Salesforce

Last year I came across a post by Sharif Shaalan on his blog Salesforce.com Tips, Tricks, Solutions, and Thoughts talking about his favorite Salesforce Tools he uses quite often and I really enjoyed his posting, so I thought I would share my favorite tools. Salesforce.com prides it’s self as a “No Software” company meaning everything you need to get up and running is in the product and platform. Well you may not need software to get up and running on Salesforce but it takes great tools to keep to running smooth and efficient. This week I wanted to share with you my favorite tools that make my daily Salesforce administration and development easy.

One of the challenges I face within Salesforce is noticing performance issues before my users do. It doesn’t happen to often but when it does my users notice. Like any other system Salesforce is only as weak as its weakest link. To help me stay ahead without constantly having to look at trust.salesforce.com I’ve created a zap using Zapier to monitor the rss feed for my server and send me a email when an incident is reported though the rss feed. Check out my zap below.

I love to learn and talk SQL all day everyday which gave me the inspiration for my blog post about my favorite SSIS Reference Points and my Favorite Business Intelligence Blogs in the past. So without further adieu I present to my list of what I blogs I commonly read in the Salesforce area and of course there in no particular order. I’ve built on the platform and written functions around it off and on over the last 4 years. So when I want to learn a little something something I check out these cool blogs they’re cross products and industries and all wholesome goodness.

This year I made the trip to San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual DreamForce a five day conference that trumps all other conference.  Every aspect of the event was amazing and WOW 120,000 attendees.  The leadership speaker series, the trainings, the networking opportunities, and the parties were all great. My highlights and most memorable moments were getting to meet a couple of vendors that I only get to speak with on the phone including one who is located in France. But it wouldn’t be a good DreamForce without good entertainment and SalesForce raises the bar in this aspect as well the opening Keynote featured Huey Lewis and The News followed by an evening concert with GreenDay and Blonde. One after party I attended had MC Hammer DJing it. As well 100’s of parties across the city. So many parties that a marketing company crested Partyforce a app to track all the parties happening throughout the week. It’s even got checkin functions and leaderboard. The speaker lineup this year focused on women in technology (WIT) and Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce had two amazing speakers join him for on stage discussions on Tuesday he was joined by CEO Marissa Mayer of Yahoo their conversation lasted for about hour and a half and focus on changing the focus and culture at Yahoo.  It was very insightful and I took away from it a lot.  One thing she said that I’ll remember is how she has stays organized with a never ending priority list. The other thing that stuck with me was a comment she made regarding work life balance stating she lived her life a Vince Lombardi quote “His priority is God, family, Packers” or something like that. The next night Marc was joined on stage for a discussion with another amazing leader in the technology industry Sheryl Sandberg the CEO of Facebook.  Sheryl has recently released a new book called Lean In which all attendees received a free copy of.  In the book she talks about closing the gap on gender diversity. It was quite interesting conversation her and Marc had the take away from their fireside was being more conscious of my communication with female coworkers…..I guess. Over the next few weeks I’ll read her book Lean In and maybe I’ll rewrite a couple of post about it and my thoughts regarding. All my crazy pictures from the week long adventure can be seen at https://plus.google.com/photos/105588147711118968857/albums/5951051845514062977?authkey=CM7cnL-j1I_GMw