Syncing Prices - Episode #172 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.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 172nd episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the last full week of March 2014. This episode is titled Sinking Prices. CloudFocus Weekly is brought to you by The Permissioner. You can mass assign and revoke permission sets, Salesforce permission sets that is. It truly is permission sets made easy. Available for free on the AppExchange or go to thepermissioner.com. I'm your host Jason. I would join meet co-host 472 times who is probably doing pretty well in his bracket Not so well not so well in his bracket not so good. I couldn't get in I got locked out of my bracket I was not happy good for you.

Justin Edelstein: That's the way to do it. Just get locked out Okay, I got off that way probably I could mine up after day three Justin Edelstein.

Jason Atwood: Oh, thanks. That's me. That's the most disjointed, start to a thing. Thanks for for all that. Yeah, you're welcome. So we have a light agenda today. Yeah, we do. We struggled with what to put on the agenda. I wouldn, I wouldn't say we struggled. Oh. Okay, then we didn't we didn't struggle we didn't struggle Sometimes there's a lot to talk about sometimes there isn't oh I found one more thing. We're talking about there. We go too late No, the agenda is always evolving.

Justin Edelstein: It's an agile agile too bad it wasn't the Google Wave. Oh Just up here. I guess It just does it here. This is really just the same. I was just trying to get Google Wave mentioned again. It's 172 episodes in. We're still mentioning the Google Wave.

Jason Atwood: As I look up to our celebrating our infographic on our 100 episodes, Google Wave was a key phrase, wasn't it? And I think we're going to hit 200 this year.

Justin Edelstein: We should. Should we hit 200 at Dreamforce? Thanks for watching. That would be like a celebration.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I don't know how that takes place to much coordination. We'd have to time that.

Justin Edelstein: Obviously. It's close. I think it'll be close. We're gonna miss a chunk in May though.

Jason Atwood: Well, no, because we're gonna... We're gonna pre-recorded ones. We're gonna pre-recorded ones. Coming to you live. Live from last week. Two weeks ago. Yeah. Well, we're gonna pick topics. So I already have... I already have some topics that I feel like we could come back on. We could do the very special episodes maybe. Yeah, we could do like two very special ones. Well, either one's that, you know, I think the two special episodes I've gotten the most feedback on. One was our streaming TV one, so we could kind of do a, you know, what's new and... in our TV loves and dislikes. I don't think people want to listen to that. people loved our top 10 list. And then the GTD one, we could do a whole thing on them, maybe on like an or, or, or just tips and tricks kind of thing.

Jason Atwood: We could do a kind of fun thing with that.

03:18 Justin Edelstein: Didn't you blog post about 10 years of GTD? I did and it's not live on the site although it should be live either today, tomorrow or the next day. By the time people listen to this?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so it should be on blog.arcasync.com. Yeah, I hinted on this one last week. I wrote it. It's ready to be published. And in it, at the end, I kind of went over the story, whatever, but then at the end, And I kind of gave my... 10 tips for 10 years on what it is. And I think this would be a good special episode. So I feel like we should just not talk about it. All right. Even though we have nothing to talk about it.

Justin Edelstein: And then we'll talk about it as a very special episode. It'll be a very special episode. So why don't we talk about the Outlook in Google Sync Off with salesforce.com.

Jason Atwood: Sure, so that blog post is live on blog. It's something we hear a lot of, we get a lot from our clients and people talking about is, you know, synchronizing with Salesforce is great if you have Outlook, right? And you have all the things that Outlook can do and exchange and then you can use the, and you have the right version of Windows. But there are people out there. strange as it might seem who don't use Outlook or don't you know or kind of migrating off Outlook so there are actually some apps out there. that allow you to not use Outlook.

Justin Edelstein: I am always so surprised when this is not Just something that salesforce provides. I'm going outlook one Yeah, like like the Gmail version of the outlook sync, right? Like I'm just always, it always perplexes me as to why these two cloud computing. Companies can't. work together in harmony and why there needs to be a third party involved when Salesforce is willing and able to write stuff for outlook a client. Like it's not even exchange its outlook. Right. Like I need to even explain that to clients when we're talking about it's like, Oh, it's really the application Outlook that is syncing, not the server. So it's like, oh, if my desktop is off, then what? So it's not thinking, not syncing.

