Topical Solution - Episode #114 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.

00:25 Jason Atwood: This is the 114th, episode of Cloud And joining me is the co-host for the 114th time, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing? I'm going to sound just as good as I did last week. You did. So just for you who listened last week and who were disappointed by the sound. We apologize. Yes. It was actually, what was funny was the mic. our snowball which you've heard us talk about a lot of times was connected but it wasn't all the way connected enough to get power and to show me that it was recording but not enough to actually have i thought we were blaming sandy yeah well sandy did it but i'm just saying that's what happened gust of wind came through and blew the usb cord out from behind it would be my one my one sort of complaint about the the snowballs is that the connector for the usb is a little bit not.

Jason Atwood: It's that weird connector.

Justin Edelstein: It's the square one square one. Yeah, which like a lot of cameras use I guess I don't understand why USB Has so many different other ends Right.

Jason Atwood: Oh square one which seems to be sort of standard well square and the regular one are standard Then there's mini which but that's a totally different than there's micro, but those are different

Justin Edelstein: Right difference and then there's lightning That to not USB. Well it's USB on one side.

Jason Atwood: The other side is lightning. Alright well let's get into the lightning and thunder of our podcast and talk about the blog post of the week. I thought this was a good one. This was called Analyzing Analytic Snapshots. And really talking about analytic snapshots, this comes because it's a feature that we rarely use.. And I remember there was a big splash when I www theorgesync.com really about how to use it and what it does.

Justin Edelstein: It's very good for longitudinal analysis of data.

Jason Atwood: So explain that to our listeners. I just pulled that one out. If you don't explain it now, it's going to sound really bad.

Justin Edelstein: So it's for snapshots in time, like data that happens in chunks or bunches. Historical data. Yeah, I want to look at. of you know totals or subtotals of this data over the course of time right month by month so not really a summary report but more of like a snapshot of how that thing looked at that time and how it looks in the next chunk of time and then how it looks the next chunk of time so a nice little line.

Jason Atwood: So what I'll give you is like so so like clients so if you said I want to know how many are of our accounts or how many clients we had at the end of every quarter right right so you could look at it you could take a report and say give me a report of all you know accounts that type equals client. Great, well that gives you right now, but there's no way to say... what you had at the end of last quarter or the quarter before that or that other than if you took that snapshot of an actual report and say to your local driver or whatever, then you go back and compare the numbers. What analytic snapshots will do is kind of do that for you in Salesforce. It takes a report and takes the output of that report and throws it into a custom object that then can track it over time.

03:58 Jason Atwood: And then you can report on that object.

Justin Edelstein: I used to do this back when I worked at not the big company that Happy weekly. But the team that managed the leads wanted me to dedupe them, but they also wanted to know how many total leads were created prior to being dedupped. So I would have an analytic snapshot run Wednesday morning, like in the middle of the morning, like 3am. And then Wednesday morning when I got into the office, I would run the dedupe script in demand tools and I'd be able to say, here's how many leads there are now, and here's how many were in the snapshot, giving them the total versus how many uniques. Neat. Yeah, so that's one use case, not the use case that was described here in the blog post, but I used them practically.

Jason Atwood: In the past myself. So what we'd love to have you do is go to blog.arcasync.com and then using discuss, which is the commenting solution on the bottom of the blog. Let us know the thing you like, because it's the thing you don't like. We're trying to mix up reviews, then we mix up things you can do.

Justin Edelstein: I feel like this is a core feature that hasn't been touched in a while.

Jason Atwood: So could I put a true to the core tag on this? Could you? What do you think? I don't know, I feel like it does what it does. I don't know, I honestly don't even know what I would want it to do more than it does. It's kind of, there are certain things like that that they kind of do what they do and there's nothing you even want them to do more. They've enhanced it.

