I want to introduce you to Robert Irvine. He is a chef, host on Food Network for Restaurant Impossible, and a great teacher that will help us be better Salesforce Admins. That’s right, whether we like to admit or not this former member of the Royal Navy with bigger than life arms is going to teach us a thing or five about being great Salesforce Admins. Robert is a great delegator, communicator, and manager. I am hooked on his shows and I think we can learn some valuable lessons from Robert based on his style of project management and apply those to our everyday jobs as System Admins. 1. Eyes Wide open Robert approaches every challenge with his eyes wide open both physically and metaphorically. What this helps him do is take in the environment around him and the possibilities. It also keeps him alert to listen to problems, issues,

I had the pleasure of interviewing Blakely Graham, Co-Founder of [Bracket] Labs, about their app Task Ray and what they saw at Dreamforce 2011. In the world of CRM Marketing, campaign management, and even task management to some degree gets overlooked. As an AppQuest ’11 judge I saw many really forward thinking apps and got to interact with some really passionate app builders. It is my intention to bring you great interviews with these app builders and designers as a way to meet with them and get insight into why they do what they do. If you are an App designer and would like to participate in the “Voice behind the App” series contact me. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrgwPbyi7jU Just as a side note: I had a light go out shortly after starting the recording so the video for me is a bit more red than usual. But hey, it fits with my

Remember that amazing keynote from Dreamforce? Yeah, me too! So now it is time to put pen to paper- or whatever that cliche saying is and read those release notes. For the last release- Summer ’11, I made my list based on what we needed to know as Admins and what we needed to train our Users on. Well, I’m going to make it easy on us- we just flat have to know it all now. Winter ’12 will be a huge release that we need to prepare for.  Oh and just in case you don’t already have the release notes you can view them here. I spent the good part of my Sunday in one of my Salesforce Sandboxes looking at Winter ’12 and reading the release notes. While not all of the features are there yet you are able to see a good portion of them. So, I

When you are a Salesforce admin, you are the admin of the entire Salesforce–all the apps, all the plugins, everything. So when a new app is needed you are often the first one called on to do some scouting. That’s a good thing because based on your knowledge you should be the one to do the scouting. The bad news is you have to scout apps even if you have no idea what you are looking for. Like what makes this app better than that app? Sometimes the request can be like “we need a project management app in Salesforce, let’s meet next week to review what you found.” So that’s what happened to me a few weeks ago and let me tell you about the adventure it kicked off. I pretty much know nothing about project management apps. What the who? Yeah, I’m not afraid to say it. For