Jason Atwood: It's like the weirdest thing in the universe. I mean, I think it's a lot of legacy stuff, right? I mean, Outlook, if you think back, if Salesforce is 15 years old, Outlook has been around for.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but the new version is not legacy anything. It's new. But that- It's a reinvestment in- Right. It's a reinvestment in integrating with Outlook and not an investment in integrating with anything else. But it's the same story with things

Jason Atwood: Like data loaders and things like that, that, you know, they'll do a little bit- You know, they have to have the checkbox, right? It's like assets and solutions. It's like checkbox we can do I don't know if enough of the email thing in your org. Google Docs tab.

06:48 Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I missed the Google Docs tab.

Jason Atwood: And that sort of died off. I mean, it's sort of not a. This is different.

Justin Edelstein: This is like what people want. You know, if you're gonna go out there and be like, we serve businesses large and small. Well, a lot of small ones use Gmail. Right. Google Apps. Lots of them. more than use, you know, maybe they use Outlook as a client, but a lot of them are using Gmail. Yep. So, you know, and that's the one that I would think would be the easier server side sync than to try and crack the exchange server side sync.

Jason Atwood: Well, what you just said, too, if you You can still sync Outlook if you just using Outlook with Gmail you can still sync Outlook Well you can still sync your Gmail if you're using Outlook.

Justin Edelstein: Right. Sure, but I mean in reality how many people are doing that?

Jason Atwood: Well, I think that's the point is that there's other options and thus the blog post. I've used three of the four of these Okay, so why don't you tell me the? Why don't you tell me one of them? I've used two. So what's the one that you've used that I haven't used? IHants. Oh, really?

Justin Edelstein: Absolute automation. I personally haven't used it on my own Gmail, but clients of ours have have used it and they like it. It allows you to do some pretty cool stuff. Templates like right within Gmail stores all of the. communications inside of, sorry. Yes, I remember the client who was using this. Yeah, and it does email the case. It does a lot of really, really good stuff right there inside of the Gmail interface and stores the stuff inside of Salesforce if you want in a really clean way. It's It's got 4.9 out of 5 stars with 253 reviews on the AppExchange, which is pretty good. And it's 10 bucks a user a month, which is pretty competitive.

Jason Atwood: I think they're all roughly in that 10 to 15 dollars. Again, it's always tough when you're a... Google Apps being so sort of cheap on a per user per month, Salesforce being not so cheap on a per user per month, then these things have to fit somewhere in between. So Cirrus, which is another one, Cirrus Insight, is a $15 per user per month. Well, I pay for. So you're down to four something. What's the math on that?

Justin Edelstein: Four 16. But not bad off top of my head, right? Pretty close. Well, cause guess who pays the bill?

Jason Atwood: So I know. so four 16 a person. So I mean, and that's male, calendar docs and a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah. It's a complete suite of tools. So you pay three times that amount. to sync it with a tool that you pay a lot times that amount if you're on EE or whatever. So I think that's one of the reasons Salesforce just get into it. It's because like what's the value add if there's already people out there doing it, doing it well and no one's complaining that they're not doing it. The only way that Salesforce would end up doing is if someone, one of these big companies would say like... the company we used to work for. If that company said, we're moving to Google, as our app thing, like Salesforce has, by the way, you'd wonder why they haven't, maybe internally they built their own thing.

10:21 Jason Atwood: And in order to sign that next $100 million investment with you, Salesforce, we need you to build this. And you can see them doing it at that point. But Outlook is still pretty big in the world, so. So that is up on blog.archeesync.com. You can go read that at any time. Speaking of Google, Google's kind of dropping into the, getting competitive in the cloud disk space, I guess you would call it. I don't know if that's what you call it. I think I would call this like.

