Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for April.

 

Join us as we talk about all the great Salesforce content from April, including some World Tour travel content and we have to say: we’re really excited to see people again.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.

Salesforce World Tour

Mike and Gillian recap all of the exciting World Tour stops that have been happening this month, including Sydney and DC. If you haven’t yet been to an in-person Salesforce event, now is the time, especially with Dreamforce coming up in September.

Blog highlights from April

“The Salesforce Admins Skills Kit is basically a way for us to put really concrete data and language behind the nontechnical skills that make a Salesforce Admin successful,” Gillian says, things like problem solving, business analysis, and communication. While we’re really good at telling you all of the parts of the product you need to understand to be a good Admin, we’re looking at how we can help you build those soft skills that create that legendary Admin magic. We also wanted to highlight an article Gillian wrote about how different Admins have built to better manage user requests.

 

Video highlights from April

As Mike says, this might be the coolest thing we’ve done since starting the podcast. Jennifer Lee is now doing a live session on YouTube we like to call Automate This. “It’s like a cooking show, but for building Flows,” Gillian says.

 

Podcast highlights from April

 

We think you should check out our episode with Antoine Cabot, who is in charge of building Orchestrator. It’s the Flow of Flows. Multi-user workflows started as a dream a few years ago and to see everything that we’re able to do is truly thrilling.

 

 

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the April monthly retro for 2022. I'm your host Mike Gerholdt and in this episode, we're going to review the top product community, careers content. Hey, you know what? Just going to make a quick edit and say world tour travel content too, that we did in April, because we're so excited to say that. And of course to help me do that, the very familiar voice of Gillian, Bruce. Hello, Gillian.

Gillian Bruce: Hey Mike, happy to join, it's good to be back with you again. It's fun getting back in the swing things because we actually have been able to see people as you hinted with the world tour teaser in your opening.

Mike Gerholdt: I know, seriously, I got a plane and took a cab somewhere and ate at a restaurant and saw humans.

Gillian Bruce: I get to stay at a hotel away from my family, it was awesome.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Oh, when they bring back room service. I've never been more excited for room service.

Gillian Bruce: So my hotel didn't have room service. It was modified room service. There was a dropped it at the door kind of thing.

Mike Gerholdt: Fine. Actually that's better as an introvert, that's even the perfect room service. Just "Knock, knock, knock. Your food is at your door." Oh, perfect. I don't have to interact with you. "Nope, have a nice day."

Gillian Bruce: Anyway, we're back. Everyone's coming back slowly. It's really exciting and gosh, well it really was a world tour, because the first stop was not even on this continent that we are both on right now.

Mike Gerholdt: And neither of us went.

Gillian Bruce: Nope. But that's okay.

Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Down under.

Gillian Bruce: Down under.

Mike Gerholdt: So World Tour Sydney happened and shout out to Judy Fang who you've seen at Trailblazers Innovate back in 2020.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, Judy's awesome.

Mike Gerholdt: She was, it's a shame I didn't get down there. And Philip for presenting admin content in the Trailblazer theater down there in Sydney. We would love to hear your thoughts if you went.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We want to hear everyone's thoughts from of any of the events that are happening, especially the event that's happening right now as you're probably listening to this because TrailblazerDX is happening right now, today.

Mike Gerholdt: You could be listening to this as you're walking up Market Street, headed to Moscone West.

Gillian Bruce: There you go. Yep. To see people so exciting. But then our next stop on the tour was one of my favorite cities, D.C. And Mike, you and I got to be there together, it was so fun,

Mike Gerholdt: And present, I got to get a badge. A credential to hang around your neck. It sounds weird but virtual events we didn't get the little thing and it was dangling and it felt important.

Gillian Bruce: I had to think about what to wear on the bottom half of my body, because it wasn't just from the chest up.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Shoes, oh man, shoes. Break your shoes in. Hey, you know what I forgot to do? Break my shoes in. Broke my feet in. Let me tell you.

Gillian Bruce: D.C. was amazing. Not only did we get to physically be in person at an event, but we got to see community members there. There is a very vibrant D.C., Maryland, Virginia community. I think there were five community groups that were all presenting big time there, so it was great to reconnect with folks. And what was really great, Mike, is that not only did we get to present three times in the Trailblazer theater with great, amazing admin content, but we also got to feature local Trailblazers and part of our presentations.

Mike Gerholdt: And who were they Gillian? Because you found them.

Gillian Bruce: I did. I feel like I struck gold. It was great. We literally and I did. Brittany Charles, she joined us. She's been working with the Salesforce platform for a long time but she's just now getting involved in the community and she has a lot to share in terms of how you can really hone your awesome admin skills, about the different kinds of instances that she's worked with. Keep an eye on her, follow her. She's got a lot to offer the community.
And then, we also featured Carmel James and when I say I struck gold, so Brittany well for sure, she's a golden, amazing, wonderful member of our community and she's got a lot to offer. But Carmel literally was award in the Golden Hoodie. She has lot to share, she's turned into a consultant so she's working with many different kinds of Salesforce instances, but she is an admin at heart and has so many great things to share. In fact, you are going to hear her or you have heard her on the Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt: You've already heard her, she was last week. Yeah, April 21st. I just had to look that up because we wrangled the Golden Hoodie.

Gillian Bruce: We wrangled her, yes.

Mike Gerholdt: Onto a Podcast.

Gillian Bruce: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That was cool. We also had in addition to the theater sessions... Which by the way I thought I had presented in, I've done stuff in front of the camera and whatever. Oh no, it's standing up again, clicking a clicker.

Gillian Bruce: The energy is back.

Mike Gerholdt: Whole different new realm of like, and people are looking at you and you say something then they laugh at your joke and you're like, "Oh my God,"-

Gillian Bruce: Or they don't,

Mike Gerholdt: "This is great." Or they don't, that's fine. I'm used to that too. We had demo station, I want to thank Nick, Justin Anne and Morgan for staffing that. That was amazing. And hopefully you had a chance to stop by the demo station. I saw there was a lot of people hanging around, questions all the time.

Gillian Bruce: We did hand out a bunch of stickers and pins, there's always that swag.

Mike Gerholdt: You did. Yeah. If you were at world tour D.C, you could have got a Salesforce admin podcast sticker.

Gillian Bruce: Those are hot items people.

Mike Gerholdt: I bet if you're listening this now and you find us at TrailblazerDX, you could probably get something too.

Gillian Bruce: I'm pretty sure it's not the way it's going to happen.

Mike Gerholdt: Probably walk around with stuff in our pockets. I wrote down another thing that was fun. I got to do a selfie at World Tour D.C.

Gillian Bruce: Selfies are back.

Mike Gerholdt: I just remember somebody was like, "Oh, I don't know how..." I like, "Just give me the phone, I know how to do it. it's like riding in a bicycle."

Gillian Bruce: Just came right back to you.

Mike Gerholdt: Just came right back to me. So yeah, I got selfies. I Get selfies with a podcast listener too. I tweeted it out.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah, it was really great. I think what's really fun about these Salesforce tours is that they're very localized, right? So it's like, a specific community, they're free, so you can come. You get a lot of people who have never been to a Salesforce event before, especially given the last couple years at these events. And so I met so many new people and we're like, "Hey, welcome. Welcome to this really fun community. And I am so happy that this is your first event and I get to talk to you and I get to welcome you in."
And there were so many people that made connections at the event. Listener, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, go to a Salesforce event because it is such a valuable way to make connections, to learn, to get stickers, because that's also really important. But yeah, come to an event, there's plenty of opportunities. The tour is going to all kinds of different cities in the next few months. And then we have a little something called Dreamforce that's happening in September.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, it's going to be awesome. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: It's epic. Okay. There's more than just, this amazing vibe of we're going to see people in person, events are back.

Mike Gerholdt: But we are really excited for that.

Gillian Bruce: We are very excited, but we also did a lot of other really cool things this month for the community. So Mike, can you give it's a little recap of some the cool things.

Mike Gerholdt: So when you say we, we really mean the Royal we of admin [inaudible]

Gillian Bruce: Very Royal,

Mike Gerholdt: The Royal we, if you know me, you know that joke. So the one thing I want to highlight that I think is just one of the coolest things we've launched since maybe the Podcast, Genly now doesn't automate this session. It's a live video on YouTube.

Gillian Bruce: Live,

Mike Gerholdt: Live. You're sitting around and you're like, "Man, wonder how Genly would build this flow. Let's just watch it live.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: I'll just give you a moment to gather your head, has it exploded. Because all of the amazingness, and so we'll link to a blog post where you can watch the recorded version of the live.

Gillian Bruce: Replay.

Mike Gerholdt: Butthat Blog post has all the information, so you can tune in and watch all the automated this. It's so exciting. This is such a neat idea.

Gillian Bruce: It's so cool. It's like a cooking show, but for building flows and automations you're watching it happen in real time, you can follow along, you can watch the replay, so you can go replicate it and follow along in your own pace. But just getting that live brilliance directly from Genly is just chef's kiss to continue the metaphor.

Mike Gerholdt: That also gives me a really fun idea for Dreamforce. It'd be fun to do live flow building and then have Genly on the side commentary. You ever watched that food network where like, "He's shaving the radishes, which will give a-

Gillian Bruce: Like Iron chef.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, like that kind of thing, that'd be fun to watch.

Gillian Bruce: She could be the, what is it? The Alton Brown?

Mike Gerholdt: Alton Brown. Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And you could be the sideline reporter in the kitchen being like-

Mike Gerholdt: I'd just be the guy that's relief. That sounds really cool.

Gillian Bruce: "Looks we're retiring a workflow here and,"

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yeah. All this stuff you'll see at TDX today, I promise you're going to see how to turn a workflow into a flow at TDX today, if you're listening this on April 28th.

Gillian Bruce: Guaranteed. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt: Like you should. We'll do a full TDX wrap up next month because it's literally happening right now. Oh, it's like multiverse, you could be listening to this Podcast now and then standing across from me or you. And we wouldn't even know it. It's like, "Whoa," wonder what that's going to say.

Gillian Bruce: Really in the Salesforce matrix there.

Mike Gerholdt: I just thought of that, makes no sense.

Gillian Bruce: But yeah. Well, I'm launching a little something right now at TDX.

Mike Gerholdt: A lot of something.

Gillian Bruce: A lot of something. We've been working as a team on a really big project for the last year and it's super important and it's very timely. And we are launching the Salesforce admin skills kit at TDX. And you may be saying, what is the skills kit you think of? Well, the skills kit is basically a way for us to put really concrete in data and language behind the non-technical skills that make a Salesforce admin successful. We're talking about things problem solving, business analysis, communication. We've done so much work over the last year between serving actual admins in the community, talking to workforce development organizations, employers, experienced admins, job seekers about how we can really help, beef up.
We're really good at telling you all of the different parts of the product that you need to know to be a really good Salesforce admin, but we've been lacking in that business skillset that you also need. To me, that's the admin magic, right? That's what makes so amazing. So we have this amazing, very robust skills kit that goes through all of these different skills that you will absolutely benefit from. If you are looking to grow your Salesforce admin career, if you're looking for your first Salesforce admin role or if you're looking to hire a Salesforce admin. It's huge, it's awesome. You can go to admin.salesforce.com/skills kit, and you can find all of the great resources there.
We've got expertise from different community members that we're talking about each different skill, showing you examples of how you represent this on a resume, how you would represent this in a job out description and then also resources for how you learn, how to develop that skill further. So I could go on and on about it. I got a whole session at TDX about it. I will be talking about this for probably the rest of my tenure at Salesforce. This is really important stuff. And I cannot wait to see what the community does with it, because it's a great resource.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And more to come when you join us at Dreamforce this year.

Gillian Bruce: Ooh. So much more. This is just the beginning, everybody. There's a little much more.

