Model Metrics

Fix It In the Mix

Devin Nowakowski — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:33:24 +0000

There is a saying in audio recording which has become a bit of a cliched pun:

“We’ll fix it in the mix.”

If anyone has ever spent time in a recording studio you have probably heard this. The advent of digital music production has made it much easier to fix mistakes during the mixing/editing process, making it arguable to skip another take and “fix it in the mix”. As a musical hobbyist, I have been part of several late night sessions where that term was thrown around jokingly for mistakes that clearly should be corrected through another take versus trying to edit them later. And after the chuckling subsides, we drag ourselves out of the control room, pick up our respective instruments and have at it one more time…

As I am sure every industry has its own similar term to reference work that is pushed off later that should probably be addressed now, there is a common saying I hear on software projects:

“It’s a training issue.”

This saying often refers to usability issues that are reported as Change Requests. For various reasons these Change Requests are not addressed as software changes but instead “Training Points” for the users to modify their behavior. The negative slant is this implies it’s OK to ask a user to change their behavior, rather than change the software to meet their “needs”.

While this thinking holds merit when custom developing an application, I disagree in terms of a customizable multi-tenant software like salesforce.com that is leveraged by the masses. Let’s look at the Microsoft Office suite of products. MS Office changed the way business works. And it didn’t do it by providing a unique experience for every type of industry and client. It dictated a set of best practices (right or wrong) that can be leveraged across the globe regardless of industry or department. While new features may not have always been intuitive, businesses realized there is a significant cost savings to not creating their own version of a word processor or spreadsheet application, or presentation maker. Rather, they should make the investment to learn how to leverage one that was created for the masses. One could argue that organizations often bettered their processes due to pre-designed functionality that was available to them that they may have not considered applicable to their work or industry.

The difference between Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office is that Office is a product, while Salesforce is a platform with product offerings. In addition to marketing, salesforce automation and customer service and support, the platform can be leveraged to apply a rich set of features and functionality to other areas of the business (recruiting, employee development, operations, etc…). You can custom configure and even custom develop on the platform to create unique applications.

One of the areas we work with clients is helping them navigate the myriad of choices they have when designing applications on this platform. When is it ok to “customize” and when should one leverage what is already available but only requires simple configuration? Here is where the rubber meets the road. Working on this platform, I have seen many clients realize the benefits of modifying their process or behaviors for enhanced visibility, streamlined work streams, or improved collaboration. Salesforce’s native page layout editor often accelerates design decision making, creates a repeatable, familiar interface, and introduces visual tools that may not have been utilized before and would not have been requested by the client. While change can be painful, the benefits can often outweigh the investments.

For this reason, businesses should always make sure they are making the proper investment in Training and organizational Change Management. Regardless of the size of your organization, Training and Change Management can consume a significant portion of any software budget, and that percentage only increases on a platform that reduces the amount of development time needed.

So next time you hear “it’s a training issue” on your salesforce.com project, try not to immediately cringe, chuckle or push back. It may very well be an opportunity to improve…and an appropriate time to “fix it in the mix.”

Force.com March Madness Brackets are Here!

The Marketing Viewpoint — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:02:24 +0000

Wait, what? That's right, this year you can manage your NCAA Tournament bracket in a Force.com application. Assembled by our good friend Reid Carlberg and the Force.com Labs program over at salesforce.com, it's easy to install. Simply head over to the AppExchange, install it, and you're off and running. Upon successful install, you'll have this in your org:

We will be the ones keeping the brackets up to date 3 times per day (scores, teams, etc) so you could say we have a vested interest in the app. If you have any questions or suggestions, post them below or hit us up on Twitter @ModelMetricsInc using the #brackets hash tag.

Force.com loses its training wheels, Dreamforce ’10 Reflections

John Barnes — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:51:18 +0000

Now that I have a few days of distance from Dreamforce, and more importantly some sleep, I wanted to re-cap my thoughts on the conference I just attended along with 30,000 of my closest friends. First off I’m amazed at how much larger Dreamforce gets every year. This was my 6^th one and I’ve had the privilege of speaking at the last five so I’ve seen it grow from being a smaller show at Moscone West, to taking over Moscone North and South, and now this year taking up all three venues. I think the big announcement back in ’05 was something around “Multi-force” and having multiple applications by switching the drop-down on the top right of the screen (which just essentially changed what tabs were available). This year we got to see VMForce go into private beta and become a reality, hear about the launch of database.com and the intent to acquire Heroku.

