Adam Caplan's Blog

Ditching the Laptop and all in With iPad 2 - October 10, 2011 at 8:56 am

 


 
I was meaning to write this blog in March 2012, one year after ditching my laptop and moving to the iPad2  for daily business use.  With the passing of the amazing, iconic, heroic, innovative (stick in your adjective) Steve Jobs, now seems like a good day to accelerate the timeline and get my thoughts out there.  When I walked into work this past Wednesday morning, our COO had placed a huge picture of Steve in the office inside a 10 foot tall iPad 2 frame we have. It wasn't the picture from his biography that is everywhere now, it was the one of him in his younger days holding a Mac in his lap as he's sitting on the floor.  I definitely got emotional seeing it and it was really interesting to see the same reaction from almost everyone who walked into the office and looked at the huge picture of Steve that they weren't expecting to see.  We're all obsessed with Apple and Jobs of course…

As the “mobile guys” within the salesforce.com world (as we are frequently called) we worship Apple and Jobs and all their products.  The fact that we are a 100% Apple shop is one of the keys to our branding and culture and has been a huge help from a retention and recruiting perspective.  It also makes us look far more innovative than competitors when we walk into a client with shiny white iPads and they walk in with dusty old Dells… When the iPad 2 launched, I figured it was time to see if I could ditch the laptop and go 100% iPad.  It's been enormously successful while forcing me to change some habits as well.  It's not quite possible to do so completely… here's what I've learned along the way, sectioned out by core needs:

- Email

Email is great on the iPad, I find it easier to use than on a laptop.  We use Gmail and the standard mail client on the iPad presents it perfectly.  You can also open up the Gmail web client and use that as well, but I find the experience far less efficient.  Sometimes search doesn't work well on the iPad email app, so I do sometimes go to the Gmail web client to search and find things.  Same with Exchange.  For those using Outlook, it is fantastic on the core iPad email client.

- Typing

A keyboard is a must.  Either of the two Zagg keyboards I find the best (roughly $100 on Amazon).  New keyboards are of course coming out all the time, hopefully they'll beat out the Zagg and force Zagg to continue to innovate.  The first Zagg keyboard that is marketed by Logitech is a nice silver case that sits on top of the iPad 2.  It is very light, the keyboard is good, although not great, it's pretty cramped for typing.  Zagg has since come out with the Zaggfolio for iPad 2.  The keyboard is phenomenal, I'm using it now to type this entry, but it does weigh a bit.  For traveling, the first Zagg could arguably be better due to the weight difference, depends how much you need to type.  In general, trying to use the iPad2 digital keyboard I find to be painful.  Buying the Zagg keyboard changed everything for me.  I type fast and just can't do it on the digital keyboard.  Now I'm used to the compressed Zagg keyboards.  When I go back to a MacBook Pro 13 with a larger keyboard, it seems huge and uncomfortable.  I've also tried the pens with the iPad 2.  Some people at the company use them along with an app called "NotesPlus" or various others.  I'm just not fast enough with the pen though.  Some people do like it.

- Note taking

Awesome on the iPad.  Evernote is a great application, it's great to have all my notes on my iPad 2 and also available on my iPhone and via the web as needed.  There might be other apps that do the same thing, Evernote isn't fancy, but it works great.

- To Dos

Wunderlist is a great application for tracking To Dos.  Like Evernote, it's available on your iPhone as well as the web.  Separating To Dos away from general notes in Evernote has been really efficient for me.  I create various categories such as "Work, Personal, etc."

- PowerPoint/Keynote and Excel/Numbers:

Our company analyst who puts together tons of presentations and excel docs is super annoyed with me since I began this experiment, even though he never admits it or shows it.  I used to be an expert in Excel and PowerPoint and do a lot of stuff myself.  Now if I want to change something, I'm pretty much incapable of doing so.  I'll send him emails that say things like "Can you change cell C18 to the following on the Excel doc?" and "On the Keynote, can you adjust slide 6 to say…"  Content creation in Excel and Powerpoint/Keynote is pretty much impossible except for the most basic use cases.  We do some pretty serious Excel stuff and have cool Keynote presentations with all sorts of cool pictures and stuff flying around the screen.  Not going to happen with the iPad 2 from an authoring perspective. Editing is OK and should get a lot better over time.  If you need to author a lot of stuff, it must be done on a laptop or have a great analyst like we do to work with.

- Instant messaging

Skype finally released an iPad client a couple of months ago, which was huge.  Before doing so, I had to use a variety of clones that hooked to Skype, none of which functioned well.

