NGO Disconnect - Episode #212 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.

00:20 Jason Atwood: Are and the.,,,, the. I I and Justin Edelstein calling you out so quickly. How you doing buddy?

Justin Edelstein: I was actually going to say clone this user recently blogged about on the Salesforce hacker blog. He did. It is up and running. You can check out the post from literally today, April 17th from Salesforce hacker, otherwise known as Adam Tormund who wrote a- and, and a a..

Jason Atwood: The the and I the' A rather big one, so we're gonna have to see if we can not make this into a three-hour tour. Sit right back. Listen here.

Justin Edelstein: Gilgas Island? No? I am too young for that. That you're a millennial. I can honestly say I've never seen an episode of Gilgas Island. Oh, I just threw up a little bit of my mouth. That's terrible. I minutes then no now an hour so maybe we should get going.

Jason Atwood: Because you know more about it than I do. I should be interviewing you.

Justin Edelstein: It's not gonna get a lot out of me in that one. Good enough. No. And then we'll talk maybe a little bit about Apple Watch and then we... Why don't we just wait on the Apple Watch? We have no idea what it is.

03:28 Jason Atwood: Well, no, because we have a lot to talk about. But alright, we'll do that for the next time. Apple Watch next time. I've already moved it to the next time on, and then I threw in some other stuff in here that we can talk about next time. Then we'll do a, CloudFocus at a pick of the week. I'm extremely excited. It might take me 35 minutes to talk about my pick of the week. That's not acceptable. I think I'm going to make you spend money.

Justin Edelstein: Oh I hate when you do. Yeah, I know. All right, so let's get to our first two blog posts.

Jason Atwood: First up, a first in order of publishing date. Thank you so much for watching! is Sales Mastery Mastery through habit.

Justin Edelstein: This. Is by the partner who shall never be. Named the maester and the sales maester. Can we call him the grand maester of sales? Grand maester. Sales. He's the grand puba. sorry, game of thrones is back. So yes, because you should still know the word may start I do know.

Jason Atwood: So this is An interesting one because there's different tracks and we have like, we have sort of a productivity track on the blog, we have some other tracks. This track is sort of a sales and productivity. It's interesting because he talks about, he's using a couple of theories from a couple different books, but he talks about using sales methodologies and tasking for us. as a way of building in habit to increase sales or help sales people be better at their job. Which is basically as much as I'm going to say about it because I think it really needs to be read. It needs to be read.

Justin Edelstein: It's not a talk about. It's a must read. It's a must read. What would you call a must read?

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I had this as a, he showed me the preview of this and like before he even started really explaining things first, I said he should just put it in the middle, so he did that, that sounds good. So go read that, that's on blog.argasync.com, you can go read that. Next up on the blog, another one that I think has a lot of self, sort of, you know, self-explanatory is Loading data with special characters.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so foreign language things apostrophes colon semicolons all sorts of weird funky characters that get caught up in CSV land. Yes, how to Kind of a step-by-step guide on how to load data that you know has a bunch of special characters You know, just using standard data loading characters special through just using a standard data loaders as opposed to having to Have something that can script those out or clean them up on the way in

Jason Atwood: And this is another of our blog post that has a lot of Although I am seeing some stuff in here I'd like to take out a lot of what screenshots on the screenshots are a little whatever a little what?

Justin Edelstein: Well, let's not talk about it. Yeah, let's just look at the third one down. Well, let's just delete them That one down the last second. Oh, no. No, I don't know what you're Oh, yeah, there's a that shouldn't be in there. Let's get rid of that. We gotta get rid of that. Let's do that You'll take that down. I'm not gonna do it right now. Okay, I'm gonna tell the prospective to do it to do it

06:30 Jason Atwood: You do that Alright, so So those are two those are two good, but they're again not really They're really read it one to read it and reflect and ones that read it and learn it or bookmark it So if you need to get back to it someday do that Next up because we're trying to get to the main event here is the Apparently you just put this on four minutes before we started the podcast is the Salesforce trust the new site Which I've never seen before so I'm looking at it for the first time. Oh good for you I looked at it for the first time

Justin Edelstein: This morning because I was looking at Trust because our our our instance was acting up a little so I was wondering if there was an issue with NAH There wasn't and then all of a sudden magically Everything was working fine.

Jason Atwood: So it's it's the the differences are instead of having green checky boxes You have big green lines, but it's a little bit more for the days You can see when things were down so like you click on it and it's like an hour You can see things are down for a little bit And I like the yes nice It's nice. It's it's it gives a little bit. I mean it's the same information, but it's just It's and has everything in there and then has the history here, so that's nice I don't know say anything else different with it really it's just

Justin Edelstein: A look and feel that's nice Yeah, I mean it's oh and you can look a little nicer you well you could always do that What I'm doing right now is sort of flipping over and showing you that I think the big deal is that it is optimized for the mobile. Optimized from mobile unlike our website unlike the arca sync website this website is completely optimized for mobile nice Which is obviously the way that you know everything is going these days. Oh and the daily transaction count There's some nice Most part the same information you can go back and forth in in the history of time you can drill into your particular So if you clicked on NA8, for example, you will see a maintenance calendar for that specific pod. So we can see on the May 17th, there is scheduled maintenance.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I like that. That's good. There's a calendar view and a list view. There's some nice stuff in here. It's very nice. It's good. Well done. I like this. Yeah, it is well done. They kept the RSS feed too, which I find a little surprised. But they're changing them.