Justin Edelstein: I remember when it first came out, it was just tabular. Right then it was limited to like 2,000 rows and then they did okay now you can do summary So it's sort of summarizing so you can do more than 2,000 rows. I Don't know what else you would do to it necessarily contracts where you can think of tons of things that you can do with contracts, but

Jason Atwood: I think of this as a core feature. Yeah. As far as analytics are concerned. I feel like it's just not, I mean, I'd love to have the stats, but I don't think it's that we used. No.

Justin Edelstein: I don't think it is either. But it's pretty powerful for certain use cases. It's definitely where it's at. And only available I think in the above, right? Now you're going to make me look at the chart. I'm not sure. I think it is.

Jason Atwood: Alright, well that's... And like I said, that's blog.arcasinc.com. I think we've mentioned that about four times. Next up is a blog post on Mashable talking about Facebook. And it's called, Facebook's New Job Board Puts LinkedIn on Notice. Which is kind of interesting. So it's basically a story about how Facebook has built up a new sort of ability to search and post jobs on Facebook. We've actually seen, which is interesting because we've seen this as a demo, as a Salesforce demo to show how you could use a widget to have people. Sort of post their jobs into your the page and then like them and suggest friends and then that would come into your Salesforce org as recruits right as people who you would then go through the onboarding process

07:25 Justin Edelstein: I'm Yeah, and I just typed in Salesforce just looking for some jobs. I found 46 of them. Okay. Okay There's here's one in New York lead Salesforce.com developer in New York City. There you go. Interesting. Not bad. It has two and a half... two and a half thousand likes.

Jason Atwood: What? The job? The job, I guess. I don't know what that means. That can't be the job. It must be Salesforce. No. Why would the job have likes?

Justin Edelstein: Alright, you can't really do anything with the job itself, but there's a like button and then it has 2.5K it says. I don't know, I'm just gonna like it and see what happens. No, look, it actually likes this thing. So you can like the... I think it's liking maybe the app, which is branch out. This is... Oh, the app branch out. can go check this out and comment on it. Let's see what did that do. I assume it just threw it on there. Alright, and then you click on it and it brings you to... yes, you can use my permission. It's asking for my permissions. Oh, and then a brings me. Then it brings me to Oh, all right. I mean the topic of this blog post was really just just to bring it back.

Jason Atwood: The most thrilling two minutes of podcast history. You're welcome. You're welcome America.

Justin Edelstein: And the best of all. Is that, this is a little jab, a little poke at LinkedIn perhaps because LinkedIn has their whole job board network.

Jason Atwood: And it did apparently like to keep their potatoes from their meat. I know what you're saying and I agree completely. I I get to be a award or something. I wanted like some sort of that. You want a badge? That's what I think LinkedIn should do. That's what I want. I wanted to put like a badge on the thing. but I just feel like people are sort of type of data very separate. I want to separate out I want to keep them pretty separate. So, interesting, but you know, I feel like LinkedIn's got such a good, from 113 times ago, let me know. What I said to people when they were looking for a job, and I have friends who come in and out of jobs and in whatever, I say, here's what you're gonna do.

11:49 Jason Atwood: Go to my LinkedIn, you, yes, okay, great. That's a company I'm Take it amongst yourselves. making the introduction so I don't feel the same way about LinkedIn I mean about Facebook so but that story then that that happened next up guys we're talking late-breaking news here we today got interdict the The podcasting studio is not sound-proof. So, so Salesforce announced a while ago, it's now in pilot. We're actually in the pilot as of about two hours ago, so we get a little bit a and M. I I. I. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. M. as a hashtag. what you can do in, can you do more them in Chatter now? If I were to chat or something and put a topic on it. Anyway, sorry, bad hole. But anyway, so Chatter Topics is taking that and sort of expanding on it, allowing you to create pages, topics, that then aggregate.

14:49 Jason Atwood: What people have either used as hashtags or added as topics. Right now they're kind of connected, which is a little strange. So the process that works is It uses a very little features right now. Totally pilot. Yeah. I've been playing with it. Well, you've played with like for an hour. That's enough. Yeah.