- Live meetings

We use GoToMeeting and their app works well on the iPad.  You can't host meetings though, only watch meetings, which is a big issue sometimes and one of the reasons you might have to go back to your Mac.  There are a few applications like ZigZag that allow you to share your screen, but it's not the full view of the iPad, it only allows sharing of a whiteboard application like ZigZag (which is a great application for white boarding).

- Content sharing

Dropbox is the leader and works well.  I can post files from my laptop or from my iPad and view them on either.  There are lots of clones to Dropbox, but might as well stick with the leader.

- Opening up files sent to you via email

This can be a bit frustrating.  If anyone has any ideas on ways to do this better, please let me know.  Depending on what type of file is sent to you, you can easily open them up on the iPad and view them, but each file type pretty much gets opened within a separate application.  So going back to find already opened files is difficult.  As an example, PDFs I open up in iBooks, Word documents I open up in Pages.  Powerpoints and Keynotes I open up in Keynote.  There are some apps like QuickOffice that can open up multiple file types within the same application, but I find I like the specific application that is meant for each file type a little bit better than using a general app like QuickOffice.

- Booking Travel

Kayak's iPad app is amazing and crushes any travel site on a laptop, including Kayak's.

- FaceTime

Amazing application, wish you could show the iPad 2 screen somehow as well… See comments on GoToMeeting up above…

- Collaboration

We use salesforce.com's Chatter application of course.  It's awesome on the iPad.

- Calendars

A little complex on the iPad 2, although it works well.  I have Gmail hooked to the primary iPad 2 calendar application.  This works great to view calendar events and create them if I don't need to invite anyone else or book a room.  To invite others and book rooms, I have saved two versions of the Gmail web client calendar as separate apps.  The first is the mobile view of Gmail calendar and the second is the desktop view.  The mobile view is great for viewing one specific day at a time, but I still can't book rooms on it and it's more difficult to invite others to it (but is possible).  The desktop view allows booking rooms and easily inviting others and seeing their calendars.  There is a negative to this view in that you can't scroll up and down through a specific date to all hours though, it gets stuck in a six hour band around your current time.

- Remote Desktop Apps

I don't use these just as I find them too difficult to use and you have to leave your laptop open and connected to the web back at your office or wherever.  I find it easier if I need to access a file or something on my laptop to just open up my laptop.  I got the 11 inch Air, so I can travel with both that and the iPad2 and it's still not too heavy.  It would be nice to travel with just the iPad, but that last 10% of usage is still a challenge.  Day trips I just bring the iPad.  Anything longer I take the crutch of the Air with me…

- salesforce.com

Salesforce has a great dashboard app now available for iPad 2 in addition to the Chatter application that is awesome.  We build all sorts of amazing custom iPad 2 apps (native and HTML5) that leverage Salesforce, but our apps are a conversation for another day. Salesforce and the iPad 2 definitely go great together. Soon Touch.Salesforce.com will launch which is an HTML5 application for core use of the app on the iPad. We’ve only seen demos so far, but it will be awesome. Major props to the team over at Salesforce that I know is working hard on this.

- Presenting from the iPad

Buying a dongle enables full screen sharing to a projector.  I find this works well, but I don't find it to be as reliable as presenting from a laptop.  Sometimes the dongle pops out of the iPad a bit, especially when switching between vertical and horizontal views if you need to do so.  Keynote and Powerpoint also run a little bit slower on the iPad, so transitions you might have created on a laptop might come across as a little slow.  If you're going to present from the iPad, definitely create transitions specifically for the iPad, not all are supported.  That being said, it does wow people when you present directly from the iPad, just take into account the risk factor involved with speed and the dongle.  Presenting from iBooks also works well.  We sometimes just fly through presentations that are PDFs and placed in iBooks.  It doesn't have the wow factor of Keynote and the cool transitions, but it's low risk and works and is fast. Of course presenting to a small group or 1 on 1 without a projector is fantastic from the iPad and far better than a laptop as it’s so easy to share with others and there is no wait time to start, etc.
 

-        Signing documents
 
This is great on the iPad, far superior to a laptop. Applications like Sign N Send enable you to pull up a PDF, zoom in on the signature line, sign it with your finger, and email it to yourself and then you can forward it on to whomever. Way easier than printing, signing, faxing or scanning, etc.
Anyway, hope this post was interesting!!  Definitely make the switch and ditch daily use of the laptop, you can survive in most cases without it and it just looks cool to walk into a meeting and pop out the iPad… everyone loves to talk about it.  Hopefully that last 10% where the laptop is needed will be solved somehow by future enhancements to the iPad and associated apps.  I don't believe that's really soon though…  Good luck with the switch! In honor of Jobs, let’s all make it happen.
 

