Many Map Mergers - Episode #303 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 three hundred and third episode of CloudFocus Weekly, third week of April, April 2019. This episode is titled, Many Map Mergers. Let's check the just a meter on that Say something else straight out of Compton.

Justin Edelstein: That would not be true. Nope.

Jason Atwood: It would not You're straight out of the Marriott marquee Seminar all day.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah pretty much. How are you? I'm great. Thanks. How are you?

Jason Atwood: I Am great. I am great. Yeah All right. Well, we got a small agenda for today small ish Because Salesforce has been up been a purchasing Oh, have they? Yeah. So we're going to go over the two things they purchase. We're going to go over one quickly because it's like beep boop. And then maybe we'll go with the other one because it's actually quite a big deal. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. So maybe we'll today in today's session of Justin and Jason therapy session. I don't know how I feel about it either. Well, you know what? The best way to feel about something is to do it. on air on a podcast and put it out for millions of people to listen to All right. So first thing is Salesforce bought was map anything So they, funny enough, they, we should have named Arkus, Arkus anything, and I think we would have been bought already because they bought town or anything.

Jason Atwood: True statement. Years ago made by... Oh, what's the name of that? Silver Wine? And then now they bought Map Anything.

Justin Edelstein: Well back in the day there was this product called Gant Anything. Yes, I saw that at Dreamforce. Do you remember that at Dreamforce? 1211? Ha! Gant Anything. Gant... Or was it Gant Everything? thing.

Jason Atwood: I don't know. I probably have a picture somewhere. See, if we were good, everything if we were good podcasters. No, we are good podcasters. I'm going to make it because I don't do this. So someone else will have to do the work. We will post a picture of that into the into the iOS and Android app as special content. Special content for this episode. Yes. take no special content special content oh that's so good yeah how about that i'll put a picture where you can reference a brutal picture gantt anything or everything actually i think i look right on you fine we're all in our matching chinos walking the sidelines of the of the of the field all right Arca's official gear.

03:27 Justin Edelstein: The Arca's official. Takis and a tucked in. Oh, look, you're still wearing it. I'm still wearing it. You're wearing that shirt. Yes, I've gone through many of them.

Jason Atwood: That shirt stands on its own. It... no, no, no. I... This is the... This is the 2017 version. This one's separate 2017? This is 2017. Those were cotton. These are... whatever. They're that... you fabric is. All right, so, Matt Penne, interesting. I think it's, you know, geolocation has always been something that Salesforce, I feel like, adopted, wow, years and years ago, because they they they actually built it into Salesforce, that geocodes were... popped into to the addresses and you could and it would run and it would take your addresses and find the geocodes for them and then you could do some fun things on top of that but you could never do it natively because there was was nothing you couldn't do anything with it with the native tool because there was no way. There was no way to actually do anything with those geocodes.

Jason Atwood: Interesting enough. They now can do something with it. This does feel like another one of these vendors What's the other vendor?

Justin Edelstein: The other map? Yeah, it's called Geo point.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, Geo point If I were to point like oh Here you go again.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I'd be like, all right the big payday, but we get to still do what we want over here and they get to now get sucked up and spit out.

Jason Atwood: Well, they also know that this will take probably a long period of time before it turns into... I mean, it took years for Calendar Anything to show up in Lightning, which is where it eventually showed up in the Calendar in Lightning, but it took two.

Justin Edelstein: This will have the impact on field service Lightning. Absolutely. Right? Yup. Routing, routing, all that stuff. people out in the fields and then it'll I'm sure be hoping that there's that this is some sort of freemium situation where there's some level of mapping that they provide outside of just like yeah there's an address and there's a little image of a google map that's what which that exists as for free right so I would hope that you'd be able to maybe like I don't know, plot a bunch of accounts on something. Right. Basic stuff. And if you want to do more advanced stuff like routing or, you know, draw your own circles to create your own territories, if you will.