Jason Atwood: They're changing RSS feeds.. they're changing. Because I know there's one thing they said that the old trust RSS feed is not going to work. You have to go resubscribe to this one. I do not subscribe. I mean, I love RSS.

Justin Edelstein: Slash, rest, slash RSS slash NA8.

Jason Atwood: Yes. Oh Yes. Oh Interesting. Very cool.

Justin Edelstein: I like it. RSS is the future of the internet.

Jason Atwood: It is not. Remember when we talked to that vendor? Totally missed that. The whole world was like, this is all about, everything's going to be about RSS.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, you know what? They missed, they should have just said feeds and not said RSS. I think feeds would have been a way more accurate statement. Well, you know what I think the future of the world's about. Computers. Computers. That's my prediction. Computers. I'm going to add futurist to my title on LinkedIn. Someone tried to link in with me. If you're listening and I don't remember your name, I'm sorry if this is how you know me, but if you try to link in with me and in your title it says entrepreneur. Slash futurist. I'm not accepting why that person could know the future future futurist. What does that mean? You mean do you know the future? No, it doesn't. Yeah, you're there If you is there a Wikipedia article on futurist, I don't know I wonder but I am I'm just not about it Oh my goodness.

10:06 Justin Edelstein: There is a futurist Futurist or futurologists are scientists and of social scientists whose specialty is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life in general. What I love about what scientists is one thing,

Jason Atwood: You know what a social scientist is? Please tell me. A scientist who didn't have to go to college. Because you're a social scientist. They went to college and you studied different things. Like a scientist has to go to college or go to become I want to this has been banging around in our heads for a while. And I first want to do a little disclaimer. disclaimer it Yeah, I'm gonna disclaimer. One is while Jason myself, I guess that's the third person. Well, me myself and I well, Justin and I are long standing Salesforce users who know A lot.

Justin Edelstein: That's all we do. Salesforce consulting,

Jason Atwood: Podcasts, and blogging. It's like 90% podcasts, like 10% or 9% blogging, and then 1% salesforce consulting. We're social. We also are users, and we are users of Salesforce and customers of Salesforce and have been for a very long time. Well, the reason I'm getting to this is... Mostly if you listen to this podcast you would have a You would think that we were what is called in the Apple world as a fanboy Which I am definitely a fanboy Which is someone who kind of like can't see anything any of the flaws that are out there and kind of always thinks that whatever They do is great, right? So people I Maybe they will the Salesforce fanboys.

Justin Edelstein: We're totally salesforce fanboys and you're absolutely an Apple fan. Oh, yeah I'm an absolute mean if Apple put out a box with nothing in it, but Apple air you also buy I'm also a social social

Jason Atwood: Social fans social science Apple fanboy, but here's what I'm trying to get to there are times in our lives when we We're also realists and we're also-. Futurists. And we're also not afraid to sometimes call it like we see it. And I want to point that out as we see it. We might be dead on wrong, but this is the way we see things. And I know that's a lot of disclaimerage. because what we're about to talk about is something we're not a lot of hedging. We're not well, we're not kind of happy with them. We're not really liking of the way it is now and the future. We're going to talk about that as well. So here's how we're going to handle this because this is this is tricky. Like when Salesforce puts out great products, we go, great, greatest thing ever.

13:36 Jason Atwood: The new trust is involved in or is it connected to something that we're not as excited about. I think we owe it to our listening audience. to not just go to not either ignore the topic, which is one way to do it, we can just ignore the topic and or to not To not discuss it. All right, or not to say what we feel. So I'm going to use that that's my platform for starting off this conversation. So Also just as a background both you and I have gone to an NGO Connect workshop. A boot camp, a two-day boot camp. And then you have much more, which I'm gonna question you about as we go through the sort of the question and answer here., I hope I can answer everything. If I can't, I'll just say I can't.

Jason Atwood: Right. So, I'm sure you can. So, and then, but that's about,

Justin Edelstein: You're gonna be the interviewee. Oh, how the tides of your yes, they have turned I'm usually the one who's doing well We question that's why we'll we get into that.

Jason Atwood: Okay, so Justin nice to. See you Jason. Hi. Hi the podcast. Thank you. Yes. Welcome. first time on fuck a little nervous a little nervous Take us to water. It's gonna be okay relax Not the whole fest. It's okay. All right. So first of all, explain to me what NGO Connect is.

