Slowbooks - Episode #72 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.

00:09 Jason Atwood: This is the 72nd episode of CloudF CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, you're a Cloud Committee expert. I'm your host Jason Alwyn. For the 72nd time in a row, is the co-host and co-broadcaster Justin Els Dean. Justin, how are you doing today?

Justin Edelstein: I'm alright, I just wiped the cold out of my eyes. The cold out of your eyes? Yeah.

Jason Atwood: All right. It's a it's the end of a cold Thursday. We took ao cold turn here in New York. Not that bad. It's gonna be it's gonna get cold here a little bit like highs of 41, one, loads of 30s, colder. I didn I didn't say about how it was cloudy outside.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah. But boom. Yeah. And, Did you enjoy this cloudy days? I did because there are umbrellas everywhere in Times Square when it When there drops of rain people get the umbrellas and poked in the eyes and stuff course you do All right, so speaking of getting poked in the eyes we have an agenda

Jason Atwood: We got our social enterprise blog post Part one part you know the series We have a question. There is QuickBooks and Salesforce. Hmm. We have intact going for the trifecta of a Salesforce integration. And then we have a couple other little things like a company banning email, we'll talk about that. And then we'll talk a little-little bit about our move to Google Wave, off of Google Wave and how it's been going. You have here a panel, discussion. I wrote that. Panel discussion. Not in Google Wave, it's actually in Google Docs is where we ended up. But we'll talk about that. So first things first, let's talk about the blog post this week.

Justin Edelstein: Which was? It was titled Creating a Social Enterprise with Salesforce.com Part One. And part one of this blog takes a look at what truly defines the social enterprise. So part one is more about defining some keys to becoming a social enterprise, where I believe part two will dive into some of the tools, some of the ammunition that you can use to actually achieve your goals. that you set forth in phase one. And as the partner who shall remain nameless so eloquently wrote, yeah, it's two steps. Two short and easy steps. Of part one. Of part one. Part two could have like 17 steps. Part two will likely have more steps. But step one, listen, listen closely. Okay. For more information, visit www.fema.gov So list, you know, it says the concept of listening to your customers is clearly not a new one.

Justin Edelstein: But there are now more ways to listen, more avenues for your customers to talk. So you have to get out there and start monitoring and listening to what your customers are saying. And it's easier for them. Well, they're also really not talking to you. No, they're talking about you. They're talking out and about you. Yeah.

03:21 Jason Atwood: That's a nice way of thinking about it is that it used to be they would talk to you, they would call you, they would go to your website. And you controlled that. And you controlled that. Now It's like I'm not talking to Nike.

Justin Edelstein: I'm just talking about Nike Nike not a sponsor not a sponsor

Jason Atwood: There's only one sponsor of this podcast forever. No always-always so Yeah, definitely that's a good step one. So, you know go out there.

Justin Edelstein: There are plenty of social Social media outlets blogs wikis YouTube's and the like so start listening and his second step was Making a friend request. Okay, so actually becoming becoming closer to your customer by, you We went to Cloud Force.

Jason Atwood: We did. We talked about social enterprise now for a while. We have been. And I went back and had to explain it. And it's a good thing, it's like being a teacher. Like in order to teach something you need to know it or you need to understand it. You really do. I went back to explain it to my wife. Oh, that's a good test. It was a good good test. I know- I know your. You know my wife. Did you put her to sleep? I did not. She actually was very interested in it. And I basically went on, it was a pretty pretty long conversation, well not long, but like 20 minutes. And I basically came down to me, and again this is my view on the social enterprise, it's really about saying, it's about these things that were corporations, that were organizations, these logos, turning them from logos and from, He's sort of blank.