Justin Edelstein: Cloud storage or perhaps, yeah, I think online storage, cloud storage, cloud drives.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. So basically they dropped their prices a lot and now a one terabyte space on their Google drive is 10 bucks a month. Imagine if I said one terabyte for 10 bucks a month. That's amazing. So my drive in my laptop is 250 megabytes. That's four times. the size of my drive for 10 bucks a month. It's pretty good. Like they're getting, you know, and then to have 10 terabytes for a mere nine and they're a hundred bucks a month. So like the, the idea of storage and putting your data

Justin Edelstein: In the cloud and all that, like it's getting. Well, just the I think the one that's like, you know, the hundred gigs a month for two dollars right I mean that's twelve dollars a year for a hundred gigabyte drive to just throw stuff on. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. Really good. I mean, you're not really gonna be in a backup mode at that point. You know, a terabyte gets you into backup mode. Yeah. We're gonna backup mode. But this is more like,

Justin Edelstein: Let me store my media up there.

Jason Atwood: Right still have transmission problems. You can't you know large files as you know is your little lady soon to be your Little are you having a name for her lady?

Justin Edelstein: Not gonna name for the little lady.

Jason Atwood: Just a little still lady For those of you who don't know we're talking about referring to Justin's impending nuptials, so I'm calling him out It's like you really does a lot of video editing. Oh, yeah, and for big for big video like it's she needs that She needs that file locally, right? Can't do it off though No, no, no, because it's just not gonna work. That's where things like drobos.-You should of see the daisy chain factory

Justin Edelstein: We've got going on Our desk it's like it's like six It's like six stacked terabyte drives or two terabyte drives right right on top of each other some of them are like those like fake raid drives for raid i don't know fake raid not like really raid but there are well there's raid there's all members of different kinds

Jason Atwood: Of raids you want to get discussion about raid but raid one versus raid five not at all okay Raid 22. Raid 22 is not as impressive. It's advanced.

13:24 Justin Edelstein: But yeah, she's got all these drives like daisy chain together because she needs them.

Jason Atwood: I mean, this is getting into the, you know, I mean, Dropbox is now one of the things that we can talk about. This is on the agenda, but Dropbox is redoing their business model and actually going to allow people to do. to switch easily between your Dropbox, business box,

Justin Edelstein: Something that Google Drive doesn't do very well. Actually doesn't do it all. Not at all. You have one drive mounted on your desktop.

Jason Atwood: And in some ways I think it's like... As someone who has to worry about the security of things a little bit, I always feel like, oh yeah, that's great. As a user, I get to have my personal and my work. And then as a security person, I think, oh, and I can just drag into personal, and I've basically created a copy that then is onto a thing that I don't control. Not good.

Justin Edelstein: But look at the price differential here. at the 100 gigabyte. Dropbox charges $999 for 100 gigs. Google charges $1.99. They charge $9.99 the price for a terabyte. It's pretty crazy. There Which I still don't quite get like iCloud storage. Like what I mean? Well, it's not like a drive. Like I can't just drag and drop stuff into iCloud. Like here, I'm going to put these 30 documents in my iCloud. Well, if you were using I tools, then they would I sync to iCloud. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: Well, they again, Apple's theory is very different. Apple's theory is always very different. You don't want you to have to think about drive.

Justin Edelstein: It's also very it's a very, very different way of thinking about like cloud storage. Do you've ever switched? You know, as I know you have, if you ever switch devices and you have that backed up to the iCloud, the iCloud does a great job with. like with media like music right movies that doesn't count towards your things but but I've never like the only thing that iCloud's ever helped me out with was like you know contacts and like preference settings and things right things that you backed up from your eye devices right But like I wouldn't even I don't even know how or think to know how to like say I'm using my iCloud storage for this document You could just open up pages.

Jason Atwood: I don't have pages. Hey you do alright Well, then if you don't have pages and then you wouldn't yeah cuz I don't want it.

Justin Edelstein: I mean Apple should probably stop making pages I believe so.