Mike Gerholdt: Just the smidge, just the corner. You think you know, you have no idea. A couple pieces of content I want to point out and then we'll wrap up so that you can get on your way, on the road to TDX. Should we say [inaudible]

Gillian Bruce: On the road from TDX? Is it the last

Mike Gerholdt: Maybe they're taking a car, rail car. Why can't I think trolley?

Gillian Bruce: A cable car.

Mike Gerholdt: Cable car. Why is that such a thing?

Gillian Bruce: Well it's-

Mike Gerholdt: The Mr. Rogers neighborhood thing came to mind.

Gillian Bruce: That was technically a trolley, that was not a cable car. It's different.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay. No. Yeah. There we go. Now nobody's listening. Two things to point out, one, there's an amazing Podcast. Gillian, you did this Podcast with Antoine Calvet, who is the PM for Flow. Is he?

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. He and his team are basically the ones who build orchestrator, which is the Flow of Flows thing. I love talking to Antoine because also I'm getting back up to speed with everything that happened while I was on parental leave, and talking to him was so fun because it's like we had this concept a year ago, two years ago, and now it's really happening where you can really take those multi-user workflows, all these processes that involve different departments, maybe external internal users and you can put all of that into one beautiful process automation using orchestrator.
You don't have to rebuild each individual Flow, you don't have to link them together and external things, you have one beautiful representation. It was really great to talk to him about what he and his team have built, where it's going, what they're excited to share at TDX, which is happening now. Yeah, it was a really fun episode to record if you haven't listened to it. Go listen it.

Mike Gerholdt: Go back and listen. And Gillian you highlighted an article that you wrote too.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, okay. I can't take full credit for this article. This is really like I put a question out on Twitter and got overwhelmingly awesome responses from the community. I was talking to a colleague like a month ago and I was like, "Hey, don't we have a good example of an app that someone's built to manage users?" And for some reason I thought that this content already existed, I couldn't find it. So what do I do? I just post on Twitter, "Hey, does anyone have a good example of how they've built an app to manage user requests?" Okay. The responses I got were incredible. I got some amazing examples of really robust and really powerful apps that people have built to better manage user requests and go read the posts. There's actual screenshots in there and actual outlines of different parts and features of these apps that people have built, so many great things you can learn and incorporate.
Things like how to really get real data on your ROI of the things that you have built to really track the time to some best practices in terms of capturing requests, in terms of forcing people to fit into the structure of a user request. It's great. Check out the post. I'm sure you're going to get something out of it that will help you as an admin, be more efficient and help you and your team deliver more powerful results and just show how amazing you are. So read it. And huge shout out to all the collaborators that contributed to it. Because let me tell you, I just put the quest out there and then just put all of their great info in there.

Mike Gerholdt: You just put the legos together, you didn't build the bricks.

Gillian Bruce: Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Cool. Well that was great. We will do a wrap up of TDX in May, hang out for that because we've also got some stuff that we're going to try and record live there. We'll see how that turns out. But if you want to learn more about all the things that we just talked about, the Podcast and that really cool article, go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are at Salesforce admins. No I on Twitter. I am on Twitter @MikeGerholdt and of course Gillian is @Gilliankbruce. I bet there's a few selfies going on our Twitter right now.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Just because it's TDX. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: April_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Karmel James, Senior Associate at Dupont Circle Solutions.

Join us as we talk about how to ask good questions and why failure is a Record Type of Success.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Karmel James.

The Life of a Salesforce Consultant

Karmel is a Salesforce consultant: “My day is filled with asking questions and wondering what my clients are going to want today and then going through and figuring out how we’re going to deliver that to them.” Along the way, she has conversations about business processes and automation to help her get clarity on how to execute on those big ideas.

Along the way, Karmel has picked up on some best practices for solving problems quickly and efficiently. She really relies on her sandboxes to keep everything organized, and recommends you do the same.

Find the right tool for the job

“Being willing to learn and ask questions is one of the first key skills that I would say that everyone needs,” Karmel said, “but you need to be able to evaluate.” You’ve got so many tools available to you, from Process Builder to Flow and Triggers, so choosing the right thing for the right job is crucial. “What makes an Awesome Admin awesome is knowing how and when to use each,” she says.

When comes to figuring out what the right questions to ask are, Karmel recommends leaning on those high school journalism skills and asking the five Ws and an H: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. You need to clearly hear what the problem is so you can engineer a solution, whatever that may be. And while there are a lot of ways to solve something in Salesforce, if you don’t understand the problem you haven’t got a chance to make an impact.

Failure is just a Record Type of Success

“Sometimes things fail, but failure is just a Record Type of success,” Karmel says, “you can’t succeed if you don't know how to fail.” And when you need help, come to a live event and ask questions because everyone there wants to help you succeed.

There are so many people working to build the community and make people feel at home, so if you’re new then look for places where you can learn more and get in touch with people who want to help. Start with your Community Groups first and go from there, and remember that everyone is there to learn no matter what your level of experience.

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product community and career. We're live this week, Gillian, at the Salesforce World Tour, DC.

Gillian: Yeah, do y'all hear that? You hear that noise in the background?

Mike: It's people.

Gillian: People in-person. Ah, that's so exciting. So exciting.

Mike: It was fun. So Gillian, you've done a couple presentations in the theater.

Gillian: And so have you.

Mike: I did. We just came off it. It was great. I presented to people and got facial feedback.

Gillian: Yeah, that isn't just on a screen. You actually could see body language.

Mike: Right, and the excitement when you say their names.

Gillian: You could ask people to raise their hands and you could actually see some hands on the air.

Mike: And then they raise their hands. Yeah, they don't just say they did in chat. I raised my hand. We're not sitting here alone. We're sitting with some shininess.

Gillian: Oh, we got some trailblazer royalty here with us today.

Mike: Please introduce our trailblazer royalty, Gillian.

Gillian: All right, listeners. I have a very special treat for you. We have the most recent golden hoodie winner. Karmel James, joining us. Karmel, welcome to the podcast.

Karmel James: Thank you, Gillian and Mike, this is amazing. While this is very shiny and very nice, I'm just in awe that I'm sitting here with you. I mean, this is just a dream come true.

Gillian: Aw, well that's sweat.

Mike: That's very nice. I'd like to think people are like, "Hmm, Golden Hoodie podcast. I don't know."

Karmel James: It's hard. I feel like they're somewhat equal some days. And then you're just like, you know what? Everything about Salesforce is great. So I'm just going to take what I can get. And this is awesome.

Mike: I hear that Lego movie song in my head. Everything's awesome.

Gillian: Everything is awesome.

Mike: Right?

Gillian: Yeah, well that was our theme song many, many moons ago for a long time now. We should bring it back.

Mike: It's never gotten out of my head. It's stuck now.

Gillian: Karmel, let's talk a little bit about who you are and what you do, and then we'll talk about Golden Hoodie and all the things. So what do you do in Salesforce World, and how long have you been doing it? Tell us a little bit about your story.

Karmel James: Yes, all the stories. I am currently a Salesforce consultant at a boutique company here in the Arlington area. And my day is just filled with asking questions and wondering what my clients are going to want today. And then going through and figuring out how are we going to deliver that to them, and having some really great conversations about business process, automation. All of the things that awesome admins are always wanting to do, that is my job 24/7.

Mike: Wow, I like that. It sounds cool.

Gillian: I think it also sounds like she has a lot of good wisdom to share.

Mike: Have a feeling.

Gillian: It could be [crosstalk] to the community.

Karmel James: All of the wisdom, all of the things. One, Sandboxes, yes. Hands down, every time.

Mike: You should have one?

Karmel James: You should have one. You should live by it. You should want three of them at all points in time. You got to test in multiple. Yeah, it's a whole deal.

Mike: Just to be clear, we're three minutes into the pod and she's already dropping wisdom on you.

Gillian: See, and this is why we have-

Mike: There's no breaks.

Gillian: Yeah, no.

Mike: It's coming at you like a wonder wall.

Gillian: That's what happens when you get everybody together in person, everyone gets excited.

Mike: I know, we have to talk, do things.

Karmel James: I thought that was the point of the community, to share knowledge.

Mike: Well, let's talk about the community. So I think what you described in your intro as like, "Oh, I did this and then I listen to the customers." Yeah, people do that in a lot of jobs. What's different about being in the Salesforce ecosystem for you?

Karmel James: Oh, that is a hard question to answer.

Mike: We're brutal on the podcast.

Karmel James: You are. I think what's different for me is, you can hear a lot of people say, do X, do Y, right? It's all there, but it's about finding what's right for you. So you take all of this information, you hear people say, "I think you should try this." And then at least in my experience, I've always said, yes to trying something once, right? I can't know if I'm going to hate it unless I try it first. And then after you try it, evaluate. Does that make sense for you? Is it still right for you? And I think that even with how you show up in the community, even how you do your job, whatever it is in the Salesforce ecosystem, it's not just about, I know this and this is great and I want to use it. It's an also questioning and saying, but is it right for me? And should I continue to do it? Do I still get that value from it?

Gillian: Okay, so that is definitely Golden Hoodie worthy wisdom there. And I think one of the things that is interesting is one of the reasons we were working with you on some of our presentations we shared today is, you really embody a lot of those admin core skills that we're talking about. We talked about, we've got the skills kits that we're about to launch, and you really embody a lot of that. And the reason we talk about the skills kit is because a lot of people can learn how to do Salesforce. A lot of people can learn how to customize a field, how to build an app. And that's great and it's important that you know that, but that admin magic is when you combine those business skills and those skills that you are hinting at. So can you talk to us a little bit, especially about in your role as a consultant, tell us a little bit how you envision that combo and how that has worked for you and how that helps create the magic that you've been able to propel your career with.

Karmel James: Yeah, no, I think being willing to learn and ask questions is one of the first key skills that I would say that everyone needs, but to your point, yes, you need to be able to evaluate. So when you're coming together and you're thinking, "Okay, I have this solution," you've got all these different tools in front of you, right? If we're thinking about process automation, you've got workflow rules, you've got process builders, you've got Flows, you've got Triggers, you've got external systems connected with an API and it can send things. You've got everything in a toolbox.
But what makes an awesome admin awesome is knowing how and when to use each. It is critical to know that these things exist. But then again, taking that step back and really thinking about, but why do I want to use it in this scenario? How is it going to be better than... How is Flow better than process builder? Well, because Flow is going to be the thing. It is the wave. Process builder is going away. Workflow rules are going away. So really taking the time to say, "Do I understand Flow? Have I tried it? Did I test this in my Sandbox?" And then going through. And once you do have that, again, asking yourself, "Is this right? Did it solve my problem?"
Because I agree. There are so many different tools that you can use in the ecosystem and you can learn it all, yes. But what makes someone super cool, super amazing, super great at what they do, is knowing in to use one over the other, and being willing to defend that or change. If you're like, "Oh, something new has come up. Actually I did want to use Flow, now actually I think I need a trigger because the business process has changed." Right? So it's being adaptable and flexible and just asking a lot of questions and evaluating.

Mike: Okay, so to go a little bit further, because I want to get some of that Karmel goodness out. I hear that a lot, oh, you got to ask questions. You got to ask a lot of questions. And then I listen to a podcast like this and I'm like, "What are the questions? What should I be asking?" As you've evolved in your career, you've gotten better at asking questions. What are questions you ask now that help you clarify one tool versus the other or one process versus the other? Or do I build an object versus the other? What's that next level down answer that an admin needs to like, "I listen to Karmel. I'm going to go in tomorrow and I'm going to ask this type of question rather than just a question and then try and figure out Flow builder."