To me these announcements show that Salesforce.com is serious about the platform and making force.com a true competitor to other cloud platforms that are available today. The ability to support multiple languages (Apex, Visualforce, Ruby, Java, or anything and use database.com) shows a real commitment to the custom development community. Past Dreamforce’s have felt more CRM focused with some excitement around Force.com, but this one seemed more like the ship is truly changing directions and that the company is changing it’s focus and truly trying to broaden it’s reach. The training wheels have been removed from Force.com and now it can be used by developers of almost any background.

As with any marketing driven company we will have to wait a bit to see how this all comes together, what limits or governors exits, and the timing of these new options. I think one of the bigger announcements was a quiet one, that they will be reducing some governor limits by 70%. As with any PaaS platform you have to take the good with the bad. You have this huge platform to use and it takes away all of the low-level details and tweaks from you (which can be good), but since it is a shared environment you also have to be a good citizen and abide by the rules of sharing and governors (which can be challenging). The fact that these limits are raising will make developing on the platform even easier and will allow for richer applications.

More options, more languages, lower governors, I like where this is going.

Force.com Platform Highlights from Dreamforce 2010

Bill Kalma — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:36:42 +0000

Dreamforce 2010 will be remembered as the year of the platform. As usual, it was an incredible show with all sorts of great product announcements, entertainment, vendors, and innovative customers. Most impressive were the platform announcements that provide us a glimpse into the direction that we are headed over the next year.

As with any announcement, salesforce.com is sure to include a Safe Harbor announcement to emphasize the point that these features, modules and capabilities are not currently part of the product. That fact alone makes it all the more exciting for us to speculate on the potential and meaning of each!

70% Reduction in Governor Limits. This is music to the ears of developers all throughout the force.com ecosystem. It is nearly impossible to talk about APEX development without some discussion on how to cope with, work around, or otherwise avoid some of the governor limits that exist. In many cases, the noise generated around governor limits has more to do with inefficient or poorly written code than it does a real problem, but there is room for improvement here. So far I have not seen any documentation that will provide further evidence on the limits actually being addressed, but we can remain hopeful that the 70% includes the ability to manage larger data volumes without timeouts.

Database.com (www.database.com). Perhaps the most talked about new module is Database.com that represents a true cloud-based database priced at just $10/user/month. This service will allow custom development on the force.com platform with authentication (oAuth), SOAP & REST based APIs, auto scaling, elasticity, and security. It is presumed that connectivity to Database.com will be made through the standard force.com API, so there is still going to be some variance between standard database capabilities and that of those offered through this service (e.g. outer join queries, custom indexing, etc), but it will make a splash in the market by competing directly with cloud based infrastructure vendors.

REST API. The new REST API is in developer beta currently, and should be generally available in either Spring or Summer 2011. This new API allows for simpler, faster development with much less overhead than the SOAP version. The capabilities of REST are currently only a subset of the SOAP version, but it easily covers the most commonly used features. The REST API also support JSON formatted messages. The predominance of mobile solutions will surely make development using REST a staple in force.com development shops.

The Force.com Labs folks have been so kind as to build a REST Explorer app that developers can use to send REST messages and interrogate the JSON response messages. Check it out: http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000003IjwLEAS

SiteBuilder. Force.com sites development is going to get a lot easier with a slick IDE that is integrated directly into your force.com instance. This tool has a WYSIWYG designer, the ability to drag and drop files from your file system, and site previews. Currently, it appears that this feature is mostly demo-ware, but in 6 more months it is going to be great.

Heroku (Ruby on Rails). Salesforce.com formally announced its intent to purchase Heroku to allow for native support of Ruby on Rails within the force.com environment. Marc Benioff did a great job introducing Heroku to the Salesforce.com family, but it is a bit early to understand the nuances of how they will play in the ecosystem.

All of these announcements (not to mention VMForce) make 2011 a year to anticipate from a technology standpoint. You can trust that Model Metrics will be here to lead the way!

Goats, Lawnmowers and the Private Cloud

John Barnes — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:39:28 +0000

“If you are paying for it when it is turned off, it isn’t a cloud. I can put a goat in my front lawn and it can eat the grass, but I can’t call it a lawnmower” - A public cloud evangelist reflecting on the private cloud.

The Private Cloud seems to be gaining traction within the halls of Enterprise IT and was a hot topic at Interop NYC 2010. But do Private Clouds exist? What are their shortcomings, and what does this mean for the Public Cloud?

I live in the Public Cloud world and spend my days with Force.com/Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google. I tend to agree with the their viewpoint that private clouds are not really clouds at all. However I was struck with how popular the idea of private clouds were to those at the Interop NYC 2010 conference. This seems to validate the opinion that companies are asking IT “What is our cloud strategy?” and they are flocking to the private cloud as it seems like a safer and more importantly “comfortable” option for IT to pursue. This demand is also driven by vendors who see this as a good opportunity to sell more hardware and management software to IT. This trend seems to ring true with the global SI’s as Dan Elron from Accenture stated that the private cloud makes up around 80% of Accenture’s cloud revenue and is “growing like gangbusters”.

