CloudForce NY 2011 - Episode #71 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. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:00 Jason Atwood: & & and-, And it's basically a mini, a one-day Dreamforce free, which is different than Dreamforce. Free force. In the Jacob Javits Center all day long. Although if you're in and around partners and whatever, there's stuff that happens before, the night before, and there's stuff that happens afterwards. But basically it's... in typical thing like if you had been to dream force and you fell asleep during dream force and then you came back to the Cloudforce, New York, you basically got the same thing you dreamt about the whole time because you have Mark Banioth you have some special guests in fact some of who have the same special guests. You have a lot of the same special guests. You have a lot of the same that was funny Everybody still laughs at the same jokes, no matter how old or bad they are.

04:41 Jason Atwood: Definitely condensed, I thought. And, you know, 120% focused on, you know, the social enterprise. The only thing I think that was a little bit different was that they brought in newer use cases. So, like, they talked about the Netflix collapse and how... They had 82,000 negative comments. They talked about Occupy Wall Street, which started off with like a Twitter feed or a Tumblr account and it turned into the phenomenon that we know it. Did I talk about one other?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah the nanny who did something with Bank of America. Yeah, they were going to do five dollar fees for Bank of America and she fought against it using social networks.

Jason Atwood: So it's all basically trying to prove the social world and basically the use case for social enterprise so Now I know we're gonna I'm gonna play a different role than you because first of all I sat neck-wise that sort of next To you. There's another big guy in between us who should remain nameless But my feeling was you were just generally pretty Negative on the keynote a little pessimistic. Yeah, so go ahead go ahead explain it. Maybe we'll play a little pro and con guy You know Are you less pessimistic now than you were then?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I got to I I got to, you know, it's been marinating overnight. Yeah. So I let it marinate a little. Along with this Smith and Wollensky's. Along with that. But, you know, what I what I take away from the social enterprise. keynotes is I Get that it's a vision and What I don't appreciate is being having it like jammed down my throat When afterwards I still can't necessarily articulate what it is So I get this message of social collaboration and open and this and that but as a nose to the grindstone doing this every single day working on Salesforce for many many many different clients I'd be hard-pressed if they were to ask me what exactly is this social enterprise and how can I use it I wouldn't necessarily be able to give them a good answer without fumbling and bumbling around.

Justin Edelstein: And I wouldn't know where to necessarily start except for turn on this social contacts feature which I don't think is very good. Right. Turn on chatter which is a checkbox and a little strategy behind how you're going to roll it out. Some training. And then the other piece with the networks, I don't think the product is necessarily there. Like I don't necessarily see it. The platform's there and you can build it for millions and millions of dollars. You have Burberry up on stage showing their vision of digital and social. Burberry world. But you and I know we're sitting there and that's a year to two year project that costs millions and millions of dollars. And they're showing it like, yeah, snap it together, drag it around, drop it, deploy it, it's live, it's chatter, it's cool.

08:00 Justin Edelstein: And I don't feel like there's the appreciation for... there's still a lot of work to make this thing work and it's not just snap the pieces together and they make it seem like it's snap that doesn't exist

Jason Atwood: So I think I think I'm gonna have a good analogy for your perspective You're at the auto show. Show me a fast car. No, you're a designer of cars. No, you're in the manufacturing of cars. Your job is to build plants that build cars. Real cars that have to produce 300,000 cars a minute or a day, whatever they do, a year. And then what they do on the stage, they roll out the new concept vehicle. It does this and that and and has mobile and built-in Wi-Fi and it talks to you and it can bolt its own tires. It can fly. And it can fly. And you're the guy who sits there going, yeah, but I'm the guy who has to deliver on that. And that's all cool. Beth marketing hype versus reality.

Jason Atwood: So I get some of your pessimism, but I will say, they don't, you say that they connect those dots and they say, you know, this is, snap, snap, snap. Never in that presentation, and I've now heard it twice, he never says, this took five minutes. I've heard him say it before, when he does recruiting, we always make the joke about the recruiting demo, which is, look, I can build recruiting in like two minutes. And you and I know that because we build applications and things for the time, yeah, some things are snapped together and some things are not. And I think what, well, maybe what we bring to the table is that since there's so much that is snapped together, like again, turning on chatter is literally a click. Building a chatter portal... for your entire work force and rolling it out and building custom widgets that pull in stuff from SAP, that is not a click.