Karmel James: I would say it's about going back to the basics. So I remember in elementary school you learned about the five Ws. Who, what, when, where, why, and then an H, how. Those are all the questions that I need. I always think about, "How can I phrase this in an open ended question, just so that I can hear what the problem is." I'm not really worried about a solution because I know that there's a solution out there, but what I really need to know is, what is going on in the business? Why is the business doing it this way? What happens if you don't get it? What's the result of that? And really trying to understand the entire picture, right? It's about, if you're thinking about a painting, you want to know what you're painting first, some artists don't and that's totally okay.
But if you want something that's structured, that's consistent, that's going to give you longevity, and it is going to mean that your users are extremely happy, that they're like, "This is amazing, you've changed my life," then it's about understanding the whole picture before building the solution. And that's a really hard skill to learn. I mean, it's something that has taken me years to really develop. It's like, yeah, I know I can use Flow with it, but first I need to know, well, what part and where am I going to put in the Flow? And I can only do that if I start asking who what, when, where, why and how. And if I can't ask any of those questions, I then question, why can't I ask any of these questions? I need to go back and rethink how I can frame this in an open-ended way so that someone can just give me all of the information, and then I can process it and really critically think about what is going to be the best solution to get us to the end goal.

Gillian: So it's funny. I actually saw you do the little bits in action just 10 minutes ago after the presentation, because of course you got swarmed after the presentation with everyone wanting to ask you questions.

Mike: I mean, it happens with the goal.

Gillian: And the Golden Hoodie, it's like saying-

Mike: It's so subtle.

Gillian: It's blindingly amazing. And so someone came up and asked you and said, "Hey, I'm trying to solve this situation. I have this form that I need people to fill out and then I got to capture it." And my first thought was like, "Oh, so maybe, probably sounds like a screen flow. I don't know." And you were like, "Hold on, let me ask you some questions. What type of form is this? What type of data is it gathering?" And it was like, we just saw you just immediately spring into action. And so that's that thinking in practice? I loved seeing that.

Karmel James: Oh yeah, no, absolutely. And it's something that I use as a consultant every day. I'm very happy to build any solution that my client wants, but I also am a consultant. I'm not going to be using the solution every single day. I'm not going to know when it goes wrong. I'm not going to understand that. And so in order to make sure that I'm building the best thing, I like to try and figure out what are the questions to get me the information to put myself in somebody else's shoes. I need to picture this as if I am the user. I need to picture this as if I am the admin who's going to receive this.
I need to picture it as if I am the manager, who's going to be receiving the complaint about their coworkers are like, "I hate this. This is horrible." Right? It's all about that user perspective. And so asking those questions makes it a lot easier. And also, I can't tell you what a link is going to do, unless I know what tool are we using and why are we using that? And can we use something different? And again, it's just who, what, when, where, why, how, it's my favorite.

Mike: So I've worked with consultants as an admin, and we can get into that as a whole other... That could be a whole podcast.

Karmel James: That's a whole podcast.

Mike: But I think one thing that you probably run into that admins, I'm going to say, don't run into, when a consultant comes in. I think the company culture, the mindset has gone to, we are ready for change, because Salesforce is a change product, right?

Karmel James: Yeah.

Mike: You don't just get at net zero cloud and then not recycle paper, right? For example, or not install solar panels. You have to commit to the change. As you would advise for admins, what is a thing that they can do? What are questions they can ask that would help bring about that culture, that process change in addition to the technology change?

Karmel James: Ooh, change management, Mike. You are diving in deep.

Mike: I'm both feet. We're back live in person's hard question time.

Karmel James: It is. Well, considering the fact that before I was a consultant, I was an accidental admin. I was working by myself at a small nonprofit, not understanding. What I would say is that what I've learned from starting out seven years ago in that position of I've got this system, of course I want my users to use it. I know about all of these cool features. Now as a consultant where my job is to come in and help other people understand that value, I think it's also positioning and understanding who is your audience. So yes, if a company buys Salesforce, of course, you're like, well obviously you should use Salesforce. Of course, you bought it, you want to use it. But it's about understanding what is the value of the executive director using it? What value to the manager who is using it? What is the value to your customer who's going to be interfacing with whatever site you put up, especially if you're using experience cloud?
It's about putting yourself in the other person's shoes and trying to imagine what is the value of the thing that you want to change. So if you want to introduce a whole new application, right, you got a whole new set of tabs. It's got all these automated things, you get all these cool buttons. Well then, my question to you is, how are you going to describe how that functions in your users everyday life? Is that going to mean that they no longer have to click through eight things? Really putting the, so what, the why, in front of them and showing them, Salesforce can do almost anything, but what we really want to make sure is that it's going to give you what you want. So is this what you want? Is this really cool? Is this going to make you excited to save time and money and effort?
And so, if you're looking for change management, start with, what are the problems? Can't change anything if you don't know what the problem is. And then once you do, understand well, what is the solution that they want? And can I deliver that solution and just keep going through? This is what you wanted, you told me you had this problem, I'm solving the problem. But again, it's just being able to ask those questions and really understanding your audience is really key into all of it. It's very hard, but you can do it.

Gillian: So yeah, actually one of the things that popped up for me, you're saying it's very hard. What happens when you have a situation where someone's either not giving you the info or you're having combative, "Hey, why is it this site?" "Well, it just is." What happens when you hit those walls? Because I can imagine when you're digging deep and asking all the questions, so you might encounter somebody who's defensive or who doesn't think you need to know, or how do you deal with something like that?

Karmel James: Well, I would stop and assess my situation of, what is the environment that I'm in. Am I in front of a lot of people or is this one-on-one? Because I think that's definitely going to change how you approach that person. But let's just go ahead and say it's one-on-one, right? I personally like to reset. If I met with a little resistance, I like to reset as why we're here today. Right? And remind them that my job is to help you. I'm not here to just come in and make change just to make change. If this is a process that you want to keep, that's totally fine. I have ideas on how I can make it easier, but it's not my job to just make things easier to make them easier. My job is make sure that if it's going to be easier for you, it's actually going to add value.
So again, it's going back to understanding your audience. And again, if it's on one-on-one reset, restate that you're here to help. And if that's something that they don't want help on, ask, "Well, what do you want help on? Tell me what are your problems? How can I help you?" With my clients I tell them, "I'm not worried about what the solution is going to be. We will find a solution. Salesforce here at World Tour, there's a million solutions out on the floor. We can see all of them, but none of that means anything if we don't understand how it's going to bring us value. So I would say, reset with that person, make sure they understand that you're just there to help them. And then say, "Remind me again, what are your problems? Tell me, show me, let me in on this so that I can maybe find something that's really cool and possibly demo it for you so that you get to decide if you want it or not."

Mike: Wow. I've met with that a few times. So you mentioned we're at an event. Let's talk about that. Finish this phrase for me, as a new Salesforce admin, I should go to a World Tour event because...

Karmel James: Because you don't know what you don't know. That is something that someone told me a very long time ago, that I don't know, know what I don't know. And so you should come here to meet with other people and say just that. I came here and I have no idea what this is about. And let someone else tell you about it. Let someone else show you the value, because everyone who is here at World Tour or at any Salesforce community event, we're all there to just drop knowledge. We want everyone to be successful in Salesforce. And yeah, sometimes things fail. But failure's just a record type of success. So keep showing up, and-

Mike: Oh, man, quote of the pod right there.

Gillian: Quote of all.

Mike: I want that on a shirt.

Karmel James: Right? It's good. But come to these events so that we can hear what you've been working on, especially those failures. Because you can't succeed if you don't know how to fail, right? And just being able to talk with other people and ask them questions. Questions, again, asking, it's my whole theme of everything. But this is really truly a place where you know people are going to be talking about Salesforce. They are bought into Salesforce. Salesforce is the only thing that they really are doing here and wanting to talk about. So this is the place to just hear what we're talking about, see what the Koolaid is, see if you want to try it. And if you do say, "Hey, I don't know what this is. Can you explain it to me?" And I swear, you'll get 10 people flock to you instantly. "I can show you this. I can show you this. Have you tried this? Did you look up this help.salesforce.com article? You haven't? You need to read this. Take a minute, process, then come back to me."

Gillian: I think that's really important because a lot of, I would say 90% of the people that I saw in our sessions today, when I asked you, I would say, "Hey, is this your first sales source event?" All the hands went up. And I think that's one of the really special things about these World Tours is that, A, it's free. We want everyone to come, but it's the perfect opportunity if it's your first exposure to Salesforce or you're about to... I talked to someone today who's like, "My organization is getting ready to implement Salesforce. So they sent me here so that I can start getting my mind all around it." And I was like, "That is awesome. This is perfect.
We're going to give you all the exposure you need, help you understand what you're looking at and how you envision how this is going to work at your organization and start getting your mind wrapped around it." And so that is exactly what these events are perfect for. And also, I mean, you're in the community you get to... And I am so excited, too. Reconnecting with people in-person in this local community is amazing. I mean, there are so... Especially the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, I mean, there's a very vibrant community here.

Karmel James: We have so many user groups, we've got the admin group. We have the women in a tech group. There's a developer group. There's a nonprofit user group. We have all of the community events. And yes, in the D.C. Area, we are all about community. And if I'm thinking about my own journey in Salesforce, World Tour is one of the first events that I went to when I was an accidental admin where I was like, "I don't know what this means. I don't know Salesforce. I am a chemist. You want me to do what? What is this thing? I don't know, sales. I got nothing." And when I was starting out, I did, I looked for places where I could just go and learn more about this thing called Salesforce, and World Tour was one of them.
And I distinctly, and I've told it to you many times today, Gillian, I distinctly remember sitting in one of your sessions about admins. I think it was an accidental admin talk or whatever. And I was like, "I feel this. I feel it so bad." And I went and I sat and I listened. And I remember watching you, and I was like, "Oh my God, I want to be like that." That sounds like everything I want to do. And here I am now at World Tour wearing this very shiny piece of apparel. And it feels very good, but this place has the power to change everything. I would not have guessed this for myself, but coming to community events and again, being willing and it's hard. It is scare having to say what you don't know, but it also gives you a chance to show what you do know. And we all want to see that just as badly.

Gillian: Well, I'm going to say I enjoyed watching you on stage today. So full circle.

Karmel James: It's so nice. It's like a dream come true.

Gillian: That's awesome.

Mike: So as we wrap up things, we talked about World Tour. You dropped a whole lot of knowledge, and I swear I'm going to buy a shirt.

Gillian: Yeah, I think we should make them for Trailblazer DX or Dreamforce, at least.

Mike: That's what I was thinking.

Karmel James: Yes, failure is just a record type of success.

Mike: Isn't that cool. It fits right. It'll fit. It'll look cool. Admins that are listening to this. We have Trailblazer DX coming up, or yes, I think it came up.

Gillian: April 27th to 28th.

Mike: Right. We'll have Dreamforce. We have other World Tours. We also have community groups. What is a new admin, somebody that's listening to this podcast, what would you tell them to do?

Karmel James: I would say, start with your community groups first, get your feet wet. Right? You just have to show up. You can sit, you don't have to talk to anybody.

Mike: But I mean, it could be two hours.

Karmel James: No.

Mike: Maybe I'm not all into that.

Karmel James: Oh, well that's fair.

Mike: Because that's what people tell me. Right?

Karmel James: Yeah.

Mike: Like I don't...

Karmel James: I know.

Mike: This is a whole lot of...

Karmel James: It's a lot of talking. It's a big investment.

Mike: Do I have to do all of the-

Karmel James: Yes.

Mike: Okay.

Karmel James: Yes, you have to. You have to do all the things.

Mike: Because that's what they're saying.

Karmel James: And that's fine, but they're going to miss out on the power of Salesforce.

Mike: I mean, if you live in the Midwest, there's usually some sort of meatloaf or a hot dish at user group.

Karmel James: Yeah, I mean at D.C.-

Mike: I don't know what you do our east.

Karmel James: We always had food at the end of ours. Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: Out west they'd usually do drinks.

Gillian: I feel like every time I've joined a D.C. user group, there's been bourbon involved in some capacity.

Karmel James: Yeah, usually at the end.

Gillian: Yeah, that's usually Toya's fault.

Mike: But so I guess what I'm getting at, you can kind of be your own little introvert self.

Karmel James: Yes, absolutely.

Mike: And hang out.

Karmel James: Yeah.

Mike: And you don't have to be a rock star up on stage.

Karmel James: Nope, you can just sit and listen.