Jason Atwood: Slates, turning them into something that people are interacting with on a social level. And it's the two way street of the corporation seeing you, right? So Arkus sees people who follow it on Twitter and follow it on Facebook as social things. We're connected to them socially. But also people have, I think I mentioned this in one of the last podcasts, people have tweeted at us, at Arkus, at Arkus Inc. And they go, hey, I miss at Arkus Inc. at Cloud Force. I'm sorry I didn't get to see you guys. They're not talking to Justin. They're not talking to Jason. I think they're talking to me. But no, they're not. They're talking about a company. Right. And think about like the Old Spice commercials, right? Old Spice with this campaign where it's kind of interacting with Twitter people on Twitter That to me is part of it It's like that's part of it is that the company is no longer just this fit this You know this logo and this big corporate headquarters It's the social being that is talking and interacting with people on that one to one ratio.

06:23 Jason Atwood: And of course there's people behind it, but the facade is that these are people, that the company is bigger than just this corporation. It has a social entity to it. You can friend it. It has a soul. It has a soul, I guess. The other part to me on the social enterprise is Thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share this video. Taking that as making in some of the chatter stuff which is making internally pulling pulling social Internally making making the things that you do like updating a updating an invoice Making a social thing around it mentioning someone tagging it socially internally. So But anyway, yeah, so creating a social enterprise of Salesforce part one read it on blog that arkusinc.com and and leave a comment and socially someone will get back to you socially.

Jason Atwood: Social. Probably. Should be a tricky game.

Justin Edelstein: So my question... Did you catch the acronym that, Mark Benioff created out of the word social? See what? Created an acri- no, social. was an acronym he made into an acronym. Oh he took social and then associated like s stood for something. Oh see all I remember was l is leaderless that was the only one I can remember but I'm sure if you go watch the video or something there's you know he created some acronym out of social it's weird anyway So here's what's weird.

Jason Atwood: Back in April. And I think we brought this up on a podcast.

Justin Edelstein: Now I don't want to tell you this. But this post here was from April 1st. Yes. So maybe it was all of Big R. You think this is an April F. Absolutely not. But go ahead. It could always be said this was an April F. Yeah. It was also a pressure waste that I read... So back in April on the

Jason Atwood: First that was put out was that Salesforce and Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks and QuickIn and also it's a QuickProducts, QuickBooks- We're going to come up with a joint product where the QuickBooks Online would have a built-in synchronization with I'm rereading this post here.

Justin Edelstein: Get out. It's vague, but it does say that it will be available next summer, which would be about six months Next. Next.- that's not how. I read next. Why would- okay then As I read this in April or something we'll see another announcement like here comes and it will be available via The Intuit App Center not like you know, it'll probably just be like a plug-in or something and as I read this it's You know QuickBooks is gonna have the ability to Basically there'd be a big reseller of Salesforce. Right, but they're also it's gonna sink like that

10:10 Jason Atwood: So I'll tell you, everybody, everybody, everybody in the world wants this, sure. Although the QuickBooks Rooks online stinks, but if it didn't stink, it would be great because it would be great. Anyway, all right, fine. Maybe it's a joke and maybe it's coming next time. Does have an online product that actually does synchronize with and For accounting. We generally say well we say there's a line. We say there. But which is also a part of the sales force in that they have their own CRM. So I talked to the people in that sweep, they basically admitted that, yeah when we talked to customers, we were like, why would you use sales force? I was like, oh, okay. That's gonna be fun to invest with you. And then intact, we looked at, and intact does a lot to actually, in their marketing and their promotion.

Justin Edelstein: With to assigning a pass, gantt charting, dragging and dropping, email in, alerts. It's actually really good, I used it in a previous job and it's very robust. Like if you really need project software to the level of like a Microsoft project, you would use Clarison if you would use.- Cloudy login collaborate things of that nature a it's actually really pretty good This is a network world and basically saying that they're trying they're gonna They're gonna integrate Salesforce and and the professional the service is automation is Yeah, competitor.