Jason Atwood: I think they're gaining a lot of traction with it. I just now they have online versions of it I should just cut their losses without

16:27 Justin Edelstein: Like you know let word and Google and

Jason Atwood: Everyone else battle that one out stay on the sidelines over there. No one's moving to pages I guess the problem is if they're always battling in the night then they don't make it just just work with their devices as well. But I think they, again, Apple just wants to control the Real time syncing between the two, it's actually offline. It's like, oh, it's all great. You know, and then, but then I want to give it someone else. So I've done pages where I didn't actually need to give it to anybody else. Store it as a PDF.

Justin Edelstein: Well, all right. And then it's or export it as a doc X or something. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: So that's where it usually falls off. It does. And then, Microsoft OneDrive, let's see, 50 gigabytes for $25 per year. Hmm. Right.

Justin Edelstein: You........ use our productivity tools store the store too and then it's you pick where you are it was

Jason Atwood: One of the things that actually it's but there's an article the I read about I don't know if I tagged it or flipped it or Tweeted it. But back to the future facts? No, I said that to you this morning. Because that was awesome. I know, because you're and And I sent the thing

19:42 Justin Edelstein: So, so, R, so, so, so, so, so, so, so.,,

Jason Atwood: That's the face I would make. You made a face. Yes. I know. And you made this face. Most have gone there, but geez, a few that had and I was so surprised. Amazon, which I use all the time, it kind of made me think. It's like, really? Why are you guys not have two factor? Sooo, two factor next week. Is this a two factor? This 2 divided by 2 is 1. Salesforce 1 in Boston? Try. No. It's an effort. It's always an effort. So yeah, there's a, we are going to the Salesforce 1. We haven't bought our tickets yet. but something in anything you're looking to get out of Salesforce 1 next week?

Justin Edelstein: No, I think I know what to expect.

Jason Atwood: Okay, no surprises. I don't think so. I think they will release Spring 14.

Justin Edelstein: I don't even know if they'll mention the word Spring 14. They're still in the hole in the Spring 14 thing. Well, at least they're doing right and not just throwing it out there. Bugs and all. Yeah, that's true. preclude. I mean, wouldn't you rather that the case then? then be like, here it is. And it just stops working.

Jason Atwood: Well, I mean, didn't they start to release it and found the bugs? I don't know that to be true. No. Hey, listen, this software development is tough. And when you add a little feature, that's one thing. I think there's a lot of re-architecting going on and that re-architecting is painful and is taking longer than we think it's going to take. And so they... They have to hit those three a year because just because that's sort of like what they say they're going to do. But in almost, you know, if it were my advice, I would say take a year and maybe only do two releases. If you need to do these big releases, you know, take a year and take some time to get to get them right as opposed to keep pushing because we now know that spring is now pushing off summer.

23:08 Jason Atwood: So summer's now been pushed. So. It was only so much time in the year and you know they want to release stuff around Dreamforce so you know that Dreamforce 1 and October 15th will then be kind of you know shortened life cycle so. Right. Interesting. Anyway, Salesforce 1 Boston should be fun. So if you're up there, we're not doing anything podcasting wise. And we'll podcast on the way up. Or the way back.

Justin Edelstein: The way back might be the better one. After some drinks. After some drinks. Well, not like, oh, maybe this is what we're going to see, but like this is what happened. Oh, yeah.

Jason Atwood: We have to bring our, well, bring our mics. Bring our travel mics. We have travel mics. Might be a strange podcast. Probably it will. Because I think we're taking the train, yeah?

Justin Edelstein: That's the plan. So we can do it from what I understand. Maybe we'll do that. I don't know.

Jason Atwood: Maybe I'll fly. Yeah, maybe you'll fly. With my wings. So without anything else to discuss, let's get onto our CloudFocus app.

Justin Edelstein: Pick of the Week. Alrighty then. So I'll go first. Well, I think you have to. I always go first. So I'm picking an app that I don't know how to pronounce. Ha ha ha. I bet you've used it a ton. I've used it a couple times. It's pretty neat actually. Oh, I like neat. It's called Ototo. Ototo? I think it's spelled O-T-O-T-O. Okay, I think it's Oto. Oto. Oto. Okay, it's a, this is, this is weird. It's a community based transit and navigation application. So basically you give it points of like where you are and where you want to go. and it uses publicly available information or community sourced information to tell you the best way and fastest way to get from where you are to where you want to go on public transportation.

