be my week to post so this week was yours that's right so you posted talk a little about your post and what

Justin Edelstein: about it. Sure, you know I was at a conference or sort of a meetup at the New York City Salesforce Nonprofit User Group meeting because I was asked to be a expert on a panel for people to be able to ask questions and the notion of collaboration came up and someone asked you know how does chatter change the game and another person brought up a service called Yammer which has been around for a couple years and Yammer has been sort of the enterprise version of Twitter. The secure closed only if you have this email address can you join this group on Yammer and you and you can communicate Twitter style, you know, short little microblogging engine between people who work within the same company.

Justin Edelstein: So I wrote a little blog post comparing Chatter and Yammer, it's kind of sounded like their little tongue twister, and came to a couple conclusions that, You know, Yammer has the leg up in that it's been around a little bit longer. Yammer has a number of applications written, meaning client applications, so obviously you can access it through the web. You can access it on cross-platform client desktop apps, so Windows, Mac, Linux I believe. They have mobile apps for the iPhone, Windows, Android, RIM. You can SMS into it, which is very Twitter-like. A bunch of different browser plugins, actual Twitter integration, email integration, and a number of other third-party products that are built on top of it. So it's an interesting way to have people start to,

04:02 Justin Edelstein: instead of just tweeting, which is very public, sort of yammer or tweet internally, right? So they're just sort of, hey, I'm here or I'm there or here's this article I just read or here's a document that I just created, check it out. And it's very standalone. So that's where it differs from Chatter, which is, as people who have listened to this podcast know, as we've talked about it before, is Salesforce's version of a collaboration space within Salesforce.com or on top of the force dot com platform so it very much is embedded right into Salesforce you can access it via Salesforce and that's you know one of the big differentiators is that Yammer is sort of open and free for the most part for you to use uh...

Justin Edelstein: as opposed to needing to have a Salesforce license. I know that there's special chatter licenses for Salesforce, which are deeply discounted so that people can actually use chatter, but there's a barrier to entry there. But what Chatter does is it allows applications to start talking. So it's not just people chattering back and forth, but it's also data and documents chattering back and forth. And it really sort of turns the lights on and allows you to see things that you may never have thought to look for. And this goes back to our blog post from a couple of weeks back, poll versus push. This is data sort of being pushed at you and data that you might find interesting or useful or need to use actually being pushed to you via a feed that you subscribe to.

Jason Atwood: I mean, it's somewhere between, I don't know Yammer, never used Yammer, but I had two thoughts as I listened to you talk about it. One is that it's interesting because you and I at a big corporation, we shall not name their name, many, many years ago worked on a project that never got launched, but that was about communication. And he was solving the problem of a lot of emails falling back and forth to the people who were in the firm, lots of them, let's call them 20 to 30,000 people. And basically it was a push down from these people, sort of the corporate offices down to all the satellite offices. And they just got lots and lots of email and they were getting very sick of it and there was really no good way to share them. So we were showing them and sort of trying to prove out the concept of RSS, or really simple syndication. And we were trying to build out a way that you would subscribe to feeds within your outlook

07:06 Jason Atwood: and then you could share them within groups, right? You could comment on them. Sort of very much what's happening with Google Reader but on a corporate setting. And it was an enterprise class software, you know, servers and lots of money and of course it never went anywhere. But it's interesting because now that I think about it, that's a lot of, some of those concepts that we were talking about, the sharing, sharing with teams, letting people see other things that you were following. There was even the, I think the concept of like, other people could see your feeds. So if I had 17 feeds on cloud computing, you within the company could see the feeds that I was following and that's sort of the concepts that we're talking about now, right? Where you have, you follow items and people can see what you follow. So that kind of struck me as interesting, because it's kind of a shift, but it's staying in line with it. And the second thing really about Salesforce Chatter is, in a lot of ways, the chattering of the objects is very basic. It's turning on field tracking of fields, and it's letting those then bubble up. So in some ways, it's kind of like a duh moment, but in that it kind of goes to the top of the page, And in that, it shows up in your overall big feed, makes it much more useful. Because field tracking was interesting, and you could turn it on. But it was kind of always at the bottom, you had to go look, and this kind of pushes it towards you. So it's a certainly interesting model. We have not even scratched the surface. I think Yammer, I mean, they both got it, and there's probably gonna be more that come out. I'm sure this is a big space for a lot of cloud computing and non-cloud computing companies is, How do we get beyond the... How do we get real collaboration?