13:25 Jason Atwood: It is nice. I mean, it was like to say it come out built into you know I think if someone could come up with a low-cost I says a hunt gas Integrated online Accounting software that could be used that was customizable enough to be used by small businesses medium-sized businesses Nonprofits they'd make a killing Because there is nothing out there that I know because every time every time that someone comes to us We're like well Here's the other options But this step up from a $300 or 250 off-the-shelf quickbooks to one of these is you know the multipliers a lot it's not the only quickbooks online is like $39 a month everyone else is like $500 thousand dollars They get up there. So interesting. So more stuff. So that was sort of my where's QuickBooks while other people were moving.

Jason Atwood: It kind of got me to go one way then the other. Next up, company bans email. Internal email.

Justin Edelstein: Internal email. Yeah. This came out earlier in the week. you know i saw this on in the elevator you saw it on captivate i saw captivate network i was captivated i like to captivate network so the company is called atos or atos atos it's a french company sorry i don't know how to pronounce it they have 74 000 employees That's a lot. Internally, they are turning off email. They're banning it. By 2012, right? Yeah, by 2012, right? No, I think 18 months. So sometime in 2013, I guess. And what they're doing is, you know, they've already said, or they've concluded that a vast majority of internal emails time wasting noise. spam internally things of that nature right and they are switching all employees and i'm air building which I would doubt. something social, collaborative, and instant messenger.

Justin Edelstein: That's where they're going, to Facebook style and I am. And the goal is focused totally on internal emails. Obviously they're still gonna have email because they have to. email their clients and their partners obviously you have to be able to get out and accept things in but you know their their CEO says he hasn't sent an email in three years so he's just like anti-email and there's some stats to prove it there's like a chart that that was included in this article about US, this is US web-based email usage year-over-year change from October 2010 to October 2011 and it's actually interesting when you look at the age difference people aged 12 to 17 have their change has been neg like they've stopped using email negative 31 percent So there's a big drop in their email usage And then as you get older it it kind of goes back upswing age 18 to 24 negative 21 Age 25 to 31.

16:55 Justin Edelstein: It's basically been even negative 1% when you get to like age 35 and up it's basically been rising anywhere between five or ten percent as it as it would I Imagine that those numbers will skew down as the you know They basically say people are tweeting people are texting people are I aming people are Facebooking more than anything to message each other and this company's like, yeah, no more email, internal, done.

Jason Atwood: I have, first of all, I need- I need to say one thing. Go ahead. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Why is that? Second of all, let me just have one scenario. You and I work at the company. We do. We're working with you and I working together on a project. We are. And we're working on a project with one of our clients. We are.

Justin Edelstein: And I want to send an email to- Don't even try and copy me on it. Don't even try it. It won't work. So that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Second of all,

Jason Atwood: Email isn't the problem. Email is a tool. You're right. I'll go back to Gary Vaynerchuk. Please do. Vaynerchuk. It's not about the tools. It's about how you use the tools. You know, I'm not gonna swear because this is not an explosive podcast, but it's it's not about the tools It's not about email versus IM versus chatter versus Yammer versus Yimmer versus dimmer If an exam made those last no, I just invented them Oh, okay, so we went on to to. Look at the app exchange today. We did exchange compliance with chatter humble brag and We were We were looking at the like share with, there's a share with button. And you click it and it comes up, I think with like 10, first 10. 10 little chiclets. 10 little chiclets. And it says, more. And I'm like, ooh, what's more?

Jason Atwood: 365 more underneath that, of places to share and to tag into. And they were literally under digs. We were looking to see if dig was still around. There were like 17 named dig something. It's like.

Justin Edelstein: I'm actually on a good mood to see my thinking about how ridiculous it was. Those stats about like I think they had stats on here. 10% of the 200 messages employees receive are useful and 18% of it is spam. Where's the other 75% or 65% of those things are. But...

