For the past two years I have been in a Communication Studies program at the University of Iowa- it’s a top-in-the-nation program. In fact, I can’t name one professor at Iowa who hasn’t wrote a book that fundamentally impacted the field of communications. Often I get the question- “Communication Studies what’s that?” Well, in a nutshell it’s the study of how humans create, interpret, and interact with each other through the shared use of symbols. I find it fascinating. I also can’t imagine a better time to study communication than right now- with the advent of social technology both outside of the workplace and inside the workplace. Being a Communications Studies student one would think that my adoption of Chatter in my org is off the charts. Fact is- it’s not and it frustrates me to no end. “Why can’t I communicate the benefits of collaborating to my coworkers?” This question haunts me. I

Today I had the privilege of speaking at the Wisconsin User Group meeting in Milwaukee, and I want to thank ButtonClickAdmin.com Supporter and Salesforce User Group Leader Julia Napolitano for helping to organize this. If you haven’t attended a Salesforce User Group meeting (or haven’t in a while) I highly encourage you to do so, it’s really one of the best ways to connect with other Button-click Admins, Developers, and Users. The speech I gave today was “How to be a Super Salesforce Admin!”; it covers six of the best practices that Salesforce Admins can and should be doing to be a Super Admin. Below are the slides I shared with the group. I would love to get your feedback and continue the discussion about how to be a Super Salesforce Admin! [slideshare id=10490906&doc=milwaukeeug-presented-111206203127-phpapp02] Related PostsSee you at #SXSW! Monday AM Admin: 5 Innovative Ways to Use Chatter (Guest Post)

It’s been a couple years now that I have been doing regular webcasts with my users as part of a team communication strategy so that everyone in my company can stay up to date. At Dreamforce ’11 I presented the “7 Habits of a Highly Successful Admin” and our 7th habit was- team communication. At the end of that presentation I was asked numerous times to demo the webinar app that I built for tracking. Of course, due to time I was unable to, but I wanted to pass along the recipe for what I built to get Admins started down the path of tracking their own team communication. The Recipe- what you will need: 2 Custom Objects 7 Custom fields 2 Workflow Rules 2 email templates 1 AppExchange App- optional 4 Reports 1 Dashboard The Objects As mention in the recipe we will need two objects. The first is

I’m going to start off this post with a video I would like you to watch. It’s called KLM surprise and maybe you have seen it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk] Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk When I first saw this video I thought- “How can I capture the same magic, the same WOW factor for my users?” Then it came to me- what if I created a birthday field on the User Record and recorded my users birthdays? Sounds simple enough! Now, what I would like to do is create a workflow to send me an email when that person has a birthday. But since we can’t do workflows on User records (vote for the idea here) what I did was create a User report that included that field and scheduled it to run on the first day of the month and email me. Strong Admins can drive adoption by keeping their Users engaged. Why do I