Justin Edelstein: I don't understand how this interested people thing gets populated.

Jason Atwood: If you look at a tag. I've been looking at them.'s every time you look at the tag you get I'm not updating.

Justin Edelstein: The number's not updating. That's you That's interesting. I don't know how this works one of them, but then that's you Yeah, but I've clicked on quite a few of these at this point.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I don't know maybe it's using It's like a little if you use it use one of the topics anyway

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of a meta layer on top of The already existing topics I think they should have chosen a different word. And topics? Yeah, because topics are already a thing. And these are not the same.

Jason Atwood: They're sort of the same, but not really.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they're sort of the same, but not really. Like, if you click on a hashtag,

Jason Atwood: Which is what? A topic is. A topic to. They should have just named the other one hashtag. The other one should be hashtag,

Justin Edelstein: Because that's what people know them like. Right. Alright. Then hashtag really cool the same as clicking on a chatter topic or giving a chatter post Or anything to a topic right?

Jason Atwood: Well, that's what this can do that Hashtags can't do is that you can go to something that already exists and add so you could post about your favorite video The metal area of just add a little data to it right Merlin man now he explained it on the call as in that you can garden and add stuff to other people to make it better. Go into a post that you post about say Merlin box zero great video I post today and I re-watched it. Yeah, it's really good. I watched it back in there watched it again. And you can add a topic so I could add a couple topics to other people and then Again, as you go, you know, I think the future of this is really about influence and then expertise So then as you add and use topics, then you could show expertise So oh we're looking at the, let's say, motorbike, motorcycle topic.

Jason Atwood: Look, Jason and Justin have expertise Let's do podcasting the podcasting topic, oh look, these people have been using these, but they have, through an algorithm, have an expertise in this. Maybe I can ask them. And we saw this stuff back in IBM like 10 years ago or eight years ago, where they were really looking at algorithms to figure out who in an organization knows about certain things especially in bigger orgs, you know, we're in a small org, but a big org with lots of people using lots of different stuff. This is a way of collecting and pulling stuff together in a way that's more manageable. Although when they use wiki, wiki, the thing about wiki is it has a very, has a very formatted feel so you can put things where you want them to be.

18:51 Jason Atwood: It's a web page. In this way, you can't really, so again, still stuff is still controlled by time, which isn't a great way to organize information. T-SEARCH is still the best way to get through the chatter. Even that doesn search doesn't organize information very well. Well, as you you find information, but when you want to organize information, I want to put the most important information at the top. But in search it could be at the bottom because it's just a term. So anyway, so that's topics kind of an interesting. So if you haven't seen a pilot if you're not in I got.

Justin Edelstein: I get home and I'm like, how do I have 36 new emails? I just checked it like 20 minutes ago. How is that possible? And like, they're all the same. Sandbox.

Jason Atwood: Sandbox. Sandbox. So winter 13, I don't think, does that mean the notes are out? I do not believe that is something true. It seems pretty quick. All right. I feel like someone would have told me. Like I would have found out from. Someone someone usually tells us when the notes are out someone like winter 13 just came out. Yeah, that's why I said wow

Justin Edelstein: Doesn't that usually come out in January or February February am well, let's think about it. That's not early Yeah, and maybe I just took my winter 13 Recertification exams this week me too Did you pass them?

Jason Atwood: I did pass them and I was noticing in web assessor when I was looking at them I was like wow I've been taking the assess since 2008. This is so same as you because we took our test at the same time.

Justin Edelstein: We both have plaques. The first 500. Mine's right there on the desk. First 500 certified. Yes.

Jason Atwood: That alone. on. I don't know. This is again more thrilling podcasting as you read things. First 500 certified award in recognition of being among the first to earn a Sales Salesforce.com certification.

