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What's Salesforce? (2019)

retool.com

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#171

I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool, but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of their Growth analyst, Justin Gage ( https://randomshit.dev/ ) who seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are and how they work in his own right. These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor cont…

Can you please post a link to the article about Accenture? Sounds interesting

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#172
post #2

I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load progressively, slowly, making it nearly im…

You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list. Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.

Haha My experience has been bit different with medium size companies. Small companies just dont buy any custom-developed software. Medium-sized have the money to pay for custom development, but not for buying SAP. And the executives are extremely sensitive to the effect of the software on work efficiency - basically this is what they pay for, the software is supposed to make employees more effective so they can avoid hiring more people. If the application gets slow and can't keep up with the business then they need to move more people to handle the slow task and the app developers get grilled. On the other hand, in large companies, management quite often ignores it, they can just hire more people and thus grow their kingdoms.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#173
post #150
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a startup in the B2B space a while back, and it's amazing how much big customers can push you around and demand features. The salesguys would promise something and then a week later we'd have the feature in a special patch build for them. I heard Cisco did the same thing, and by the time they got big they had hundreds of special branches for different groups of customers. It was a mess. Then I worked for…

Yes, it takes special fortitude to fight off the demands of your precious new mega-customer, be they a Cisco or whoever. Sometimes they'll really screw your product up if you let them. (Though sometimes also they'll give you those jewels of requirements that you really needed). It's a sliding scale. You have to pander to them to some degree - there's no choice. But it takes grit to refuse to e.g. branch your core cod…

And sometimes you just screw your product up by not listening to what customers need, or by assuming that you know it better than them. For now i refused to do custom branches, instead the product is made more and more configurable. And it's more successful approach so far than trying to maintain a separate version for every customer.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#174

I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating. You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely e…

You have to buy a specialized backup product like Ownbackup or Spanner. These in turn, utilize Salesforce's bulk apis. Salesforce does not let anyone touch the underlying databases.

It's baffling that a product like Salesforce relies on paid third party products to deliver an essential feature like restoring backed up data.

And even those can't change autonumbered standard fields, like the case number. That's problematic, because they don't only live in Salesforce but get referenced from outside.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#175

I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating. You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely e…

> You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields Have you tried marking fields for user set IDs as external IDs. This field can then be used while doing upsert. But what do you mean by there is no way to import it? Apart from Dataloader there are a host of companies that offer this feature.

Suppose a bad actor has gotten full access to our Salesforce, deleted everything and emptied out the recycling bin. We need to restore everything.

Luckily, we used the weekly export feature and have all our data, we only need to get it back into Salesforce. But how do we do that?

- Dataloader can only restore one object at a time. We have 350 different objects.

- We need to restore the relationships between objects. They are saved by Id, but we can't keep the original Id. So we have to keep track of the original Id and the new Id for each inserted record, and replace them in every other object. That also means we have to insert the objects in topological order. If there are any cycles or self-relationships (like Account.ParentAccount), we have to fill in the Field with NULL first and update it later.

- Even after all this effort, we still can't recreate the values for autonumbered fields. If it's a custom field, we can change the type to text, insert the values and change it back. For standard fields, there is no practical way to do it. No company can help us, because it's just impossible to do using the Salesforce API.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#176

The most interesting thing in this post was that Mark worked for Apple in 1984 and stayed in good terms with Jobs long enough so that he was still Benioff’s mentor in the 2000s before Jobs died

Marc Benioff's book Trailblazer goes into that story a bit more. The rest of the book is pretty good too.

This thread seems dedicated to picking Salesforce apart from the technical side but you should really look at it from the business value side and as an ecosytem.

Salesforce has certainly defined digital transformation for a lot of companies.

Anyone that wants to beat Salesforce is going to have to be 10x better or come in from a new or niche angle.

No code, slack/chat interfaces and AI assistants seem to be viable paths.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.

Which ERP isn't?

Maybe none? I think Netsuite is particularly slow though. Luckily I only have to use it for timesheets but even for that it should have its own job number for the time wasted waiting for it to load.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#178
post #171

I really enjoy these articles. I don't know a ton about Retool, but I know these articles are often written by or in the style of their Growth analyst, Justin Gage ( https://randomshit.dev/ ) who seems to be fantastic at writing articles about what these are and how they work in his own right. These types of posts are a refreshing change from what company blogs have become (or maybe always were?): garbage vendor cont…

Can you please post a link to the article about Accenture? Sounds interesting

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969364

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#179
As someone who has spent the past several months using Trailhead to learn Salesforce - even picking up some badges for things that seem practical this thread is making me reconsider my choices.

Have I wasted my time in learning Salesforce?

I know that there is what is effectively a cult following of Salesforce evangelists but I was hoping this would be valuable in the long term.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#180
post #2

I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load progressively, slowly, making it nearly im…

You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list. Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.

> Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.

Or wined & dined.

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