Jason Atwood: That's a little bit more on the list view maps would be nice. Take a list view and hit a map view of this view. That'd be cool.

Justin Edelstein: Again, things that we have no idea if they're gonna give away, charge for. My guess is they're gonna charge for lots of this stuff.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, that's a good prediction. All right, well, that was fun. I mean, it'd be fun, interesting to see it come in to Salesforce and where it comes in. I predict at least a couple years to see that. But the other bigger, much more controversial, and maybe sad, maybe happy news. is Salesforce buys Salesforce.org. and so for $300 million and this is, it's a strange, it's very strange because, and I read over the articles and some are very negative and I've talked to some people about it. We've internally talked about it as like, what does this mean? We obviously just full disclosure, we do a lot of business on both sides of the dot com and the dot org. And so this means something to us from a business standpoint because we work with both of these teams and have for years.

07:12 Jason Atwood: And we've been working with the dot org since they were tiny and now they're huge and now getting kind of swept back up into The $300 million, the money is going towards the foundation, which is, again, it is a confusing landscape that there are three entities, not two, because, you know, the salesforce.org and salesforce.com. but the foundation is the nonprofit center of it. So now there's only gonna be two. There's gonna be a foundation which is gonna handle all the guests, the grant writing and sort of money in program management.

Justin Edelstein: I'm just letting you do this. It's so much fun for me. Okay.

Jason Atwood: And thanks a lot. It's like watching you pretty much do anything else. And then... And then.org is not gonna, it's not gonna exist anymore. So.org with all the sales people and all the service and the product people is all swept up into Salesforce and they're gonna be part of Salesforce.

Justin Edelstein: So the foundation has been this way for a little while. Yeah. For about two to three years. It's been its own thing. Yeah, they've been focused on like disaster relief, like things of that nature. Whenever Salesforce gets involved with. an occurrence somewhere around the globe and they need to rally the you know the proverbial troops and raise some money and match some money and send some people. That's what the foundation is taking care of. It's much smaller than it used to be. It used to be salesforce.com and the sales First Foundation. And the Sills First Foundation were the ones that... were Salesforce.org before it existed. They sort of split out the business side and made it a social enterprise, the.org. And then the foundation just did really foundational stuff. And now it's like, okay, well, this business and this business.

Justin Edelstein: They look alike and they kind of do very much the same things. So let's make them into one business, I guess. I don't know. That's all we know, right? One.com buys.org and that's now they're going to be one. And who knows what's going to happen with the teams. Who knows if they'll actually, you know, start learning from each other and collaborating with each other from a product perspective. I mean, think about it. Like you've got this nonprofit cloud, you've got this education cloud. They are called clouds. That means something. And well, it does. I know you make a little shruggy face, but it's true. Because it's just a marketing term, but okay. Yeah. But you know, financial services cloud is actually a real... cloud a real product and is actually in the release notes the sales force release notes same for health cloud marketing cloud these are like real entities the non-profit cloud always felt like well that's a dot org thing oh that's just npsp over there and they actually have some really great tech really interesting things that they do and are on completely different release cycles and have their own version of the same thing that other products have their own versions of.

10:38 Justin Edelstein: There's no standard model for B2C, for example, right? Financial Services Cloud uses person accounts. nonprofit cloud uses its own householding model. So action plans, the three different version of the action plans. All these versions, right? There's engagement plans, action plans are actually the same thing. They're probably built on the same initial code base and then modified. So it'd be great to see these teams start to work with each other, but also not slow each other down like you know leverage and. my opinions of handling through this position period it a seamless to the what do you think it was mean to them so

Jason Atwood: From up from a from a From a the nonprofit if you are a nonprofit working with sales for laying one of the fears is to raise prices Right there's always been very deep. There's been that's not a fact right? That's just a story that you tell yourself so that's one of the fears Not necessarily based on reality. I don't, in being around this for way way way too long, I don't think they would do that. They just raised their prices. I see this as, I see this as someone in Salesforce, the Salesforce, the big salesforce.com. looked at the growth of.org growing faster in a ratio than.com and saw that as like wow this thing's getting very big I hope they get to enjoy all the cross-contamination. It is like a company buying another another company, except for one of those companies couldn't exist without the other.

