Salesforce Heretic

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Occasionally I stumble upon polarizing issues, and then promptly beat them into submission on this blog. I’ve got some pet peeves (yes, I have stupidpeopleitis… therapy helps… a little…), and some easy targets (outages), and whatnot. I didn’t start this blog as a popularity contest… I’m quote happy being a ‘behind-the-scenes’ guy. Hard to believe, I know…. In the last few weeks I’ve been getting more and more emails and I was perusing some interesting ideas over on the idea exchange earlier today and it all came together:

If Salesforce.com is selling Customer Relationship Management software (it’s core business by any definition) they why do they constantly hinder the users efforts to maintain a good (clean) relationship by ‘branding’ all over the place?

Case in point - if you’re a Bandwidth.com customer, do you really care if Bandwidth.com uses Salesforce.com? Do you care of Cisco does? Does their use of Salesforce.com make Cisco’s routers more stable, Bandwidth.com’s VoIP service sound clearer? Should the fact that your company uses Salesforce.com change the way your customer should interact with you? (more…)

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Just a quick update on my previous posts regarding obnxious advertising in the SFDC UI….

Fifedog has submitted a request to the Salesforce.com “Ideas” site entitled Be Gone Sawbanners Please Ge Gone. Those of you who think that advertising to your users on a service you pay for should be opt-in, not opt-out please hop over and promote the idea.

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If users whine to their admins, and SFDC never hears it… did it really happen?

Hot on the heels of the AppExchange intrusive ad is a brand new “Unlimited Edition” advert… Same thing, same obnxious locaiton, new code to disable it: (more…)

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As I previously covered in my “Dare to Dream” blog entry I outlined a scoring system for the Winter ‘07 release. Now that Dreamforce has passed, and hopefully those at Salesforce.com are well into the post-Dreamforce recovery period we can take a look ahead into the new release. Scott Hemmeter over at Arrowpointe wrote a nice summary of the announced features over on his blog.

I’ve taken most of the publically available information and added it to my scoring spreadsheet, available as a PDF: Winter ‘07 Preliminary Release Scoring

Please note that I’ve generally erred toward a higher score, with a few exceptions, and I have not gone through my list of bugs yet. It would be premature to speculate as to what they may, or may not, have fixed until it is finally released. As the release approaches I will post my excel spreadsheet so that everyone can score the release for themselves.

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OMFG - If I read one more blog entry this week that has a link to the ‘Apex isn’t vendor lock-in’ blog post I’m gonna hurl. But first….

I gotta give some kudos to Marc (it’s with a “c” guys, not a “k”) and the Marketing Team over at SFDC. The aggregate hype and spin that was spewing forth from this years Dreamforce was nothing short of, Salesforce-esque. In one move you announced your most important announcement ever (so far), completely overshadowed the next release, and hyped a feature that won’t go into beta until 2007. But what really impresses me (and I’m actually not being sarcastic - in this sentence) is the number of press pundits, bloggers, and tech writers who have completely missed the boat and tied Apex solely to the Winter ‘07 release. (more…)

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Now I know I said I wouldn’t be blogging anything Dreamforce-specific, but I think you’ll forgive me a bit.

So the cat’s out of the bag finally on Apex. It’s a really cool hybrid language that allows us to run code on the salesforce.com server. No more back and forth with the API for alot of stuff. It’s an aweful lot like Java in many respects, but I think I see a hint of Python in there as well. (Why we need another full-blown language aside — couldn’t we just have used Java?)

I haven’t yet been able to get hands-on with it yet, but its features seem VERY cool. It even allows you to expose your code on the SFDC server thru the SFDC API.

In keeping up to date with my various RSS feeds I came across Dan Farber’s blog entry from today over at ZDNet. (more…)

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I’d be hard pressed to find a Salesforce customer who doesn’t know there’s 3 days until the start of Dreamforce now… You could barely miss the advertising — something akin to using a nuclear warhead to clear out a tree stump. If you want to meet me I won’t be at Dreamforce this year. My operatives will be in place, so I’ll pass along anything major that goes public. Me and 50 other blogs.

I haven’t been very deep ‘in the loop’ with this release like I normally try to be. It’s a culmination of a number of factors, but mostly I want to take a step back and really evalaute this release without all the inside information and getting caught up in the hype and anticipation. So in keeping with that idea I won’t be blogging anything dreamforce specific, however I do plan on scoring the new release.

Yes, scoring. (more…)

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In my last post I basically ripped apart an SFDC AppExchange advertising campaign as being overly obtrusive and obnxcious.

Gareth Davies followed up with an excellent blog entry on his “Where’s the Upside?” blog. It’s a great read, and he raises some excellent points:

How can partners sell their new products to end-users? In the B2C market it’s easy. They guy using the product has the power to purchase and install it. No-one else is involved, in B2B that’s not the same.

If you haven’t read it, go take it for a read, well worth a few mintes of time.

I had a reply to his post I was going to place on his blog, until I realized just how long and varied it got and thought I’d express it here as well. (more…)

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I don’t know about most people but I tend to go quite a long way to block pop-up, pop-under, roll-in, roll-out, roll-over, auto-click, and other obtrusive, annoying kinds of advertising seen around the ‘net. I also don’t know quite when SFDC decided to put one on the home page after you log-in either…. I’m not one to stand for things that really annoy the living hell out of me, especially when they get in the way of clicking the too-often-used Setup link. (Admittedly I should Bookmark the thing but….) So instead of, well, raising my concerns with SFDC, I took matters into my own hands. Here’s the ad, read on to see how to disable it.

(more…)

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I just read Jeff Nolan’s post on his blog entitled “What is the deal with Salesforce.com and their Cult?” (Thanks SalesForceWatch.com)

There’s one quote in particular that I’d like to call out. In fact I think I’ll be emailing it to Marc himself later today or tomorrow: (Emphasis added)

Here’s the real problem that I see SFdC running into with their obsession with multi-tenant hosted software, it’s really their religion and just like you can’t decide it’s convenient to switch religions when the opportunity avows itself, they will not be able to offer anything other than what they are currently doing when customers ask them to.

The thing about religous zelots is, sometimes they can’t see the forest for the trees. This also dovetails nicely into my discussion about trying to be everything to everybody.