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.”
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.
Selected for the innovation and success of the Ingram Micro Cloud website, developed and deployed with the help of Model Metrics
CHICAGO – June 09, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced that customer Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM) has been named a recipient of IDG’s CIO magazine’s 2011 CIO 100 Award. Ingram Micro, the world’s largest technology distributor, received the prestigious honor based on the innovation and success of the Ingram Micro Cloud website (http://www.ingrammicrocloud.com), which Model Metrics helped to design, develop and deploy.
Model Metrics and Ingram Micro partner to deliver the Ingram Micro Cloud to 35,000 partners
The Ingram Micro Cloud is part of Ingram Micro’s effort to enable the success of its reseller partners in the cloud by providing them with education and business development opportunities. Innovative to Ingram Micro’s strategy was the company’s decision to deliver its cloud strategy via the cloud, using cutting-edge cloud technology.
Model Metrics partnered with Ingram Micro from advising the company on the cloud landscape to the delivery of the system. Because it was built 100 percent in the cloud, the site was deployed rapidly and live within four months with no IT infrastructure required.
The resulting cloud-based system is intuitive and easy for partners to navigate, while also being highly customized to Ingram Micro’s needs and existing business processes.
Today the Ingram Micro Cloud is the first of its kind in the industry and is the go-to business and education resource for approximately 1,600 solutions providers and managed service providers (MSPs).
Comments on the news
“Ingram Micro is exemplary for its use of the cloud to enable thousands of reseller partners,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “We congratulate Ingram Micro on receiving this great honor and are proud of our role in bringing their vision to life.”
About CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 Awards
The recipients of this year's CIO 100 award were selected through a three-step process. First, companies filled out an online application form detailing their innovative IT and business initiatives. Next, a team of judges reviewed the applications in depth, looking for unique practices and substantial results. Finally, CIO editors reviewed the judges' recommendations and voted on the final 100.
Complete coverage of the 2011 CIO 100 awards will be online at www.cio.com on August 1, 2011 and in the August 1 issue of CIO magazine.
About Model Metrics Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and Dallas, Model Metrics’ customer base spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allstate, Aon, Cars.com, CME Group, Honeywell, InfoUSA, MasterCard, Medtronic, and Orbitz.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR,Amazon Web Services, Google and the Apple iPhone enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences. To learn more, visit http://www.modelmetrics.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @modelmetricsinc.
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Media Contacts: Kelly Indrieri
Kulesa Faul, Inc. for Model Metrics, Inc.
1.650.340.1983 kelly@kulesafaul.com
Model Metrics receives the highest score possible for client satisfaction; also receives its highest scores for its implementation life cycle, vertical expertise, key partnerships and go to market strategy
CHICAGO – May 23, 2011 – Model Metrics, the leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced it is cited as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Salesforce.com Implementation, Q2 2011 (May 13, 2011). In this evaluation of leading service providers for complex, enterprise-wide salesforce.com initiatives, Model Metrics received its highest scores for client satisfaction, implementation life cycle, vertical expertise, key partnerships and go to market strategy.
The report evaluated 11 salesforce.com implementation service providers with more than $10 million in revenue associated with salesforce.com projects, more than 50 consultants, and breadth of capabilities from process expertise to technical programming skill. The report focused specifically on the needs of larger, more complex salesforce.com deployments, often global in scope, large in scale, or complex in terms of integrations and customization.
According to the report:
Model Metrics was noted for developing its 2GO Cloud solutions, which enable Salesforce and other cloud solutions on mobile devices, as well as its concentration of client experience in financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and CPG/retail industries.
“It (Model Metrics) is an excellent choice for firms that are seeking a more nimble, flexible partner that is highly dedicated to SFDC (salesforce.com).”
Model Metrics, eight years of expertise in the clouds
Recognized for its expertise with custom, mobile, and multi-cloud deployments, Model Metrics has 100,000+ mobile application users and has completed over 1,500 cloud computing implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies.
Today Model Metrics is the go to service provider for enterprises looking to deliver the power of cloud computing on the latest tablet and smartphone devices. Its expertise at the intersection of cloud computing and mobility enables businesses to not only discover the productivity of conducting business transactions on the road, but also to gain competitive advantage by mobilizing the cloud.
Comments on the news:
“We feel our placement on this Forrester Wave focused on large and complex enterprise-wide salesforce.com implementations is a testament to our early commitment to the cloud and the expertise we’ve developed over the past eight years with custom, mobile and multi-cloud deployments,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “With over 1,500 cloud implementations under our belts, we’re at the cutting edge of making the cloud work for enterprises.”
About Model Metrics
Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Detroit, and Minneapolis, Model Metrics’ customerbase spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allergan, Aon, Honeywell, L'Oreal, MasterCard, Medtronic, NBC Universal, The Boeing Company and Walgreens.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR, Amazon Web Services, Google and the Applei Phone and iPad enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences.