Mike: And you cannot know stuff, right?

Karmel James: Oh my God, please not know stuff. Let us teach you.

Mike: Please not know stuff.

Karmel James: Yeah, no, we are more than happy, right? And just sitting and watching gives you this space to have ideas, right? There's there is no expect you have to talk to us, right? In the keynote, I said, if you were to look in the dictionary and see the word extrovert, my face is next to it. I am 100% that person where you were like, "Who is she and why?" That's too much energy. I can't be around it. But you don't have to be that way, right? You can just show up and we want to see you anyway. Even if you're just sitting there and you're just listening. That is it. That is all you have to do. That is step one to being in the community, is just showing up. Then step two comes with time and feeling comfortable.
Then it's talking about what your challenges are, sharing what you've learned and where you're like. "Hmm, no, I don't understand what this is. I got nothing. Can someone help me?" So showing up is just the first start. And it's a really low barrier. And yeah, it's two hours of your life, but it's two hours with a lot of people who are very happy to see you. And even if you're not going to talk to us, that's totally okay. We're just going to be like, "Well, please eat the food because we don't want to take it home."

Mike: Nobody wants to take food home.

Karmel James: No, never.

Mike: Not a hot dish.

Gillian: Unless you've got one of those-

Karmel James: I mean, unless it's Mac and cheese.

Mike: I did, so favorite. Okay, fun time. Favorite user group food. I'll go first. I one time to a Twin City's user group. And it was middle of winter, December when it's negative a gabillion below. Everything's froze. And it was over the lunch hour. They did the intro, and they're like, "In the back's lasagna, meatloaf and mashed potatoes."

Karmel James: That sounds like-

Mike: "And then after that, we're going to do break out birds of the feather." I love the Twin City user group. It was everything and a bag. Gallons of Mountain Dew got me home that afternoon because I finished eating and all I wanted to do was just snooze. Can we all just have nap time?

Karmel James: Yes, I would love to bring siestas to the Salesforce.

Mike: So Mac and cheese would be your preferred-

Karmel James: Yes.

Mike: That's what?

Karmel James: Well, I had Mac and cheese yesterday, so that's why it's on my mind.

Mike: You, can have Mac and cheese today too, by the way.

Karmel James: There was Mac and cheese?

Mike: Mac and cheese can be an everyday kind of food.

Karmel James: It should be an everyday type of food.

Gillian: [crosstalk] is the official food of the Salesforce Admin podcast because I do it.

Mike: I don't know. We should have a poll.

Karmel James: Is it going to have bacon in it? Can we add bacon?

Mike: Oh, it's got to have bacon.

Karmel James: Got have it.

Mike: Yeah.

Gillian: See? This is where I have a problem.

Mike: Gillian doesn't like bacon, she's weird.

Karmel James: That's totally fine. We still love you anyway.

Mike: I mean, it's okay but it's weird.

Gillian: Can you keep it on the little crumbles on the side.

Karmel James: Yes.

Mike: You can put it on. It's like a Mac and cheese bar.

Karmel James: It's a toping, yes.

Mike: Have you seen that? I saw a thing on Food Network. They have a Mac and cheese bar.

Karmel James: Well, see, this is why I like noodles and company, because I can go and I can get all the Mac and cheese that I possibly want.

Mike: There you go. With bacon crumbles.

Karmel James: With nothing else. Yeah, bacon crumbles, that is my entree. Mac and cheese. But no, I would say the women in tech group here in D.C., we do lots of sandwiches. And so these san-

Mike: Finger sandwiches look little?

Karmel James: Yeah, no, they're really good meaty sandwiches.

Mike: Will gel.

Karmel James: You're going to get a meal out of this. And we usually always have leftovers. And so, I either would pick them up and would take them home. And in some cases I could eat all of them, which was great, or I would actually give them away to people. And so, they're just like in... I know that this theme for this World Tour is gratitude. And so, I always go into all of these user groups thinking, "I'm very lucky to be here. This is very exciting." And a lot of it is per chance, right? And so, if we have the opportunity to have leftover food, I personally like walking the streets of D.C. Being like, "Hey, we can't take all this home. There's no way." And sandwiches make it really easy for someone else to be like, "Yes, I actually, I will take a sandwich."

Mike: Yep. We did that at my first Trailhead, it's now called Trailblazer DX. We had leftover food in the employee lounge and we all took a plate, and then the first person that we ran into on the street.

Karmel James: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, I get a soft spot if they have a dog.

Karmel James: Yeah.

Gillian: Yes.

Mike: Yeah.

Gillian: Karmel, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike: Yeah, this was fun.

Gillian: You've done an amazing job today in all of the things that we've asked you to do for Salesforce.

Mike: Really.

Gillian: You did an incredible job during the keynote and you well earned Golden Hoodie, and thank you for joining us on the podcast today, and dropping those wisdom bombs on us. And I can't wait to see your Salesforce nomad life come to life over the next few months because I know that you're just hopping between Salesforce events all over the world, which is very exciting.

Mike: Should go to more Salesforce events and we will.

Gillian: She will.

Karmel James: Yeah. Oh yes, we got Southeast Dreamin. We have Dreaming in Color, Midwest Dreamin'/Witness Success. We have all of them.

Mike: Yeah, we'll be at Midwest Dreamin'.

Karmel James: Ooh, okay. Well then I will see you there.

Mike: I might know the keynoter.

Karmel James: Oh right, yeah, that's happening.

Mike: I won't. I won't make you eat a hot dish, not in summer. Not in Minneapolis.

Karmel James: No, not in July.

Gillian: [crosstalk]

Mike: Shandy, yeah.

Karmel James: We're not doing that in July, no. But Florida Dreamin', it's First [Landia] right? In Portland? First Landia?

Gillian: First Landia.

Karmel James: I've been told about that so I've got to consider.

Mike: Have you thought about making a tour shirt? I could see that. That would be, see Karmel James, and then the dates on the back.

Karmel James: Right? That'd be pretty cool.

Mike: That'd be boss.

Karmel James: With my travel, what's really nice is I kind of don't plan it so far in advance where I know where I'm going. But for conferences, I absolutely know when I'm going to those. Okay, I got to go make a shirt now.

Mike: I'd do a tour shirt, that'd be cool.

Gillian: That would be very awesome.

Mike: See me at the following event.

Karmel James: Yes.

Gillian: Well, thank you so much for joining us and we cannot wait to see what's next for you. And yeah, keep letting us ask you to do things.

Karmel James: Excellent. Well, thank you, Gillian and Mike, this has been so amazing. I am just overly happy that I get to share, who, what, when, where, why? Oh, don't forget how.

Mike: And how.

Karmel James: Yeah, don't forget how.

Mike: If you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including all the links if we mentioned any in today's episode, as well as the full transcript.

Gillian: That's going to be a good one to read.

Mike: I know, I can't wait. They usually-

Gillian: Have fun with that, transcribing.

Mike: I will. Yep, here we go. You can stay up to date with us on social. We are at Salesforce admins, no I on Twitter. Gillian of course is on Twitter @Gillian K Bruce. Our guest today, Karmel.

Gillian: She might as well be a host.

Mike: I know, a guest host. Coming soon to a podcast new year.

Karmel James: Thank you.

Gillian: Yeah, right?

Mike: Karmel James is on Twitter at...

Karmel James: A-R-M-E-J-A-M, 44.

Mike: Or armejam as I almost introduced her. I, of course, am on Twitter @Mike Holt. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome. And stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.



Direct download: Live_from_Salesforce_Tour_DC_with_Karmel_James.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Antoine Cabot, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce working on Orchestrator.

Join us as we talk about what Antoine and his team have learned since Orchestrator went GA in February and all the cool things they’re looking forward to sharing at TrailblazerDX.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Antoine Cabot.

Looking forward to TrailblazerDX

Orchestrator is a new product, introduced in February, to support multi-user workflows by adding one more layer to the Flow tooling already in place, accommodating more sophisticated business processes for customers.

At TrailblazerDX, they’ll get into the nitty-gritty of what a multi-user workflow is and why you’d want to use them. “Orchestrator is not only a tool our customers can use out-of-the-box and build their own Orchestrations—it’s also a tool that can be used by partners and startups to create products and sell them through AppExchange,” Antoine says. They’ve invited some of these businesses to share what they’re working on so you can see what Orchestrator is capable of.

What is Orchestrator?

Flow is already a powerful tool with a lot of capabilities: screen flows for user interactions, recall trigger flows to update records, and more. There’s a reason we encouraging folks to transition to it and deprecating older ways of doing things.

“Flow is great when you have some kind of recall-centric process,” Antoine says, “but Orchestrator is great for user-centric processes.” You can assign work to the right person at the right time, which is a godsend for multi-user or multi-department processes where you have to support parallel work.

One of the best things is that working is Orchestrator uses all of the skills you’ve already learned for Flow. “If you know how to create a Flow, you will know how to create an Orchestration,” Antoine says.

What’s next?

As far as what’s coming up, there’s a lot to look forward to. They’re looking to make some major gains in how they do reporting on tasks completed in Orchestrator. The goal is to build something that lets you analyze processes to figure out how specific steps are going and where you can make improvements.

Antoine has one message for folks listening in: “Please start measuring how much time it takes for a process to go from the beginning to the end.” When you want to prove the ROI for what you’re doing, you need to know how things were going before you put new automations in place. It really makes a difference when you’re talking to leadership, and Orchestrator is going to make a big impact.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host, Gillian Bruce. And today I am joined by Antoine Cabot, he is product manager working on Orchestrator here at Salesforce and he and his team have some awesome enhancements that they're really excited to talk about at TrailblazerDX coming up here in just I think, a week away. Oh my goodness. So I wanted to get him on the podcast to talk a little bit about what their team has learned since Orchestrator went GA in February, and about some of the exciting things they're going to talk about at TrailblazerDX. Including some amazing use cases that customers are doing and building. So without further ado, let's get Antoine on the podcast. Antoine, welcome to the podcast.

Antoine Cabot: Thank you for having me.

Gillian Bruce: Well, we're excited to have you, we're getting ready for a little something coming up in a few weeks. TrailblazerDX, and I know that you are getting excited to share some fun news about the products that you're working on at TrailblazerDX. Do you want to give us a little overview about what your team works on first?

Antoine Cabot: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the product manager for a product called Orchestrator. That is part of the automation platform at Salesforce. Orchestrator is a new product that we introduced back in February this year. And the idea is to support multi-user workflows. So adding one more layer to the flow tooling that we already have, to support more sophisticated business processes for all our customers.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. So just a little tiny feature that no one wants to use, right?

Antoine Cabot: It's basically a new category for Salesforce, so that's a big deal.

Gillian Bruce: It's a huge deal. And I know admins absolutely love any automation they can use and Orchestrator is a game changer. So let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you and your team are going to be presenting at TrailblazerDX. Let's talk about this multi-user workflow. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. So we'll have one session specifically about multi-user workflows and that session will be very interesting because, we'll have some partners there. We'll invite startups to talk about how they use Orchestrator to build apps for their customers. Orchestrator is not only a tool that our customers can use out of the box and build their own orchestrations. It's also a tool that can be used by partners and startups to create products and sell them through app exchange. And we have this great example coming from Full Solution, which is a company based in the Netherlands, that is building an amazing approval process right on top of Orchestrator. That will give you a great example of how Orchestrator can be used as a platform tool for everything you want to do in Salesforce.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. So, I think that's like next level of thinking of Orchestrator, right? Because it's not just building it for your own platform, but the fact that now partners can use it to create solutions that admins might be interested in using.

Antoine Cabot: Exactly.

Gillian Bruce: So can you tell us a little bit more about what makes this exciting, especially for admins? Aside from the fact that, hey, now their partners can build solutions that admins can use. Can we talk a little bit more about the differentiator between this and maybe some of our other process automation options?