Jason Atwood: So what I think maybe your issue is, and I'll give you some credence for it, is that they're connecting things in the same bucket that are literally as easy as a click to six month multi-man hour projects. And they're putting them all together and they're not really distinguishing, they're not saying to you on stage, We'll see you next week. This piece is simple. This piece is really freaking hard. They don't say that. They just say here's it is at the end and isn't great. And so, but again I don't know if I don't know if the presentation would be better if they go this is easy and this is hard. This is because a lot of what they show and again they when they do their demos you know showing chatter now which I'm excited about and they show customer groups and they show social contacts, it does all look easy and they show you real live working examples.

Jason Atwood: And so it is sort of this very simple thing. You know like the, I'm sure the Toyota friend car thing, whatever. No that's not a button, there's a button in Salesforce, you turn on the friend. And I'll leave a reminder to myself which is many years ago. You and I went to one of these events and I said to you, they showed the dashboard that social, this was before they actually had Radiance 6, they showed this dashboard of all the different channels of what's happening.

11:09 Justin Edelstein: The service cloud. Yeah. There's the service cloud. With this graph that showed you everybody how they're talking.

Jason Atwood: And I was the first person that says, Thanks for watching! I've never seen that. I've never seen it working. I've never seen it anywhere near the middle of their slide like it should be there. So I get it. I get some of that. But what we have to understand is Salesforce people who are a little bit too deep with Salesforce, at this point, you know, couldn't be deeper unless we owned some stock. that that is part of their thing is vision and vision then leads to these successes. To your account to your point with this. We rolled out chatter, we rolled out a to a community bank the other day right yeah went live with it I did training on site And we had a chance to go back and check in with them and say, how are things going?

Jason Atwood: It's been a month or so. You've been using Chatter. You've been using the thing. It was a pretty big project for us. So whatever. So we're there. And I said, how has Chatter been? Because we're in a smaller org, and Chatter in a smaller org is kind of like, eh. We've heard a couple stories from Salesforce. In fact, That's it. That's it. on the day before we went to another event called Spark where we heard some really cool chatter stories but they- they're all Salesforce internal stories where it's kind of like you're eating your own dog food of course it's going to sound good but we asked this client, hey how's chatter been, been you're a bigish or you got lots of people using it bigish or smallish or but still enough people. Has it been helpful?

Jason Atwood: Have you had any use cases? And our client rattled off two or maybe three really cool examples of where chatter changed the scope of what they were doing like this that's only been alive for a month and I so I think you know while there is a lot of hype when we went to check with the reality and put our finger on the poles wow no that stuff's really happening and happening to people we know and they're not lying about it and they're not hyping it they're not up on stage talking about real life examples of where chatter really is working. And where I put my head around social enterprise, which I agree, seems like this nice term. It's kind of like cloud computing. It's like, it's this thing. Well, what is it? Define it for me.

Jason Atwood: Social enterprise is, you know, sure, you could build collaboration tools inside. That's not a social enterprise. That the part of it. You can build things and talk to external sources. That's not social enterprise, that's part of it. It's when you start to look at your world, your entire social, your entire world as an organization, whether that be a nonprofit, whether that be a for-profit, a bank, whatever. When you start to look at the way that your apps work together, the way that you treat your customers, the way that you treat your internal employees. Please. less than the old- using a sort of social technology or methodology, you're actually making business decisions in there. That is the social enterprise, knowing more about your clients and knowing their last three tweets, which is something that does exist.