Justin Edelstein: One of the things that Yammer does really well is that it is a true sort of consumer-like web app within the enterprise. So it does integrate and interact with things like Google Reader. So you know how in Google Reader you can send to places, right? If you connect them you can send an article that you're reading to facebook or to twitter well you can send it to yammer which is really interesting because you're taking things that you know i read a lot of things in my google reader that very much relevant to the work that i do and i think a lot of people do that as well uh... maybe it's interesting to see like consumer web products connected to enterprise tools and how people sort of mix their lives together their their work life in there their home life and home life being cool reader and work life being outlook email well maybe work life could be something like a hammer or chatter uh... the interesting to see where chatter goes with integrating those types of you know integrating with twitter integrating with the google reader something along those lines

10:07 Jason Atwood: absolutely so second uh... article uh... was not produced by us, but CIO Magazine, which the article title was The CRM Talent Shortage Here, Now. And while it is talking about CRM, they did kind of hook into Salesforce most specifically. And it was interesting because it's really saying that, as these platforms become more and more, as we're predicting that the online, The cloudification of CRM is making these things much more available to any size firm. In that case, there's much more people moving into the market using these things. And then there's much more people needing much more companies, organizations, needing people to help them implement them. And so you're seeing a shallowing of the market for real, true CRM people. One of the things I thought was funny pointed out was, saying that there was, you know, faux consultants and that there are a lot of people out there, or I guess consultants, who try to talk the game, but don't really understand CRM, don't really understand customer relationship management. And he points to Salesforce Certification as a good way to kind of give a little, a bar for people to get over, but you need to go much more than that. So, you know, what would be things that you would look at If you were hiring you, what type of questions should our clients or our prospects or people who would never hear of us be asking of those consultants and or people they're going to hire about the systems and what would you be asking? What would you put them through? What would you do to find the right talent?

Justin Edelstein: I would use certification as a key, I don't want to say crutch, but it's there. It's something that exists, it's something tangible, and it's standard. So you can say, do you have your certification in this case we're talking about Salesforce and CRM, do you have a certification as a Salesforce certified consultant? They have that. If you're claiming to be a Salesforce consultant, why are you not certified by that company? So that's one thing I would certainly, knowing that that exists, certainly ask people about. I'd definitely ask them about experiences, whether it be experiences within the market segment that I, the customer, am in. So if I'm in financial services, hey, Mr. Consultant on Cloud Computing CRM, how many implementations have you done in the financial services space? How large were they? How many users did they involve? as users are sort of an important factor in cloud computing, it's more about users and licenses and how do you manage that, if it's a large amount, have you ever dealt with that.

13:19 Justin Edelstein: I would also ask specific questions, not around necessarily the consulting company themselves, I'd want to talk to the consultant, the person, and ask them what experience they personally had, whether it be with the consulting company that they're with currently or in the past before that. Because if you've been with a consulting firm for three months, but you have eight years of experience doing CRM at an enterprise company or at an enterprise, that counts. That counts as real world experience. and might even be more important than eight years of consulting experience. Those would be some of the key questions I would ask or I'd want you to answer for me.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, you'd want me to answer. I would answer those questions for you. Yeah, I think those things and I'm gonna add in a couple more.

Justin Edelstein: I knew you would.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, business intelligence. That's a bad way of saying it.

Justin Edelstein: You mean reports?

Jason Atwood: No, I do not mean reports. I mean the ability to understand, comprehend, talk the lingua franca of business. We deal in lots of different kinds of businesses and we deal with nonprofits. They have a different way of speaking. They have a different way of doing business. They have a different way of organizing. It's been, even I've been, since we've started this gig, I've been learning more and more more about nonprofits and how they are organized. I think that would be the thing. It would become very clear to me if I got someone in the room and started asking questions whether they knew about business and could they ask the right questions. I know that a lot of this comes down to, the coding is the coding. This will bring us into the next question. Seguin. Yeah, it is a nice seguin. At the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to getting the right information out of the right people, asking the question that gets you that little piece of functionality that they were thinking about but not saying, or they weren't even thinking about, or showing them something a little bit different and having them go, oh yeah, that would change my life. But you have to understand the way people work and understand how they deal with data and how they work together and asking those questions is a key. So I'd almost want to do a mock-up and say, okay, I'm a business. Come in and gather requirements from me. I know that's a very typical thing, but talk to me. Find out how can you get the information out of me, almost lawyerly. Certification is definitely big. Certification is just like don't walk in the door unless you're certified. He talks actually some about growing your own talent. I actually believe in growing your own talent. Just realize when they walk in the door, they're not gonna be talent. They're gonna be seeds.