Antoine Cabot: Absolutely. So, if you think about Flow, I'm assuming that some of you on this call are familiar with Flow. Flow is a great technology, you can do a lot of things like screen flows if you need user interactions, recall triggered flows if you want to update things in your Salesforce records. It's a great tech. We have been pushing for it for 10 years, we are also kind of deprecating all the technology like process builders and workflow rules. So now we are moving on to flow, we want all our customers to use flow as much as possible. Flow is great when you have some kind of record centric process, you want to do something on a specific record, make sure that the data is accurate, validate the data, update a discount percentage or things like that. This is great for that.
Orchestrator on the other side is great for user centric process. You really want to assign the right work to the right person at the right time. That's exactly what Orchestrator is great at. When you imagine a process like a simple case management process, that's usually the simplest example I can go with. This case will be created by a customer and then will go through a queue and then would be assigned to an agent. This agent will eventually escalate that will go to his manager. And then eventually the case will go to a different... out of the organization. Like a different department, different business unit. That's exactly where Orchestrator is targeted for, that's when we can say, "Okay, the agent will complete the first step, but then the next step will be done by the manager."
And the next step will be done by someone that is in a very different part of the organization. And Orchestrator to combine all this step together, making sure that this process is executed without any problem and in timeless manner, so that you don't lose time between end offs. That's where Orchestrator is great at. So think about a process that involve multiple user or multiple departments, might be some parallel works that you have to support, things like that's where. That's where Orchestrator is just providing a lot more value than what flow already provides.

Gillian Bruce: So I think that's really interesting because I think in the past, an admin would have to set up a separate flow for each of those steps. Which would, as you said, take more time and also require a lot more work. And there just opportunities for things to fall through the gaps. Your use case is perfect, that really helps I think understand how this plays in. How different is it to use Orchestrator and think about these multi-user workflows than creating a typical flow, is it something that is much more complex or is it something that, if you've created a couple flows, you can also do this?

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. So, that's one of the great thing about Orchestrator, is that we are reusing all the skills that you already have with flow. If you know how to create a flow, you will know how to create an orchestration. It's the same builder, same components, while just adding two additional elements called stages and steps, but it doesn't really... I mean, it's not complicated. And for example, if you are concerned about the scale of Orchestrator for example, Orchestrator is based on flow. So it's based on our flow engine and it scales very well. Like we're running billions of flow every month, you will be able to run billions of orchestration also on the platform. So in terms of skill set, many of our customers actually say, "Hey, are you compatible with BPM? And I ingest some BPM diagram into Orchestrator?" That will come probably one day, it's actually on my roadmap, but-

Gillian Bruce: Safe harbor.

Antoine Cabot: ... today. Yeah, safe harbor. But today it's really, we are betting on the skills that our Salesforce Admins already have. They know how to create flows, many of them knows how to create flows. They will know how to create an orchestration without knowing anything about BPM. And that's really our bet on the market today.

Gillian Bruce: That is great. Because I mean, I think that's one of the beautiful things about the Salesforce platform, right? And especially, hey, awesome admins. This is the unique thing, is we can build these very complex processes without having to use code or have to know all of these other systems necessarily that maybe someone who's been working as a system admin on other platforms, would have that skillset. With Salesforce, you can do it all in Salesforce, you don't have to work with all these other things. But if you do understand these other systems and these other processes, it's easily translatable and you can use that as well. I think that's huge. That's what makes Salesforce so special.

Antoine Cabot: Absolutely. And you mentioned one thing Gillian, about connecting flows together. It's definitely doable, everything you can do in Orchestrator, you can potentially do it with flows. That you would have to write a bunch of apex codes to manage the assignment, manage the connection between two flows et cetera, et cetera. So there is nothing that we are really inventing there, but what we are really bringing to the customer is the ability to do that in a low code manner. You don't have to write any single line of apex code to run an orchestration. You just drag and drop your different flows, you say this flow will run first, this flow will run second. This is the condition between those two. You want to get the output variables from one flow and ingest them into the second step. That's doable. All of that without writing again, a single line of code.

Gillian Bruce: Hooray for awesome admins everywhere. This is awesome. So Antoine, one of the things that we'd love to talk about on the podcast and especially with admins is, some of the cool use cases and stories and maybe some interesting things that you and the product team have seen admin or customers in general do. Now I know you talked about the partner story that you're going to share at TrailblazerDX, which is super exciting. Have you had any other fun, little pieces of feedback or examples that you've seen people use Orchestrator for so far in the community?

Antoine Cabot: Yes, absolutely. And I would talk about one customer specifically called [Agrar Solar 00:21:42] , which is a German company. They will actually be at TDX also, giving some feedback about the product. I think this would be during the main keynote, which is great. So Agrar Solar, it's a so panel company. They install solar panels in Germany and they have this very nice process that is happening when and a customer wants to install solar panels on their roof, they talk to them and then they created an opportunity. And when this opportunity is created, they have to go through a bunch of steps internally to verify that the house is suitable for installing the solar panels. And it goes to many technicians internally. And then on point in this process, they also need to gather information from the customer like photos, more information about how the house has been built, what's the roof looks like and everything.
So they had this very specific need of saying, "Okay, it's great to have Orchestrator because I can connect all the internal steps. But what I want now, is be able to ask my customer to also be part of this process so they can upload photos and provide more information. And then when it's done, go back to my internal process and move on with the next steps in the process." This is something I haven't thought about when we were shipping the product GA back in February, but this is really something that was really cool. And we said, "Oh, now we can enable this with Experience Cloud." We have Experience Cloud websites running on top of Salesforce. Nothing actually prevents us to say, "Hey, let's put this survey on a website and ask the customer to go on that survey link and complete the survey."
So, that's what we are building now. We are making sure that you can create an orchestration that is running both internally and externally. That's where you see that all this Customer 360 experience come into play, where you can have your entire process from beginning to the end, including internal people and also your customers, all your partners.

Gillian Bruce: Ugh. That's so great. I'm just envisioning the hurrah moment when you realize, "Oh, I can build this entire process in Salesforce." And I mean, I'm thinking about all of the steps that we're just saved, right? Having somebody reach out to the customer for every single request and shepherding all of the internal processes along, and then someone having to bring all of those together. I mean the hours saved, days, weeks probably saved by that process. Awesome.

Antoine Cabot: The ROI is huge, it's huge for... When you think about a company like Agrar Solar, so which is like 200 employees, it's already significant. So think about like AT&T or a very large company out there, it's millions of dollars that they can save in just connecting the dots in their process and making sure that we always present the right work, to the right person, at the right time.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well and you know who builds those things to save all the money it's admins, right? So admins, this is a huge ROI. Talk about a bullet point to put in your performance review every year, right? Like, "Look what I did, I saved the company this much money." That is huge. So Antoine, tell us a little bit more. You mentioned there were... you already did a little sneak peek on some stuff that might be coming on the roadmap. What other roadmap things might you be willing to share with me today? Again, forward looking statement for everyone who's listening.

Antoine Cabot: So there is definitely Experience Cloud, which is a big thing. The other big that we will be working on in our next cycle, which would be like for the summer of '23 release is reporting. We want to make sure that we not only... So what we capture today in an orchestration run is everything that happened in this run, right? How much time it take for one person to go into that step, complete that step et cetera. So we have that information in the format of a log, we log all these operations, but there is no way to do reporting on top of that. There is no way to create graphs that say, "Hey, I want to analyze for this specific step, how much time it takes over hundred thousands of iteration." That's not exposed today. So that's what we'll be building in the next six months, that will be available by the end of this year. The ability to create Salesforce reports on Orchestrator objects. And that will include work items, runs, step and stages.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, I love that. I mean, that's totally related to what we just said. This is a bullet point to put on your performance review, like look at how much time this is being saved. You now have a report you can run to show how useful your orchestration is and how many people are actually adopting it and using it within the organization. I think that's awesome.

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. So I have one thing to mention here is that, if you haven't done... So please start measuring, please start measuring how much time it takes for a process to go from the beginning to the end. Because usually when we want to prove the ROI, we need to know what happened before automating it. So if you really want to see a difference, start measuring now, build the orchestration and then run the orchestration and see the difference.

Gillian Bruce: Oh yes. I love that. I mean, you got to be able to tell the difference, right? Come on.

Antoine Cabot: Yeah.

Gillian Bruce: I love it. That's great. So Antoine, any other fun little pointers or recommendations that you have for admins who are like "Okay, this orchestration thing sounds like it's for me." Clearly, we're going to put some resources in terms of where you can go to learn more on Trailhead. What else do you have in terms of maybe strategically thinking about what would be a first step that someone would take to start building an orchestration?

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. Maybe let me give you my one more thing for today. Slack, Slack is usually fun. You probably all know that Slack is now a part of Salesforce. So we're thinking a lot on how we can actually leverage Slack with Orchestrator. And something that we are building that will be huge, is the ability to do work directly in Slack using a screen flow that will be kind of started from Orchestrator. So think about an interactive step that you create in your orchestration, it means that you will have some kind of human interaction. This person will have to go through a Salesforce record and complete a few screens in Salesforce. Now imagine that you don't even need that person to go to Salesforce. This person would just be notified on Slack, they will see, hey, please complete that work that is assigned to you now.
You click on that button and then everything happen in Slack. You see the screen flow render directly in Slack, natively in Slack, you complete the work and done. You have never been on the Salesforce Instant. You are maybe not even a Salesforce user at the end, you are just Slack user or Slack is the place you go, where you work every day, that's where you complete the work. That's where this association of Slack plus Orchestrator is huge. And that's coming up at the end of this year.

Gillian Bruce: Oh, I love that. That is so smooth because like you said, there may be a lot of users who never really need to be in Salesforce. They're just doing their work in Slack, so let's bring it there. I mean, that is that's slick. I like that, that's going to be amazing.

Antoine Cabot: And for Salesforce Admin who might be like, "oh, I don't want to support Slack, I don't want to create specific flow for Slack." You don't have to. We will actually make the easy lifting of converting your screen flows in the Slack format, which is called Block Kit. So you just build your screen flow in Salesforce and we do everything for you to render it in Slack and make sure that your user has the best possible experience, desktop and mobile on Slack.

Gillian Bruce: That's cool. That's really great. Again, save an admin's work. That's even better than admins saving end users work. That's great.

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. I mean, we want to keep them focused on what adds value, right? So there is no need to rebuild all your screen flows for Slack. We really want to save time on that.

Gillian Bruce: That's fantastic. So any kind of parting words of wisdom in terms of how to admin strategically think about where to start with Orchestrator?

Antoine Cabot: Yeah. Great question. Think about one of the most painful process you are facing in your organization. Usually it's a process that involves multiple individuals. You have to constantly ask them to complete the step that they have to do. That's usually a good start when you start building an orchestration, think about a very painful process that you are experiencing pretty much every day or two days. If you are from IT for example, like in a provisioning scenario where you have to provision laptops for example, is a great example. It has multiple people involved and that's very, very easy to build in Orchestrator. So start simple, start with something that is really painful and you will see the value very, very quickly.

Gillian Bruce: I love that. Well Antoine, thank you for all the amazing work that you and your team do to make-

Antoine Cabot: Thank you.

Gillian Bruce: ... admins look like rock stars because this is literally one of those tools that truly make admins awesome, and really makes a huge difference in the efficiency of the organization. So keep on doing the good work. Thank you.

Antoine Cabot: Thank you. We will.