13:42 Jason Atwood: It was a shadow company, right?.org relied on Salesforce for a lot. When we used to talk to the.org people, there was...

Justin Edelstein: Sunday, we'll have a customer as Salesforce calls there. We call them clients, customers of Salesforce where they will probably have to go through some legal stuff like re-signing of paperwork to a different entity. We've worked at big companies. That was always a thing. Let's reset. Oh, we got to get this resign. Oh my goodness. It would take like six months to get like a contract that you've already signed. Resign. Right. Hey, you're one big company. You should all be in the same Salesforce. Right.

Jason Atwood: You know, this is going to take at least three to four years.

Justin Edelstein: I don't even know if they're in the same org or not, but I would have to assume that they're not currently. And I would hope that they end up being in the same org. I have no idea.

16:53 Jason Atwood: Anyway. Yeah, I just I don't. I can't find anything that really upsets me about it, except for just the feeling of it feeling upsetting.

Justin Edelstein: There's a little culture thing that I feel, personally, having been a customer of the Salesforce Foundation back when it was 10 to 15 employees, and having watched it grow from 10 to 15 employees and knowing pretty much everybody who worked there. to being a thousand employees and not knowing everybody who works there, but still knowing a lot of the people who work there. helping the effort that they put into help people's missions as opposed to driving bottom line, right? And that's where this culture thing is going to be very interesting. When these companies actually become a company, because they really were different. They really were separate. They were.

Jason Atwood: But my, My argument is they've been coming closer and closer over the last three or four years.

Justin Edelstein: I would agree in part like from a much more about the money on the door sales like hey Sales account executives like really being driven By quota and hitting numbers. Yes, that's definitely become and that's why the businesses thrived in a certain respect, right? You can't just sit there and be like, we're just helping the world and let's just try and sell our biggest, baddest thing, which isn't even that great, to a competitor, a Blackbaud shop or something like that. But they've really invested over the last number of years in things like the nonprofit Success Pack in the nonprofit cloud, education cloud. with real infrastructure, real products, real ability to go to market with these impressive pieces of technology, that also have some real deep meaning a behind them. As opposed to, I'm going to make your salesperson more efficient, or I'm going to make your call center.

Justin Edelstein: Work better. Right. It's a different story to tell.

Jason Atwood: It is. And I think there are people who probably work at that organization who don't feel good about this. There's like I started at a company that was meant to do one thing and now I'm at a company that again, very highly connected that other company. So it's not like you didn't know that you're part of Salesforce. They were the best Salesforce ISV.

Justin Edelstein: That's what I've I've said it for a long time. When people ask me about Dotorg. I say Salesforce.org is the best Salesforce ISV. They're the best ISV out there. They have the best product that's part of the company. But now they're really part of a company. So are they an ISP anymore? Are they like financial services cloud? And that's it. You just get the resources you get. And that's that. I mean, I could see them peeling backs into those resources and saying, whoa, the product team for nonprofit cloud. And the product team for financial services cloud or licenses of financial services cloud costs like I don't know Ten times the amount of and I'm making that up I don't think it does but like ten times the amount of a license for nonprofit cloud.

20:36 Justin Edelstein: Why do we have So many resources working on this nonprofit cloud. They're gonna start to have to answer those very hard questions. Yeah and impact and Outcomes and doing good in the world hopefully will be an okay answer for why? Those resources are necessary otherwise they're gonna get stripped down to the studs and there'll be a big sales team and there'll be a Good product not a great one and that'll

Jason Atwood: Be the way it goes I mean, so you see how they even how they do the the sales structure, you know, there's Anyway, so many things that could happen. We'll learn more about it as it does as it goes. I am again Part of me believes that the core of Salesforce the dot-com core is Strong enough and there is still a vision of of you know business helping the world Which is one of Mark's Beniops big thing is that he will keep to that core regardless of where the organization sits or what their name is or whatever. Anyway, it's definitely a touchy topic and it'll actually be interesting to be at TDX and to be gathering some opinions and hearing about that. Okay, so All right. Well, we also by the way summer 19 the release notes are out They are so we will start blogging about those In the next well, yeah, we should are you sure?