14:23 Jason Atwood: I actually connected up to our client today, and that is the first client on social contacts all three of them to work out of the box. The Facebook, the Twitter, and the LinkedIn, they all worked. I've gotten that before. Was someone you didn't know? Was someone I didn't know? Meaning, yeah, you're not. You're not Facebooked in with them. Oh, I don't think so. And not only that, they pulled up all three. First shot, like it literally hit the first Twitter, the first Facebook, it was pretty good. I was impressed, first time it worked. Anywho, knowing that about them, the other day I give you an example, on my own social contact. I went into, we were meeting with a prospect. that. and we're meeting at Crowdforest and I didn't, I don't know what she looks like.

Jason Atwood: We're supposed to be meeting in a crowd of people and That's part of the social enterprise. Again, I think it's hard to really define in a word or two or sentence or two. Someone gave you a really good definition, but you didn't remember it. They did, and I just forgot it.

Justin Edelstein: I'm gonna come back. Okay. That's all good. A lot. It's a lot. I think I've drawn my mind. I mean, there's a couple, again, your right, the good analogy is I'm the car manufacturer and. end. Mark Benioff is the car salesman who is showing 2018's car, right? There's a couple but as they demo things as like demo Dan and Craig is up there and Craig Swenstrud is like and that's social Service right? I'm like well not really cuz I know what you just showed us Isn't a sham it all worked But doesn't work as fluid well, you know, you're showing inbound Inbound CTI and I know that you have to run that on your Windows machine and you get the call and it does the screen Pop and that's great. Then on the other hand, you're showing me outbound face timing Which does that work on the same relent?

Justin Edelstein: I don't know, does FaceTime work on a PC? I don't know. Not to my knowledge, that's a macOS 10 thing. So here you're showing me one demo that doesn the actually really work. Like you're showing me it on two different machines cause you have to, cause it wouldn't work on one. And that demo's a little tired. The, oh, you're on your iPhone, let me FaceTime you.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, right. Like. Thanks for watching. Sorry, but yeah, right. It's also a link within within Apple and Mac. It's a link to Poppy FaceTime to a number.

Justin Edelstein: I get it, but it's like yeah, right. Okay. Oh, and you happen to need help with that DVI kit. I could walk through that demo now because I've seen it like 18 times. Well, it changed it. It was server and now it's the first time it was sort of cool. Now it's like, I don't think so. Like, I didn't, and it misses, to me that misses the mark. That misses the mark what mark though the mark that that makes me me Angry like I see that me Justin Justin me that's not about me that you're gonna say the socials about everybody Well that one's not about me that one misses me cuz I don't I in my in my mind And maybe I'm the maybe I'm the IT guy from 2004 that's saying clouds never gonna work I just don't see it, right?

17:52 Justin Edelstein: And maybe I'll be proven wrong over time. And I hope I am. I hope this is the next thing since sliced bread. But those whole examples of, and that's the social service cloud, like after he shows us this FaceTime thing where. That's not the so sorry that's not it you know I'm not calling into a call center they're not gonna ask me if I'm on an iPhone and click something and all of a sudden we're looking at each other it the first time that happens I'll be really excited but it's never gonna happen

Jason Atwood: It's not what happened if you call Apple that's why I could say maybe you call Apple that They actually had a when face that first came out They had a way to test FaceTime and it was to call Apple people there were people in their call centers You could test it by calling them because there was you know, it's like who has it Well, I don't know less if we can call Apple and they'll they'll actually answer the phone and like there'll be a person Looks like your FaceTime works. This is how it works. But yes, it's not a I agree I like it's like waves the magic wand and it's like and that's the social service cloud. Well, maybe that's not the of the social service cloud. But that's the vision. That's the vision.

Jason Atwood: That's where I think you get caught. You have to drop some of the reality and say, and again, it's,

Justin Edelstein: Well, I wouldn't. It's hard to do that when you're the person who's making the sausage. It's like, I need to know that that thing that you're showing on the stage that my customers are going to ask me to do can be done.

Jason Atwood: Right, but again, I don't think they show you anything that can't be done. I think they show you stuff that is not as easy as what they show you it to be. I believe that they showed us some things that can't be done. I think that, listen, I agree to you. I've had plenty of times where I looked at stuff that they've shown. I mean, knowledge is the one that I always looked at when they originally showed it way back when, two years ago, whatever, new knowledge. And I remember watching the guy, I think I was in a private meeting with them when we work at the big place that we shall not talk about. And I remember looking at him demo this. I think he was a pretty high up guy. He might have been the guy that came over from the company, whatever.