Gillian Bruce: Huge thanks to Antoine for taking the time out of his day to talk to me about all things, Orchestrator and multi-user workflows. Wow. I just got to tell you for Admins, this is a game changer, because think of all the individual flows that you can now tie together in one seamless orchestration. Think about the external and internal use cases you can combine into one big process. I mean, the example of that solar company and how they connected an external survey using Experience Cloud all within one big orchestration. I mean, that is really, really powerful. And talk about the time you can save your organization, the money, the resources and demonstrate your value as an awesome Admin. So definitely admins check out Orchestrator. If you're coming to TrailblazerDX, I hope you are able to join Antoine's session. I'll put a link to the session in the show notes, and you're not going to want to miss it.
It's all about multi-user workflows. And if you're not able to join us at TrailblazerDX, don't worry. There's tons of great content on Orchestrator out there for you to get skilled up and ready to really make a big impact in your organization with this powerful, powerful tool. Now, if you want to learn more things about anything we talked about in this podcast or other podcasts, or otherwise you just want to skill up on being an awesome admin head on over to admin.salesforce.com, where you'll find amazing resources, blogs, videos, more podcasts, anything you need to help you be an awesome admin. You can find out at admin.salesforce.com. You can also stay up to date with us on the social medias by following @SalesforceAdmns no I on Twitter. And you can follow my guest today Antoine, @antoinecabot on Twitter, as well as myself, @gilliankbruce. My co-host, Mike Gerholdt, is @MikeGerholdt. And with that everyone, I am looking forward to seeing you at TrailblazerDX and I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Road_to_TDX__Multi-User_Workflows_with_Antoine_Cabot.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Karen Fidelak, Senior Director, Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about some exciting announcements she’s got about DevOps Center coming up for TrailblazerDX.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Karen Fidelak.

Why we’re psyched about the beta for DevOps Center

We’re really excited about DevOps Center, and there are going to be tons of exciting announcements at TrailblazerDX so we wanted to talk to Karen to give pod listeners a little preview. The biggest news is that an open beta is coming this summer, with a GA planned for the Fall.

“We’re excited about where we’re at and we’re excited to show it at TrailblazerDX,” Karen says, “DevOps Center is all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire community, regardless of where you fall on the low-code to pro-code spectrum.” The goal is a tool that provides easy-to-use change management, source management, push-button deployments, and, overall, will allow hybrid sets of users to work together more easily.

Lessons from the pilot program

“We hear a lot of Admins and low-code developers who really want to be more involved in these DevOps practices that include things like source control but haven’t had the experience or tools to easily adopt and feel comfortable using them,” Karen says. They want to give you what you need to do just that and work with other members of your team that may already have adopted source control and other change management best practices.

Their pilot program introduced a number of features to help create an end-to-end, declarative flow around lifecycle management. One thing they added was automatic change tracking, so any changes made in the developer sandbox are added to a list where you can select which ones you want to move forward. It’s a big upgrade over Change Sets, and they’re looking to make even more improvements going into the beta.

A sneak peak at TrailblazerDX

Karen and her team will be at their spiffy dedicated booth at TrailblazerDX, so be sure you stop by if you’re attending. They’ll also be doing some theater sessions to get you up to speed with DevOps and DevOps Center. Finally, there will be a breakout session where Karen will present with a Salesforce partner and a customer to show DevOps Center in action.

They’re really excited to hear from real customers and get any feedback they can to make DevOps Center even better, so don’t be a stranger. If you can’t make it, be sure to check in on the Trailblazer Community group (link below) to get involved.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce and we are joined by Karen Fidelak, who is going to talk to us about DevOps center. Why? Well be because they've got some exciting announcements they're going to be sharing at a little party we're throwing later this month called TrailblazerDX. That's right folks. We are having an in-person event. It's going to be so exciting.
Trailblazer DX, April 27th and 28th here in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. You're not going to want to miss it. And to get you excited. I decided to pull together a few of the product managers who have exciting things they're going to be talking about at that event. And Karen is one of them. Now last we talked to Karen about DevOps Center, which is what her team is working on, was a while ago. And since then she and her team have been working very, very hard to get this product ready for prime time. So let's check in with Karen and hear about all the goodness her team has been working on and get excited about what she and her team are going to be doing at TrailblazerDX. Karen, welcome to the podcast.

Karen Fidelak: Hi, I'm glad to be here. This is exciting.

Gillian Bruce: Well, it's been a while since you and I chatted. In fact, I think this is my first official podcast I'm hosting since I've come back and I think you were the last product managers I've worked with before I left. So it's like nothing has ever happened.

Karen Fidelak: Boy. Welcome back.

Gillian Bruce: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to check in with you Karen because you and your team were working on something really awesome and amazing for admins. DevOps sent her. And I wanted to check in with you because we're coming up on a little something here in just a couple weeks that we're getting excited about. TrailblazerDX. And I know that you and your team have some exciting things you're going to be sharing and talking about related to DevOps Center. So can you give us a little update, catch us up about where we're at with DevOps Center?

Karen Fidelak: Sure. Yeah. So we, I think last we talked, we were running a pilot. We ran a pilot from about last May through the end of the year. And then early this year in February, we started what we're calling a Closed Beta, where we added some more users, added some more functionality and that's what's happening right now. We're kind of in the middle of our Closed Beta period. Then we're planning in around June to release an open beta. And so we'll open that beta up to all users in the summer timeframe. And then the plan is around fall to go out with the GA. Now this is all sort of safe harbor everything in the future, but that's our kind of plan right now. And we're really excited about where we're at. And we're excited to show where we're at, TrailblazerDX in just a few weeks.

Gillian Bruce: Well, yes, again like safe harbor forward looking statement. We always have to reiterate that when people are going to be like, "Oh my God, I'm going to get this then." We always, we need a little safety there. So, all right. So we talked about, you have gone a long ways through this development cycle with this product so far, which is very exciting. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the details of that? So you said pilot is, we're kind of wrapping up the pilot phase, getting ready to go to beta. What happened during the pilot phase? What did you and your team learn? And actually before we get there, can you just remind us kind of a high level, what is DevOps Center?

Karen Fidelak: Sure. Yeah. So DevOps Center is a new product that we're building. It's all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire developer community, regardless of where you fall on that sort of low code to pro code spectrum. So the idea here is to bring easy to use change management, incorporate things like source control, really nice, easy to use experience, provide push button deployments and allow teams that involve, like I said, mixed or hybrid, what we call hybrid sets of users to work together, to manage their applications' entire life cycle. So we're trying to really bring those modern best practices around DevOps, to everyone in a really easy and accessible way.

Gillian Bruce: And that I think is the key, right? Because this is where admins are like, "DevOps Center is something that I should pay attention to," because you said this hybrid model of the pro code developers, the low code developers, which admins, that's you. So this is where they kind of play a role. And this is why DevOps Center is going to be really awesome for admins.

Karen Fidelak: Yes, absolutely. We hear a lot of admins, low code developers who really want to be more involved in these DevOps practices that involve things like source control, but really haven't had the experience or tools that have allowed them to easily adopt and feel comfortable using them. And so that's really our goal here is to bring to you a tool that lets you really easily incorporate those into your overall flow and allow you to participate now with those other members of your team that may have already adopted source control, but you haven't been able to be part of that yet. And so this is going to allow you to just jump right in and take advantage of those really, like I said, modern best practices around DevOps that everybody really does want to adopt.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And change management is definitely one of the core Salesforce admin skills that we have ... We're actually going to be focusing quite a bit on some of these. We have 14 core admin skills that we're going to be focusing and for the rest of the year. And we talked about it at Dreamforce last year, but change management is a big, big piece of that. And this tool, this DevOps Center is going to be such a really great way to kind of get a handle on change management and really kind of give yourself as an admin, a leg up in that arena. So Karen, you told me about this pilot that is now coming to a close. Can you tell us about some of the things you and your team learned during that pilot phase?

Karen Fidelak: Yeah, so the pilot was really all about bringing to bear this fully declarative experience. Like I said, we're trying to incorporate this whole end to end flow around lifecycle management. And so some of the features that we introduced there were like automatic change tracking. So when you make changes in your developer sandbox now, we're automatically tracking those and you can see those in a nice list within the application. You can select which ones you want to migrate forward in your flow and just at the click of a button, you can move those changes forward. And as part of that, we're doing a nice integration behind the scenes with source control and allowing you to then through clicks, promote or deploy those changes through the various stages of a pipeline. And so some of the things that we learned through this pilot was that first of all, people really appreciate that overall experience.
So overall it was really, I would call it a success. The source tracking capability that we have was really loved by people. So just that automatic tracking of the changes was a super nice convenience and really an improvement over our current declarative change management, which is change sets. Any of you who are using change sets probably know it's not the easiest to use. And so we've learned that this is really an improvement over that. We learned that the source control integration is generally, it's good, right? Like people, while they might have a bit of a learning curve, when it comes to source control systems, we've made it really easy. You don't really have to ever go into the source control system. Basically, all you have to do is create an account and then we handle all of the integration to move those changes into a source control system.
We manage the branches there. You really don't have to get into it at all if you don't want. And so that was positive. I think that the people were able to adopt that and appreciated the integration that we were providing there. We also learned some things that from a usability standpoint, we need to improve and we're working on those right now. Some things that I would say are sort of UI usability enhancements, which we knew going into the pilot. We didn't have all of that in there. That's why we kind of put the pilot out there, get people using it, understanding the overall basic flows and then figuring out where it is we really need to add those enhancements to make it really usable and adoptable. And so things just like list management, like sorting lists, filtering lists seems pretty basic.
And we understood that those were the kinds of things that needed to come along. We also added in our, as a result of pilot feedback and as we went into the beta, better, we call it activity history views where we're seeing a full history of everything that's happened within DevOps Center. So that gives you a nice sort of auditability trail and visibility into everything that's happened and better error tracking. So just sort of like that second level debugging capability, error management, history management, those are some of the things that we layered in to our beta and then some things around like how do we handle the cases where things don't go kind as planned. Maybe you're moving some changes forward and they're failing to deploy. We want to make sure that we handle those use cases reasonably well. And so we've added some features as we move into our beta to be able to kind of pull those changes back, start over.
If you get into kind of a situation where you've got some failed deployments that are sort of partway through the pipeline. We've provided a better way for you to kind of start over with those. And these were all based on feedback that we got as part of that pilot. So I would say overall, it's very positive for us. I think we're definitely moving in the right direction. We've got kind of our core use cases that we're working on toward RGA. And then we're layering in these sort of usability and kind of secondary I would call use cases to those primary use cases. And that's based on the feedback that we're getting.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. You know what, I always love hearing from product teams about how they really incorporate the feedback from these pilot phases, because I think it's one of the amazing things we get to do here at Salesforce is being like, "Hey, we know it's not perfect. If you want to play with us, come on in and play and then tell us what you think and we're going to make it better."

Karen Fidelak: Yep.

Gillian Bruce: I love hearing about that process. One of the things that I heard you say a few times, a theme that kind of came out is really this availability to get a better visibility into what's happening and where it's happening and when it's happening and being able to control when it's happening, which I guess it's one of the core tenants of DevOps Center, I think all admins will definitely appreciate that. I think every admin is a little bit of a control freak. It's kind one of our core tenants, I would imagine. So that's really great. Karen, you're also doing a lot of stuff at TrailblazerDX, which is coming up here soon on April 26th and 27th. I'm sorry, the 27th and 28th in my head, it's a day early. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the amazing content that you and your team will be sharing TrailblazerDX?

Karen Fidelak: Absolutely. So we've got quite a few different places and sessions that you can come hear more about what we're doing and see it in action. So first we have a booth demo. So on the floor where all the demos will be happening, we will have a dedicated booth dedicated to DevOps Center. We'll have team members there. So we really encourage you to come take a look at what we've got and talk to members of our team who are building this product. They would love to talk to you and get your feedback there as well. We also have on the floor there a few theater sessions where we'll be covering DevOps and DevOps Center. So the first one is called Getting Started with Salesforce DevOps. And this is we're going to be talking sort of about general principles of DevOps and things that you can start doing now to start laying a good foundation for adoption of DevOps Center when it's available.
So even if you aren't part of our beta yet, or you can't get your hands on it just yet, there are things that you can be doing now to prepare yourself really well, to be able to quickly adopt it when it's available and just think about sort of general best practices around DevOps principles. So that's going to be a fun one. We also have another theater session called DevOps for Salesforce Developers. And this is where we'll show the product. We'll also talk about how we on our team are building it, using some of these practices. So we'll talk a little bit about general DevOps practices and show the product. And then there's another one called What's New at DevOps for Architects, and that's going to be focused on tailoring the DevOps experience to an architect role, and we'll be covering packaging as well as DevOps and DevOps Center there.
So it's another opportunity to see it. And then finally, there's a breakout session that's called DevOps Center Practical Use Cases, and this is going to be a really fun one. I'm really excited about this one. I'm going to be presenting with a partner and a customer. And the customer has been using the DevOps Center product from the pilot and into the beta. So they'll be able to speak firsthand about their experience using it and how it's providing value to their business. And then also have a partner who is building an integration, building an extension to their own package that they provide through our app exchange. They're providing an integration to DevOps Center. So that's really cool to see that it's getting out into our ecosystem and we're going to see, I'm hoping, more and more of these partners being able to build extensions, to incorporate like, sort of the best of their product and the best of the DevOps Center experience and bring those two things together. So that could be really fun.