Jason Atwood: I'll just someone will start blogging about the house Someone well, maybe you'll write one maybe no, I think it's on schedule You're giving me the no face. You checked. I will rectify that. I will say right now there should be some summer 19 blog post coming out. That will be happening.

Justin Edelstein: And then it'll happen. See how this thing's happy? You just say it and then it happens. It's like the image showing up in a special section.

Jason Atwood: It's funny, it's like I'm talking to somebody who's maybe going to be listening and it's going to happen. They're going to be listening. Maybe they'll just download. That's so fine. Just don't listen. All right. So we'll start covering that as well. Let's solve a quick one today. Someone pointed out to me today that we did one on... February 22nd March 22nd and so the person's like hey are you gonna do like April 22nd? I said no April 24th. Well, we'll skip a couple days.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, well we did January 22nd and March 22nd. I think no I think we February and March we definitely January No, I think we saw 300 no 300 was in December Oh, and we definitely took January off. Yeah, definitely. We did February 22nd and March 22nd. I think something like that. Oh, we should have done this on Monday.

23:38 Jason Atwood: Yeah, well, no, I was traveling. That's your fault. Yeah. All right, so let's go. Let's make some pics.

Justin Edelstein: Clap focus whenever pics. Yeah. I'm gonna do another anti-pic.

Jason Atwood: Oh, you're so grumpy. Wait, check the meter.

Justin Edelstein: Yours all good. oh, it's all good. It's all good. Is it good? Good? It's good. Good, you know, I'm in this anti-pick mode While I'm here Do you know how hard it is to get a known issue created from salesforce support? Oh, it's bad You just can't do it.

Jason Atwood: So you're basically still talking about the pick you made last time Didn't sales for support. No you pick the Gmail Anti, anti-pick gmail

Justin Edelstein: Whatever that thing happened that just solved itself. I guess magically sure it did Yeah, you know I had this issue yeah bring this now is it known Now it's gonna be yeah twelve people listen to this and the couple others that download So I deployed a process the other day. Very good. And it had a chatter post as part of it. And it was to at mention a chatter group. Okay? Okay. You can't really deploy these things because chatter groups... You can't really deploy a chatter group, right? So I deployed the thing and it's referencing this chatter group, but I created the chatter group in production environment with the same exact name so that it would be deployed. And it did deploy and it was fine. I even went back into it and edited it before I activated it and retyped in the name of the group.

Justin Edelstein: Like because it was So I was like at the name of group right so that it made sure it was the right one saved it activated it Every time the process fired got this like exception that the group didn't exist Like that doesn't make any sense like I typed it in the groups right there, right? I submitted it to support they told me that Should rebuild the entire process And production yeah, and if I rebuild the entire process not a new version but a brand new process. Oh, that's fun That it'll work and I'm like, okay, but bug here like I didn't like I'm typing in I'm at mentioning that group right there with this ID right this group that ID And it's referencing some other ID. I don't know where it's coming from must be stuck in that deploy And that's why they said to recreate one and then they said you shouldn't do what you did You shouldn't deploy the thing and I was like, oh so I should just build stuff in production.

Justin Edelstein: I guess I actually feel not they would not create a known issue for me on this.

Jason Atwood: Oh Did you take the Twitter?

26:42 Justin Edelstein: You know, I guess it's not that big of a problem. I don't know. It's a bug. It is a bug, which is a known issue. Well, apparently I was the first person to find it. That's right. Until more people find it It's not a known issue, but by their standards. No, you have to have one person find it and then other people apparently not Apparently like for it to be known more than one person has to know about it. Well, I know about it Well now that's two. Can you? Can you submit this exact problem? Yes! Just copy the text you did, I'll post it in, that'll be two people. I was befuddled by the whole situation and then to just rebuild it in production.

