DimDim SomeSome - Episode #27 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 27th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the second week of 2011. This episode is titled Dim Dim Sum Sum. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. And joining me as the co-host for the last 27 times, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you very much for asking. We got a big agenda And today we're going to talk about the waste notes for Spring 11. I posted a blog post today about that. My seven favorite features. Talk about Google Hotspot or Hot Pot as it's really called. Which is a competitor. Talk about how they're getting to the location based awareness business. And we have Rackspace is doing some accelerating of the cloud, as well as Salesforce bot Dim Dim. We'll talk about what that is and why that affects us Salesforce people.

Jason Atwood: And then our cloud focus app pick of the week to end off the show. But let's get started with spring 11 features. Seems like just moments ago we went through a winter release and we're in the middle of winter and we're talking about spring, which is a nice way to keep us busy. So for those who don't know, on the 27th time, Salesforce releases roughly three times a year. They name them after the seasons, and they're usually a season ahead of wherever they are, although summer is actually in summer, or right before summer.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I guess.

Jason Atwood: Summer's in June, so that is summer to me, although not officially on the calendar. But spring release in February always seems a little odd, because it's not even close to spring. So I wrote a blog post about this. You did? And I named off the top seven features that I'm excited about or are worth the wait. This isn't a jam-packed feature set this time around. Again, I think it's the smallest cycle between releases that they have in terms of development cycle. But there are a couple that I'm excited about. So I'll name a few. Lots of chatter stuff. But the two chatter things that I'm really looking forward to that I would literally use today. I almost use today if it exists. and that I would use every day going forward are chatter mentions and chatter email replies. So chatter mentions is the ability to type the at symbol and then it's gonna look up against the chatter users and be able to include them in your chatter. So then they are clickable and they get notified.

Jason Atwood: So I could say having a great podcast with at Justin Ellis team and then you would get notification that I sort of chattered you.

Justin Edelstein: You mentioned me, it's like Twitter.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's like Twitter. It's exactly like Twitter. It's exactly like Twitter. The only thing I think it does better than Twitter is it actually looks up against users.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I wish my Twitter app looked up and told me that I spelled Jason M. Abwood incorrectly, where I started typing and it would be like, oh, that's the person you want. But I guess Twitter has millions and millions of users, so it would be a little harder to look up against that.

03:19 Jason Atwood: Google looks up against trillions of results in real time.

Justin Edelstein: I guess.

Jason Atwood: So the other one that I'll throw out there for chatter, and then maybe you can tell me one or two that you're looking forward to, is the chat or reply email. So you get a chat or notification, someone writes on your wall or your profile, and like Facebook, you can actually hit reply. And then the message goes back in and attaches as a comment to the message that was posted to you. So a great way to take this, it's great to have chatter and I like to be in chatting, But I also want to be able to do the chatting without having to go into a chat or application to find it. I want to just hit reply and keep going. So that's great. We'll not work with the attachments. So you can't send an attachment up there just yet. I can only assume that's coming. But that's very exciting. So those two I literally would use almost at any point in time during the day. What are you excited about for the Spring 11?

Justin Edelstein: I'm going to go off of your blog post and mention some that I'll just mention too, since you mentioned too, that I think are phenomenal upgrades coming in this release. The first one being the ability to share based on criteria. So expanding on what roles and sharing settings can do within your Salesforce instance, you can now share records based on criteria within those records. So you can share a, if you have a drop down called type, you can share certain types of records with other records, even if they're, with this group of people can share with that group of people based on the fact that the type field equals open or something like that.

Jason Atwood: You can even put a field in there called group and then have them maintain their own sharing setup. Which of course.

Justin Edelstein: So lots of expanded capabilities there sharing and roles and public groups and queues and whatnot. So that'll be interesting to see how that expanded use will work for our clients and for other users around the Salesforce universe. One of the other things that I really like is the ability to now inline edit within Visualforce pages. I I always thought that that was sort of a limitation. You can inline edit records, you can inline edit lists of records, but on a Visualforce page you can't inline edit a field. Now you can. Coming in Spring 11, I think that that's a really nice enhancement for the user interface and makes for a much more consistent application as you go from a standard Salesforce page layout to a Visualforce page. They should have the same interaction abilities.

