Live from Dreamforce 12 - Episode #107 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 107th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the Dreamforce Week of September 2012. My name is Jake And joining me A lot of people A lot of people are staring at me right now And But I'm actually going to Get over to JustinI'm Justin Joining me for 107th time Live from the What are we the community now? We're in the community meeting lounge Alright And lucky for Yes As MVPs

Justin Edelstein: Were allowed to do Yes This podcast from the community lounge Excellent And even luckier for us We're joined by some MVPs and- right this very second.

Jason Atwood: We have professional headshots being taken so you can for you R. It's amazing. It's overwhelming and bigger and better and better. And it's still lots to come. So come to the Community Meetup Lounge and meet some amazingly brilliant and bright people. And when is this open? Because this podcast will probably go out today. So people might get it today. Is it going to be open tomorrow? It will be open. Okay. What time is tomorrow? It is open actually from 9 a.m. You know, it's kind of just open all the time because it's just a space. We're having a meeting. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you, Erica.

Guest: Sure, sure. So thanks Jason and Justin. This is really cool. I'm about two octaves lower Yes, then what I should be because this is my third

03:17 Justin Edelstein: Dream force and I just completed my seventh session That is seven sessions seven sessions dream force not just not total

Guest: Right just at dream force 12 I've completed seven sessions. So wow, I know we actually met somebody on the street that said They haven't even been to seven sessions, so I've actually presented more than the sessions they've been at. The person sitting across from me right now has only been to like four, so yes.

Jason Atwood: And one was my own. One was your own. So, yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I've actually been to more sessions this Dreamforce than I have in the last two combined. Oh, absolutely.

Guest: Way more. Way more. This Dreamforce for me is like my first Dreamforce on steroids. It is. This Dreamforce is in... So you're saying it's illegal it is okay It should be illegal to come to this dream force for the amount of collaboration and thought

Justin Edelstein: That you get out of it Yeah, there's so many people at this dream force. I've heard numbers upwards of 85 to 90 thousand Well, they said in the keynote yesterday 95 thousand. Well nine. Oh, that's even more than what I just said Yeah, that is a lot of people and I've noticed we could we could jump right into a. A feedback on dream force I've noticed that I don't quite have that Dreamforce feel during this Dreamforce because I think it's spread out so much. Really? Yeah, it's usually just at Muscone and Muscone West Muscone the three buildings. North-southwest. North-southwest and it feels yeah It's a little weird, but it feels a little more close-knit whereby you know you tend to run into the same people all the time you always you're walking underneath those little corridors And I mean, we just walked from Moscone to the Hilton, back to here where we're at, we're at the Community Meetup Lounge, which is at the Marriott.

Justin Edelstein: And it's a lot of walking, you get a lot of exercise. So I don't mind eating the cookies and the cakes that are coming with my lunch. But I mean, it feels a little different. Do you guys feel the same way? I would say my feet know it's Dreamforce,

Guest: But my body doesn't. Like, so last year it really felt like we were walking through a straw the whole time. Everything was tight, everything was packed. Oh yeah. Everything felt rushed. Yep. I don't feel as rushed at this Dreamforce. I actually feel a little bit more like the South by Southwest. I've never been so that was what feels like this? Yeah, so in March I was at South by Southwest. And it was really cool because you kind of had this collaborative feel and this lounge really feels like that as well. I wish I had found this lounge before the second to last day because

Jason Atwood: I feel like I would be over here more.

Justin Edelstein: I found it this morning because I was speaking in this. building.

Jason Atwood: Okay, so let's get into the keynote. So really, we don't know we have much of an agenda. We usually read off our agenda, talk about what we're gonna talk about, but this is really just all the Dreamforce. So we have a keynote yesterday. Again, it's sort of a different feel to Dreamforce because they kicked it off with a full day of sessions and then they had the keynote and there's only one main keynote. Mostly, in most Dreamforces in the last billion years, this being the 10th. Dreamforce. There's usually a couple big keynotes. Now they're like breaking them out. There's key R notes for sales, there's key notes for marketing, but there's the massive key note. The Marc Benioff, we like to, you know, the sort of the big one was yesterday and was, you know, as normal for a big and big and surprising.

06:35 Jason Atwood: They kicked it off with what other been How it does the launch Salesforce touch to the general public but by having MC Hammer come out and say can't touch this He wasn't wearing his MC Hammer pants.