20:23 Jason Atwood: Whatever so we were in a, littleh We went from one email solution free to every year the big company had to replace the free thing with something that was internal It's instant messenger is mess right so we said we had aim with a, whoa it's a messenger then we went to Same time in the same time we went to my Every time we went to And of course if you look at any logs to anything, you're going to be outraged. They're like, what are these people doing? They're like, what are these people doing? They're like, what are these people doing? You know, there's whatever. So then he says, shut it down. And then he shuts it down and the people come to him and say it He goes, well, I shut it down because it's a waste of time.

Jason Atwood: I haven't seen it.. you want to use it, you come to me, I'll look at your logs. We'll go through them together. And if you can prove that you're using it for business, then we'll do it. And that's the misguided part of this.

Justin Edelstein: Right so so I think it's still interesting to say that we're going full force to instant messenger and some sort of Facebook style collaboration for internal communication. But here's the thing about Facebook, and we're big,

Jason Atwood: Chatter users. We use instant messenger. We use all these things. We even, and we'll talk about it in a second, we now have even more places to have conversations. It's not about where the habit comes from. It's about the right use at the right time and having people trained to know what to use and what the best use is. Not everything is the best to use for everything. So it's not all, you can't just say, oh, no one internal communication via email. There's also bad use cases, rutting back and forth. I don't know, what do you want to do? An email is a waste of email. That's a better instant message conversation. But there are times when email is very, very useful for imparting information. I feel like all they should have done is have been sent their...

23:26 Jason Atwood: Spend their money and go hire Merle and man and and go over there and do a webinar for their 75,000 and tell them how to use email like I feel like the thing that's missing from this world is that we throw out all these tools to people but no one ever trains anybody on anything anymore no one ever trains people on how to use things how to use email It's the thing that you use more than anything else in the day and yet no one trains you on it, right? It's like my thing with typing and I know I've brought this up in podcasts before Typing is the number one way we communicate you put your hands on a keyboard for 10 hours a day Yet you probably haven't taken a typing refresh course in 15 to 20 years.

Jason Atwood: You're talking to me. Yeah you Oh, a refresher?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I did learn how to type. Like really type type. Yeah, but 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, in junior high school or something.

Jason Atwood: You use more often than not, that is the key to your communication with 90% of the people in your life, you learn in high school and never gone back on.

Justin Edelstein: The rest of the world, like they don't... Oh, I can make... When was the last time you took a took a math refresher?

Jason Atwood: I don't use math that much. You don't use math at all? Can you see me how much time do spot? I'm pretty good at typing, I would say. I'm saying that if it is that important, I think people should go back and spend more time. I was last time you refreshed your driver's ed.

Justin Edelstein: Good example. I know. It's a good example. So I brought it up. It's something that people should. Well, we do. You have to retake, you have to re-get your license. You have to re-do what? You don't have to do anything. I know. send money.

Jason Atwood: Exactly. Mail on a piece of paper. It's, and we stared out the keyboard and go, be.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah but that guy really knew his stuff. No!

Jason Atwood: He was the most unproductive person on the planet. He used to, instead of forwarding me emails,

Justin Edelstein: He would print them. I remember that. Walk up, go to the printer, go to the printer. They weren't emails, they were green screen things.

Jason Atwood: No, he printed emails and he would, instead of forwarding them, he would print them and then bring them to me. It was ridiculous. Thank you, Liz. Those are good practices. Anyway, alright, I think this is interesting.

Justin Edelstein: It sparked a conversation. But here's why I would be mad if they do this to me.

Jason Atwood: Things that don't exist in IM and in instant messaging and Facebook social networks that still are better in email. Red and unread state. It's the number one thing that they don't have. You can't tell what I have I go into Facebook now and I'm like, I don't know if I'm missing seven days worth of information or seven minutes. I can't tell because it's like lists of stuff but it's no way of going through. You give me 3,000 emails in my inbox, I can go right through it and pound through it and sort through what I need to do because I know I've either read it or haven't read it. There's no sense of that and I am, it's the same way. We used to have a thing when I had employees. I used to tell my employees don't send me important information over.