Jason Atwood: JONATHAN BERIUNT-SHORTYIYA I have a client right now. We're building a component inside of their page that shows data to other data within the system. And right now, you can't inline edit that. It would be nice. This would be a great feature. And you'll be able to inline edit that. I guess that's a, yeah, that would be really nice. So also, there's some limits. They're upping some limits on things. JONATHAN BERIUNT-SHORTYIYA Yes.

06:37 Justin Edelstein: They're upping a lot of governor limits as far as for developers are concerned, they're upping the amount of operations that can happen on certain saves and inserts and upserts and whatnot. They'll allow for, I think the limit right now is like 20 queries per interaction or something along those lines. They're upping it to like 150.

Jason Atwood: Also about outbound emails are actually being upped in this next release, which is, again, something we're running up against with a client right now. So good stuff, because these are things that I don't know what percentage of Salesforce users or orgs run up against these limits. But when you do, it's really painful.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I mean, one last limit that's being increased or being rolled out more broadly is the run as logged in user dashboards. So currently, in the current release of it, you only have three, and only if you're on unlimited edition, it's now being rolled out to enterprise edition as well. And they're increasing it to, I believe, five. So that is a great feature. The ability to look at a dashboard and see it as you. Wow. That's great.

Jason Atwood: I can't wait to get our hands on it. We get the name was always Raru, Run as Running User. Be nice to get it for that. And then enterprise users get it, or I don't know how many users get it even up for them so they can use it more. I think this is Salesforce's way of sort of testing to make sure that not everybody throws a million of them out there. It's a pretty special use case that you need to use it for, but great feature. And something we asked for when we worked at that big bank that we never talk about. We asked for this years and years and years ago. So good stuff. We'll have more as it comes out. And when we get to play with some of this, maybe we'll bring it back up and bring it back into our talking points. But next up is a little bit of Google, a little bit of social. Google has released their new Google Places, and they're calling it Hot Pot. It's Google Places with Hot Pot. So they've had it. For the iPhone.

Jason Atwood: For the iPhone and Android, which is basically their competitor to things like Foursquare, to Facebook Places, which is location-based social networking. The idea that you go to a place like McDonald's here at Times Square, and I check into it to say it's a great, I'm checking in. Then you get to see a notification to see that I checked in that place. You can follow people. Foursquare has made it a bit of a game. They have badges, and they have numbers. And you and I go back and forth on who's the mayor of Arcus, which we find fun.

Justin Edelstein: It reminds me I'm going to have to check in as we do this

Jason Atwood: podcast. Yeah, that would not be good. But Google's getting into it, and they're adding a So they have Google Places, which has existed for a long while, but they are now extending it with this check-in ability. So all that stuff that shows up on the Maps views, so when you search for people in Maps, they show up in Google Places. Now you can check in and rate them while you're there. So I think it's a great way for Google to add on to something that is probably their most popular product, besides Search, which is Maps. So they added on to Maps with Places. Now you have places that you can check into. If they were to add in the ability to then feed that off to other social networks at the same time and choose those, I might switch over. I like the ability for Foursquare to shoot out to Twitter and Facebook. But if I could have Google shoot out to Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter at the same time, I might use that as well.

10:19 Justin Edelstein: So it's kind of interesting. What Google always brings to the table is search. So it does bring, and they're just dearth of information that you can then search through, right? So they have, Maps has been out for a long, long time, and they have all these places that are designated on Maps, and they have the ability to even direct you to places using directions and things of that nature. So this will allow you to rate things and have, once you start really rating things, it'll set your preferences for you and allow you to say, you know, if you're at a restaurant, the food was good, the service was, and the atmosphere was bad, you know, things like that.

Jason Atwood: Which is really nice because it kind of extends where, it goes beyond where Facebook Places and Foursquare are now, because they allow you to check into places and give tips, but there's no way to say food here stunk.

Justin Edelstein: Right, this is like a mix between those applications and then applications like Urban Spoon, where I wanna find a pizza place within or around me, within three blocks of me here in Manhattan, or a mile of me somewhere else, or five miles wherever you might live. And it allows that searching ability with the reviews and all that rich information that already exists within the Google database, for lack of a better word, the Google sphere, whatever they call it. And just sort of brings all that information to the forefront and allows you to interact with it in different ways and allows people to use that information to then make decisions about. And it'll be interesting to see if it takes off. Google does not have a great track record in launching these types of social apps.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, this is on the iPhone, so it has a little bit of juice to it. It's on the Android phones. That helps. I think these social, particularly the location-based ones, are much better on mobile devices than they are on a laptop or certainly a desktop. So we'll see if it goes anywhere. but right, like Buzz didn't really hit. Buzz off. Yeah, it didn't really hit the market run in wave. Had to mention it, not working.