Justin Edelstein: So NGO Connect is a series of packages that creates in totality a product that is built on R.Salesforce. platform, Salesforce 1, Salesforce force.com, whatever you feel comfortable talking about it in those terms, it sits on the platform. It's a series of packages that make up actually a series of separate products. So, you know, the two that I would say are like the big ones are NGO Connect BIOS and NGO Connect okay proper. Let me but let me back you up a little bit. I'm gonna get there. All right You get this so it's it's meant for higher-end enterprise level or enterprise class Constituent and. Donation management for nonprofits and send a NGO connect the connected NGO So for

Jason Atwood: Those who don't know and I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little bit ground ground laying here, okay? Salesforce offers free licenses as part of a grant program as part of their Salesforce Foundation. This is so not the question you asked me. No, I know, but the end, but I'm just, I'm getting there in a weird way. So that as nonprofits get discounts and they get 10 free licenses, if they're 501c3 to Salesforce as part of the foundation, as part of the 111 program. But they also have helped foster another thing called the nonprofit starter pack. Which we have blogged about and talked about. In the past. Yes, we have. But first thing I was going to say, so, so, okay. So I'm going to play, it's not going to be hard, but I'm going to play dumb.

16:48 Jason Atwood: Yeah. That sounds a lot like what the nonprofit starter pack is.

Justin Edelstein: What's... Can you explain a little bit what the nonprofit starter pack is and what the differences are? Sure. So the nonprofit starter pack, and the reason why I emphasize the word starter is because that's precisely what it is. It's a good start. It's good head start on taking Salesforce as a traditionally B2B sales tool and rewording and adding some additional functionality into Salesforce to turn it more into what is typically a I'm gonna use B2C as the as the model For fundraising, right? You're you're doing B2B work again to translate your your your fundraising against a corporation or a foundation or a government organization or some organization, but you're also collecting individual gifts donations like It could be $5, $10, $20, it could be peer to peer stuff, what have you. So they've taken in the starter pack, Salesforce, and reworked it a little bit to handle, you know, individuals, households, things of that nature, salutations for writing thank you taken the opportunity object and sort of turned it into a donation object, how to collect payments for things that are more either grant-like or pledge-like, where I'm going to pay you over the course of time, how to actually book that in your general ledger, which fiscal year, so on and so forth.

Justin Edelstein: And it allows you to continue to build on top of the the nonprofit starter pack and add additional things that you may need over the course of time. But it essentially gets you from zero to somewhere. If you wanted to get off the ground and get off your Excel spreadsheets or I mean, I've seen organizations track things in Microsoft Word or somebody built an Access database 10 years ago or whatever. for small organizations who just want to get onto this enterprise platform and Salesforce but not necessarily have all the bells and whistles that You know some of the competitors out there would have is they're selling their own

Jason Atwood: Fundraising packages like what give me some competitors. Well blackbaud is the big one Okay, so blackbaud sells packages for and they're a They're a dirt there too.

Justin Edelstein: Well, they bought convio used to be a convio used to be a standalone and they had they had they had convio and then they had convio common ground which was built on top of force.com And then black but bought convio To get into more of the cloud space, they were very much like if you look at Blackbaud, which is Razor's Edge and Financial Edge, and they integrate really well. It looks like an old VB app, that's what it is essentially. Convio is more web... forward-thinking online donations, peer-to-peer stuff, mass emailing, things of that nature. So they took the product and sort of turned it into Luminate, which is another force.com fundraising application that you can buy from Bachbod.

20:17 Jason Atwood: Okay. And so let's get some pricing in here. So how much does nonprofit starter pack cost? Free. Okay. And you said illuminate, which is the don't know the cost. No,. I didn't do any research. It's money. So, where does NGO connect fit into this somewhere closer to illuminate?

Justin Edelstein: So, it's a pay. Oh, yeah, it's a pay product. And that's where I was going with it has two flavors. There's BIOS, which is the like base package. which essentially handles contacts. So it handles the account contact data model. There's it does sort of take the account contact data model and add things to it. Right. To handle addresses, preferences. And we'll get into what some of those things are. Constituent types. things of that nature. Then there's the Connect which is what handles like the giving aspect. That's when opportunities come into play as well as a whole slew of other things related to giving and Connect which enables sort of the online stuff. So online event reg, online donation forms, All hosted, all native on Salesforce. So basically using force account sites to put out web pages that people can register for things or create donations online, put their credit card in, goes through a payment processor, can set up recurring stuff, all that fun stuff that...

Justin Edelstein: In. that people like, even integrates with stay classy for peer to peer, which is pretty interesting because people like doing peer to peer and not much integrates with Salesforce from that perspective.

Jason Atwood: And when they talk peer to peer,

Justin Edelstein: We're talking about, you go run the marathon, you stand up your own page, people donate, they say, hey, you're running a marathon, I'll give you 50 bucks, that's cool. That kind of stuff.

Jason Atwood: So, and where did NGO Connect come from? Did Salesforce build it? And what's its connection with Salesforce now?

Justin Edelstein: So good question company called round corner built NGO connect there's also another flavor called NGO advance or advancement or something along those lines That's for higher education Round corner built it round corner was was doing the services around it was doing all the sales around it until struck a deal with Salesforce and it is now rebranded as Salesforce NGO Connect. It used to be called Round Cause. So Round Corner created Round Cause. Round Cause turned into NGO Connect from the, the Salesforce Foundation. Salesforce Foundation sells it. Salesforce Foundation supports it.