26:55 Jason Atwood: Good. Right. And it doesn't follow me across multiple devices, which email does. Email is still the best tool. It's shut it down.

Justin Edelstein: Shut it down. Alright, no more gas. I've had my nice rant.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, yeah. So why don't we talk about, speaking of collaboration. Speaking of. Why don't we talk about our MOBA. Google Wave. I don't know why anybody would be interested in this because probably no one is using Google Wave at this point. Yeah, but we talk about it so often

Justin Edelstein: That I think it warrants a panel discussion. A panel discussion? How do we invite other people to the panel? We should have. But let's not call it a panel discussion then. So, like we said last week, we got the warnings, the emails, and when we were logging into our... Thank you for watching! When we were logging into our you're doing things in the Google Doc in front of me when we logged into our wave instance There was a nice big warning message at the top that said this wave will turn read only Starting January something or other end of January January 2012. Yeah, and basically this thing's gonna explode in April So get your stuff and get out of here So basically you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. You pretty much have to get out of here.

Justin Edelstein: So You know, I think there are two things to talk about number one. I don't really like this Google trend of Shutting things down now, I understand they have to shut things down from time to time because it's just people aren't using it and you can't support everything forever and you have to cut bait and innovators dilemma and things of that nature but when you take a product like this and forget all the fanfare that it had going for it at its release because when they released it it was a bfd yeah it was and it was like email 2.0 and whatever right yeah What to me makes this kind of a travesty is that they went beyond the whole this is a labs project. They integrated this with the Google Apps suite. But I feel like this is what we've been saying for about a year and a half.

Justin Edelstein: But I don't know if I have another example of Google... integrating with the Google Apps the enter price Google apps single sign-on suite I don't think we have another example of them shutting anything like that saying that for you and have it are we still mad about this yeah I mean if you're gonna have people pay for your service and then go so far as to take it out of labs take it out of beta included in the single sign-on What are you doing? No, I keep doing it. You can't just turn it off. I mean, I know they're not just turning it off, but they're... They're... You have a pick or something that you're doing. What are you doing? I'm broadcasting. Oh, that's not broadcasting at all. Alright. you can't just turn it off like that like again they gave us fair warning they know the usage patterns whatever they know the usage patterns they know people probably weren't using it but as soon as you say this is part of the enterprise package right and this is this is a bit of a not really a black eye but a little

30:47 Jason Atwood: Included in your license and you use it all the time and then all of a sudden they say we're not going to include it anymore. Poopoo on Salesforce as well. But here's the thing, it's back and forth. So it is the pros is near impossible.

Justin Edelstein: It's really difficult. It's difficult difficult. So let Products that you know there were certain criteria. We wanted it to obviously we don't want to have to log into something else We want to be integrated with the things that we're already using using you know single sign-on the Google password or something We wanted it to be real time I was but that's what you wanted don't brush over that because that that was a decider I mean basically that was. That was the George Bush desire. We wanted real time, we wanted comment threading, we. We wanted pervasive chat and and just presence and things of that wave brought. And you know what? Google Docs is basically where we landed. It has wave-like you features where you can do the real-time edit. No, you just and it's just hopping and you're in.

Justin Edelstein: Remember when I said I'm so used to hitting shift return? Oh yeah, that's what I didn't know what you Yeah, like in Google Wave for or you click the done button and that means you're done editing. In a dock you just sort of, you just jump in and start typing in it. It's saved the whole time. You don't have to think about saving. I did lose messages in WAV by not hitting shift return, navigating away and it was gone. And so far I got to go the wrong way. The biggest headache is going back into the wave You can, you can export a wave to HTML. I've given you two, you can export a wave to HTML, you can export a wave to a zip file. So we've been exporting it to HTML, importing it to Microsoft Word.

