Yazar Turk

Keep Private Clouds Private

I can't stand IT people talking or writing about private clouds.  I don't get them, what they are, why anyone would care.  I have a suspicion that they are simply trying to confuse all the business people out there.   Lots of jargon, lots of technical terms, advanced sounding language, and hope that maybe some business people might think there is something to it.

"They" bring up scary sounding (but really baseless) objections to public clouds that might scare some business people about putting their data in the cloud.

They say - 

1) Its insecure.  This is total bullshit.  The real truth is that a real cloud provider is far more secure than a privately managed infrastructure can ever be.

2) Its not government compliant.  Huh?  What the hell is that objection..!!  Where'd they get that.?  Please, read SOX.  Its about policy, procedure, and controls.. No one makes a judgment as to how to achieve it.  In fact, it is far easier to put those controls in place with a real cloud provider like salesforce.com.

I'm more in the "make fun of the private cloud people" tribe.  Peter Coffee sums it up pretty nicely.

I used to feel the same exact way 10 years ago during the ASP hype days.  (Application Service Provider for the young readers.)  Though there were some real service clouds even back then like openair.com or even quickbase.com, there was a lot more companies taking on premises equipment and hosting it for you in their data centers, and calling them selves ASPs.  I used to think, gee, what the hell are you doing for me again besides moving my machines and reselling me your pipe?

Fast forward 2010.  Same bullshit, this private cloud stuff.  The Cloud Movement is real, its growing fast, it has real benefits, and real adoption.  So there is a lot of companies mostly in the in infrastructure space renaming their hosted / "managed" services to private clouds.

Smart people, smart companies will see through the propaganda.  The real, open, cloud service providers will be the only winners in this race.

Chatter Your Way to Real Time Information

Chatter is going to replace the way you collaborate with your colleagues.  Today, it’s highly likely that you use email to communicate facts.  Facts about deals, contracts, projects, requirements, personnel, hiring, etc.  You probably also have a lot of status meetings.  If you’re like most people, you have more meetings than you care for.   You probably have a lot of memorandums, conference calls floating around.  All the business communication tools you have at your disposal serve to relay important information.

Although I think it’s too radical to say it’s the end of Email, Status Reports, and Meetings, but, I would say that it certainly is going to make a dent in all three if Chatter is adopted and used throughout an enterprise.  The real power of Chatter is record / context based threads.  Imagine facebook, except you can ‘friend’ any opportunity, account, contact, etc and see its status updates, whether they are automatically posted by the record itself, or a colleague posts something interesting about it.

Let’s look at all three:

Email

What is in your inbox these days?  Do you get as much personal email as you use to?  Probably not since you’ve started using Facebook in earnest.  Your inbox is probably full of business communication.  Multiple people on the cc line, you probably get 100s of emails where you are not the direct recipient, but, rather copied as an FYI.  How much time do you spend sorting through it all, then searching and retrieving a piece of information later when you need it?  If you’re like most people, email is not the most productive use of your time.

In comes Chatter to the rescue.   Chatter should replace a great deal of the volume of the fact based emails you get.  Why?  Because facts can be communicated in context sensitive wall posts about a particular subject.  When the Account manager on a large key account wants to publish a delay in the opportunity and the reason for it, she will post it on the opportunity’s wall.  Those who care will be followers of the opportunity and can see the needed information.  It makes the information available to all that need it, not just those privileged enough to be remembered to be copied on the cc line.  Perhaps even more importantly, it creates a real time dialogue online that anyone can join in, creating an easy to manage context sensitive topic based thread.  This is revolutionary.

The great thing is Facebook has already trained everyone on the concept of walls, posts, threads, and the user experience will have instant adoption.

For project management, I’ve already eliminated emails as a fact communicating tool even before Chatter.  I’ve been using SFDC Ideas to post and track facts for years.  Chatter will take this to the next step and make it intuitively easy for everyone to get with the concept that email is bad, real time as needed thread tracking is good.

 

 

Status Reports / Updates

Ask anyone where they rank their daily / weekly / monthly status reports on their ladder of job enjoyment and you’ll likely find a similar theme – everyone hates it.

Chatter, combined with scheduled sales force reports will provide the ability to end or seriously reduce the waste of needless status reports?   Everyone that needs information will be able to access it in real time, when they need it.  For the diehard status report recipient who refuse to logon, you can still send them whatever information is needed in a nice automated report.  It works, as long as you can get your team to input the date into your apps.

 

Meetings

Who loves meetings?  I haven’t met anyone in corporate America that will stand up and say they love meetings.    People show up late, people that aren’t contributors ask a lot of questions.

If everyone has all the information they need simply by logging on, you can eliminate a lot of the more needless meetings.  The idea behind real time information flow is that people don’t have to wait for a scheduled meeting to obtain information from others.  It’s all online.  In wall posts and relevant context based threads.