16:31 Jason Atwood: And if they have some basics for it, I don't think computer knowledge is huge personally. I don't have a huge background in computer science. I have some. So I would look towards problem solving. I would look towards an interest level. I'd look towards loving of technology and wanting to learn. If I were gonna grow my own talent and those types of things and then I'd get them certified, I'd say, okay, now time to get certified. You and I, and actually all of us have never, everybody in our company so far has never taken a course. Like we've never taken a full on course on any of this. We learn by doing. And so getting people in there and getting doing is important, like saying, hey, go build me this app. So those are the things. So speaking of building apps, the last topic that we were going to discuss actually came up at a social event. You and I were at a social event the other day. We are both partners and podcasters, but also friends, so we do hang out when the podcast is off. And someone was giving us a bit of guff about the difference between a coder and what we we do. Saying that what we do isn't true coding. We're not developers. We're not coders. And I kind of thought it brought up a question. So I'll ask you straight up. What did someone say? Do you think of yourself as a coder? What do you think of yourself when you've defined yourself?

Justin Edelstein: No, I will define myself right now for all to hear. I do not believe I'm a coder. I don't I don't think of myself as a coder and although I am a certified developer on the force.com platform I don't even think of myself as a developer. I think of myself more as a business analyst and a business process engineer for lack of a better word. That's a really bad word. I know but lack of a better word. And sort of some of the advantages and some of the things that we love about cloud computing and our weapon of choice salesforce.com is that you don't have to be deep in code. You can, you certainly can. There's code to be written if you'd like to. But you don't need to know how to write a line of code to make the product really, really do some amazing things and adhere to some pretty impressive business processes and build out robust applications. So I don't think of myself as a coder but I do know that I can build some really good functional applications that people use in a very functional

Jason Atwood: way. Yeah I too I mean I'm definitely not a coder. There was a day when I was a coder I mean I do do remember the day right sit for my computer put on uh... uh... deep and it was a techno i think the out of the jury mountaineer and pizza i'd definitely a lot pizza not never mountaineer fan diet cokes i could i could line up like six to ten day cokes on my desk and i would sit there and write python so p l was that coding it cheer was measuring python and x m l scheme uh... translation and database stuff. So was that coding? That was coding. That was as close as I got to coding. Everybody looked at me like, you are a coder. But you're right. I mean, I'm more interested now, and I would say coding is great. I think coders have a mentality that I don't personally have. It's that heads down, deep in, looking at the lines, compiling. Salesforce, I think a lot of cloud computing platforms and a lot of these platforms that

20:21 Jason Atwood: that are really taking off now, they, I wanna say like they limit you in a lot of ways, but that allows you to be much better at what you do. So they limit, you know, Salesforce doesn't say, oh, just go build anything. There's limits to what you can do. There's, you can't make any kind of crazy relationship. They've basically built, you know, good database design into their product that they won't let you fight. They won't, you can build a really bad database on your own if you just go and start, you know, typing into a, you know, Unix shell and say, okay, create table and relate this to the, and you can build really bad database designs that can take down sites. Do they get me? But they don't allow you to do that. So in some ways they take that off the plate, but because they have, you don't spend your mental energy thinking over, it's this third normal form of a database. You think of, okay, how am I solving this for the business? What are they, how are they interacting with the data? And I think that's a powerful thing. So the answer is no, we're not coders. All right, well, that, That wraps up our little what we had to talk about today.

Jason Atwood: We always have our out of focus app pick of the week. The CFAPW. The CFAPW. Aptly named. Just rolls off the tongue. Right off the tongue. Just rolls off the tongue. CFAPW. I feel a little dirty every time I say it because it is such a... Have to create an acronym. Come on. Well no, it's such a taking right from MacBreak Weekly. I'll give them another shout out. MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte.