34:26 Justin Edelstein: A bunch of the HTML doodads and images and things that just come across and then uploading that saving it as a docx and then uploading those into the Google Docs using the convert feature and it converts it to a doc and it works okay. yeah. say that's a bit of a shame because that it was our internet for over a year yeah you're right before that was something was sites are internet before that was a Google site and before that right so

Jason Atwood: You know the point is you move off these things in some ways it's nice and refreshing to kind of be like, all right, bye. I actually have found Only thing that I really really really wish I could get this now is the I miss the view. I miss having a view of documents on one side, being able to click on it and just open up here. Wave was like an inbox.

Justin Edelstein: Yes. You went in and there was a list of all the waves and they had the red on red state. So they'd be bold and you'd see a number of how many messages did I miss or whatever. Yep. Docs has the same, like if you jump into the folder, you open up Docs.

Jason Atwood: Different but in some ways better. exporting is much better, exporting is anything in the world I had to close my eyes.

Justin Edelstein: So, you know the the sharing is not quite as good like with wave you create a wave and it's Click-click-click and people are added to it. The sharing of a dock is a little confusing You have to share it with an individual. Do you have to share with the whole company? Here's a trick. Yeah. Go to the comments and just comment in people and it automatically shares with them. Is that why you did that to me earlier? Yeah, and you just resolved it immediately

37:36 Jason Atwood: If you just comment to any people, it just adds them right to the wave. Adds them right to the dock. That's good. There are so many tricks and tips I've learned.

Justin Edelstein: Like, I've been having like a master. Yeah, I like the shortcut keys. I like a bunch of the, you know, a bunch of stuff that exists in docks. And docks is core. Docks is not, you know, docks is not going anywhere. I think we can feel pretty secure in our usage. And that was the thing. Our next stop was going to be something that...

Jason Atwood: To pick something new. I did, right? No, no, not the one I have. Yeah, I did. Not for Salesforce. I did, trust me. It says Dragon Dictation for iPhone, not for Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: Trust me, you might have written that wrong. He was gonna pick Dragon Dictation for Salesforce, but I picked that already. I remember talking specifically about how you can send in ladder and you can create tasks or something along those lines. So,

Jason Atwood: Can I pick OmniFocus again? Sure.

Justin Edelstein: Alright, so I'll go first. You always go first. And you know I've noticed over the last week or two Evernote has released a bunch of applications and becoming a nice little platform for every note taking and they've acquired a few companies and they did the skit. So I- I'm going to pick one of the apps that they just launched... food Evernote Food and it's a running and create or capture as far as notes. I know they have a bunch of other apps that they've been toying around with and skitch that they purchased so they're really coming together. Ever note is fascinating,.

41:10 Jason Atwood: Super powerful. I wish it was... The the the onlys only thing is it's a little bit dis... I use it all the it all the time. I actually am having a problem, I can make this a but I have a thing with my PDFs. I keep all my PDFs, I scan things in, and I've been always putting them in something called Yelp,

Justin Edelstein: Which I'm not gonna make a pick. Not Yelp, the rating system. No,

Jason Atwood: No, sorry, Yep. Yep. Yep, and it does all the information and tagging of PDFs, and I really like it, but I find that I want.

Justin Edelstein: You,, a of a the and of a note maybe when i get siri and there's some I aint.

45:02 Jason Atwood: Things for weeks. There's a couple E and O apps out there now. There's lots of integrations. I know there's like FTP, not FTP, I know there's fax integrations. I know some other cool ones. I've even seen and installed and played with a Salesforce integration for E and O. Me too. I've done it.

Justin Edelstein: It's not that good. It didn't work the way I wanted to. But I also toyed with...

Jason Atwood: I'm is is we we we You can log in with any kind of like any profile in the world including You know Facebook and Twitter you can log with any of these you don't actually have to be a member of our blog They use login and that works really well And do that because it's fun and we like it and Until next week