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. Máte tip na někoho, koho bych měl určitě vyzpovídat? Sem s ním! děkuji
Další v sérii mých rozhovorů s lidmi ze Salesforce komunity je Sabina Ene ze společnosti Deloitte.
I started with Salesforce slightly more than three years ago in Bratislava, by ‘accident’. Almost two years later I was moving to Prague. Now I am a Senior Salesforce Consultant, developing great things at Deloitte, and having lots of fun while doing it.
How did you get to Salesforce and what is your role?
About three years ago I was supposed to start my first corporate job as an Application Developer. By the time I joined, the resource planning shifted a bit, and I was ‘lent’ to their Salesforce team. Three months in and I didn’t want to go back to the team I interviewed for. Salesforce was that cool. I am now a senior developer and occasional dev lead, mentor for new hires and architect wannabe.
How to you keep with the continuous development of Salesforce, which sources can you recommend?
With each new release, I skim the release notes for the topics I am interested in.
If I want to understand the basics of features I am not familiar with, I prefer 1. Trailheads, 2. Webinars / the Salesforce YouTube channel(s) / Conferences. And if I need to go into more detail: blogs, Trailblazer/Partner communities, and, most important of all, discuss with my colleagues.
What do you think about certifications? Are they important to you?
I have mixed feelings about them. If you truly study for these certifications, then they do add a lot to your Salesforce knowledge. Some of them are so easy to get that experienced consultants without any certifications may be perceived as lazy or clueless 🙂 On the other hand, if you work hard to get certified in a product you don’t use at all, only to forget everything after, then I find the certification to be useless. I guess it makes sense to get certified in the fields you are working with the most.
Administrator vs developers – does their work mix and is it good if it does? Or is it better to separate them?
I’ve done a lot of admin work as a developer – and loved it. I think a good developer should know when to choose configuration over coding. Salesforce is such a comprehensive tool, it truly breaks my heart to see it used only as a development platform and not to its full potential.
As for the admins – they should also know when the out-of-the-box configuration stops making anymore sense or when the order of execution gets in the way. Coding may be a better option.
I tend to prefer the separation of tasks though. This way, people can focus on a smaller set of components and not step on each other’s toes while working. Also, a team with both admins and developer (or even admin only) is usually a good sign that out-of-the-box configuration is also being used (and valued!).
3rd party app – which one do you like the most?
In terms of AppExchange, I’ve used a couple for various Salesforce implementations, but I cannot say I’m a fan of any.
For development, I use the Illuminated Cloud plugin for IntelliJ, Workbench, and a couple of Chrome extensions. And, of course, our cool internal tools, soon to be made public (stay tuned!).
One feature you like the most in Salesforce?
I’m liking the security model. Security is usually one of the biggest pain points in development. With Salesforce you still need to go through a lot of planning and designing (and I like that!), but at the end it’s all done (mostly) with clicks.
Chatter and the ‘login as’ feature are pretty cool too.
If you can wish one thing, which Salesforce will be able to do tomorrow, what it’ll be?
Improve (read: replace) their customer service.
Other would be: translatable email templates, making Lightning faster
How customers keep with the quick improvement of Salesforce’s features, do they implement new features or are they happy with what they have and don’t implement them?
It really depends on the client. I’ve noticed that most organisations with an internal team of Salesforce specialists tend to be more open to new features. If the training is good too, the end users quickly adapt to changes.
Unfortunately, I have also seen stubborn customers who prefer to stick to (and extend) very complex, 5 year-old Visualforce pages. They even wanted to create new functionality with the same ‘look & feel’!
What is the hardest part about Salesforce implementation?
Convincing the customers to invest in Salesforce as CRM.
Lightning – can you recommend it to customers? What you like and dislike?
I always try to recommend it to customers. Let’s face it – it looks much better, it’s designed much better, and it will be the main focus of Salesforce when creating new features.
It’s still slow and has a lot of limitations. It’s also missing some features from the Classic version. Their recent URI updates (in Spring 18 and Summer 18) caused a bit of a headache for us developers.
She Salesforce or he Salesforce? (ok, this question probably doesn’t make sense in English)
Indeed, in English I prefer to use ‘it’. In my mother tongue, Romanian, it’s also neuter – no other gender makes sense in this case.
In languages without neuter gender, such as Spanish, I’d opt for masculine. Although ‘la Salesforce’ would be nice to hear.
How did you end up in Czech Republic? What do you like/dislike here?
You’ve already interviewed the ‘reason’ I ended up here :).
I find Prague to be the prettiest city in Europe and I’m definitely loving the alternative side of the Czech Republic – it breathes culture! Oh and the beer. The craft beer!
It takes a while to get to know the locals, but the keyword here is ‘patience’. It does pay off eventually!