Justin Edelstein: There you go. little thing they don't do these things anymore they did that surfboard thing yeah that's true that was kind of cool I wish I got one all right last

Jason Atwood: Topic of the day speaking of topics is is what's up surprise you didn't make your pick of the week Why?

Justin Edelstein: I don't make hardware picks. Oh, well you should. Should I make it?

Jason Atwood: I could be my pick of the week and I could save this other one. Save this one. Make it your pick of the week and let's discuss it. Alright,

Justin Edelstein: So let's just make the picks, picks of the week then. Alrightbraska what's your pick of the week? I got my iPad mini in the mail.

Jason Atwood: Mine arrived today. Otherwise I was gonna make mine the pick of the week but I haven't actually played with it so I feel... I've been playing with mine. Yes. So let me hear about it. I love it.

Justin Edelstein: And you know I'm not really, so I got a white, 16 gig Wi-Fi only iPad mini. Excellent. With a green, smart cover. The Arkus Green. I felt like it was the only choice.

Jason Atwood: Well I may kind of go to you into this, but would you make it your pick of the week? Is this something you like? I've been using it every day since I got it. Yeah, I got it on. Monday.

21:55 Justin Edelstein: I have not used my other iPad my original iPad says you're like the first one, right?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I have the iPad first generation I think I have I think I think that's the one I put next to the hole open the door and my my yes I'm

Justin Edelstein: Gonna get rid of it because this does everything that that that one does That one's 32 gigs, so it has a little more space. A little more space, yeah. But I find that that's not necessary for me, because I stream a lot of things. That's true. I, I, it's snappy. It's, I mean, because coming from where I was talking about the iPad Mini. So, so, now I'm coming from the original iPad, you have the... third generation, the new iPad, whatever it's called. So the iPad Mini is definitely smaller. I mean you're looking at it, it's totally smaller. By the way, you and the audience listening to

Jason Atwood: This right now, you are not looking at it. Unless you are. I'm saying you. Okay, I'm just saying. Jason, you're seeing this. It's... It's really tiny. It's like a kindle. Yeah, when you brought it in, when I came to see it for the first time because I ordered mine, but I got the sellier one which took a little longer to ship, I was surprised.

Justin Edelstein: It's surprising, isn't it? But it's also surprising how not small it is when you're actually using it. So it feels small in the hands, but it doesn't. It feels small in the hands, but the screen itself is full, like it's the full experience. Right. So, you know, you don't feel like you lose anything. Yeah, you're really not. I don't feel like I'm losing anything. As a matter of fact, for me, I'm gaining quite a bit. It's really fast. The internet is lightning quick on it. Yep. the Safari browser is very very, very fast, it, very fast, it downloads extremely quickly like the apps. I've used it everyday, the mail client works great, iMessage works great on it, I mean now with the messages it's just great. Apple's done this.

Jason Atwood: Amazing thing. Still a little quirky for me, but it works, but it's like... I've gotten it now down pretty well. What are you doing with the multiple devices and being notified about the same message on 10 devices at once?

Justin Edelstein: It doesn't really happen to me. Because I've found that when I'm here at work, I'm sitting at my laptop and... I will get notified, twice, once in messages on the laptop and once on the phone that's sitting there. Then once I start answering using the computer, it doesn't notify the phone, which is smart. But the messages are there. They're on the phone. It's just not doing the same thing with the iPad. I sit there with the iPad watching TV or watching a basketball game or a football game and I'm texting back and forth or I messaging back and forth.

Jason Atwood: And it knows to notify one or the other. So you think there's an algorithm that if you haven't been notified about a new message, it'll send it to all devices, and then after you start... Once you start with one, I think it sticks to one. Sticks to it. Unless...