Jason Atwood: Salesforce Foundation does not. build it does not develop it does not develop it itself is not the developer behind it correct so do can you think of and i'm racking like can you think of another product that has

23:25 Justin Edelstein: This type of relationship with sales force no i can think of products that they've bought Tons of them that they then take over like data.com and live agent and things like that. I could have very easily said we're gonna sell exact target. But instead, you know, they bought them and turned it into the marketing cloud. I cannot think of another product like this that somebody else develops on the force.com or Salesforce one platform. I'm going to continue to just use it's forced.com. I'll be okay. That they're responsible for selling slash supporting, but not responsible for actually building.

Jason Atwood: I mean that is a sales force. It's supposed to be seamless.

Justin Edelstein: We're a little behind the scenes a little bit. The customer, it's supposed to appeal, though, the sales force. You're going to know around. Right. People do.

Jason Atwood: Give me some of the things that you big things that you learned that

Justin Edelstein: Give me some the process I think that they thought really deep problems that fundraising organizations have that you just wouldn't be able to solve with a non-profit starter pack almost to the point of over engineering for every little thing, but they've thought about quite and create content.- the that you know they have a lot of visual force pages tons and tons the edit button is not there, manage these relationships, manage these preferences, so on and so forth. I think, in a sense, that's a pro for people who are not used to using Salesforce. So anyone who comes into it fresh and has never seen Salesforce, well, Again, I have to take myself out of like being a sales force because I just want to edit the record and put someone's address on the page.

27:42 Justin Edelstein: In this case, they've created what I would say a pro and a con. A pro, you can manage tons of addresses. So you can have a different address for different seasons. And when you're dealing with big, big board members who are CEO's of big companies, well I'm sure you'll be able to speak with me. I'll see you next time. Maybe during the month of August, they spend their time on their island or whatever. That's where I spend my time. You want to send them a piece of mail? That's where they get it. so they've added the ability to do all of those things and essentially the addresses sort of flip on the contact, but you have to manage them through this interface. For me, it's a little weird because I'm just like, edit, edit contact, add a new address that sort of screws things up.

Justin Edelstein: You want to manage things through this address module. The pro is pretty flexible in terms of managing addresses. Right. The con is a little weird for someone who's a Salesforce user and used to doing something a certain way. Right. So again, it's very much a product built on this platform. You kind of have to take yourself out of Salesforce. and put yourself into this is NGO Connect. Right. Right. This is how they do things. some interesting ways of managing people's preferences for things. It's this very amorphous object that can be used for so many different reasons or preferences, essentially. Like. Opt me into this type of mailing but opt me out of all the rest of these email But I want these snail mailed, right? You know interests and things like that are captured there.

Justin Edelstein: So they're interested in golf, right? What have you or they're a Yankee fan. So take them to the Yankee game really nice flexible object there's an inline visual force page that allows you to see all this stuff very nice pro con. Some of this stuff has to do with how you communicate with people preferences for communications so this is where it gets a little murky is you know when your sales force and you are selling NGO connect as a sales force product and then. The organization wants to go to the next level and says, all right, I'm ready to do some, some marketing here. Right. And give me some exact target, some exact target marketing cloud love. These things should work really well together. They kind of don't because marketing cloud has its own preferences center where you can unsubscribe and subscribe to certain types of appeals or what have you, and that doesn't sync or integrate with the preferences object where that stuff is stored in NGO connect.

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of a big problem actually, if you ask me. Because it's like, well, good thing I am asking you. Well, it's like, you know, you run your reports and you filter people out based on their preferences or you add people in based on their preferences, but then they've already opted out on the exact target side and you don't know. Right. So it's like, oh, they've heard he. They said that they don't want this. Or they said that they do want this, but my preference data is stale. Right. Kind of a wonky thing because these are Salesforce products. They should work together. That's where the thing is. It's like, this is a Salesforce product. It should work like Salesforce.

30:59 Jason Atwood: It's not. It's not working like Salesforce or it is not a Salesforce product. It is a Salesforce product.

Justin Edelstein: Technically sold by Salesforce, but it doesn't really work like Salesforce. So when you say three upgrades a year and you're talking about Salesforce, you get three upgrades a year. You don't really have to do too, too much. As a matter of fact, sometimes you have to do nothing, and you just get the upgrade and it just happens. And it's like, Ooh, new stuff. And you either turn it on or you don't. Sometimes it's turned on for you. and it's like great. With NGO Connect, these are a series of managed packages. So take a second. I Both are installed from the AppExchange. Let's just start there as a baseline. Let's go unmanaged first. Unmanaged packages on the AppEx D. You install it and it's essentially open source. All the code is there. It's in your org.

Justin Edelstein: It's now yours. The publisher has no ability to really control it at that point. They can't like. do any patch upgrades or anything like that to it. It's yours. You own it. If there's bugs in it or whatever, it's like, all right. Right to install, you know, fix it yourself. You install at your own risk kind of thing. So a lot of this, so. Out of the force.com lab stuff is, is unmanaged. And it's like that for a purpose. They're meant to be like templates or Used for certain things with like a buyer beware sticker on it, but they're also extensible That's very because you can have the code and it was long I mean unmanaged packages could also be extensible if they're documented really well But we'll get to that in a minute So this is a series of managed packages The pro of manage packages that you don't have to worry about it, right?