Justin Edelstein: I had so disappointed was I've had people say so what do you that? So generally using your third dream for us.

Jason Atwood: Yes What do you think about the opening of the keynote just sort of in general? I wish I was at more conferences that open the way that that keynote did that got the energy and it really set the tone.

Guest: In terms of their announcements, I love how they've finally folded everything together. I've really felt like their acquisitions in the last few years have been a little sporadic and maybe a little hasty. I was excited when I saw what they were doing with Sales and Service Cloud.

Justin Edelstein: And let's talk about marketing cloud. Yeah, I was gonna say the marketing cloud and the work. to me seemed like the two that were most like let's let's show you how we're folding some of our acquisitions in and and from a button-click admin standpoint I didn't see a whole

Guest: Lot of customization with code that I had to worry about. I really looked like I could deploy it tomorrow to my org.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. Minus some training. Well, probably not tomorrow. Well, I know. So now he's gonna go neg on you. Exactly. By the way, I found your replacement for when I kick you off this podcast. It's my... So I'm just saying, he's a very positive guy. Keep nagging on me. I'm the one that goes negative because someone's got to keep it real. So I'm going to, I have, this is the first year. I've been, this is my sixth or seventh, I think we said sixth or seventh Dreamforce. They're all coming together. This is the first year that I've now look at the keynote in a different light. And I look at it as that. is just about vision. So the thing is we always compare this keynote sort of to Apple keynotes, because it's sort of like the two big keynotes, I follow the Apple products very well.

Jason Atwood: And so I always think about the Apple keynote. And the Apple keynotes are really about reality, right? They're, I'm releasing the iPhone 5, it's available in two weeks. I'm releasing the iPad, it's available in two months. It's very much about What is real? This is not a keynote about what is real. It's a lot about, here's the vision. They showed stuff that was really cool, but it was like stuff that's visionary. It's not stuff that you can put your hands on. I know you Justin, that's sort of your biggest thing. My big thing, I like to put my hands on things. I like to go to...

Justin Edelstein: The expo floor where they have the huge Salesforce campground and I like to play with the things That they show and sometimes they're not really available. I will say I Tend to like I tend to like the older format where you know They they go cloud by cloud and they show you the different things but sleeping on it, having slept on it overnight.

Jason Atwood: Because you were pretty much, you sat next to me shaking your head. Yeah, yeah, I've slept on it and I think they actually, I'm coming around on it.

Justin Edelstein: Introducing the individual cloud segments, the sales cloud, the service cloud, the marketing cloud, the work cloud, the collaboration cloud. in ways that weren't just like, here's the sales cloud. It was, here's a story about how somebody is using the sales cloud. So it's not just like, here's the sales cloud. It's like, no, here's how someone's using it instead of just saying, and now you can sign stuff on an iPad and who knows how that's gonna work or what that is, but. That's irrelevant, that's vision. But the way that they presented the stories in those six different customer segments, I think got the point across better than having Craig and Demo Dan up there just saying, and that's the marketing cloud, you know? It's interesting, because you have flipped it. You've like- I totally flipped it.

10:25 Justin Edelstein: I was against it yesterday, but I slept on it, and I said, you know what?

Jason Atwood: That was good. So, well then maybe I'll go neg. You go neg though. I'll go neg. The one thing is time. Three hours, there's nothing in life that should be three hours. Well there are probably some things. Not even titanium. We don't do this. Football games. Football games are three hours. But there's no, keynotes. You shouldn't make anybody sit for three hours. It's not fun. The seats are not. comfortable enough and again I've watched enough keynotes it's like hour and a half two hours max lots of people laughed

Justin Edelstein: Yeah and I just leave mine did you stay for the whole thing I left because I had to present yeah and I had to present to about 25 people

Guest: Ah who didn't come because neither didn't come they were still sitting in the keynote yeah so I think the original time was okay they had a lot to show they had a lot of really good stories right and that working for a bigger company helps translate kind of the visionary aspect into the practical. I just think maybe they tried to over tell.

Jason Atwood: You know it is interesting because I went and talked to our clients afterwards and we had a couple of events and so we chatted about it and I always like to gauge because I'm kind of you know I've been around this this thing a long time so my I'm biased you know I'm a guy who has to roll this out for people so I kind of The way I look at it, it's always kind of like, oh, you know, how am I going to roll that out? Yeah, that doesn't exist. But I was then I was like talking to clients and seeing what they what they took out of it and and hearing that they really really, one of them was really excited about the marketing. Yes, some of that stuff. I don't know when it's coming and there's no dates on it and whatever.