24:57 Justin Edelstein: I feel like there's a time element to it also. I also send the read receipts. I mean, it knows whether you read it or not, whether you're sending that receipt or not. Back to the Mini, it's light. It's really light to the point where I'm bringing it back and forth to work. I don't even feel it in my bag. It's got features that I've never gotten the chance to use before, like a camera. on an iPad. It's got the photo booth, it's got the FaceTime, and I feel like it just, it works really great. iBooks sunk over, everything just sunk over. Well that's sort of nice about this universe now.

Jason Atwood: I mean we are a cloud computing podcast so we can talk about it. But that's are so nice about this new universe is that you think of when you have Almost everything is, you know, between your apps, between, you know, your mail, your calendar, your contacts. It was so easy to set up. Dropbox, Drive, it's like, you know, everything you can get, everything you, want is all kind of, you know, cloud based. Well, that's the thing. I haven't plugged this in to any machine yet. Right.

Justin Edelstein: And I've been using it and it works like a charm. Yep. You know, all the books. the books sink down, the music's there, through iTunes match, the only thing that eventually I'll have to plug it in for is to get some videos over to it when I hop on a plane to go somewhere next time.

Jason Atwood: Well, if you bought those videos on iTunes, you can download them right from iTunes. You don't even have to plug them in to get them over.

Justin Edelstein: All of them? Movies too? Movies now. Yeah, but I have a lot that I didn't. right from iTunes. Spoiler alert. I bought from somewhere else. Yeah, you bought from somewhere else.

Jason Atwood: My personal DVD collection. Well, funny enough, I did actually buy a video literally yesterday that was not an iTunes video because it was available on, it was Louis CK. And this is one hour Beacon Theater show. And it was five bucks, and I downloaded it. But I downloaded it on my computer and I was like, oh, I wanna watch it on my iPad. And I was like, how do I get this on my iPad? I didn't even know. You know what I did? I just played it on my computer and played on my iPad while I watched it. So I actually played it. Did you plug it in? I didn't, I don't plug it in. I plugged it into Recharge.

Justin Edelstein: I just plugged it into the wall. That was the other thing. It has the lightning. So now I've got all these lightning cables. rules. That's nice because right now my house it's like all my devices are on lightning because I'm gonna sell the Original iPad right on eBay or Feliciner if you guys hey make an offer Selling it. It's in great condition 32 gig original Wi-Fi only there you go

Jason Atwood: 600 bucks or best off Not gonna happen. Well, I can't wait I actually left to come to go to a client meeting and then got the notification as I was like came out of the subway We're both all dressed up today. I know it's a big big dress up day. So the iPad mini nice pic multiple prices way my

27:58 Justin Edelstein: So mine after all was said and done I got I got the cheapest version But I got the case. Must have been about 500 bucks. Yeah. You didn't do Apple Care. Did not do Apple Care.

Jason Atwood: Not yet. You're crazy. Very cool.- Mine's at home. I actually went for the.... I think we said this on the other. But I went for the cellular ones. First time ever done the cellular. Because the other person has a cellular and And he really loves it. Yeah, but I'll tell you one thing. The other person, the partner, shall be, shall remain nameless.

Justin Edelstein: And I were at this client meeting together. And sometimes you go to a client meeting and they're like, yeah, we got Wi-Fi, but you can't get on their Wi-Fi. So we could not get on their Wi-Fi. So he opened up his iPad. And I opened up, I just took out my phone. Right. And I tethered to my phone. And he tethered to his iPad. And someone else tethered to my phone. 1. And the two of us were tethered to my phone, never lost connection, worked great. He was struggling.

Jason Atwood: So phone DeTinti, MyFi, or sorry, iPad Verizon.

Justin Edelstein: He was struggling. He was just losing it every three minutes. He was just losing the whole connection. So I'll tell you, this is something that I...

Jason Atwood: This is why you have to have two. t- because the iPad just wasn't doing it. Yeah, but that's not the iPad, that's Verizon. It's Verizon, right? So, whereas Verizon's great in some areas,

Justin Edelstein: It- It was weird because we were in midtown Manhattan and they should all be- They should all be good. They should all be good. but AT&T happened to be better at that point.