Justin Edelstein: It doesn't so I still install it from the app You still have to install it from Not really the app exchange, but like a private area. No, no, but well we we have Oh, yeah If you want to install what you would you of this one off with clone this user if you want to install clone this user You go to the app exchange you install it. It's mad. You're not seeing our code, but it's there The good part about that is, if we wrote crappy test classes, it's not going to count against your issue. If you want to deploy something from Sammux, it's not going to count. Our tests won't run against your org, that kind of stuff. We can also push minor changes to the application out to our user base. Can't push major stuff right minor stuff like can't add an object can't add new I can change the code I want

Jason Atwood: That to be a very clear understanding too because I don't think people really get that is that a managed a managed package means that the publisher of it manages the code and can

34:24 Justin Edelstein: Without you knowing yes, and we've done it Oh, the other one,

Jason Atwood: Compliance loggers have been patched a bunch of times. But the point is that as the developer of it and as the manager of that and package, I can push code into your orgs. Correct. Tested. Yeah. Or not.

Justin Edelstein: No, or not. Or not. So, managed packages, so there... It's a series of them. There's about seven of them. Right. each one have their own licenses associated. So you have to grant those licenses to the users that are going to use it. So back to NGO Connect. Yeah, so NGO Connect. So some users of the org could be just BIOS users. They just need to count contact and biographical information, that kind of stuff. And others can be full on giving Connect. work with the giving, which is essentially opportunities, renamed giving. They do some interesting stuff with that, by the way, like how they handle giving records versus transaction records. This is other stuff about they do duplicate a lot of data across the system to make it work. So addresses are... duplicated and potentially even triplicated triplicate.

Justin Edelstein: So like three records for what should essentially be one. Donations the same. There's a big overarching opportunity record and then there's a transaction record to draw down that opportunity. So $100 donation, $100 transaction record says, here's the payment essentially. Anyway, back to the packaging. So in the real, you know, real world of Salesforce, you get summer 15. Release date comes around. It's well known. It's known months in advance or two months in advance. Pre-release notes are out there. Sandbox upgrades, pre-release orgs have a ball play around, test your integrations, test your apps, all that stuff. And now is when I bring up spring 14. Just want to say spring 14. Yeah.- With NGO Connect, a little different. These are a series of managed packages. So if you want to get from what we're currently on, which is winter 14 or winter 15, whatever, winter, to spring, which will be released in some time, you have to go through and do that.

Justin Edelstein: Through the upgrade steps to get to the next series of packages. You have to install the packages that are upgraded. And if you, if you don't, if you skip a release, you have, you kind of have to double your work because you can't go from like winter to summer for example.

Jason Atwood: Well so what I like and that's a very interesting point why I don't think a lot people get about managed packages and or One of the more definitely in the con category, category on NGO Connect is that there is a feeling that once you're on the platform, once you're on Salesforce, that everything is this easy upgrade path, right? No more upgrades, no software. It's, it's totally sold that way. But in reality, a managed package is almost... I'm gonna say as bad because there's lots of there's lots of pros to it, but it is almost as bad as Installing something on your computer. It is a version of software is a version software And they don't auto upgrade and they don't keep

37:45 Justin Edelstein: Up with the stuff to two years ago I'm sorry cut you off to two years ago or so. There was like a push major Or patch major pilot maybe, we were looking into it as AppExchange partners and I don't think it's ever actually come to fruition where you can really deploy and push major upgrade, right? Meaning you know, delete a bunch of stuff, that's deprecated. You'll see- all over the NGO Connect package, you know, they've been upgrading this thing over time. Time and there's tons of stuff that's just labeled. deprecated, right? Like just don't touch it. Tons of like custom label or custom labels in custom settings and just tons and tons of stuff that is just deprecated across the board, which you have to do in this managed package world. Right. So give me some other...

Jason Atwood: And I totally get you. Give me some other cons.

Justin Edelstein: I don't think that there's great documentation, when you compare it again to Salesforce, which is how I'm going to compare this. Salesforce comes out with a new release and there's 300 pages of notes and those live on. and they get updated over time to be living documents. And GeoConnect is trying to their credit. They have a wiki for partners, and then they have some some interfacing documentation, I'm going to have. I'm going to have to just say it's bad. It's bad documentation.

Jason Atwood: No document is worse or is not is, is. Is worst than no documentation.

Justin Edelstein: It's better than no documentation. I'll put it there. I'm definitely better than nothing, but it's riddled with, you know, issues because things get updated over time and it's like, well, which release are you on? And it's hard, right? Being on one release is way easier to have documentation for than having to document across many releases. Right. So it's hard to keep up. you'll find tons of old stuff mixed with new stuff. There'll be features that are totally not explained at all. Like big features that need. Many pages of documentation are just left out completely not explained So it's just Interesting world this NGO connect and a lot of people say you know It's it's it's the future like invest in the future and I kind of look at it like I agree. It's the future.

Justin Edelstein: We can all say, you know, it's, this is, you know, Salesforce for nonprofits circa, you know, what Salesforce is today, eight, 10 years ago, right? So if you were to say to me like, Hey, wouldn't you have loved to have been in on Salesforce like 10 years ago? I was. Right. Sorry. But actually, you know what? If you were to say, wouldn't you have liked your org to have been spun up 10 years ago? I'm not sure I would say yes, to be quite honest with you, because we'd probably have done some stuff really dumb and then not continued to make it like stay up with the times. Well, we have and we have customers who have orgs that are.