Jason Atwood: But they got into the vision of it and they said, oh, we really got something we got to focus on. We got to focus on that marketing piece. Thank you. and A segue.

Justin Edelstein: A segue. A segue. Is where they scrolled through like at the end of or as part of the end of the story of like the sales cloud is like the true to the core movement. And then they would scroll through the things that they've released and scroll through the things that are coming in a winter. You're not going to go there, are you? I'm going to go there for a second. All right, go there. Just for a second. because we...

Guest: We you got to go I actually like you gotta go you're gonna go to the true to the core Yeah, I'm gonna go now. So let me give you a suggestion. Are you talk about the true to core? There's actually a true to core session. Yeah, I want to go represent the MVP group represent us I want this topic in mind.

Justin Edelstein: There were a lot of things that were which I truly don't believe are true to the core. No, they're not true to the core. You don't get anything to say.

Jason Atwood: The core is about the core functionality of Salesforce.

13:25 Justin Edelstein: And as you pointed out, and I retweeted, that was basically, I was his tweet bot. I was sitting there saying things and just not feeling like tweeting, so he was tweeting for me. I was giving you credit.

Jason Atwood: But the one that he says, chatter bookmarks. are not true to the cause. So what we're not saying is that what they did is they took, they took the true to the cause sort of thing, they kind of branded it and they put it up on the deck and said, these things are true to the core and they roll out all these features that they're rolling out. And one of the most chatter book, are chatter bookmarks. And that's, and a lot of people tweet it and we're saying, hey, listen. in. That's great. I love that you like the concept of the true the core, but you can't use it as a marketing term if you're using it incorrectly. It's supposed to be about the core functionality, basically CRM, service functionality, not add-ons to things that came last year.

Jason Atwood: So anyway, Mike's got to go. Pleasure having you here. Thank you. Thank you for doing the session with the news. Absolutely. We'll post a link to it in some place. Maybe it'll dream course wrap up. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thanks for coming. I think you were our first ever guest. Our 107th episode and you're our 107th guest. We've had other people who we've tried. We like this to ourselves.

Justin Edelstein: We're going to have to try and pass that message along. Get up there and give Parker something like you more than likes us. Well he's got a voice. Go to buttonclickadmin.com. Check out the Monday AM admin. And what's your Twitter handle?

Guest: I'm at Mike Gerholt, M-I-K-E- G-E-R-H-O-L-D-T, because there's a a whole lot of German at the end. All right. So if you're talking to people who are listening,

Jason Atwood: What displeasure, what were you telling to do to get to you fastest? easiest and easiest is Twitter. Twitter. Easiest is Twitter or buttonclickadmin.com. Buttonclickadmin. That seems like the... That's the one I would remember. That's the first one, right. Well, pleasure having you on. Thanks a lot. I'll go represent the MVP group and the core stuff, right? Enjoy it. And I'll keep this out when this is up so you can put it up somewhere else. All right. So, it was nice having our first guest. Yeah, nice guest. That was fun. By the way, if the sound is crazy, it's because we're in this huge lounge and there's a lot of people talking and we're bent over.

Justin Edelstein: People are kind of staring at us like, what are those guys doing? Do you remember last year we were literally on two beanbags holding the mic in between us? This is actually way better than being able to sit on a beanbag chair. It was nice to have Erica on who runs the MVP program. Yes, absolutely. We're both a part of and we thank her very much for all the things that she's done for us. Yes this week. It was really nice to have Mike on. What was your, you know, aside from the keynote, because I think we've a lot of the keynote. The keynote, while very long, wasn't really what it's always been.

Jason Atwood: What was, how many sessions have you attended this go around? So I have attended four, three sessions other than my own. and your own.

Justin Edelstein: Which was my own. So of the three that you attended that wasn't yours, which one was your favorite?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, it's kind of hard because the sessions that I'm attending are sessions that our clients are speaking at or we're speaking at. So I'm basically picking between a list of, it's like self-promoting.

16:28 Justin Edelstein: Feel the need to self-promote on your own podcast. Go ahead. But wait, wait, but then don't client over another. Then pick, don't pick a client one. Pick the one that the clients don't listen to.

