V sérii „O Salesforce s …“ jsem si dal za cíl během celého roku vyzpovídat alespoň 52 lidí, kteří se v České a Slovenské republice pohybují okolo Salesforce. Jedno, zda jde o lidi od partnerů, zákazníka nebo dokonce někdo přímo ze Salesforce (ti to prý mají zakázané). Máte tip na někoho, koho bych měl určitě vyzpovídat? Sem s ním! děkuji
Další v sérii mých rozhovorů je Antone Kom, byznys analytik ve společnosti Monster Worldwide, globálního hráče na trhu zprostředkování zaměstnání a rozvoje kariéry. Kromě práce na interní implementace Salesforce je Tony také dobrovolníkem v CRM pro neziskovky, kde pomáhá implementovat toto řešení neziskovým organizacím.
How did you get to Salesforce, what is your role?
I started working on Salesforce when the company I work for decided to replace our 10 year old Siebel implementation with Salesforce. My role at the time was as a business analyst, but since we’ve switched I am trying to grow into a more technical role on our Salesforce implementation. At the moment, I am something between an Admin, Developer and Analyst, and I currently have Salesforce Certified System Administrator and Certified Force.com Developer certifications.
How to you keep with the continuous development of Salesforce, which sources can you recommend?
When the company has available budget for training, I prefer instructor-led or online Salesforce training courses. When I am learning on my own, I refer a lot to the Salesforce Help & Training portal which has more material than any human can possibly review in a lifetime. I also really enjoy learning on Trailhead.
Certifications – yes or no? Do you feel they are important or one can fake them easily?
I think certifications are important, but it is also true that hands-on experience is the best way to learn. The certifications show that you know the basics of what tools and features Salesforce offers and what the possibilities are. What to do with that foundation is then up to each person and their individual goals and abilities.
Do you think that in Salesforce are clearly separated the roles of admins, developers and consultant or is it a mix when everybody knows everything and they are just focused on something more?
With Salesforce, I don’t think there is a clear delimiter between Admin, Developer, and Consultant. I know that some companies (and employees) like to try to have a strict definition of job roles, but Salesforce makes it possible for functions and roles to overlap.
Do you have some favourite 3rd party app?
On the few implementations I have worked on, there has always been a need for some functionality that Salesforce doesn’t provide. With thousands of apps on the AppExchange, there are some excellent ones that can really enhance your Salesforce org, but I don’t really have a favorite. I also use quite a few Chrome Extensions that make my daily work on Salesforce a lot easier. Three of my favorite Chrome extensions that I use every day are: Salesforce API Fieldnames, Force.com Logins, and Salesforce Inspector.
One feature that you like the most about Salesforce?
Probably the „Login As“ function, allowing you to login as another user and see their view of the application and data. In large orgs with hundreds of users, this is sometimes the only way to reproduce issues that a particular user has reported.
If Salesforce can tomorrow do one new thing, what would it be?
Salesforce is great but occasionally I have run into „features“ that either are really important and missing from the application, or that are there but just don’t make sense. The IdeaExchange is great for this, and several Ideas that I have been following and wishing for have already been released.
One thing I find extremely annoying as a developer is that there is no easy way to run SOQL queries and export the data directly out of Salesforce. You can run the queries easily in Dev Console, but there is no export feature. You can write a report in the application, but there is no good way to get the data into an excel sheet to work with it. There are Chrome Extensions and AppExchange apps that can do this, but I haven’t really found one that works smoothly and easily.
Do you implement new features as they are comming, or aren’t interested in continuous changes and development?
It depends on the functionality. If it is something interesting for the customer, we will implement new functionality sooner. Sometimes it happens that new Salesforce features aren’t released fast enough, so in a few cases we had to custom-build some functionality that Salesforce later released as a standard feature. Some major new features (like Lightning, for example) are interesting for customers but require quite a lot of time and effort to get their current application fully ready to support it.
She Salesforce or he Salesforce? (which doesn’t really make sense in English :))
I know this is a Czech language thing, so maybe this question just doesn’t work in English, but for me, neither – it’s just „Salesforce“ :).