41:07 Jason Atwood: Nine, eight years old, and I'll tell you, they struggle with this stuff. They struggle with things they installed nine, 10 years ago or seven years ago that don't work, that can't be uninstalled, that are not. Just legacy.

Justin Edelstein: So it gets worse though when you're talking about managed. packages because really all it is is a version of software. The platform is going to keep going and that's Salesforce standalone, separate from NGO Connect. So if you want to say you want to invest in Salesforce, good, great. You want to invest in NGO Connect. It's not like investing in NGO Connect today is going to make your life any better a year from now because it's three packages from now. Three distinct packages with three upgrade paths that you need to do. and test and make sure everything works. And it's not just three, it's three times seven. What's the time seven? Well, you could say seven. Oh yeah. All those packages. Yeah. So it's a lot of work actually. It's not seamless to just say like, Oh, I'm investing in the future now.

Justin Edelstein: When you know, verdict, I'm not a hundred percent sure. It's like.

Jason Atwood: Ready right now and it's something we've seen there are other vendors who I will not mention because they're not as close to you Know this but this it's one of the reasons that we as a as a services Have kind of stayed away from from productizing things. It's because the world of managed packages and software and Salesforce is It's a difficult world to deal in. It's a difficult world to keep up with. And even in little simple things that we've done, like compliance lock or our first package, our first managed package, there's still things in it that I can't believe we can't change. Like we made choices. Now let's, I'm not going to label them mistakes, but they were mistakes. And we can't even change them. We can't- we can't go back and do anything with it because it's stuck in this managed package which we somehow can put in things and some things cannot.

Jason Atwood: So I'll tell you from my own experience, I don't have as much experience with NGO Connect. I did the work with the boot camp which I spent two days actually installing and playing with it. I came away with the feeling that it was I'm trying to figure out the words. A, I was finding a lot of bugs. aAnd I don't mind finding bugs. I mean, I test my own software and I've written software and I've been a programmer. And so I know that and stuff happens, but it felt like, wow, I'm a surprise that I'm sitting here and just finding bugs randomly. Not one, but multiple over a two day period. I found that kind of... I'm also, while I know that there are limitations in the Salesforce UI, I'm also a believer in user interface parity, and that when you start to overtake one part of the application with a different user face, It makes the overall use of Salesforce more difficult as you bounce from user from user.

Jason Atwood: One of the things I love to explain to people when, I train them on Salesforce is When you land on a lead and you click on the edit button, and there's lists, there's views, and there's lists, and there's fields, and they're in two columns, and then you go to a contact, you don't have to relearn what you just learned. Oh,

44:16 Justin Edelstein: First name, last name. We're related to this. This really causes you to relearn patterns. So that's like, I'll go with this as kind of another little side note. You know some of the in-line editing you can't do so you land on a record. It's in line editable. You land on another record It's not you know why right because you can't for this particular record Some places you edit things other places you manage things and the rule of thumb is if there's a manage button use the manage button That's it. Right? and the last thing I'll say is is If you've got an org that's two or three years old and you're running your program in this org That's two or three years old. you've been running your program You say you know what I'm sick and tired of this razors edge on-premise Nonsense can't use it on a mobile can't use it from anywhere.

Justin Edelstein: These are all pros by the way event you connect Here it's a lot of sales here. It's a platform right? It's mobile It is collaborative. so on and so forth. Have fun getting it into that org. That's almost impossible. We were pretty much told, don't do that. Like just spin up another org with NGO connect in it and then move, either move everything in, which have fun with that or Run them separately there again have fun with that there were a couple drop draw droppers when I was in when we were asking Questions and the one like

Jason Atwood: So what happens if you know someone's got an old org and you know they're doing they have let's say 300 people in their org and they want to use NGO connect and they won't install it for 20 30 people And their answer was boot up new org, move 300 for 20. I was like, that to me seems like a very, no, their answers probably have 320 live in separate orgs. But as we know, as you Salesforce people out there know, that's like being at two different companies. There's no interconnection of those two things. So I was, I was, I struggled with that even that I thought that was a very really bad answer. It just felt like wow that's putting a lot of people so as a net new right yeah there's some there's some value if you're you need to look at it deeper and look at it more carefully if you are someone who wants to add it on to something or if you because there also is no integrate there is no migration path from non-profit starter pack if you're non-profit start-up user.

Jason Atwood: It's start again.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah. Move data. I mean, and the data migration is tricky. Mostly the address stuff is tricky because everything's in these little objects. Well, everything's in these objects and these a lot of there's a bunch of address objects and they're joined in weird ways. And the data wants to be entered through the UI. The visual force pages are what take care of the, you know, calling into the classes and putting the data where it's supposed to be. So when you're doing the data loading, you can't really rely on. NGO connect to do those quote-unquote transformations for you You kind of have to load stuff in all the different places It needs to be and make sure it's correct and then turn the triggers and such back on Right you sort of have to turn a lot of functionality off load data turn functionality back on right whereas you'd really just like to Throw stuff in through the API and let It just handle it.