Jason Atwood: Pick the other one. I don't think they listen, so it's okay. Oh, well actually I know one of them does... I don't know, I mean it's tough. I really liked, here, I'll give you the overall. The overall I was going to the two client, I'm punting, I'm totally punting. The two client ones were my favorite because watching them talk about stuff that we had direct involvement, there was a moment of pride, was just amazing and having them be so excited.... to talk about and explain how they're being successful with Salesforce tools I'm so so self-promoting but the two client sessions were just were just awesome. Which ones were they? Do you know off the top of your head? Oh, the social advisor.

Justin Edelstein: I don't need to put you on the spot. It was yesterday. I've had the sleep. One was the social advisor. Yeah. And the other one was... The next generation advisor. Next generation. And the other one was self-service, how to run an internal global IT help desk. And there was another one that was a banking one. And there was vision to... It's called like vision to reality or something. Yeah,

Jason Atwood: For the... For financial services. So, yeah. So those were... Those are the ones. What about you? I mean, you've probably only done those one. Have you actually gone to one that you just just two?

Justin Edelstein: No, you've probably been in ones that you had to. Well, I don't feel like I have to go to anything. I felt, I'm going to be really honest with you and I'm going to blow some smoke up your rear. I really enjoyed your session. Oh, wow. Thanks, buddy. Mike, who's just sitting here, did a great job of educating. Those of us who are in the crowd around three of us. Oh, no, you had probably about 75 maybe That's being generous I think you guys did a great job of showing how to build a brand using social Techniques. Yeah, you mixed in some non social like I mean at this point is a blog social He's a podcast social. I mean it kind of is but it might be like Social 1.0 right where you guys were talking about but the the core concepts that you guys were talking about with And I think you got a lot of decent conversation going on afterwards.

Justin Edelstein: Some good questions afterwards. You guys were both very engaging. I thought the slides were really good. So I thought you did a great job. Thanks. It was fun.

Jason Atwood: As I said as we walked out, talking about that stuff is literally like talking about my kid or something. It's something that I do, I think about. I do every day of my life, but I really enjoy it and I don't have to prepare for it. In fact, we never ran through anything. We never ran through the slides. We literally did it five minutes before. We built the slides together, but we never did a full run-through. We just said, we're going to make this conversational. We know this topic very well. We got some great slides. We put them together and we just kicked it back and forth with each other. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

19:47 Justin Edelstein: That's very much like like one of my sessions that that was a community-led session Yeah, just you and Mike no Salesforce employee. Yeah, and now it's weird Too like it showing some of the back-end, really cool analytics around the idea exchange and how they decide what ideas to put into practice and the velocity of an idea, how many votes, how many ideas get put through each release. It's very impressive numbers. And I got to actually lead the session and... I got to present the safe harbor statement which for me was that is like I can die a

Jason Atwood: Happy man has massive Yeah, I mean I will say so a couple other thoughts about the whole sort of I love the the you know Dreamforce is taking over the the middle Street now

Justin Edelstein: Howard Howard Street was totally it taken over it's called like Dreamforce garden or something

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I don't know this and I said this before about Dreamforce and I forget if I've said it online or not or on the podcast But Dreamforce has become it's become a bunch of friends getting back together And to me, you know, yes, we run a business and yes- We're representing a business here and we're also podcasting and but it's really a time to meet people. I haven't seen in a year You know who I get to stop by and say hi to Is a really there is a community friendliness to this to this to dream force that I really love and I Still and here's the thing. I still think it's here even though it's 95,000 people like yes There are tons of people I don't know and but I still I still walked around everywhere I went no matter where I was I still saw someone I knew and I was like hey How are you and so even with 95,000 people I still felt I don't think the lines have been crazy.

Jason Atwood: I don't think the getting food or drinks or anything's been easy. The past, the egress of people's been pretty good. Not again, I think the splitting things up to all these different areas is a little tough. It's been a little rough on my feet, I have bad feet. Yeah, and I think it's hard for- I have old man feet. And it's hard for sessions because literally you could be coming out of a big keynote but then have to go. 20 minutes over to another thing. They have the shuttles, but I have not seen one either.

