Monday, December 8, 2014

The similarities are amazing.

I got laid off not too long ago (not bad, 4 times in almost 40 years and twice I asked to be laid off) and I started to use Salesforce to track my job search. It is a sales process after all. Then I started looking under the hood and found that Salesforce is not just a CRM.  You can build many different kinds of applications with Salesforce, just like Domino. You can use a drag and drop interface to create simple forms and views, build relationships between different document types, do field validations, and even use simple formulas to perform calculations. And there is a more powerful scripting language to add some automation or workflow. Sound familiar?

But wait, there's more. This easy to use interface means the person that knows some Excel formula's is now a 'developer'. And these newborn developers don't know what a development environment is, much less source code control, so changes are made in production with the resulting occasional loss of productivity while corrections are made.  It is so easy to create new applications that it is hard to keep track of what is being used. And have you ever seen an out of control security model where admins don't make changes for fear of breaking someone's access?

But the similarities between Salesforce and Domino do digress. Many of you are looking forward to going to Connect shortly, There you are expecting maybe 10,000 attendees, and hoping more than half are not IBMers. Well, Salesforce just had their big trade show called Dreamforce, and there were 140,000 attendees.

Another difference is if you go to your favorite job search site and look for Domino developer positions and then search for Salesforce developer positions, let me know what you find.

3 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about your layoff John. I wish you well in your search.

    Can you share more about your dev environment in Salesforce? Is there a client download or is it cloud based? What are the licensing costs for someone who wants to learn how to use it and develop in it?

    Thanks,

    Dan

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's all cloud based and there is a free trial. They have good on-line training, but most of it requires premium support. The free stuff will give you a good feel for the platform. I accidentally took the first part of the dev certification path, but that is now locked down. I'm trying other paths now.

      Delete
  2. We moved from Notes to Salesforce a year ago, so this is written with knowledge of both systems. We wouldn't go back to Notes, even if it was free.

    With Salesforce we get free development and UAT environments and nobody, not even experienced devs, gets to make any changes to the live environment. Everything goes from Dev to UAT on a weekly roll out and gets a week of testing there before it's signed off and deployed.

    A year ago, we'd have snapped your arm off to get you in to help us migrate from Notes to Salesforce on hearing that you had experience developing both. I think there's plenty of opportunity for somebody looking to do that as a living....

    I wish you well with it all.

    ReplyDelete