Gillian Bruce: So you're going to be really busy at TrailblazerDX, is what I'm getting.

Karen Fidelak: I mean, it'll be busy. And we will see if these sessions actually get scheduled such that I can be in all the right places at the right time. But yeah, I'm excited.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, I mean, so here's the great thing about TrailblazerDX and listener, if you've never been to a TrailblazerDX or a TDX, this is a great reason for you to come is because not only are you going to get access to all of this great information that Karen and her team will be sharing, but you're going to get access to Karen and her team directly. And visiting that booth, that DevOps Center booth will be so, so fun because seeing the product in action and asking your questions and getting them specifically answered. I personally am really excited about that theater session about how you prepare basically for DevOps Center, because I think that's going to be really key for any admin persona to know whether you actually get into adopting DevOps Center or not. Those best practices will serve you well beyond just this specific product, I would imagine. So yeah, everybody, if you can come join us in San Francisco for TrailblazerDX, do it, come, play with us, it's going to be really fun.

Karen Fidelak: Yes. And I would just like to add that a lot of times it's me or members of my team that are out talking about this product. I think what's really exciting about this event is that we're getting the rest of my team here, out there and able to present and talk to you, the customer. And that's really exciting for both me and for them. So they're really excited to be able to hear from real customers maybe who have been using the product already or who are excited about seeing the product and what we have coming and to see all their hard work because we've been working really hard on this for multiple years now, but to see all that hard work really become real and something that customers can actually start using really soon. So that's very exciting for us.

Gillian Bruce: Yes, there's nothing more reward than actually talking to someone who's using what you've built and seeing, hearing how it has impacted what they do every day. So agreed. That's awesome. So Karen, if people want to learn more about TrailblazerDX, I'm going to share links to your sessions that you mentioned in our show notes. If they want to learn more about DevOps Center in general and you know, how they can participate in the beta, where should they go?

Karen Fidelak: So the best place to go, we have a public Trailblazer community group it's just called DevOps Center. So if you go out in our Trailblazer community and search for DevOps Center Group, you'll find it. And that's where we post resources. We've got some things like FAQs out there. We've also got some links to some product demos. We have just a forum for community discussion. And it's also where I will post updates on our product releases. So like for instance, when our open beta is available, we'll make an announcement there so everybody can go get their hands on it as it's being released. So that's where I would recommend that you go.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, I will put that link in the notes as well. Karen, thank you so much for the work that you and your team do. I think this is going to be a hugely important and very powerful tool for admins to use, especially as they try to focus on that change management core skills. So thank you on behalf of the community and we're really excited to see what people start doing with this.

Karen Fidelak: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Always happy to talk more about this product and get the word out there that it's coming. So thank you.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. All right, well, I'm sure we'll have you back before long. So good luck getting ready for TrailblazerDX and we'll see you there.

Karen Fidelak: Awesome. Excited.

Gillian Bruce: Well, huge thanks to Karen and her team for all the hard work that they've done to make DevOps Center a reality and thanks to Karen for sharing her time with me today. I know everyone's busy getting ready for the event. Now we talked about quite a few things on this podcast that I think is going to get every admin excited for not only TrailblazerDX, but DevOps Center, which is a huge, huge game changing tool that's going to help all of us be better change management professionals. So a few of the highlights I want you to pay attention to, if you didn't catch it the first time around, DevOps Center is here. It's coming. The beta will be opening up in June. If you want to be a part of it, you can join the Trailblazer community group called DevOps Center Group. You can find that very easily and put it in link here in the show notes, and you can find it on the Trailblazer community yourself.
Now, a few things about DevOps Center that I think are really, really key to us as admins is it enables a hybrid change management model. That means your developers can be working in the CLI and you as an admin, who's maybe not working in the CLI can still track and see all of the changes that they've been making right there in DevOps Center. You'll be able to sort through it, you'll be able to filter through it. Those list views that Karen mentioned, she and her team got feedback on improving are going to be improved. And this really enables you to make declarative changes alongside your developers who are making code changes. So this is really, really a powerful tool. Want you to check it out, make sure that if you're coming to TrailblazerDX, which I hope you are, you join some of these sessions.
I think the biggest, most important session for every admin to attend in terms of DevOps Center will be that theater session that Karen mentioned getting started with Salesforce DevOps, steps you can take now to start preparing yourself for DevOps Center and join the breakout. I mean, to hear how Karen has been working with a partner and a Salesforce customer about how they've been using DevOps Center, I think that's going to be a really awesome breakout session.
Okay. So make sure that you join both of those. I'll put links to them in the show notes so you can get excited about them. If you can't join us for TrailblazerDX in person, don't worry. You can join the broadcast. Now you're not going to get access to all of the amazing things that Karen mentioned, like the demo booth and the theater sessions. But I do believe that breakout session will be available after the broadcast ends or after the event, sorry. During the live broadcast, you'll be able to join a lot of the super sessions and the main show. You may see me on there as another MC because you know, it's TrailblazerDX and it's kind of what I do.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this episode. It's so wonderful to be back and I hope see you at TrailblazerDX. If you want to learn more about anything we mentioned on today's podcast, please go to admin.salesforce.com and you can stay up to date with all of the fun, awesome admin happenings on Twitter. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I. You can find our guest today, Karen Fidelak, @KarenFidelak, very easy Twitter handle to find. And you can find my co-host the one and only, Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt and you can find myself @gilliankbruce. All right, everybody. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Hope to see at TrailblazerDX. And if not, I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Road_to_TDX__DevOps_Center_with_Karen_Fidelak.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Karen Fidelak, Senior Director, Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about some exciting announcements she’s got about DevOps Center coming up for TrailblazerDX.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Karen Fidelak.

Why we’re psyched about the beta for DevOps Center

We’re really excited about DevOps Center, and there are going to be tons of exciting announcements at TrailblazerDX so we wanted to talk to Karen to give pod listeners a little preview. The biggest news is that an open beta is coming this summer, with a GA planned for the Fall.

“We’re excited about where we’re at and we’re excited to show it at TrailblazerDX,” Karen says, “DevOps Center is all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire community, regardless of where you fall on the low-code to pro-code spectrum.” The goal is a tool that provides easy-to-use change management, source management, push-button deployments, and, overall, will allow hybrid sets of users to work together more easily.

Lessons from the pilot program

“We hear a lot of Admins and low-code developers who really want to be more involved in these DevOps practices that include things like source control but haven’t had the experience or tools to easily adopt and feel comfortable using them,” Karen says. They want to give you what you need to do just that and work with other members of your team that may already have adopted source control and other change management best practices.

Their pilot program introduced a number of features to help create an end-to-end, declarative flow around lifecycle management. One thing they added was automatic change tracking, so any changes made in the developer sandbox are added to a list where you can select which ones you want to move forward. It’s a big upgrade over Change Sets, and they’re looking to make even more improvements going into the beta.

A sneak peak at TrailblazerDX

Karen and her team will be at their spiffy dedicated booth at TrailblazerDX, so be sure you stop by if you’re attending. They’ll also be doing some theater sessions to get you up to speed with DevOps and DevOps Center. Finally, there will be a breakout session where Karen will present with a Salesforce partner and a customer to show DevOps Center in action.

They’re really excited to hear from real customers and get any feedback they can to make DevOps Center even better, so don’t be a stranger. If you can’t make it, be sure to check in on the Trailblazer Community group (link below) to get involved.

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Full show transcript

Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce and we are joined by Karen Fidelak, who is going to talk to us about DevOps center. Why? Well be because they've got some exciting announcements they're going to be sharing at a little party we're throwing later this month called TrailblazerDX. That's right folks. We are having an in-person event. It's going to be so exciting.
Trailblazer DX, April 27th and 28th here in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. You're not going to want to miss it. And to get you excited. I decided to pull together a few of the product managers who have exciting things they're going to be talking about at that event. And Karen is one of them. Now last we talked to Karen about DevOps Center, which is what her team is working on, was a while ago. And since then she and her team have been working very, very hard to get this product ready for prime time. So let's check in with Karen and hear about all the goodness her team has been working on and get excited about what she and her team are going to be doing at TrailblazerDX. Karen, welcome to the podcast.

Karen Fidelak: Hi, I'm glad to be here. This is exciting.

Gillian Bruce: Well, it's been a while since you and I chatted. In fact, I think this is my first official podcast I'm hosting since I've come back and I think you were the last product managers I've worked with before I left. So it's like nothing has ever happened.

Karen Fidelak: Boy. Welcome back.

Gillian Bruce: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to check in with you Karen because you and your team were working on something really awesome and amazing for admins. DevOps sent her. And I wanted to check in with you because we're coming up on a little something here in just a couple weeks that we're getting excited about. TrailblazerDX. And I know that you and your team have some exciting things you're going to be sharing and talking about related to DevOps Center. So can you give us a little update, catch us up about where we're at with DevOps Center?

Karen Fidelak: Sure. Yeah. So we, I think last we talked, we were running a pilot. We ran a pilot from about last May through the end of the year. And then early this year in February, we started what we're calling a Closed Beta, where we added some more users, added some more functionality and that's what's happening right now. We're kind of in the middle of our Closed Beta period. Then we're planning in around June to release an open beta. And so we'll open that beta up to all users in the summer timeframe. And then the plan is around fall to go out with the GA. Now this is all sort of safe harbor everything in the future, but that's our kind of plan right now. And we're really excited about where we're at. And we're excited to show where we're at, TrailblazerDX in just a few weeks.

Gillian Bruce: Well, yes, again like safe harbor forward looking statement. We always have to reiterate that when people are going to be like, "Oh my God, I'm going to get this then." We always, we need a little safety there. So, all right. So we talked about, you have gone a long ways through this development cycle with this product so far, which is very exciting. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the details of that? So you said pilot is, we're kind of wrapping up the pilot phase, getting ready to go to beta. What happened during the pilot phase? What did you and your team learn? And actually before we get there, can you just remind us kind of a high level, what is DevOps Center?

Karen Fidelak: Sure. Yeah. So DevOps Center is a new product that we're building. It's all about change and release management and introducing DevOps best practices to our entire developer community, regardless of where you fall on that sort of low code to pro code spectrum. So the idea here is to bring easy to use change management, incorporate things like source control, really nice, easy to use experience, provide push button deployments and allow teams that involve, like I said, mixed or hybrid, what we call hybrid sets of users to work together, to manage their applications' entire life cycle. So we're trying to really bring those modern best practices around DevOps, to everyone in a really easy and accessible way.

Gillian Bruce: And that I think is the key, right? Because this is where admins are like, "DevOps Center is something that I should pay attention to," because you said this hybrid model of the pro code developers, the low code developers, which admins, that's you. So this is where they kind of play a role. And this is why DevOps Center is going to be really awesome for admins.