We all know that IT budgets are tight and are asked to do more with less and generally have a large backlog (usually years) of projects that are waiting in the wings. I can’t imagine that many IT departments are going to have the budget or time to fully embrace a private cloud initiative. If only 20-30% of IT has embraced virtualization (which has been around for ~10 years), how will they be able to turn that into a private cloud? I’m sure a few are diving in head first, but many more are probably trying private clouds in small ways or adding a level of self service over any virtualization they may have.

I heard a statistic during one session where the speaker shared that without virtualization you achieve about 10% utilization on your hardware. If you add virtualization it goes up to around 30-35%, and if you add a private cloud on top of that it goes to ~38% utilization. Why so low? The real issue behind these numbers is that almost all companies have some degree of spiky demand. Either there is more demand during working hours to handle the 9-5 end users, or more demand overnight for batch processing. Either way, virtualized, private cloud or bare metal, the hardware needs to be sized for that demand plus a certain amount of overage. That leaves troughs. Times where that capacity is not used or needed no matter how virtualized that hardware is configured.

The challenge with virtualization and private cloud isn’t just the technical aspects, it really centers around process and change management. Many companies use slow hardware provisioning and IT backlog as a mechanism to kill projects or ideas that should never see the light of day. Most IT departments are built around these delays and moving server provisioning to minutes from months can have unintended consequences. Sys Admin’s suddenly are trying to manage 5 to 10x the number of virtual servers if developers have easy access to provisioning their own servers. I’ve seen companies put processes and artificial delays in place to handle these types of issues and it lessens the advantages that can be achieved.

I’ve lived in the public cloud world for the last six years and certainly understand the benefits and shortcomings of the various leaders in this space. However I recently had an opportunity to speak on a panel at a Datacenter Dynamics conference around the topic of “The future of the data center” to provide a “cloud viewpoint”. I’ve been away from that world for awhile and I was struck how hard it really is to create and run a data center. You need to be an architectural expert (where to put cooling, raised floor, pillars, generators) and electrical engineer (how to power it, add redundancy, cooling, cabling) and a system administrator (server setup, configuration, management, backup). While my fellow panelists debated whether or not the mechanicals (fans, cooling, etc) needed to be on a UPS or not before temps hit critical mass during a power failure, I just thought about how much I love not having to worry about any of that with the cloud. At the end of the day, why do you want to have your own data center and worry about all of those types of details?

While talking to some of the Interop panelists who spoke during the private cloud summit another trend emerged. It turns our that several of them don’t actually have a private cloud, but “they are working on it”. No one was able to articulate what it really takes to build one beyond using some of the newer offerings from VMWare or other vendors plus a lot of custom development. There is no clear answer today and it is made worse by the “Cloudwashing” going on by all vendors who are quick to state the cloud benefits of their particular solution.

So what does all this mean for the future of the private cloud? My prediction is that it’s future is bright for the short term. It “feels safe” for IT, is being pushed by vendors such as VMWare and IBM and is validated by global SI’s who see it as a great vehicle for long term consulting contracts. Longer term I think everyone will realize that it has limited benefits and but it will be a stepping stone toward the public cloud. As Allistair Croll put it during his closing remarks, the future is the Hybrid Cloud.

A Few Force.com Best Practices

Developer's Tales — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:22:56 +0000

The one thing I have noticed in my time as a Force.com Developer is there is a fundamental difference between someone developing in the Force.com language or someone developing on the Force.com platform. Both have to figure out ways to work within the constraints of Force.com limits. People working with the language see the limits as a constraint but someone who works with the platform understands that constraints breed creativity.

The fundamental difference is are you using best practices?

If you use the following in your Apex Code, whether it be controllers or triggers, then you are really working within the platform and using best practices. What I love about most of these rules as I see it is that they are already spelled out to us in the Apex Documents:

If you have used all of the above or at least some of the above, then you can be considered a developer on the platform. They are all vital to making sure any application you build on the Force.com Platform accounts for any errors that can come up. Something as basic as someone adding a validation rule to the declarative side of Force.com can throw off all of your production code and cause the need for a rollback of data. One of my favorites is the for update used in SOQL queries. Its a great way to make sure that any records you are updating are locked from modification on the declarative side or the API. Many take for granted the possibility for deadlocking resources in the Cloud, but it can happen.

The list above is not the end all be all of what it takes to develop on the platform. These are best practices as I see them and the list is definitely growing.