Jason Atwood: Not a social networking thing at all?

Justin Edelstein: Well, it has a social component to it, a communication component to it.

Jason Atwood: You could say that. I think it's interesting, I like the way they're going. This is becoming, this location-based social networking is becoming a huge push now. Again, Facebook, I've heard of Facebook's plans. They are going to add in these types of things into their places. I see more and more people checking in to places on Facebook. So there's going to be a bit of a push to say, where is your, what is the one that you use? I'm always surprised that Twitter, which I'm already tweeting about stuff in some ways, I'm already there saying, oh, I'm at McDonald's having a meal. I'm always stunned that Twitter kind of doesn't jump on any of these bandwidths. Well they do location. Yeah. For years.

13:45 Justin Edelstein: I mean they know your geolocation when you tweet. And do you use it? No. Well, it's not something that you use or don't use. You're using it.

Jason Atwood: No, you just turn it on for each tweet. No you don't.

Justin Edelstein: You either turn it on or you turn it off. And it's on and then you can search and say show me, you know, here's a term and show me anyone who's tweeted about it within 30 mile radius. How often do you use it? No, I don't use it. Exactly. But you can.

Jason Atwood: with one of these, they could have, if they had sort of, because they've had that for a while, they could have brought in this better. They could have built this, either done the four square model, made it more of a game, or they could have done the review stuff, or.

Justin Edelstein: I think Twitter's doing just fine with what they do.

Jason Atwood: I would even think why shouldn't, why shouldn't Twitter profiles have a geolocation to them? So like Arcus, we have a Twitter profile, why shouldn't that have a geolocation assigned to it? So then when you're tweeting, you can say not only what other tweets are happening here, but what other Twitter's homes are here, or other places that tweet from here, come and tweet.

Justin Edelstein: Well, you have a location. You've said it. It doesn't work that way. No, it doesn't work that way.

Jason Atwood: I'm telling you ways that Twitter should be better.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they do what they do, and they do it well. But they don't.

Jason Atwood: My point to Twitter is I don't feel like they really keep trying to. Their biggest thing lately, their biggest thing they've done in a long time is the rebranding of their pages. That's not keeping up with the Joneses. Anyway, let's move on. Small is cloud news, but kind of showing where things are going. And I guess this is a chance to talk about CDNs. I love talking about CDNs. Which is Rackspace is now going to accelerate their cloud offering, their cloud files, and some of their other, that's a notice from cloud files, some of their other cloud initiatives that they have. They have cloud files, cloud servers. They have their own dedicated server stuff. But they are using Akamai now to extend their cloud offerings. Akamai is a huge, huge, longstanding company. Been doing this, I think, it's the leader. I can't think of anybody else who does it more or more successfully. They're the back end to a lot of the iTunes stuff.

Jason Atwood: So Apple, when they release their massive amounts of data to everybody and everybody goes down, it all comes off the my content delivery network. So for those who don't know, content delivery CDN stands for content delivery network. The idea is that while a server with your data on it is called a Salesforce server, might be sitting out in San Francisco somewhere, or just below San Francisco or California let's say, but I'm in New York. When I want to get an image or a file or a PDF or something static, if I didn't have a content delivery network, I'd have to go all the way back to the server on and that's across the interweb, across the country. Of course, that's not, that's lickety split. But if you do that across millions of people and millions of files and big files, that's what content delivery networks is. They cache things locally. So when I go to ask for that release note, the Spring 11 release notes, instead of it going all the way to California, it'll say, oh, we have a local cache somewhere in New York. We have a cache of that. And then it'll send it from New York. It'll be much faster and keeps the server load off that one

17:01 Jason Atwood: server, because it kind of spreads it out. So Salesforce does this with their sites technology, which is great. They do it with their own technology, which with their own sort of Salesforce stuff, they do a lot of caching. Really, and now obviously Apple's doing it. It's almost imperative if you're going to grow to a certain size, you have to be able to do cache networking. And then our last story of the week, before we get to our Cloud folks pick of the weeks, again, came out I think the day of we were doing it. I think we just published it, someone tweeted this to me and said, what do you think of Salesforce buying Dim-Dim? So Dim-Dim is a online conferencing solution for screen sharing and showing things, conference line. It was something I used about six, eight months ago. I will tell you I used it and then moved off of it because it wasn't stable enough, had a lot of people's problems getting into it. They had a free version, which was really nice. had some unique features, like it was all browser based.