Jason Atwood: And I remember him clicking around and doing all this and I said, you know what? that looks great. But here's the thing. What you just did took 14 clicks to do. What my call center is asking to do is reduce clicks. And right now, the thing that I do in our org takes two clicks, and you just showed 14 clicks. And while that's all fun and games, call centers aren't about fancy documents. Call centers are about speed, and about handling requests as fast as possible, and going on to the next one, and handling them well, and that's it. Because call centers are about their cost center. and they're about money being lost. All that fancy cooking around and sorting and faceted navigation, people don't want that. They want speed. They want cook, cook, done. Cook, cook, open and closed case in a second.

Jason Atwood: And I couldn't agree more.

Justin Edelstein: I'm just going to give my last one. On the last rant. Okay, last rant. And then we can move beyond it. Okay. And this is a little bit of a pet peeve where again, I feel like there K There's a little smoke and mirrors. Yeah, where they show Social contacts. Yes, and the conversations. Yes as being one thing like here look here's here's Jason's picture, right? Here's his Facebook. Here's his Twitter. Right? Here's his LinkedIn, right? We're not gonna talk about that one that was awesome. I want that. I. I want to be able to talk to. I want to be able to like every time someone tweets at me bring it in and I want to like in real time like talk right back. That happens when I just, just. Have their picture right.

22:28 Justin Edelstein: Actually, there's, You have to know that the con... Eh, no, it doesn't really work that way. And it's not connected. At the end of the day, they're not connected at all. There's caveats. There's definitely caveats. But they don't show it with caveats. They show it as candy.

Jason Atwood: Well, but the I and that's- okay-. You could you could do this, but do you realize it's 125 dollars per user per month to do Like you know there's There's- there's lots of caveats. They show us nice big vehicles and they say this vehicle plugs in It's a hundred percent electric the caveat is there's no place the world to plug it in Or like with the new leaf have you ever looked it up? I went and spent a lot of time looking it up. I thought that was really interesting. Oh, it looks like you have an electric car and you can plug it in home. Do they tell you that you have to have something that costs $30,000 installed in your home to plug it in? No. And you have to have a guy come to your house and even...

Jason Atwood: They have a program where they come and evaluate your house to see if you even can own the car because they can come to your house and say you don't have the power to handle... this thing they were about to install, so you can then drive this car. So that's all caveats. I don't know. Again, I'm more... I'm usually pretty negative on this. Maybe just you being negative makes me be positive on it. I think that's the case. I like the vision. And I'm beginning to get my head around where the vision is and where it should be. And so... I like the vision. I like what he's saying. I also am okay with the caveats because they're always there. I will say, and I said this about Salesforce before, and I've been on the negative side, I wish it was a little bit more like Apple used to be or was with Steve Jobs.

Jason Atwood: Whenever he got up and showed you the new iPad 2. and went through five demos. He would then get up and say, available in a month for $4.99, done. the and And I liked that the TV they set up the whole they do that all you don't need to even Not I not even like the main side section where we were in the subsection I was massive and they had three halls and like you know all all these breakout rooms I didn't go to any sessions I assumed I know you didn't I thought the expert hall was really well set up you know they kind of did the stuff in the back where you could sit they actually replayed the keynote in the back which is kind of cool so you could go there if you missed it go and sit in the back they had the sales force big area Then they had a lot, they had partners, not as big a partner community.

26:18 Jason Atwood: You know, it was basically all products. It was all products. A surprise is that some partners had little small booths. I'm like, boy, you're usually the person with the massive booth.

Justin Edelstein: I didn't think there's a lot of opportunity. There wasn't even a massive booth. There were two. There were bigger booths. Well, there were two big ones in the middle.

Jason Atwood: And then the side ones were all kind of same size. they were bigger. I, I, anyway, but you know, I didn't think it was, that was good.