Jason Atwood: Just rebuild it. By the way, we have enough people at Arkus that we could have everybody put in cases at the same time. I don't want to bother everybody.

Justin Edelstein: Coordinate the clicks. I don't want to bother. It's just so annoying to deal with support that I just can't even..... Anyway, that was a little rant Hopefully support will get better when these two companies become one and they'll like you know Double down on it and not just pull away from it. I know we're laughing It's so bad. It's gonna be the support It's gonna be the first thing to go for a company that sells the best customer support Whatever they want to customer service cloud thing ever on the planet. It's just, I mean,

Jason Atwood: Again, personal opinion here. Oh man. Look what I did. It's just they don't, it's a people problem. This is not, this is not their support process of tickets and cases and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And auto responses, it's all fine. It's just a people problem because first of all, they deflect way too much. Their deflection shields are on 10. They will deflect anything and give you just canned responses. And I get it. They're getting tons and tons of crap. But there's got to be a better way. Maybe. some sort of artificial intelligence that can figure out whether this is something that needs to be deflected because it's some stupid person asking some stupid question that they could easily google four seconds and find and whether it needs it needs to actually be looked at and not deflected.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, how about also like you're paying for it? Like if you're paying for the as opposed to their free support. There should be a different level of sophistication.

Jason Atwood: Free support for a subscription model, for a description I mean I'm paying for licenses, so I hate when they say free support. Whatever baked in as opposed to premier.

Justin Edelstein: Okay, whatever But at the same time, I think their KPIs are just wrong like as a consultant who has a Service Cloud consulting certification. Ditto. I'd walk right in there and I'd be like, show me your dashboards. What are you measuring? Because whatever it is, it's wrong. It's closed. It's wrong. Whatever you're measuring is wrong because the whole process is really screwed out. The def the deflection is very bad.

Jason Atwood: And then some of the policies they have that's, just like, that they want to get back to you within certain periods of time, even if it's just to say, KPIs are off. They're measuring this stupid thing. And then what's the other thing I would say? And then it's the people. They're... Because again, if you find a very good support person, here's what good support people do. I know this is... This is cost money, but sorry, kids. Like, they look at the ticket. They think about it. They then research it. And then they get in to help it. But then they ask if you granted log write permission. But a good first. They ask that first? Or do they look? A good support person looks at the ticket, reads it thoroughly. Sees that they've granted then goes in the crazy man logs into the org tries the thing Sees that it doesn't work and then goes to working on it And the problem is they're so into deflection that they don't they just immediately deflect like well, I can't go again You didn't grant me.

30:39 Jason Atwood: Yes, I did. It's in the ticket and they just do it over and over and over again And that's the problem And I'll tell you because I am support, like you're support too. We support our clients and have things that people come to us and they say the difference is when I send you something you actually look into it. I say yeah. Well A, you're paying me to do it, but B, I'm gonna be thorough because that's my job is to be thorough. I'm not just to go, did you hit that X button? No. If you send me something, I'm gonna look at it. I'm gonna log into your org, I'm gonna see what I can see, I'm gonna try to replicate what you just saw. Right, I'm gonna be thorough, and that's the difference.

Jason Atwood: It's all that needs to happen, they just need to be thorough.

Justin Edelstein: All right, so here's my pick. All right, here's your pick. That came out of poor support experience. But thorough is expensive, very expensive.

Jason Atwood: But premier support should be thorough. Yeah, you're paying for it. They should be thorough. They shouldn't do all this deflection stuff, they should be thorough. They should be able to open up a ticket, sorry, open up a case. read it, go through the steps, try it. They should do all that before they get back to you with the deflection.

Justin Edelstein: Right. All right, moving on. All right, so RCN to go. My pig. You have it, no?