Justin Edelstein: So if right now I open up the app, which I'm not gonna do and I were to say and I were to say I, you know, it up the app, which I'm not gonna do and I were to say I'll do it, you know, it knows, where I work and I know, and it knows where, where I live and I say get me home, right?. It will tell me the next. 7 train is leaving in 6. minutes from Times Square that's where you need to go okay and it covers thousands of lines Thousands of of like it's it's multinational. It's got like so why is this better than like Google Maps that has this in it? this this is From what I understand. It's like It picks up on like people saying like this is happening or this is happening like it's not It's not just like Google Maps, which might just be based on like service Disruptions this is actually like people reporting like this isn't happening or this isn't well in real time Yeah Like okay, like crowd-sourced type of You know community-based right information share it Change it Right, so you know, it's just basically trying to get you a good route And when the things are leaving right there on your mobile with like a countdown, right?

26:32 Justin Edelstein: Like, you know, this bus is running late because there's traffic that it Okay. and it I was really surprised like we used how accurate it was because I don't know how accurate it was because I have no clue how it knows like the 7 train which doesn't really have a timer on it How it knows when the next one is like leaving her they do I mean

Jason Atwood: Google Maps on me it says the next one leaves in X But this thing has based on a single it's it's multinational like it's got like thousands of different transit.

Justin Edelstein: Whatever they're called, you know, like trains and planes and automobiles. But all over, like all over the world, it's actually rather interesting. Like I looked at all the places it has in America and I was like, oh, my goodness. Really? And even no, like it has multi region ones that it has like states and cities and. it's just like every single system it has in there which is pretty darn neat I would say and it's and it's a really cool UI like the UI is is pretty good looking it's iphone only I just looked it up I can show it to you it's in my pocket here I could tell you when the next time we would get home okay well we do that so let's see leave right now the next train leaves. 5 and a half minutes till the next.

Justin Edelstein: Train leaves.

Jason Atwood: So their theory is if literally we get out the door right now that's when that train will leave. That's right. Have you tried it like walked in and see if the train actually leaves at that time?

Justin Edelstein: No I haven't And it's like, oh, this is different timing for me, because I had to walk to a different train. It's pretty not use this app. And I was, like, well, why didn't it pull that one up? Let me see. I say, how do I get here via? This is amazing radio, by the way. So yeah, it doesn't. or whatever it is. It doesn't consider this one of those apps. Yeah. All right, cool.

30:03 Jason Atwood: So, o-t-o-t-o-t-o-t-o No, people were like he seemed chipper to me. Yeah. I saw the conversation. I'm gonna tweet pictures of you when you're grumpy Put them on a the autobioban Facebook or on same and the. iOS and you say it really fast. It sounds funny a totalde mine I just switched We were talking great because sometimes I don't know I just I get in one mood and then I like I decided on top of something else so Again,

Justin Edelstein: I'm sure you haven't picked this. I sure pretty sure really. Yeah, it seems like something that should have already been picked

Jason Atwood: I don't think I've ever reallyed music before in my life.

Justin Edelstein: I'm really interested in I just recently started a new hobby that I like to listen to things while I do it. And this is one of the words in our entire D will find one.

Jason Atwood: So tell me about it. audiobook syncing thing and I was like, ooh, audiobook syncing, what So the next time I went to buy a book on Amazon, I bought a book, actually someone I- I was going to pull it up right here. It was The Blank Slate. I- I haven't read it yet. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Oh, The Blank Slate. I won't ruin it for you. I won't ruin it for you. Whatever, you don't read, so it's okay. So I go read, I I go buy this book on Amazon.com and I click on, you know, buy the book. You know,... books in the Kindle are $7,999,999, right? Roughly in that range. If you say so. And the issue with audi... Audiobooks for me has always been, well, if you're gonna buy the the book on audiobook, you're gonna pay 20 something dollars.