If you have any question, comments, or anything just leave a comment below or reach out to us at @ModelMetricsInc

A Two-Hour Chatter Application

Developer's Tales — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:21:07 +0000

I get bored. When I get bored I code. Here’s an example:

Two hours later I had this:

Which is all about this:

This is my two hour Salesforce Chatter Air Application. Its simple enough functionality wise, all it does is:

Login into Salesforce using Username, Password, and Token
Allows a user with the Chatter license to update their Chatter Status (see code snippet above)
Allows a user to see their current status
Allows a user to see and refresh manually their Chatter Feed

The reason I created this AIR Application a few months ago was simply to drive my own adoption of Chatter. I was so used to using Social Network services like Facebook and Twitter from AIR applications that I wanted to see the same from Chatter. The awesome thing is that coming in the Salesforce Winter 11 release is a Chatter AIR application that puts mine to shame.

What allowed me to build the application out in two hours was really two things: the fact that all you need to do to update your Chatter status is to update the CurrentStatus field on your User record and the ability to parse quickly through the FeedPosts, FeedComments and FeedTrackedChanges from my Users NewsFeed.

After making sense of the Chatter object model and parsing through it I was able to take the Feeds and any subsequent data that was needed and insert it into a really simple Flex DataGrid.

A few text boxes, buttons and a data grid later and boom, AIR Application.

Keep in mind that only API version 18 and above will have access the Chatter objects.

Now this is the part of the post where I would provide you source code, but that’s really not necessary. In the time between when I built this AIR application and now there have been a ton of resources here at http ://developer .force .com /chatter. What they have there basically blows out the water what I have and with the new Chatter Visualforce components if you do want to build an application on the platform its very easy.

Working with Chatter is very simple. The Visualforce components that are coming out and the fact that you can simply post your status on your User object really made the whole experience very smooth. I urge all Force.com Developers to get into Chatters metadata and platform offerings and see what they can do with it.

Questions? Reach out to @ModelMetricsInc on Twitter.

VMForce has Landed

The Marketing Viewpoint — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:53:54 +0000

At long last, the oft-rumored VMForce has been officially announced.

Huh?

VMForce is a technology brought about by a partnership between salesforce.com and VMware, the leader in virtualization technology. VMForce enables Java applications to run on Force.com infrastructure, the robust development platform built by the folks at salesforce.com.

What does all of that mean?

Java is one of the most widely used development languages in the world. It is a mature technology with millions of active developers, with more applications running than can likely be counted. With VMForce, many of those applications can now be migrated easily to run in the cloud.

These applications will then be available anywhere, on almost any device. They are instantly social, searchable, and scalable. And since they’re on Force.com, you get great security and visibility into uptime.

Cloud Converter Update

Developer's Tales — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:54:28 +0000

Posted a couple of minor updates to Cloud Converter, mostly small bug fixes that affected the metadata explorer feature. If you already have it installed as a web tab in your org, there’s nothing you need to do. You automatically have access to these. Enjoy!

Adobe AIR Marketplace, from Idea to Product in 4 hours

John Barnes — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:58:39 +0000

I recently listed the desktop version of CardLasso on Adobe’s AIR Marketplace. If you haven’t heard of AIR, check it out on the Adobe site. It is the “Adobe Integrated Runtime” which allows you to run RIA apps on your desktop and distribute them with the ease of a web app. Our AIR version of CardLasso is targeted at the Tradeshow user, and allows you to quickly gather business cards when you have no internet connection and save them locally. You can sync them up to Lasso2Go later back at Starbucks or the hotel.

It seems like not a lot of people know about the AIR Marketplace so I wanted to write a quick note to raise awareness and let you know about the listing process.
First off, I really like their approach. You can use your existing Adobe ID to create a publishing account on the marketplace, this took 10 seconds.

Next you enter publisher information to tell everyone a little about your company and upload a company logo. Very fast and easy. I was immediately approved as a publisher.

Then I filled out the listing for our application which included all the standard info you would expect, description, logos, links to download the app, etc… (See below)

The only hard part about the listing process was sizing down graphics and screen shots to fit the requirements, but not a big deal.

Then I clicked submit.

Literally less than an hour later I had an email from Adobe with a few questions and suggestions on my listing. I made the suggested changes and our product was live.
It was great to list a product on an online store and have it live a four hours after starting the listing process. Granted it doesn’t have the volume that the Apple AppStore has, or the security implications that the Salesforce AppExchange listings have, but both Apple and Salesforce could learn a few things from how Adobe approaches the listing process.

It’s been live for a few days, check it out here and add a review to let us know what you think.