We All Use Gmail for Personal Stuff, Why Not at Work? - February 6, 2009 at 7:44 am

I just wanted to share my Gmail transition experience over the past 24 hours. 

I was extremely resistant to switching to Gmail.  I’m one of the last in the company to do it.  I love folders, I love offline, I love exchange/outlook/entourage (EOE). But as a company, it just made sense to make the switch.  From a cost perspective, it’s significantly cheaper.  We’re also very much about eating our own dog food, which is cloud computing.  

So I made the switch yesterday.  I was not thrilled.  I asked our IT guy to forward Gmail to EOE, so I could continue to use EOE and my beloved folders as opposed to using online Gmail.  It was slow and wasn’t as great as standard EOE and I was definitely frustrated.  Online Gmail seemed confusing and cluttered and not that great and my standard folders were available there, but not in an ideal fashion, to the bottom on the left of the screen and requiring too many clicks to access. 

I asked the IT guy to sit down with me and try to help me out.  30 minutes later I’m loving this thing.  I’m using only online Gmail, in the way it’s supposed to be used.  EOE is officially turned off forever. 

Here’s what helped me change my thinking: 

  • You can choose different markings to flag various types of emails.  Those are emails that are flagged do show up in a separate folder.  This is immensely helpful for me.  I had previously thought that there were no folders, so it would just be a mess of an inbox with a ton of emails and lots of flags that would take forever to sort through.  So I still get one folder instead of my usual four.  Within that folder though, the different flags are easy to manage and to differentiate between. 

  • You can clean up the screen and remove clutter by clicking on edit labels on the left and by clicking on the Settings and Lab buttons on the upper right.  The Settings let you move stuff around.  The Lab feature (represented by the little green vial) is sort of like an appexchange where you can choose from a bunch of features. 

  • By moving away from EOE and having Gmail forwarded there, you can truly leverage the good parts of Gmail, especially the archiving function and the search capability and the ability to see all emails that are replied to in one string (this is very cool).

  • He turned on the Offline version for me, so I can use Gmail on a plane or whatever.  It looks exactly like standard Gmail, it’s not a separate app, you just happen to be offline. 

Anyway, I’m now done with EOE and it feels really good.  I’m done with bloated software sitting on my machine (read Microsoft).  I’m still getting used to everything, but day two I’m very happy.  If you are worried about switching to Gmail, please give it a try first with someone who’s done it, don’t just get frustrated and try to figure it out yourself.  

My two cents…

ac

 

In the Cloud with SFDC, Amazon, and Barack - January 20, 2009 at 11:30 am

First blog since Dreamforce… not good! The marketing guys are all over me. “You have to blog consistently.” Of course they’re right, but who has the time! Inauguration was yesterday, pretty amazing times. So now that Obama is in and the recession will be coming to an end, banks will become stabilized, the capital markets will bounce back, and general goodness will proliferate throughout the world, it’s time to blog and get ready for a great 2009. Maybe he’ll need a quarter or two…