Jason Atwood: I have it. I haven't used it in a long time. All right, so.

Justin Edelstein: We both live in the same building. You have RCN. I have RCN. I do. Now, now RCN2GO is free with a subscription to RCN and a TiVo box that they,

Jason Atwood: Yeah. Is this RCN2GO to hell? They can.

Justin Edelstein: So... It does one thing really well, which on my phone like right now I could pull up and Hit record on something tonight at like 8 o'clock if I want to now use RC in to go to there You use T-boat in there. I see and ago. That's weird, which basically logs you into T-boat. It's the same difference. Okay And yeah, I can go and like set a recording like oh, I really want to watch that. Oh my goodness on tonight I'm gonna be out tonight. Let me set that right now. Right? Yeah easy peasy done but You're supposed to While you're on your network, you're supposed to be able to actually watch things on rcn to go and also download things that are on your TiVo onto your device. You have ring with you like on an airplane.

Justin Edelstein: So I go to try and do this before I last traveled whenever that was a couple of weeks ago. I could not get it. Do the download thing hmm, then I couldn't get it to even just let me watch something So I look into it and I call them up and they say well, you're not on the same network Tivo and I don't understand how that's possible Because my internet is from RCN right? And my cable is from RCN. Okay, and I only have one network And they can't really answer these questions for me as to how the TiVo is on a different network than my iPad. Huh? It... you can't. So they're gonna have to send a technician. Oh. Which I'm like, I don't want a technician. No.

34:24 Jason Atwood: Ahh. That's what you need to do. That's terrible. Okay, your your pick is terrible. Well, it's a good pick, but it's a bad pick So I'm going to pick bad pick. I don't pick podcasts very often because I don't. You pick releases. I sometimes pick releases. Pick release. It's been a while. But I have found actually off one that I think you and Amy listen to, which was the BBC World Service, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. Yeah. Which stopped because it got to 50, 50. But then they started up again. Oh, they did? Yes. And they started up again. So that first of all, that's a great, that's a great series and you don't have to listen to them in whatever. The only thing is they're about nine minutes. So they're short, they're commuter, they're, they're commuter length.

Jason Atwood: You listen to like three of them in a commute. Very good. Really just fun, whatever. So when they started up. Which I've been hearing this has been podcast mean we should do this on our podcast Where one podcast will promote another podcast so like Freakonomics used to do it with the with another one Like they'll kind of tell you about another one But so anyways from 50 things that made the modern economy was from the BBC World Service for the first three episodes as they were getting ready to watch their new the new season I guess although they're going beyond 50 so I gotta rename that they a started playing another another podcast as like a preview and it was 30 animals that made us smarter which is basically the same thing just about animals and it's great it's great I will say it is just It's fun, but it's all about how animals we taken things from and use animals and as you know, either, whether it's technology, whatever it is.

Jason Atwood: It is a great series. So that's a double pick for you. This 30 animals that made a smarter in the 50 things that made the modern economy They're both from BBC. They're free They download this and they come out every couple of weeks. Really bite-sized little things, but just really, I mean, podcasts are amazing. This one excluded, of course. But they, it's just, it's like great information and stuff like that you can just listen to and just go, wow, that's, I learned something. Okay. That's it. That's, I've also learned that, that you don't like RCN to go. All right, so next time we'll probably jump into summer 19. You can follow Justin and all of his rants against RCN at Just Elstine. You can follow me at JasonAtwood, the company's at Arca Sync. We're in the success community in the Power of Us group hubs, although I think we've been migrated to a topic or something now that's in the Power of Us group.

Jason Atwood: What is this? Run. We're in the LinkedIn on the Google Plus. Of course, you want to review us. We love that. Subscribe and review an iTunes stitcher, Google, tune in. I think we're even looking at putting ourselves in soundcloud. It's so much fun. And Spotify. Until that happens, it's Justin and Jason saying, enjoy those cloudy. days.

38:02 Justin Edelstein: You