Jason Atwood: You really didn't have to have a plug-in download or anything. Webex and the other competitor, GoToMeeting, they download something in the background or an app that then runs and does a lot of features. This all did to the browser. But that's where we ran into problems. So Salesforce now buys basically a conferencing solution, which for me, other than it being dim-dim, I'm I'm like, hooray, because what's one of the biggest pains is setting up a meeting within Salesforce and then having to go set up the go to slash WebEx meeting immediately after and having them be not in sync. And if you change one, you have to change the other. It's always a pain. There are some solutions out there. I've never seen a good one. Some of them have been pulled down. Something I've looked for. I've created buttons that kind of link you between the two. Always a pain. If that were integrated, I'd be very happy.

Justin Edelstein: That would be a nice integration. I could see Dim-Dim being used in a multitude of ways. how you described it in a sales scenario where you want to set up a meeting with a potential client or with a client and want to demonstrate something to them and don't want to fly across the country to do it. Obviously that's what these web conferencing solutions do and really they were sort of one of the first like software as a service type of applications that were out there, right? People even at the largest of enterprises didn't try to build their own web conferencing, they used to Microsoft Live meeting or WebEx and not really go-to. It's more for small and medium-sized businesses, but they would trust these applications to do that work for them instead of building their own. So that's interesting that their Salesforce and DIMDIM are coming together. Another use case that I see for this that could be really phenomenal is call center and service and support. So you're always, you know, you have to grant login access and let's join this go-to meeting and let's share our screens and it takes like five minutes. And if you could just cut that out and just be like, click a button from a ticket or a case and say, here, here's the link and it sends out automatically and it just starts this meeting. That could be phenomenal. I could see that being a big thing as well. So both for sales and service, this could be a big, big acquisition for them depending on how while they integrated into the system.

20:27 Jason Atwood: Yes, here's the things I want added in. When I create a meeting request in Salesforce, I have a checkbox that says include DIMDIM meeting, and then when it sends out the meeting request. It's not gonna say include DIMDIM. Sorry. It's gonna say

Justin Edelstein: include web conference.

Jason Atwood: Include web conference, and then I want to include the phone number, the password, the login, all of it right within. And if I change one, it changes the other. You do that and I will be happy and I'll use your service. I'll tell you that the reason I really like this, and I know our Cloud Focus app picks the week, So we're going to continue to talk about this a little bit. Right now, the two big competitors are sitting at the exact same price. And I like this because I pretty much guarantee this will be included in the sales cloud. And it will be free as a free feature. My gut is, because I can't see adding this on as a, well, maybe you could see adding this on. But anyway, I think it will be at a price point that we I can see adding it on. But I can see adding it on a price point that gets these other guys to drop their prices. Yes.

Justin Edelstein: You're already paying this, and because you're paying this, pay an extra 10 or whatever bucks a month per account or whatever it is, and we'll volume price it for large enterprises, all that stuff.

Jason Atwood: I think that's where they're gonna, that's why I would not go with the per person, per license fee, is because you can use the other competitors without that. You can just have one username and password. It looks a little odd, but it works perfectly fine. So if you just said to me, OK, DimDIM is $5 per user per month, but all three users are all 10 or 15 or 20 users in the org have to have it, versus one $50 a month WebEx, well, then it's not comparable. So let's get on to our Cloud Focus App pick of the week. Let's do it. So what's yours?

Justin Edelstein: Mine happens to be GoToMeeting. You're kidding. Yeah, well, because we were talking about the DimDIM, and You and I have different opinions on which service is better or which one we prefer. I prefer GoToMeeting. I like GoToMeeting. I think it has some great built-in features. I think it works really well with products like Outlook where it has plugins to Outlook for scheduling meetings. It does really good recurring meetings. It has conference lines built into it. good screen sharing capabilities and really good controls. Again it's a free 30 day trial, $49.99 in a month is the standard price. You can then get GoToWebinar which will allow you to do some more higher end things like add polls and surveys and have more people in the conference as opposed to just a conference call. It's actually a webinar that can support many, many people. So I really like GoToMeeting.