Justin Edelstein: There are shuttles. So I've been walking, and my feet hurt, is all I'm going to say about that. So let's wrap it up. We're not going to do a cloud focus. No, we don't need to do a big... Although let me just throw one in there. It's not a real pick, but it's something that we've both had issues with in the past. The Dreamforce mobile app. has been working like a charm. The mobile app. It has been killer at the event. It's been pretty good, yeah. I've been, I've had zero issue getting into the app, hosting chatter in the app, finding my agenda in the app, seeing the maps for where to go in the app, and the wifi has been pretty good too. The wifi's been very good. So, kudos. to those who were put in charge of getting that mobile app together, making sure it's not buggy and crashy and that it actually works and getting the wi-fi together because it's been working like a charm.

23:06 Justin Edelstein: So let's do instead of a pick, let's do a pick. So that's my pick, the Dreamforce portal.

Jason Atwood: No no no, pick your favorite announcement so far. The thing that you, you are the most excited about. so far that you saw, let's not do the spin of when we're going to see it, but it doesn't matter if you, or here's the thing. Everything you saw, if you could snap your fingers and have anything tomorrow, you could have it in your org, what would it be? Work.com. Really? Yeah. I thought that was super awesome. They showed you how big work.com integrated. When I, when I, they started to say it, I was like, oh, I wonder if work.com's going to be integrated. It is integrated very well. Really well. So definitely a separate license. I made a joke last night.

Justin Edelstein: It's ripple, but it's totally integrated and it looked really great.

Jason Atwood: I figured out the licensing scheme by the way. What's that? Everything costs something? No, if it's a dot com after its name. It costs something? It's a different license. So work.com, data.com, site.com. There was also something that they showed that this is hard to tell what it's going to

Justin Edelstein: End up being and if it's real or not or if it was a demo type of thing. But the data.com part of the sales cloud where they have the social key that they mentioned Oh, yeah, and you like press the button and all of a sudden you can pull in all their social data Which is killer way better than what social contacts and accounts and leads are today, right? I couldn't tell how it really worked because it looked like it was a mix of like that Salesforce social app that me seeing work.com and how Facebook is using it. I was like oh, I want to use that at Arkus. Like setting goals when you hit the, goals. Yeah. You can reward people. I thought it was really cool.

Jason Atwood: I like that. I'm trying to think of the thing that I saw that was most exciting. That was really it. Well, Do.com API integration. I know that's kind of crazy, but I really love the concept of Do.com. I just haven't figured out how to build it into the existence. Having the AI available so I could actually figure out a way to get it into my OmniFocus or in my salesforce or maybe Connect them all together. That was kind of cool So I think that's the thing that I'd like. I start playing with like maybe something I'd want tomorrow But the thing I'd like to start playing with on the marketing cloud I don't know if I wasn't paying enough attention. I was tweeting too much But I saw lots of stuff like building an ad and sales.

Justin Edelstein: That's not something you're going to see for a while. That's my that goes to my prediction blog post where you're going to see something on stage you're not going to get to touch for 18 to 24 months. That looks like one of those things. Okay, I'm going to give the props right now.

Jason Atwood: I made my prediction on the podcast. I'm giving huge credit. They never went political. No, they really didn't. That was really good. I'm very, very proud of whoever made the decision. They've always done something political. This is a heavy political season. We're two months out from the, from, or a month and a half away from presidential thing. A big election day. And there was nothing political. I think that was really, really well done. Very, very smart.

26:12 Justin Edelstein: Again, just really smart. There are many people here to piss off.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, we'll just be taking in some of the stuff. Read some of the stuff. I haven't even gotten to be able to play with anything. If you haven't already, stop by the booth tomorrow. It's the last day to put in for the podcast. Stop by.

Justin Edelstein: Anyway, we'll be seeing you next week. By the way, just quickly before we sign off, it's been great seeing a bunch of you, you, our fans, who've come over to the booth and said hello.

Jason Atwood: We really love that. Thanks for stopping by. It's really fun to see you guys. You know what, we can see the numbers, because I can see the numbers in- you know, in Cash Fly, I can see how many hits and how many downloads and all that, and it's a lot. But there's something real about having someone come in and shake your hand. And I've been asking people, like, kind of saying, do you want more Salesforce, less Salesforce, more cloud, less cloud? But it's been really great. Thank you for stopping by.

Justin Edelstein: It's really funny. I just really quickly, I know we've said this like 16 times. On the session that I was doing this morning on cross-object workflow.

Jason Atwood: Until