Jason Atwood: So that's why I got the iPad Mini with Verizon, and so now I can get away from having, carrying my Mi and just carry the Apple Mini. Because unsusited. It's because we're on AT&T. So what's your pick? Alright, so mine's actually something to play on your iPad. So I don't know, I have talked about. Some of my favorite games. I'm not a big gamer. Okay, well I love games on my iPad. I like flick games. This is not a flick game.. This all I like is flick. I like flick, flicking my finger. This is not a flick game. I like two different genres of games. actually three but one I did one is not as much I like I just had a brain not working. Racing games, I love racing games. I love any kind of racing game.

Jason Atwood: So if you're looking for a good racing game, my pick is not Need for Speed Most Wanted, which is now on the, that's not my pick, by EA. But if you want a good racing game, that's a good racing game. So, if you want a bad racing game, yeah, there's many bad racing games. and then the other kind of game I like is tower defense games oh yeah you do like those yeah the ones that you like showed me that one that one time well Plants vs Zombies is like the number one it's just awesome fun it's also because plants and zombies and it's funny then there's a lot of other ones out there I made I actually made one of my picks was Kingdom Rush yeah we were playing that together you're like You just gotta prevent people from getting past you.

31:10 Justin Edelstein: Yeah, kingdom rush. And I lost like in three weeks. So,

Jason Atwood: Kingdom rush I've actually gone back to, like I made that as a pick a long time ago, I'll make it again, cause they put out some new levels, so you download that. But a new one, which I never played the first version of, which is a big hit, it's called Field Run, Runners. So, Field, Runners 2 is released, it actually works in the iPad mini, write it in the iPad mini, some of reviews. If you holding out and buying one of these things, Field Runners 2 is great, I'm deep into it now. Is the best thing, when you're watching a show that you don't care about, like, you know, I don't want you to show a like, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna watch a show. But like, like, sometimes you're watching a show that you don't care about, or watching a sporting event that you're kinda like, but you don't like.

Jason Atwood: Like, sometimes Sunday Night Football, it's not very good, it's like, okay, I'm just kinda watching, but I'm not really watching. Oh, I just love it. Pull up a nice game of Field Runners. I think it's... Think it's a couple bucks. So whatever it's a couple bucks field winners, too It's universal and I pretty sure it's universal and it and it works great on all the different iPads Check it out. All right. Well that wraps up the week We actually forgot to mention one thing. We'll bring it maybe next time. We forget right here in our agenda We have something in the agenda that we didn't mention. Yeah, I'm highlighting it right now in front of you. Oh Yeah, I was going to mention that with the mini. Why don't we leave that for next week?

Jason Atwood: We'll leave that for another week. Maybe we should even do a blog post about that. That could be a good blog post.

Justin Edelstein: Could be. I'll look at the calendar and see if there's an open... Talk to the blog master.

Jason Atwood: Well, that's myself. I talk to myself all the time. Yeah, all right. In the meantime, go to blog.arcasync.com. Follow us on twitter.com slash justettlestein. Follow us on twitter.com slash Jason timeoutwood. Twitter.com slash arcasinc. We're on Facebook. Facebook.com slash arcasinc. We're on R the Google R. We're on the LinkedIn. We're in the Dreamforce portal. If you want to go in there still, guess what? Still works. And you can bookmark a place so you don't have to use the touch interface, which I have done because I just don't like that on my big screen. And that's it. Oh yeah, go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast or use one of the others. There's a bug actually in the podcast app. for the iOS that was downloading tons and tons of repeatedly downloading podcasts over and over again.

Jason Atwood: It was killing people's bandwidth. So, you had another reason to use Instacast. So use Instacast, because you get what you pay for. And until next week, we'll be back with another episode. Until then, for Jason and Justin, CloudFocus Weekly, have a great week.

34:16 Justin Edelstein: Music You