47:53 Justin Edelstein: Right.. That's not really the case. Right. So, you know, all the code is, you know, a good thing, right? All the code is sort of called through the visual first pages. But again, for data migrations, it's, it's a task. Right. And it kind of reminded me.

Jason Atwood: So to me, and I would that we'll get off of it and wrap up our conversation, but to This is from a history of something, but if you were to rewrite this today, you would not write it this way. Meaning you're caught with your own legacy pants down. That's an absolute fact. Right, because it is written in a way that wasn't really thought about from a, thought about well at the the beginning. And in that. That's sort of.

Justin Edelstein: I think just use sales force as your platform because you are that you either wait forever or go with a a

Jason Atwood: The and even There are ways to get around the limitations. if I were just going to go write Java code to do something, I would write it in a totally different way than if I would write something for Salesforce. Now you gain all the stuff you gain off of Salesforce, the platform, the scalability, Enterprise class software on top of enterprise class software that has tons of limitations and cool things You get games and I've seen again I've seen more than-- The vision is which is that they are the epicenter of enterprise class software and that you can install the health module the HR module the You know the NGO connect the whatever and it's your platform that you then use to build out your enterprise software They have a ways to go Because right now manage packages have a and the I just I think it was good for us to have a candid come to come to It's not full of a lot of you know flowery goodness, but sometimes that's what we do Next have lots of flowery goodness watch will have a new blog post Do you know who's right for this one?

52:18 Justin Edelstein: Nope? Yeah, I'll have a formula. It's about formulas I'm doing this.

Jason Atwood: What do I don't know anything that I even use so that's gonna be tough.

Justin Edelstein: We have been playing around with the Ionic framework for building mobile applications, connecting to sales. force is the back end so this would be like a you know consumer mobile app that would be available cross platform on iOS iOS and potentially Windows phone. And we've built out an Ionic app within the framework. The framework handles a lot of creating the hybrid app, if you? You handle the UI layer within the framework the connections to the phone itself. So you're building within a framework using and using Angular and things like that. You're so techie a lot this. It just the world of HTML apps. Makes it- makes it nice and easy for a phone.

Jason Atwood: That then can talk to phone features like location and beautiful camera things like that. Anyway, so...

Justin Edelstein: When we started building the app, this little application didn't exist called Ionic View. So what Vue allows you to do is to actually, instead of previewing the application in an emulator, you can actually preview it on your phone. And they made it as dumb simple as possible. The developer of the application It sends you an invite. It invites you to preview the app. You get an email. You click on the email, you log in, you register, whatever, and then out of nowhere, boom, it's just on your phone, like inside of the Ionic View app. So I open up the Ionic View app and it has a list of all of my applications. I then click on the one I want to look at. And then boom, there's the app. So really easy way to a preview be test app, the share, present, present.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah. Present's a good one., present the application on the actual device as opposed to just looking at it in like a Chrome extension or an emulator or something like that. You know, it's more meaningful on the actual device. Have it in your hand. So yeah. Ionic view free. from a company called Drifty, and they're extremely responsive on Twitter. I will tell you. If you mention them in the announcement of this particular podcast, they will like, they will favorite it or retweet it or what have you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. I will.

55:48 Jason Atwood: Mine is, again, I'm gonna make you spend some money. Maybe not. You know you're gonna resist me and not spend the money, but I know within like- I will spend zero dollars. I spent within- it's not Madden, because then that's- I know you spent a lot of money on Madden. Amazing how the season's over and you don't play it anymore.

Justin Edelstein: Are you kidding? I play it every day. You still play it every day? Every day. I'm just so hooked. Oh my god. I quit our league. I joined a new league, because nobody in our league played anymore. So I'm in a new league now. I'm not even in your league. I don't even play any more. I have so many good players. Oh my goodness.

Jason Atwood: Alright, I dominate. Alright, so here's, so this actually came up from a discussion we had. You made a pick. I think someone sent us an app called Authy. b'ight, Authy? So and this is an app that has been talked about forever. Basically I've known about this app for free. Isn't this a Merlin man? Everybody loves this app. I've owned this for over a year And I've never used it because I just couldn't come up. I couldn't figure out what it was that was doing for me. I have my password system. I don't know what it is. I don't I it's like me and I'm like, why do I need this? Well, I figured it out. And the way I figured it out was a scenario that you and I so we both use two factor on Salesforce.

Jason Atwood: One of the limitations of two-factor on Salesforce's is that you have it on your phone. You, the other day, dropped your phone and broke it. Sorry, a little showing of the whatever. And you then couldn't two-factor it because your phone was the only thing it was on and I had to turn, I had to go in and turn off your two-factor so you could get into our Salesforce org. And it's been thinking, I was thinking,, Othy, that sounds good because then you can sync it back and forth. And I was like, I should give Othy a try. And then all of a sudden, this app, One Password, which has been around forever and b So I started with the scenario of what I want, which is I want to be able to have Two Factor in many places.