IBM acquires Cast Iron

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700501

This is certainly an endorsement for the cloud.

The iPad is the ultimate amazing CRM tool

The iPad is truly a remarkable, amazing, game changing device. It will forever change the hand held market for CRM. I just don't see sales people ever running around anymore in the field without one. Salesforce.com works beautifully in the Safari browser. I've been testing various orgs, and it is a no brainer decision for mobile CRM. I'm just going to ditch the quirky little iPhone and Blackberry apps and go with the iPad's browser. Moreover, if you get scheduled reports emailed to you, you will LOVE the formatting on the iPad mail browser. Scheduled reports was near useless on my iPhone or BB. So from now on, I'm strongly recommending the iPad for mobile CRM use.

Tour de CRM?

"What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equilavent of a bicycle for our minds."  - Steve Jobs

This visionary statement still holds more true today than ever.  Think about that.  It is not that people can't walk from one point to the other.  Its that they can do it a lot faster if they ride a bike and cover a lot more ground.   Note that unlike a car, the bike uses human creativity and energy to make it work as remarkable as it does.

Consider CRM - it should act as a bicycle for sales people.  The CRM, like a bike, should work to unleash the power of human eneergy and creativity.  It can't work without sales people, and the human element should still be the key component.

Next time you are doing another CRM project, think about that when you are looking at your desired features list.  For every feautre or Idea that is proposed, evalute it in terms of the Bike analogy - does this unleash or accelerate the human power of my sales people?

Using Chatter to Thrash

Every project, irregardless of size or formal methodology being used has it - The traditionalists call it requirements gathering, the more elegant amongst us call it requirements elicitation, the agile camp calls it story boarding.  Seth Godin calls it Thrashing in his new book Linchpin.  I like the word Thrashing, because I think it more accurately describes the often chaotic, mostly random, usually unstructured, free-form nature of collecting and documenting requirements.  It typically involves a wide group of people that crosses geography, functional departments, and lines of business.  Its an inclusive process with lots of opinions.

All really comes down to the same thing - getting to the blueprint of what you are going to do by engaging all the stakeholders early in the process.

The one thing that strikes me as odd about the whole thing is that very smart people are still talking about using physical note cards, or sticky notes, and what not to paper record ideas and notes as part of the Thrashing effort.

I think the better way, at least for salesforce projects, is to use ... (drum rolls please ... ) salesforce Ideas and Chatter to collaborate.  You already have an instance turned on for the CRM implementation, it doesn't cost you anything extra, your clients users are already all on the system, and what better way to get your client user groups adopting the platform?  The added benefit being that if they use it during your implementation, you'll get pre-trained users by the time your CRM project is finished. 

CRM User Adoption Problems? Think Sprezzatura

"What exactly is CRM anyway?"  "What's it supposed to do for me", sales people often ask.

Getting sales people to use the CRM everyday is a challenge for most organizations.

Sure, the executive sponsors can dictate its use, you can have live sales management meetings using data from the CRM system.  Commissions can be tied to sales data inside the CRM system.

But if you really want to get user adoption soaring, think in terms of Sprezzatura, “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

If you can get your CRM system to help the sales, customer service, marketing users increase their Sprezzatura, your user adoption will increase dramatically.  Why?  Because Sprezzatura is elusive to most people, and CRM technology can certainly help if done right.

What they don't tell you in Org migration school.

OK, well, not quite true, its in the SFDC enterprise lifecyle development guide.

However, I'm always hunting and pecking for this information and tend to forget where to find it.

So here is a list of Metadata components as of Winter 10 that CAN NOT be auto migrated and needs manual migration between orgs.  This is important when planning on a production release and you need to create a checklist of items for your team to migrate manually post deployment but pre launch.

From the salesforce.com development life cycle guide:

 

The following components cannot be retrieved or deployed in the Metadata API, and changes to them (in a production organization or development environment) require manual migration:

 

• Account Contact Roles

• Account Partner Roles

• Account Teams

• Activity Button Override

• Activity Settings

• Approval Process

• Auto-number on customizable standard fields

• Business Hours

• Call Center Case Contact Roles

• Campaign Influence

• Case Assignment Rules

• Case Team Roles

• Case Escalation Rules

• Console Layouts

• Contracts Settings

• Delegated Administration

• Dependent picklist rules

• Email Bounce Administration

• Email-to-Case

• Fiscal Year

• Forecasts

• HTML Document and Attachment Settings

• Label renames

• Lead Assignment Rules

• Lead Processes

• Lead Settings

• List views on standard objects

• Ideas Comment Validation Rule

• Ideas Communities

• Ideas Settings

• Mail Merge Templates

• Mobile Administration

• Mobile Users and Devices

• Offline Briefcase Configurations

• Opportunity Big Deal Alert

• Opportunity Competitors

• Opportunity Contact Roles

• Opportunity Sales Processes

• Opportunity Settings

• Opportunity Update Reminders

• Organization Wide Defaults

• Partner Management

• Picklist in customizable standard fields—custom picklist fields on standard objects work in the Metadata API, but not standard picklists

