I often get this question.
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What the heck is "Salesforce" . The definitions I'm seeing are quite a murky mix. Is it like Azure/AWS? It is like SAP? It's just a CRM Application? OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
Vunic wrote:
OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding. That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match. Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices. Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my. Such has been my limited experience. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
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Vunic wrote:
OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding. That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match. Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices. Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my. Such has been my limited experience. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
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SalesForce is anther one of those apps that is supposed to turn normal (work cheap) employees into "programmers", thus allowing you to fire all of your real programmers (don't work cheap) until you realize that the product is indeed snake oil. On the other hand, thank your stars that you don't have to use QlikView...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
It is a CRM application but it is also a platform. In other words, if you wanted a web app that has forms then SalesForce can make that very easy to do, without having to know how to code. It has workflows built-in and many, many other features. It's actually pretty awesome.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I think it is a CRM software written in Classic ASP.
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The original "Salesforce" was a customer relations management application. As they have grown, they have expanded now into Platform As A Service for building application / services to meet your own specific needs. You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research! :rolleyes:
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DaveAuld wrote:
You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research!
But Lounge makes it lot easier :rolleyes: . lol I got the picture a bit, but I wanted to register the fact here - "The definition of salesforce sounds very polymorphic" as I did my little research.
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Vunic wrote:
OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding. That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match. Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices. Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my. Such has been my limited experience. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
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Vunic wrote:
OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding. That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match. Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices. Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my. Such has been my limited experience. :) Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
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What the heck is "Salesforce" . The definitions I'm seeing are quite a murky mix. Is it like Azure/AWS? It is like SAP? It's just a CRM Application? OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
It's funny you should ask that question, because every time I see an article about "Salesforce" I automatically think it is a recruitment company. They could do with a bit of rebranding IMO.
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What the heck is "Salesforce" . The definitions I'm seeing are quite a murky mix. Is it like Azure/AWS? It is like SAP? It's just a CRM Application? OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
Salesforce, Sharepoint, Willy Wonka Chocolate factory. All very well contrived fantasies to allure you to a 'one size fits all' idea of software. Who on earth wants to learn YOUR platform when you could just learn how to program.
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Salesforce, Sharepoint, Willy Wonka Chocolate factory. All very well contrived fantasies to allure you to a 'one size fits all' idea of software. Who on earth wants to learn YOUR platform when you could just learn how to program.
I have to step on this post a bit. We wrote a successful app for our company that really streamlined business process flows. We grew, but it lacked lots of things, like a web interface that people could use from anywhere. They migrated over to salesforce.com, and with some stumbling, figured it out. The company has a product they sell, and now uses salesforce.com for managing sales/contacts, etc. They have 1 programmer nowadays as the product is in maintenance mode until it dies a slow death as companies using it go out of business... But salesforce.com was there, and is there. it works. And from a business standpoint, I would rather change my non-critical business processes to match existing (written and debugged) software to leverage that than to risk writing it from scratch. I bet you could write a word processor, too... But why would you? The ONLY time to write your own home grown software is when there is no software that allows you to encapsulate your business specific advantages (Special Sauce, as we call it). If you lose that, then you lose a competitive edge... Then you need either a different solution, or a different way to keep the Special Sauce alive. (We are currently bolting on a Special Sauce piece for a client who is moving the operations to a similar product. They cannot afford to maintain 40 year old Cobol code, or to rewrite it. Nor does anything have the Special Sauce. So, they will use the off the shelf product, and bolt on the Special Sauce). Now, this is where Saleforce.com and similar models can be amazing. They let you customize their datastructures and screens. We can literally add to their system, the data we need, add a BUNCH of screens to make it operable, and have a consistent system that the reporting system works on. This, to me, is where the industry will go. Your data will be in the cloud, your access will be everywhere, your customizations will be available, and your ability to expand will grow, without growing your IT staff by nearly the same amount. Fewer programmers, and more business analysts. To compensate for the shortage of programmers, and also the loss of the good ones over time.