Justin Edelstein: You know, they served lunch. I didn't.t actually get as much, no, I mean, time as I want to on the floor looking at products. Yeah, that was a good opportunity to actually spend more than a second with.

Jason Atwood: A product and I just didn't have the time. I've decided that I don't like doing that. I used to think that it would be fun to go the from booth to booth and really get into the product and and really ask the tough questions. The problem is, first of all, there's too many people there asking- the not right questions. For me, right? Secondly, I don't really learn by someone showing me a four-second demo and shooting me off the stuff that I can learn on a literally a one-pager. I learned by doing. I learned by getting a trial. I learned by using it for 30-40 minutes and really deciding. So, I always think that I'm going to learn so much more than those and then when I This, this, and this, you know, well does it do this?

Jason Atwood: Well, we'd have to get back to you on that. you really know your I don't get it.

Justin Edelstein: What is that?

Jason Atwood: Country. same this is second cloud for us I mean then New York in a year to me there was nine months they announced a new cloud this marketing social marketing cloud

Justin Edelstein: And they spent like four minutes on it I don't know if it's just not fully baked or something. spent on it where there was two hours spent on something that we've already seen. Yeah. So like, I know we get on them like you guys, show us, stuff that you deliver like 12 months later. But if you're going to do this whole visionary thing, that's not necessarily tangible and and more and more about the road map stuff and I want stuff It was held at the East Hotel, which was kind of like the first Cloud Force New York. It was very small. It was in a small little area, maybe a hundred or so people, maybe a little more, 200? No, I think so. No. Yeah, the breakout alone, there was at least 50 people. Anyway, well, there were, three breakouts if they're all mine I went to the service cloud, break out so started off with a note about the social enterprise and opportunities for partners All right this event was for partners only and partners who are certified consulting partners So you could be a certified the admin, you were not invited to this, sorry.

30:50 Justin Edelstein: It was for certified sales cloud consultants. And there was a you know 45 minute keynote about the social enterprise. Basically rehashing-hashing all the things that Mark was gonna say the day after and what we've already seen a. Bur- And they had these breakout sessions. I went to the Service, which was essentially a roadmap session. Yep. So there was a bunch of the the key hit on were knowledge knowledge, CTI, and radiance 6. So giving a quick like one minute on each. Yeah, and the knowledge is impressive. Knowledge with portals is gonna, is gonna have a whole new Sonic come spring summer safe harbor safe harbor applied but the user interface for the customer service experience is going to change drastically. Particularly where they talk about creating communities answers is going into a chatter- and allow people to answer their own questions, which I think is the idea.

Justin Edelstein: That's ultimate deflection, right? So that to me was the cool part. There's a bunch of stuff on the Knowledge Road.map that they have already. So just stuff that's coming down the road. To me that was the best part.

Jason Atwood: Which is very cool. So the concept of actually I think they were using the Force where a lot they were using the king the mayor ship kingship from four square But the idea that in chatter if people start to like certain things that you talk about and you know that you can start to build Influence and then you can say this person has the best it has the best influence on I guess topic levels Something is like interesting like that Topics were the coolest part of that road. So they showed a topic page. Smart folder, smart what they what do they call it? Smart filters, smart searches for. Chatter, so that's very cool, that's my thing. So demos of touch, learn that touch will will not be browser based, it will be hybrid based, meaning it will be.

34:09 Jason Atwood: It will be using a browser but it will be inside of an app which is kind of interesting. They'll never do a native iPad app. They're not going to be able to do that. R.

Justin Edelstein: K. Oh, why don't you just revisit the entire thing? Well, no, I got one more. What the hell is it? Social accounts.

Jason Atwood: And so social accounts are coming sooner, which is the idea that you can look at an account and see if they a blog associate to that account. Twitter associated to that account. I think that's very cool. We track that in our org, but there's no way to really look at it. What if they have. I did. Safe Harbor, which I thought was really cool, was tasks and chatter. So the idea that you can assign, task, sign, box, sort of in your chatter. If you're a salesperson, you don't realize that everything you're doing and will do is going to move into chatter you need to get on the bus because it's all moving to chatter. Approvals, ideas, tasks, everything's gonna move to chatter. You're gonna be doing everything in chatter and you know the entire interface might be chatterific.