• Predefined Case Teams

• Product Schedule Setup

• Product Settings

• Public and Resource Calendars

• Public Groups

• Queues

• Role Hierarchies

• Salesforce.com to Salesforce.com

• Sales Team and Account Team Roles

• Search layouts on standard objects

• Search Settings

• Self-Service Public Solutions

• Self-Service Web-to-Case

• Self-Service Portal Settings

• Self-Service Portal Users

• Self-Service Portal Font and Colors

• Sharing Rules

• Solution Categories

• Solution Settings

• Solution Processes

• Standard picklist fields

• Support Processes

• Support Settings

• Support Auto-Response Rules

• Tab renames

• Tag Settings

• Territory Assignment Rules

• User Interface Settings

• Web Links on PersonAccount page layouts

• Web-to-Lead

• Web-to-Lead Auto-Response

Can Opportunities Really Talk To You?

Well, not yet.  But they will in 2010 when Salesforce Chatter comes out.
And so will any other object - you'll be able to turn Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, custom objects, etc into chatterboxes.

There is a lot of mixed reviews about the recently announced Salesforce Chatter.  Some are wondering why would you need Chatter in the world of twitter and facebook.

I got a chance to talk to the a developer on the Chatter team at Dreamforce and walked through the application. 

The way I make sense of it is that each record in salesforce can have its own "wall" like in facebook.  You will be able to configure fields (up to 20, just like history tracking) in the record to publish to its own wall when criteria you set is met.  So for example an opportunity can have a wall where different users can post comments (nice.! even by itself) and also intermingle with system generated wall posts that make sense.  So a team can be collaborating on a deal by posting information to the deals wall, and at the same time the deal itself can intelligently participate in the conversation by posting to its own wall.

I think its neat, and can think of a lot of uses for it in records that require collaboration (bugs, requirements, user stories, opportunities, quotes, etc.).

Even now, I have really abandoned email in requirements elicitation and sfdc implementation management - both my customers and developers post comments into Ideas to collaborate.  Chatter will replace that in a much more context sensitive and useful manner.

Integrate Google Wave, use Salesforce Chatter, and you'll be able to get everyone collaborating an order of magnitude more productively than you can via email.

I'll blog more specifically about it when the developer preview becomes available next year.

Managing Multiple Salesforce Org Logins

If you are an admin or Salesforce.com developer, no doubt you have multiple logins to manage multiple production, developer, and sandbox orgs, all of which must be unique.  In addition, if you use the same email address for your different orgs, it is often difficult to know the sending sfdc org origin of an auto-email that you have received.  

For example, check out this Apex governance warning:

So I know that it came from org  005700000012eDf/00D700000008qtn.  Now, there are probably people that I don't know, and probably don't want to know, that remember their org ids.  I'm not one of them.

The only other clue is that it was sent to mehmet@ergun.net.  Since I have a couple of dozen orgs that uses that address, so that's not too helpful either.  Now multiply this my lots of orgs, lots of clients, and well ... it can become confusing.

However, I've found a few simple tricks that you can use to simplify multiple org management and keep sane.

Part 1 - Use + Aliases to create unique user names and matching emails

For Gmail users (is there anyone who isn't anymore?!) here is a neat trick that can come in handy for managing multiple Salesforce logins:

Without changing any of your Gmail settings, you can alias the same address by adding a + to your email address before the @ and designate the org name.  It also works fine with domain names you have associated with your Gmail account.

For example:

ergunme@gmail.com can be aliased as 

ergunme+prodClient1@gmail.com

ergunme+devClient1@gmail.com

ergunme+trainingClient1@gmail.com

Now the trick is for each SFDC Org login use a + alias for your unique user name and make your email address the same as your user name for that particular org.

When you get an email from SFDC you can easily tell which email alias / user name it was sent to:

Part 2 : Managing Your Logins in SFDC

I use a simple SFDC custom object to remember my logins and auto-login in to my different SFDC orgs.  That way, I only have to login once to a single ORG.

Simply store your org name, user name, password, and org type in an object and create a custom formula field to enable auto-login by passing the user name (un) and password (pw) as parameters in the login URL.

Here is the formula field:

----------->

HYPERLINK( 

Case( org_type__c,
'Production',
"https://login.salesforce.com/?un=" ,
'Development',
"https://login.salesforce.com/?un=" ,
'Sandbox',
"https://test.salesforce.com/?un=" ,' ')

& substitute(substitute(un__c, '+', '%2b'), '@', '%40') & "&pw=" & Pw__c
,

"SFDC"

)

<----------------

The HYPERLINK function encodes the URL based on the Org Type, User Name, and Password fields.

The only thing to remember is that the + and @ signs in the URL must be encoded with %2b and %40 which you can easily do using the substitute function.