Justin Edelstein: It's a good product, very stable.

Jason Atwood: it works for me. You know what? I like GoToMeeting, but what I really like is WebEx. So my Cloud folks at Pick of the Week following on this news as well is WebEx. I wonder if people

23:28 Justin Edelstein: use what we pick for like decision making and now we're giving them like the two choices.

Jason Atwood: So here's why I like WebEx better. Go on. First of all, in my experience, whatever you use, the other one people always say it's hard to get into. That's one. So I just, I just, This is not really a competitor of the two because I think they're very, very close. The one main one that WebEx has over GoToMeeting is that WebEx doesn't allow a feature that almost every bank in the United States will not allow into their system. So again, we talked about you and I used to work at one of these banks and you could not use GoToMeeting at these banks. So that alone made me pick WebEx because I want to work with these banks and I don't want to have go-to meeting, have send them out. And we used to do it all the time. Salesforce is a big go-to meeting. Whenever they had to do a presentation to us, we'd have to say we can't accept go-to meetings. We cannot accept it. So for me, just ubiquity of being able to go to any company, I've never had a company say to me, we can't use Webex, but I've had plenty of companies say, I can't use go-to meeting. So that's a go-to meeting thing.

Jason Atwood: If they could pull out that one little feature, which is basically giving control over to see someone else's desktop, Or no, is it, yeah, that's the one that banks don't like. Maybe it'll come out. So I like Webex because it's easy. I like that they have multiple, they have both iPhone and iPad apps. GoToMeeting does not. They only have an iPad. They do not have an iPhone app. So check one there.

Justin Edelstein: I have a smirk on my face, by the way. Because that's true. By the way, scheduling a meeting with GoTo is easier than scheduling a Webex.

Jason Atwood: So they have all the audio stuff. I like their computer audio integration with headsets. That works great. They do great recording of meetings. Their new version actually is very nice. It kind of disappears into your whole desktop. I like you can control which application you can show. I always almost only show one application because I don't want to have things popping up on my big screen. So I don't want to have things popping up or people looking at what's on my desktop.

Justin Edelstein: Let's put it this way. They're really close. Very close. So if you need a web conferencing solution, they both, I believe, have free trials. 30 day free. Go try them both and see which one you like. And let us know which one you like better. I like GoTo. Jason likes WebEx. Let us know which one you like better. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: The one thing that, so on the other side for GoTo, that they do is you can have, and we've talked about this recently, you can have an open meeting that has a conference call number in it that can then be accessed. So it kind of replaces a conference call line. And the meeting doesn't have to be in WebEx. The meeting has to be going for you to get into the conference call number. It's attached to the meeting. So if the meeting's not going, you can't get into the conference call number. In GoTo, you can have the conference call number open with the meeting open, and it can just expand many days. Is that correct?

Justin Edelstein: I am not certain that the actual person who sets up the meeting, the organizer, doesn't have to actually start by opening up the GoTo meeting. But you can definitely have a extended upon, always recurring meeting.

26:40 Jason Atwood: So there's the one thing that it did that I thought was cool. It's not even exist.

Justin Edelstein: Well, we would have to test that. We'll get back to you.

Jason Atwood: So speaking of, we'd love to hear your opinions on GoToMeeting and DimDim and WebEx and all that. My blog post will be up on blog.arcusinc.com. You can subscribe by RSS if you want to. That's a really simple syndication. You can follow the company at Arcus Inc. So that's twitter.com slash arkisinc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. I'm at twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood, and Justin here is at twitter.com slash Just Edelstein. And then we're on Facebook, facebook.com slash arkisinc. We're also in places. So with your new places thing, if you come visit us, we are at our location, which is 1501 Broadway. Look us up, New York, New York, and we have a place page there as well. And for the podcast, go to iTunes. subscribe to it. It's easy, it's fast, it's free, and it comes down every time we publish one. We're publishing one on our normal Thursday today, but you know next week could be a different day, different time of week, so you'll get that. Leave a review there if you would like.

Jason Atwood: Five star and above. We'd really appreciate it. And until next week, we'll see you on the Cloud Focus Weekly. Enjoy those cloudy days.