Jason Atwood: And you buy the book on Kindle, it's gonna be $12. And so, well, all right, I like audiobooks, maybe we'll just buy the audiobook. But the buying of them both, you're now spending $30-35, which which is like more than... than anything and so I think Amazon again, I'm just on audio are absolutely, there's no crossover. were losing money because people see it as one side is more expensive. So what happens I've visibly offered the person who bought I the Kindle book a very, very discounted rate to buy the audiobook at the same time. Yeah, now we're talking. So I- I bought this book, the blank slate, I bought it on the Kindle, the Kindle and after Ooh, I say five bucks more. Amen. Let me try this, because this new feature, obviously Amazon owns Audible, right?

33:38 Jason Atwood: So it's an Audible book. So this new feature is synchronization between audio. I was just gonna ask, do they sync? Audio and reading.,

Justin Edelstein: That's fantastic. It is. So you're reading it, you're on page 53. Yup. Stop reading.

Jason Atwood: You're going to the. It's taking a book to a new level because it's exactly what I kind of wanted. I want the ability to read, but not have to make that choice of like, well, now I want to read, oh, I can't read this because it's not, I don't have it. I'm like, that is actually a very good feature. Very well thought out. So my what I'm picking is the Audible app on... on the aipad. It's audiobooks by audible. Bye. I've actually done two now because, literally, I buy the book and it's like, oh, 399, 499 for the audio version. I mean, this one's 22 hours, it's the unabridged version. I'm like, yeah, I'll pay five bucks for that, sure, because I might want to listen to it, right? I might not want to read it.

Jason Atwood: Anyway, so I'm picking audiobooks by Audible. I think it's great. I think they've really figured this out. I like, this is where I think books, the book reading on a digital book reading is becoming, you know, has something extra to it. You know, there's extra stuff that they've been adding, obviously having a lot of books and all that stuff. But this, I think brings it to a whole other level and it's kind of like, oh, this is why I would buy the digital version, which you can't get in obviously a paper version. So that's it for my pick of the week. It is free. Except for you have to buy all the content. So speaking of free things you can follow Justin on Twitter just at Elsin for free you can follow me Jason Matt would on Twitter for 20 cents per follow Fall Arkus Inc.

Jason Atwood: Are you paying them? No, no No. Didn't pay you. That's nonsense. That's what we got to do. I already asked for a refund immediately. We're on Facebook.com slash ArcaSync, Dreamforce Portal Group, Success Community Group, pause for dramatic effect, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and then of course you can always subscribe and review the podcast on iTunes. and We love the feedback, by the way. I know people are sort of going, they know us, they're sending us emails. I know, we're getting emails. Yeah, they're like not tweeting at us, not putting on Facebook, not putting in the comments.

36:41 Justin Edelstein: Guys, we love you. But come on, make it public. Make it public. Right. Show the love publicly. I have people come in to me and I,

Jason Atwood: And then we'll be back next week. How many weeks until impending nut trolls? It's like six weeks now five weeks. Oh, man What's the countdown?

Justin Edelstein: Website I'm going to read you outside on the air. It's 45 days to go 45 days 45 days to the day Got a meeting later this evening with the DJ. 9 o'clock phone call like

Jason Atwood: Great DJ can't do anything but a phone call so you're phone calling him or you are you going to his DJ place and watching him DJ no way man just call him. Is he gonna be at the, is he gonna have one just call him. Is he gonna be at the, is he gonna be at the, is he gonna have one ear and spinning the wheel ear and spinning I hope not I hope not. Maybe, I don't know. We'll see. I was watching an episode of Girls. Have you watched the I have seen every episode of Girls. It's a terrible show, but there's a funny scene with the DJ and he gets all mad because the DJ cut his song off and... Went from playing, I think, Nirvana to playing... Oh, and they get in a fight?

Jason Atwood: So we'd love to hear some ideas. So if you want to slight catch up on or hate to deep dive into this or whatever, again one of those things that's not time specific, tell us and we will do that. Alright until then we bak next week Justin, Jason saying enjoy those cloudy days.

Justin Edelstein: You