Jason Atwood: I set it up. It synchronizes through Dropbox or other places, iCloud, whatever, and I have it on my phone, on my phone, on my iPad, and on my desktop, and you can boot it up and go Two Factor, hit copy,

Justin Edelstein: Paste, boom, you're in. all of a sudden saves you time. So your phone to log in two factor because you have it under the set. So that's the two factor piece, but what is the one password piece part of it?

Jason Atwood: So the thing is, when you install it, it installs on your desktop, it installs extensions in both in your browsers.

Justin Edelstein: All of my browsers? Chrome,

Jason Atwood: Safari, Firefox. Then as you manage your passwords, you log into place. does that too and it sits on your and it sits on your safari Oh the browser.

59:02 Justin Edelstein: And I'm here.

Jason Atwood: It's in the browser. It provides its own browser. So if you were thinking, wow, I never want to log into that ADP. I'm giving ADP as an example because it's like, you know, like a 41K. Like, oh, I don't want to log in for a 41K. I can't get it because I don't know. Oh no, with this you go boom, boom, click in. And it will generate the password for you when you go to log in. So when you first go set it up, you say, it'll say what password you want. You just go... Give me 1700 characters. Fine. The highest password ever. Cause you never have to see it or know it ever again. Cause it synchronizes to everything.

Justin Edelstein: You click it, it's in and you can log into. That's a little scary for me. I'm got to be honest, like not knowing my password. Don't know it. That's a little frightening. I know. Just because, but it's secure. What if this, yeah, but what if this thing doesn't work one day? Like all of a sudden it just stops working or whatever. It's totally a trust thing. I totally get it. The sinking like what if you don't know your password then you have to reset it then they send it to you anyway Gas does it reset?

Jason Atwood: No, you would go to the website and reset it But the point is so first of all, there's there's two apps and you have to buy them both It's really we were trying

Justin Edelstein: To keep this to a half hour and it's definitely an hour. It's just you just hit an hour

Jason Atwood: Anyway, that is some there are tons of features. It can keep social information like your it can keep credit cards It can keep all sorts of stuff. I'm just trying with passwords the syncing works great Having it on Multiple places it has touch ID so I like that it's even more secure on your phone because you have to get touch I need to get into it It remembers where you I love mobile apps that have touch ideas But listen, it remembers where you were last on your phone So when you go into the app and you click it it brings you right back to that place That's a password for the one that you need because it's only the one you need most often It it is very how much does it cost? What's the deal?

Justin Edelstein: Well, you we're supposed to know these things before you do a lot of things the things but let me go look it up I think Wait So when I buy it, is it completely universal or am I buying this for my desktop and my mobile?

Jason Atwood: Well, there is nothing that's... Well, the Apple needs to fix that. Well, that's just ridiculous. Just ridiculous. Fix that. I don't know how much... Because I bought it. I can't see the price K- Like this synchronizes. I think you need the desktop because the desktop saves you, but when you do it here and it shows up on your other device and again, you have to log into it, you have master password, it is really, really good. And I've only put like six or seven passwords into it. I can tell you that this is going to be my new password manager. No more Evernote, no more putting passcodes and all stuff. I'm going to have, I'm going to start trusting it. I'm going to start generating it.

1:02:16 Justin Edelstein: Agile bits.t. Yes. How much is it? I'm on their website right now the store so they have bundles They have one password For Mac is $50 right? I think I got it through some sort of whatever but I think called knocks for Mac I don't know what that is. Yeah There's I One password for iOS and for Google or for Android and Google Play But they don't they don't have a place to

Jason Atwood: Click on them to go to the price

Justin Edelstein: Okay So I went to Google Play just to see what they wanted free on iOS. Oh, so basically you're buying it It is they made it As such, it is kind of cross-platform. If you want to think about it, you pay for it once you get it. Here's the other thing. It's cross-platform.

Jason Atwood: So if you're a Google Android user, but you have a Mac, or a Windows user, it's got Windows too. And I like that a little bit because what happens in two years, I want to, my password, I want to give up Mac and go to Windows, and I can't imagine, but wow, this fanboy can then take all his passwords and everything he's worked in one password for four years and work. Anyway. It's pretty cool. You know, I jumped, I thought it was too expensive. I think I got it through, I don't remember when. I just walked down by. I've owned it for so long. I've never used it. I now, I think within probably a month, I will say, I don't know how I live without it. It's really, really good. Especially generating and keeping it.

Jason Atwood: So anyway, that's my pick. It's one password by Agile Bits. It's 50 bucks, I guess, on the platform. And then you can get the free ones on the side. I don't know how that works... But it does all that stuff and does the generation. But again, the first time you go in and log into Salesforce on your desktop and you just click a little button and copy it and put it in, you're going to be like, oh, that's worth it. Because you literally just save yourself like 10, 13 seconds a shot. All right. That's the end of our podcast. We went over now. We're sorry kids. Follow Justin at Justin. Follow me at Jason Atwood. Follow Arkus at Arkus Inc. Facebook.com slash Arkus Inc. Success Community Group, we're there. LinkedIn, we're there. Google Plus, we're there until they shut it down.

Jason Atwood: Subscribe and review in iTunes and in Citro. That's Justin. This is Jason saying as always, enjoy those cloudy. days.

Justin Edelstein: You