Jason Atwood: Wow. So anyway, that was a great, that was a great event. We stayed for a while. Maybe, maybe took some of the bite out of Cloud Force because it had a while the same content. Alright, so let's get on with folks that particular week since we're running low on time. What's yours for this week?

Justin Edelstein: Mine is, it's social. And it was brought to my attention by one of the fellow Salesforce MVPs who put one of these things together for all the MVPs that were going to be at the Cloudforce event. and it's called GroupMe. I've talked in the past about WhatsApp on my iPhone. Yes, you have. I think you've made the pick. I've made the pick and I really think GroupMe is actually a better version. So GroupMe is a cross-platform messaging collaboration service that's on the web. So you can log into groupme.com. It works on your iPhone, it works on your Android, it works on your Blackberry, it works on your Windows phone, and it also works over SMS. So everyone can use it. What it is is these short form messages that are kinda like texts.

Justin Edelstein: Now what's cool about it is it's very ad hoc. So anyone can just sign up for a groupme account and then create a group. you I don't know where, just new group called Salesforce MVPs at Cloudforce and that group gets a phone number, every group gets a phone number and you can have the app on your phone or you can you can choose like message me through the app or message me just over SMS and it'll just come from that english phone number. The cool part is you can do group messaging, you can call the phone number that is assigned to your group and start a conference call so everyone can just, you know, be like dial into the number and you dial in and conference call. You can share location so you just hit map inside the app and it shows where everyone is and you can share.

37:53 Justin Edelstein: Photos. These are some of the things

Jason Atwood: That WhatsApp doesn't do all a That's right.

Justin Edelstein: All right. Group it. or bump it and group it. Bump it, flip it, group it.

Jason Atwood: Could have been a good title for this podcast. So I would have picked something that I've already picked before. since we're kind of in two days ago. It's called Salesforce Viewer and it used to be called the account viewer by- sales with Salesforce So this is where the no iPad thing comes in, no, native iPad. It's native to the iPad and it's basically this great, and I know you love how I do this. So you log in using your Salesforce username and password and then you got every object in your entire org, available to you. I like it. And you could go into any one of the org, I mean any one of the org, including solutions or custom things. And then it gives you kind of quick quick searches, you know, like records I created, records I modified, records I own, and you could go in, like we keep our projects.

Jason Atwood: So here's recent records, I can see projects, I can click on those, they pull up information, it pulls up all the related information in this kind of like side list. I mean it's a really nice little interface and basically a free... iPad mobile version of Salesforce which is pretty cool. So it went from being again, just accounts to, you get all this stuff and again it organizes it well. It's read only, yeah?

Justin Edelstein: Viewer would imply read only.

Jason Atwood: Is chatter in there? Chatter is not in here. So it is another one of those chatter. It's a little weird. Well let's see if chatter object is in here, no.

Justin Edelstein: But like you can't see chatter on anything.

Jason Atwood: So there's, but it does like instant mapping, it does the mapping for you already. That's kinda cool. It's a nice little app, I mean it's, I will say I use these now, right, so I can't edit. You can FaceTime right from there if I want to. You can follow, so you get to follow. You can follow, but you can't see anything. so I can follow or unfollow things. So, it's a nice little app, I mean again, free, force.cof. labs, it is called Salesforce Viewer now, it's actually an update to the other one, so if you had a account viewer, this would just go update, be there. And that's it for this week, we will be back next week. Until then, we have a blog, post that's in the works, but that'll go up probably soon.

40:55 Jason Atwood: ... So didn't make it for this podcast. Go to blog.arc, arkusinc.com for all the blogs Also remember that you can actually come back and comment with you. So we are fully social. But until next week, we back with another episode of CloudFocus Weekly. Like to say... until those fun days.

Justin Edelstein: So, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you enjoyed it.