Anyway, things are moving fast. Salesforce’s year end is approaching at the end of January, so things are crazy. A million deals, trying to help the SFDC guys to pull them in. Since Dreamforce, we have seen custom development opportunities on the Force.com platform explode. Some of our customers and prospects are simply looking to add a bit of functionality such as in-line dashboards with the slick Adobe Flex look. Others are extending application functionality to expand the footprint of Salesforce in dramatic ways within their organization. We have seen huge demand for platform applications of all sorts, especially portals, call center applications, and now Salesforce Sites for building websites of top of Salesforce.
Many of these applications leverage Amazon’s new web services as well as Google technologies. The mashing up of all these cloud technologies has definitely arrived and we as a company are really starting to be known as the cloud guys and not just the salesforce guys. Of all the cloud players outside of salesforce, Amazon is definitely the most interesting (no offense to Google, Adobe, Facebook, etc.). Salesforce is the place to start for entry into the cloud, but once in, it’s time to leverage all these other technologies and bring the things they do great back into Salesforce and to the huge benefit of users, customers, or partners.
So what’s cool about Amazon? Roughly 30% of their revenue now comes from outside their core business of selling their own books. We get asked all the time about what they’re doing and how it can be leveraged. Here’s my quick two cents:
  • EC2 – Host your data center on Amazon, leverage it for databases and mail servers, use it as a disaster recovery site, and leverage vast amounts of computing power. This isn’t the most exciting offering to talk about, but you can have access to Amazon’s amazing infrastructure for pennies.
  • S3 – This is what most people think about when they think about Amazon Web Services. This is simply storing documents with Amazon, again, for pennies. You can easily pull images of documents into Salesforce or wherever else, so the user doesn’t even know where it’s located, they just know it’s easy to access and you know that it’s cheap.
  • DevPay and Fulfillment Services – Now we’re getting into some more exciting areas. DevPay enables you to leverage Amazon’s shopping cart and billing system for launching a store. You can even sell subscription plans, not just a fee per order. Fulfillment Services is really interesting. This may not be a true cloud app, but you can actually send Amazon your inventory and they’ll store it in their distribution centers, which of course are the best that money can buy. They handle packing and shipping when someone buys from you, whether from your website or from there’s. You can focus on sales and marketing, they focus on the boring stuff that they do better than anyone else. Very cool!
  • Mechanical Turk – This is definitely my favorite. Amazon calls it artificial artificial intelligence. It’s basically a workforce in the cloud. Some tasks computers just aren’t that great at. So you can send a task up through Amazon to the Turkers and for pennies they’ll complete the task. These are people located all around the world, who, for 2 cents or 5 cents or 1 dollar, depending on the task, will do something you ask of them. It could be looking at an image and transcribing it into data. When Steve Fossett’s plane went down, they leveraged the Turkers to look at satellite maps and help in their search, scanning for the plane. Companies also leverage it to clean data, analyze catalogs and competitive coupons, etc.
Anyway, hopefully it won’t be another two months and change before I blog again! Definitely check out the Amazon stuff and let me know what you think. On a sidenote, some of our team was out in Seattle meeting with the Amazon crew. Amazingly nice and wickedly smart people with huge visions. Thanks again to all those guys. To circle back to Obama and the future, leveraging the cloud is also the right thing to do from a green standpoint. Amazon and salesforce already have the servers and the data centers. No need to build the infrastructure yourself and incur all the electricity costs along with everything associated.
All the best,
ac 

First blog… - October 24, 2008 at 12:01 pm

Hey all, first blog here.  I’m sure my prose will thrill the masses.  What could be more exciting than reading about CRM?  Truly thrilling!!  We’ll try not to make it too dry.  Maybe we’ll throw in some discussion around platforms and CSS and other equally compelling topics.

So let’s see, what’s going on.  One word (or is it two?) Dreamforce!  The center of our little universe.  Been excited for an entire year.  Last year was phenomenal.  We ended up taking home the Appy Award for Breakthrough Application.  John Barnes got to go up on stage and take home the dancing hula girl.  It doesn’t get much better than that… We brought a great crew out there, I think we had about 15 people.  This year I think we have 30 people going.  Pretty crazy.  It’s great for everyone though, the ultimate kool-aid and reward for great work.  And of course fantastic networking with everyone in the eco-system.

So what am I excited about this year?  The Foo Fighters maybe?  Somewhat, although I’m from Seattle and do have some love for Mr. Grohl.  But Dreamforce isn’t about the band.  It’s all the cool companies we meet at our booth and around the conference and having a chance to catch up with customers and all the interesting things people are doing with SFDC that we collaborate on.  And hearing about the roadmap and the cool new stuff of course.  And then the drinks at night and hitting the Red Room around midnight and fighting for a spot at the bar and downing a few cocktails and then heading home around 3 and trying to be awake and good to go for the next morning keynote.  The Monday morning general session is probably the most exciting part.  All the energy in the room.  The big announcements.  Two years ago they announced dependant picklists and got a standing ovation from the crowd!  Now that’s a room that seriously loves their SFDC…

I hope to post some blogs while I’m out there, but may not have time with all the running around.  Here’s some of the stuff I think will be cool:

Monday 9:00 to 11:00 – General Session – The main keynote.  We’ve seen some of the cool new stuff and it is cool new stuff.

Tuesday 3:15 to 4:45 – Keynote – Malcolm Gladwell is speaking, the author of the Tipping Point.  Great book, supposedly he’s a great speaker, haven’t heard him before, but looking forward to it…

Tuesday 5:15 to 6:15 – Extreme UI – Using Adobe AIR and Flex to Make Your Apps *Bling* – The Adobe technology is very slick.  This should be good.

Tuesday 8:00pm to 12:00am – Model Metrics Party at Foley’s – Shameless plug.  Party of the year!  Hope to see you there and have a pint.

Definitely stop by our booth (#625) if you are out at Dreamforce and say hi and check out some of our cool iPhone apps and portal demos.  We would love to see you.  We’re officially launching our new branding and website and logo as well.  Hope you like them.