Large hospice and palliative care provider uses Model Metrics’ cloud deployment and integration expertise to gain business visibility, cost savings and ultimately provide high quality care to its community
CHICAGO – May 2, 2011 – Model Metrics, a leader in cloud computing services for the enterprise, today announced the success of Tidewell Hospice in using cloud computing to provide high quality care to its patients and greater community. Florida’s premier hospice and palliative care provider, serving 1,300 patients a day, worked with Model Metrics to deploy Salesforce CRM and integrate it with its electronic medical records (EMR) system. Tidewell has greatly gained business visibility from the resulting system, improving the effectiveness of its business liaisons in building relationships with physicians, hospitals and the community, and giving the company a competitive advantage in the face of healthcare reform.
Bringing technological innovation to hospice and palliative care Tidewell’s innovative use of technology is paving the way for hospice and palliative care centers across the country. It wanted to extend the knowledge contained in its EMR system to track its referral relationships with physicians and hospitals, as well as fundraising, events and the grief and bereavement services it offers to families and its community. Tidewell saw the potential for CRM technology to support its business process, and leveraged donated and discounted licenses of Salesforce CRM from the Salesforce.com Foundation. It turned to Model Metrics for their expertise with Salesforce and the healthcare industry to customize the system to its unique needs.
Model Metrics’ cloud expertise and proven methodology led to a quick deployment. Translating Tidewell’s requirements into visual prototypes happened nearly instantaneously, with the system being configured and customized in just 60 days.
The dashboards Model Metrics created give business liaisons and their directors new insight into their relationships with physicians and long term care facilities, including referral performance by physician and admission trending. Management is now able to leverage standardized and consolidated information to direct liaisons to work more efficiently on the best referral sources that create access to hospice benefit.
Model Metrics integrated the cloud-based CRM system to Tidewell’s EMR system using the Informatica Cloud. Patient information from the EMR system such as census data and their transitions is automatically updated in the Salesforce system on a real time basis.
As a result, Tidewell has been able to save costs. The new system did not require a significant increase in headcount or operation. In addition, the business visibility and control afforded by the new system gives Tidewell a competitive advantage by being able to quickly adapt and expand into new markets as a result of the changes taking place in healthcare reform and Medicare reimbursement.
Comments on the News
“Model Metrics represents a new breed of services provider in the age of cloud computing. Their ability to provide nearly instantaneous proof of concepts of our vision, along with their healthcare and Salesforce domain expertise, was crucial in guiding us towards a solution that brings new innovation to how we run our business,” said Dave Lafferty, EVP and CIO, Tidewell Hospice. “Cloud computing not only affords us the opportunity to manage our organization without having to maintain a large IT department or infrastructure, but also gives us nimbleness to secure our future in the face of a changing healthcare system.”
“Tidewell Hospice is exemplary for its use of cloud computing in a unique healthcare environment,” said Adam Caplan, CEO of Model Metrics. “Through its foresight into how a cloud-based CRM system could apply to how it manages relationships with its community, Tidewell is able to focus its resources on its core mission to provide the best possible care to its patients and their families.”
About Tidewell Hospice Serving more than 1,200 patients daily in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and DeSoto counties, Tidewell is one of the largest not-for-profit hospices in the U.S. Home-based palliative care is the basic premise of the program, involving the support of physicians, registered nurses, social service counselors, certified nursing assistants and volunteers, all following a prescribed plan of care. Tidewell's services are available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. For more information, please visit: http://tidewell.org/
About Model Metrics Model Metrics, enabler of the Model Enterprise, delivers solutions and services at the cutting edge of the cloud computing industry. Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google. Headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and Dallas, Model Metrics’customer base spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbott, Allstate, Aon, Cars.com, CME Group, Honeywell, InfoUSA, MasterCard, Medtronic, and Orbitz.
With a focus on mobile and call center technology, business process and change management innovation, and custom development, Model Metrics has completed 1,500+ salesforce.com implementations for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. Its world-class application development skills using Force.com, Adobe Flex and AIR, Amazon Web Services, Google and the Apple iPhone enable the creation of custom applications featuring multimedia-rich user experiences. To learn more, visit http://www.modelmetrics.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @modelmetricsinc.
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Contact:
Kelly Indrieri
Kulesa Faul for Model Metrics
(650) 340-1983 kelly@kulesafaul.com
Apple's iPad is the hottest device in the workplace today. According to Computerworld, Medtronic recently purchased 4,500 iPads for employees, and they aren't the only ones. Microstrategy is behaving similarly. Many companies are making the jump early to adopt these devices and putting themselves at an advantage.
Given the iPad's vast consumer and business market acceptance (15 million units sold in 2010 alone), what exactly are companies doing with these devices? Are they more than just a pretty toy?
Join us for a free webinar where our CTO, John Barnes will walk through answers to those questions and more, including how to take salesforce.com Content with you even without an internet connection. If you don't currently have a tablet device strategy in place you don't want to miss this interactive event.
