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…

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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…

• 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.

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.