Justin Edelstein: they created the uh... they should be giving us a shout out

Jason Atwood: if they did with their seven hundred thousand users or listeners i'm sure that would be helpful uh... so we got some pics this week what's your

Justin Edelstein: particularly always go first i would go first even though yours is written first in the in the wave where we've runs podcast out of all right i will go first uh... in keeping in the spirit of my blog post where wrote about chatter uh... many pimp a useful chatter utility it's not really an application it's a utility that is used in conjunction with chatter it's called super follow buttons for chatter uh... and this is a package that is in the salesforce app exchange and anyone who's familiar with with salesforce and with chatter you'll know that when you find a record, you can click the follow button and then you're following the record and that's wonderful. But what if you wanted to follow every opportunity in the system? Or if you wanted to follow every opportunity that is still open and over $100,000, you can run a list, a standard list view in Salesforce and this super follow button will appear at the top of the list and you can select as many as you want from the list, all of them if you wish, and click the button and automatically you are following all those records. Very useful tool or utility to be able to do some mass action stuff with following things. Because right now it's sort of manual, you know, you bounce around and you say, oh, let me look at this record, oh I'm not following it, I'll click the button. This sort of allows you to do that en masse and use it frequently. That's a good one. That's very good.

23:54 Jason Atwood: Mine's going to be, I will say it does, it's another thing that it talks about is that you know, Chatter is new and Chatter has a lot of missing pieces to it. So it's nice that they built very quickly and they actually asked the community to build it for them and help out. Build a lot of the stuff that they were missing out of the box and that's nice because we We added in other products which I'll leave for next week, but that's a good one and we use it. Another one, so my Cloud Focus app pick of the week, it's a CFA PW, is something that you actually brought to my attention a long, long time ago, like literally a year ago. I think I went, oh, that sounds cool. But then I actually had the chance to use it a couple days ago. And it's Ethereum, easy to describe by Ethereum, which is always interesting putting the company name in front of the product, but whatever. And it is another AppExchange product. It is free, it is zero clouds.

Jason Atwood: We're gonna get there. And what it does, you install it into your org, and you go to then a tab where you then say, Okay, I want an object and I want you to give me all the relationships of this object or all the fields, record types, all of it so I can export it as a Excel document. It's very good for doing that and it gives you basically a really nice Excel document which you then can look at or edit or update and send back to someone and say, here's what I'm going to do. So that's one of the things that, you know, there are, it's the good and the bad of working in Salesforce is that because changes can happen so fast, you know, it's like, okay, I can make a change in 30 seconds and then I can document that change in, you know, two minutes. So for every change I make, if I make 300 changes, that's a lot of documentation when I could have just made it. This kind of allows you to make the changes and then say, here's what I did or pull it all out and kind of say, here's what I'm going to do and do like this.

Justin Edelstein: So it's great for consultants and it's great for system admins of salesforce.com for when you have to provide documentation or just need to look at an object and any sort of entity that's related to it or all the fields and field types it gives you, you know, if it's a boolean or if it's a string or any sort of information like that that you might need. really a good product. And for the price of free it's pretty phenomenal.

Jason Atwood: It is free, it is good, and it is very geeky. Both of our apps were free this week.

Justin Edelstein: Yes, two free apps, there you go. Two free apps, you can't beat that.

Jason Atwood: So that brings us to a little bit, I'll tell you something that's also going to be free.

Justin Edelstein: What? Us not doing a podcast next week. Ooh, I hear the booze through the speaker right now.

26:58 Jason Atwood: So sorry, but next week we're going to be taking a week of vacation So there will be no podcast next week. I'm calling it taking our victory lap six successful podcasts in a row But we will be back the week after with episode number seven and going Try to keep up that weekly pace. It's been okay We're trying to keep the timing down to around 30, which is what we're hearing from the friends and family and followers. So we're gonna do that. But until that time, because we are always on Twitter, you can follow Arcus on Twitter.com slash Arcus Inc. You can follow me at Twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood. You can follow Justin at Twitter.com slash Just Edelstein. We're also on Facebook. The company's on Facebook, which is Facebook.com slash ArcaSync.

Jason Atwood: And if you want to keep up with the podcast, those are all good ways, but the best way to keep up with the podcast, to get the podcast, to not have to think about the podcast and have it just come to you weekly,

Justin Edelstein: except next week. Soon store.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, is to go into iTunes. Oh, the other one. No, that wasn't it. And then go into iTunes and subscribe. So while you're there, leave a nice review, Subscribe to you can just type go to iTunes, the store and go type in Cloud Focus Weekly. Cloud Focus is one word and boom, it'll come up. You can subscribe to it. It'll flow down to you. It's a great way to know that it's coming up and then to get a copy of it to listen to on your Zoom player. And leave a review there. That would be very nice. But for this week at least, Thank you for joining us on Cloud Focus Weekly. And until next week, happy clouding.