As the bulk of Internet sites and services have moved or are moving to using the REST API (Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Facebook), salesforce.com is also moving in that direction. Amazon's Jeff Barr has acknowledged that although both REST and SOAP APIs are offered, 85% of the calls to Amazon Web Services use REST.
Since Model Metrics prefers to be on the leading edge of technology, we have already developed an application that enables order entry on an iPad and communicates to Salesforce using the new REST API functionality. It's a truly elegant, yet simple to use application. Check out the video of it in action:
As pretty much anybody who has a pulse already knows, BlackBerry has released their latest technological marvel, the PlayBook tablet. Initially, it appears to be a direct competitor to the iPad, which as far as we're concerned is a good thing. Competition breeding innovation and all.
But what really excites us is that this new tablet device runs Adobe AIR, which our 2GO platform and applications are built to run on. Sweet! Now our customers have a true choice in the marketplace when they want mobile access to salesforce data, content, and so much more.
Now to the fun stuff, a video demo of the PlayBook in action:
Theres a few rules that I've learned while working with Salesforce/Azure/Amazon Web Service/Google App Engine that everyone should follow:
Manage your DB read/writes - It may seem beneficial to do a write then a read for the latest data, but manage the data in cache so you don't waste precious resources. Many Cloud providers lock down your DB read/writes, keep those limits in mind.
Be mindful of memory - All of the cloud providers, especially Google App Engine and Salesforce have limits on Heap size. Refresh your lists, make sure your heap time is properly managed. Everyone provides some form of garbage collection, but they won't watch your resource limit for you.
Always cache your public pages - All of the provides have a hard limit on bandwidth. If you don't have proper caching, you'll hit your limits and lose money when you don't need to.
Make "More Hardware" your last resort - As software engineers we usually prefer to say "Toss a few boxes on, cluster it, and boom were golden". When it comes to the Cloud resources = money. Unroll loops, deallocate memory how you can (clear list and maps OUT after they aren't needed), and be mindful of memory leaks.
Triage scheduled jobs - Scheduled jobs are those special processes that happen when you need them to happen but be very careful. If the cloud goes down and your needed job doesn't happen, you could be in a heap of trouble. If its REALLY necessary then have a manual process or a servlet setup that can be run later on to make up for that missed job.
PAY ATTENTION TO ENVIRONMENT UPDATES! - When your Cloud provider releases a new SDK, updates your environmental variables, or makes a change in any way, KNOW ABOUT IT. Cloud providers are constantly upgrading their product, and since its in the Cloud they will update it and you will need to deal with it. There is no "OK this app works with Tomcat 5.5, so we don't really need 6.0." No, they will give you 6.0, and your application could crash and burn. You may need to make some changes but so what, get with the program or get off the Cloud.
Someone else built your security - Every cloud provider has their own security setup. Now you don't have to build one, great! But it keeps changing, not so great! How your provider chooses to manage your apps security, authenticated or unauthenticated, can and will change. Like before, pay attention to security updates. Make sure your app is XSS and XSRF safe even if your provider makes that guarantee.
Is your application Cloud Ready? - Your Java application uses Struts. You wan't to use either Google App Engine or VMware's vSphere. Uh-oh, GAE Java uses Spring(sort of) and vSphere uses SpringSource. OK, should you rebuild your app or go over to another provider such as Amazon Web Services? Know this before you start refactoring.
Know your costs - If your app needs to grow, the Cloud can accommodate………….at a cost. Its hard for a developer to see dollar signs when they need something done but you need to learn that with great power comes great responsibility. If you want to start your own Cloud ISV, make sure your income statement keeps those growing Cloud costs in check.
Remember: You're Sharing - You could have three boxes, you could be with three other people on a single box, you do not know. Keep in mind that if you screw up big, it can affect alot of people. Safe virtualization techniques by your Cloud providers can prevent this from happening from the most part, but take some of your own precautions. Most cloud providers don't allow for any real multi-threading, but if they do remember the following: avoid deadlocks and race conditions. These aren't just kernel issues, they're hardware issues and can do some real damage to other peoples applications.
Nearly all of my recommendations are the the same as if you were designing a C application for a router. Be safe, be secure, and watch the expenditure of money and resources. Keep these things in mind and you will have a great experience in the Cloud.
Salesforce chatter has been gaining market buzz over the past month or so, especially after salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff posted a guest blog on TechCrunch on what he calls the "Facebook Imperative." His point wasn’t just to get people talking about his own social platform, but to make people realize just how far technology has come in the past 10 years.
Salesforce has always set out to make enterprise applications (the stuff you use at work) as easy to use as the applications and websites you use at home. Salesforce Chatter is going to do for the workplace what Facebook has done for personal communications. Things will move much more quickly and relationships will grow.
The ability to update your co-workers enmasse without spamming them and filling their already overfull inboxes represents the biggest difference between push and pull communications. Salesforce claims that since rolling out Chatter internally their email volume dropped by 40%. Imagine how much time that would save you in a given day!
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