Karen Fidelak: Yes, absolutely. We hear a lot of admins, low code developers who really want to be more involved in these DevOps practices that involve things like source control, but really haven't had the experience or tools that have allowed them to easily adopt and feel comfortable using them. And so that's really our goal here is to bring to you a tool that lets you really easily incorporate those into your overall flow and allow you to participate now with those other members of your team that may have already adopted source control, but you haven't been able to be part of that yet. And so this is going to allow you to just jump right in and take advantage of those really, like I said, modern best practices around DevOps that everybody really does want to adopt.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And change management is definitely one of the core Salesforce admin skills that we have ... We're actually going to be focusing quite a bit on some of these. We have 14 core admin skills that we're going to be focusing and for the rest of the year. And we talked about it at Dreamforce last year, but change management is a big, big piece of that. And this tool, this DevOps Center is going to be such a really great way to kind of get a handle on change management and really kind of give yourself as an admin, a leg up in that arena. So Karen, you told me about this pilot that is now coming to a close. Can you tell us about some of the things you and your team learned during that pilot phase?

Karen Fidelak: Yeah, so the pilot was really all about bringing to bear this fully declarative experience. Like I said, we're trying to incorporate this whole end to end flow around lifecycle management. And so some of the features that we introduced there were like automatic change tracking. So when you make changes in your developer sandbox now, we're automatically tracking those and you can see those in a nice list within the application. You can select which ones you want to migrate forward in your flow and just at the click of a button, you can move those changes forward. And as part of that, we're doing a nice integration behind the scenes with source control and allowing you to then through clicks, promote or deploy those changes through the various stages of a pipeline. And so some of the things that we learned through this pilot was that first of all, people really appreciate that overall experience.
So overall it was really, I would call it a success. The source tracking capability that we have was really loved by people. So just that automatic tracking of the changes was a super nice convenience and really an improvement over our current declarative change management, which is change sets. Any of you who are using change sets probably know it's not the easiest to use. And so we've learned that this is really an improvement over that. We learned that the source control integration is generally, it's good, right? Like people, while they might have a bit of a learning curve, when it comes to source control systems, we've made it really easy. You don't really have to ever go into the source control system. Basically, all you have to do is create an account and then we handle all of the integration to move those changes into a source control system.
We manage the branches there. You really don't have to get into it at all if you don't want. And so that was positive. I think that the people were able to adopt that and appreciated the integration that we were providing there. We also learned some things that from a usability standpoint, we need to improve and we're working on those right now. Some things that I would say are sort of UI usability enhancements, which we knew going into the pilot. We didn't have all of that in there. That's why we kind of put the pilot out there, get people using it, understanding the overall basic flows and then figuring out where it is we really need to add those enhancements to make it really usable and adoptable. And so things just like list management, like sorting lists, filtering lists seems pretty basic.
And we understood that those were the kinds of things that needed to come along. We also added in our, as a result of pilot feedback and as we went into the beta, better, we call it activity history views where we're seeing a full history of everything that's happened within DevOps Center. So that gives you a nice sort of auditability trail and visibility into everything that's happened and better error tracking. So just sort of like that second level debugging capability, error management, history management, those are some of the things that we layered in to our beta and then some things around like how do we handle the cases where things don't go kind as planned. Maybe you're moving some changes forward and they're failing to deploy. We want to make sure that we handle those use cases reasonably well. And so we've added some features as we move into our beta to be able to kind of pull those changes back, start over.
If you get into kind of a situation where you've got some failed deployments that are sort of partway through the pipeline. We've provided a better way for you to kind of start over with those. And these were all based on feedback that we got as part of that pilot. So I would say overall, it's very positive for us. I think we're definitely moving in the right direction. We've got kind of our core use cases that we're working on toward RGA. And then we're layering in these sort of usability and kind of secondary I would call use cases to those primary use cases. And that's based on the feedback that we're getting.

Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. You know what, I always love hearing from product teams about how they really incorporate the feedback from these pilot phases, because I think it's one of the amazing things we get to do here at Salesforce is being like, "Hey, we know it's not perfect. If you want to play with us, come on in and play and then tell us what you think and we're going to make it better."

Karen Fidelak: Yep.

Gillian Bruce: I love hearing about that process. One of the things that I heard you say a few times, a theme that kind of came out is really this availability to get a better visibility into what's happening and where it's happening and when it's happening and being able to control when it's happening, which I guess it's one of the core tenants of DevOps Center, I think all admins will definitely appreciate that. I think every admin is a little bit of a control freak. It's kind one of our core tenants, I would imagine. So that's really great. Karen, you're also doing a lot of stuff at TrailblazerDX, which is coming up here soon on April 26th and 27th. I'm sorry, the 27th and 28th in my head, it's a day early. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the amazing content that you and your team will be sharing TrailblazerDX?

Karen Fidelak: Absolutely. So we've got quite a few different places and sessions that you can come hear more about what we're doing and see it in action. So first we have a booth demo. So on the floor where all the demos will be happening, we will have a dedicated booth dedicated to DevOps Center. We'll have team members there. So we really encourage you to come take a look at what we've got and talk to members of our team who are building this product. They would love to talk to you and get your feedback there as well. We also have on the floor there a few theater sessions where we'll be covering DevOps and DevOps Center. So the first one is called Getting Started with Salesforce DevOps. And this is we're going to be talking sort of about general principles of DevOps and things that you can start doing now to start laying a good foundation for adoption of DevOps Center when it's available.
So even if you aren't part of our beta yet, or you can't get your hands on it just yet, there are things that you can be doing now to prepare yourself really well, to be able to quickly adopt it when it's available and just think about sort of general best practices around DevOps principles. So that's going to be a fun one. We also have another theater session called DevOps for Salesforce Developers. And this is where we'll show the product. We'll also talk about how we on our team are building it, using some of these practices. So we'll talk a little bit about general DevOps practices and show the product. And then there's another one called What's New at DevOps for Architects, and that's going to be focused on tailoring the DevOps experience to an architect role, and we'll be covering packaging as well as DevOps and DevOps Center there.
So it's another opportunity to see it. And then finally, there's a breakout session that's called DevOps Center Practical Use Cases, and this is going to be a really fun one. I'm really excited about this one. I'm going to be presenting with a partner and a customer. And the customer has been using the DevOps Center product from the pilot and into the beta. So they'll be able to speak firsthand about their experience using it and how it's providing value to their business. And then also have a partner who is building an integration, building an extension to their own package that they provide through our app exchange. They're providing an integration to DevOps Center. So that's really cool to see that it's getting out into our ecosystem and we're going to see, I'm hoping, more and more of these partners being able to build extensions, to incorporate like, sort of the best of their product and the best of the DevOps Center experience and bring those two things together. So that could be really fun.

Gillian Bruce: So you're going to be really busy at TrailblazerDX, is what I'm getting.

Karen Fidelak: I mean, it'll be busy. And we will see if these sessions actually get scheduled such that I can be in all the right places at the right time. But yeah, I'm excited.

Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, I mean, so here's the great thing about TrailblazerDX and listener, if you've never been to a TrailblazerDX or a TDX, this is a great reason for you to come is because not only are you going to get access to all of this great information that Karen and her team will be sharing, but you're going to get access to Karen and her team directly. And visiting that booth, that DevOps Center booth will be so, so fun because seeing the product in action and asking your questions and getting them specifically answered. I personally am really excited about that theater session about how you prepare basically for DevOps Center, because I think that's going to be really key for any admin persona to know whether you actually get into adopting DevOps Center or not. Those best practices will serve you well beyond just this specific product, I would imagine. So yeah, everybody, if you can come join us in San Francisco for TrailblazerDX, do it, come, play with us, it's going to be really fun.

Karen Fidelak: Yes. And I would just like to add that a lot of times it's me or members of my team that are out talking about this product. I think what's really exciting about this event is that we're getting the rest of my team here, out there and able to present and talk to you, the customer. And that's really exciting for both me and for them. So they're really excited to be able to hear from real customers maybe who have been using the product already or who are excited about seeing the product and what we have coming and to see all their hard work because we've been working really hard on this for multiple years now, but to see all that hard work really become real and something that customers can actually start using really soon. So that's very exciting for us.

Gillian Bruce: Yes, there's nothing more reward than actually talking to someone who's using what you've built and seeing, hearing how it has impacted what they do every day. So agreed. That's awesome. So Karen, if people want to learn more about TrailblazerDX, I'm going to share links to your sessions that you mentioned in our show notes. If they want to learn more about DevOps Center in general and you know, how they can participate in the beta, where should they go?

Karen Fidelak: So the best place to go, we have a public Trailblazer community group it's just called DevOps Center. So if you go out in our Trailblazer community and search for DevOps Center Group, you'll find it. And that's where we post resources. We've got some things like FAQs out there. We've also got some links to some product demos. We have just a forum for community discussion. And it's also where I will post updates on our product releases. So like for instance, when our open beta is available, we'll make an announcement there so everybody can go get their hands on it as it's being released. So that's where I would recommend that you go.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, I will put that link in the notes as well. Karen, thank you so much for the work that you and your team do. I think this is going to be a hugely important and very powerful tool for admins to use, especially as they try to focus on that change management core skills. So thank you on behalf of the community and we're really excited to see what people start doing with this.

Karen Fidelak: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Always happy to talk more about this product and get the word out there that it's coming. So thank you.

Gillian Bruce: Excellent. All right, well, I'm sure we'll have you back before long. So good luck getting ready for TrailblazerDX and we'll see you there.

Karen Fidelak: Awesome. Excited.

Gillian Bruce: Well, huge thanks to Karen and her team for all the hard work that they've done to make DevOps Center a reality and thanks to Karen for sharing her time with me today. I know everyone's busy getting ready for the event. Now we talked about quite a few things on this podcast that I think is going to get every admin excited for not only TrailblazerDX, but DevOps Center, which is a huge, huge game changing tool that's going to help all of us be better change management professionals. So a few of the highlights I want you to pay attention to, if you didn't catch it the first time around, DevOps Center is here. It's coming. The beta will be opening up in June. If you want to be a part of it, you can join the Trailblazer community group called DevOps Center Group. You can find that very easily and put it in link here in the show notes, and you can find it on the Trailblazer community yourself.
Now, a few things about DevOps Center that I think are really, really key to us as admins is it enables a hybrid change management model. That means your developers can be working in the CLI and you as an admin, who's maybe not working in the CLI can still track and see all of the changes that they've been making right there in DevOps Center. You'll be able to sort through it, you'll be able to filter through it. Those list views that Karen mentioned, she and her team got feedback on improving are going to be improved. And this really enables you to make declarative changes alongside your developers who are making code changes. So this is really, really a powerful tool. Want you to check it out, make sure that if you're coming to TrailblazerDX, which I hope you are, you join some of these sessions.
I think the biggest, most important session for every admin to attend in terms of DevOps Center will be that theater session that Karen mentioned getting started with Salesforce DevOps, steps you can take now to start preparing yourself for DevOps Center and join the breakout. I mean, to hear how Karen has been working with a partner and a Salesforce customer about how they've been using DevOps Center, I think that's going to be a really awesome breakout session.
Okay. So make sure that you join both of those. I'll put links to them in the show notes so you can get excited about them. If you can't join us for TrailblazerDX in person, don't worry. You can join the broadcast. Now you're not going to get access to all of the amazing things that Karen mentioned, like the demo booth and the theater sessions. But I do believe that breakout session will be available after the broadcast ends or after the event, sorry. During the live broadcast, you'll be able to join a lot of the super sessions and the main show. You may see me on there as another MC because you know, it's TrailblazerDX and it's kind of what I do.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this episode. It's so wonderful to be back and I hope see you at TrailblazerDX. If you want to learn more about anything we mentioned on today's podcast, please go to admin.salesforce.com and you can stay up to date with all of the fun, awesome admin happenings on Twitter. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I. You can find our guest today, Karen Fidelak, @KarenFidelak, very easy Twitter handle to find. And you can find my co-host the one and only, Mike Gerholdt, @MikeGerholdt and you can find myself @gilliankbruce. All right, everybody. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Hope to see at TrailblazerDX. And if not, I'll catch you next time in the cloud.



Direct download: Road_to_TDX__DevOps_Center_with_Karen_Fidelak.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST

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