Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for July. Join us as we talk about the latest and the greatest Salesforce content from July and the wide variety of midwest-specific treats we tried at Midwest Dreamin’.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.
Dreamforce is just around the corner, but the team has already been busy visiting in-person events. We recently stopped by Midwest Dreamin and WITness Sucess, where I introduced Gillian to the wonders of puppy chow and scotcheroos. Take a peek at the linked resource below which can help you convince your boss to send you to Dreamforce.
Cheryl Feldman’s comprehensive guide on the User Access and Permissions Assistant was a standout post from July. There are a lot of cool features to play around with, particularly with reports, so make sure to take a look.
We’re really excited to relaunch “How I Solved It” on Salesforce+. The first episode with Andrew Russo is up now, but keep a close eye as more are on the way soon!
This month, we had our first Olympic medalist, Christine Magnuson, on the podcast. She was a 2008 Olympic swimmer and two-time silver medalist, and now she’s a Solution Engineering Manager at Salesforce.
Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the July monthly retro for 2022. I’m your host, Mike Gerholdt. And in this episode, we’ll review the top product, community, and careers content for the month of July. Imagine that. To help me do that is the very familiar and keynoting voice of Gillian Bruce. Hi Gillian.
Gillian Bruce: Hello there, Mike. Nice to be here with you.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s good to be back on a pod with you. It’s been a month.
Gillian Bruce: It’s been a month. It’s been a busy month.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Quite a few things that we have done and it’s been hot all over the world. Just hot everywhere.
Gillian Bruce: Except for where I am.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: I am still wearing a sweatshirt.
Mike Gerholdt: Don’t tell anybody.
Gillian Bruce: Our heat has been on for the last couple weeks.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh my God.
Gillian Bruce: Because if any of you don’t know this, for most of San Francisco, June/July is some of our colder months because we are covered in fog and we don’t get to see the sun. So it’s about 55 to 60 degrees. It’s foggy. So if you want to break from the sun and the heat, come on over to San Francisco.
Mike Gerholdt: People are going to be flocking to San Francisco now.
Gillian Bruce: But you got to hurry because it’s about to change. Our summer starts the end of August and goes through November. Then we get sunshine and gorgeous weather, but it never gets 100 degrees. That’s just craziness.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So it’s going to be gorgeous weather for Dreamforce, which we’ll talk about later. Teaser.
Gillian Bruce: Sure is.
Mike Gerholdt: But let’s talk about blog content. So we had some really cool, again, ton of blog posts that went out this month. But the one that I want to highlight is the one that Cheryl Feldman wrote on Analyze, Report and Manage Permissions with User Access and Permission Assistant. Not a short title.
Gillian Bruce: But you’re permitted to use as many words as you’d like in your title.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes, at some point. But this is really cool. So user access and permission assistant. She details everything that basically admins have been wanting for, I don’t even know how long. She even tells a story of when I first joined Salesforce almost a year ago and it took on permission sets, and how do you work with the permission assistant and what can you do with it? The coolest thing down is the third one, report by user permission sets and permission set groups to understand who has what. If you need a moment to sit down, I completely understand.
Gillian Bruce: Game changer.
Mike Gerholdt: I got goosebumps just reading that sentence.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, if you’re an admin and you don’t use this, I don’t know what to say.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, your days are very long, that’s what I would say, while you troubleshoot things. So yeah, this is really cool. There’s also a video. And then of course, a link to the app exchange listing. Get all over this because just to sound old, it was a lot different when I was an admin. You had profiles and page layouts and you didn’t have to troubleshoot things. We didn’t have the tools to be as granular as you can now, and it’s just amazing. But with that you need the ability to report on stuff and this is so cool.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. The technology’s come far long ways since your old, early admin days.
Mike Gerholdt: Since back in the day. I walked uphill both ways in the snow just to do a page layout.
Gillian Bruce: Barefoot.
Mike Gerholdt: Barefoot.
Gillian Bruce: Well, Mike, we also have some pretty incredible video content. You mentioned a video in the last post, but we have some videos that I am very fond of and feel so excited to release out on the wild, that have just been released, or at least the first episode has been released this month. That is How I Solved It on Salesforce. Plus we have taken the incredible show that Marc Baizman and then Jennifer Lee have been doing with admins showing how they’ve solved real actual problems in their orgs. We gave it a little extra production love and shined it up and put it on Salesforce+, which is our free online streaming platform. It’s really exciting.
We have five episodes that we’re going to be releasing over the next few weeks. But the first one came out and it’s all about Andrew Russo, who is an incredible, awesome admin, expanding on that blog post he was featured in many months ago about managing users and really getting into a demo and showing us some of the things that he’s built. Man, it is awesome. It is super fun. Watch it. We had a lot of fun making it.
Mike Gerholdt: It shows. You’re now a streaming star, Gillian. You could watch stuff on Hulu and Netflix.
Gillian Bruce: I got to say, I feel really special that I’m on the same platform as one of my idols, Kara Swisher. So I feel special about that because they do clips from Kara Swisher’s podcast that she does with Scott Galloway, Pivot, on the Salesforce+. So the fact that I get to be a part of the same platform that she is, makes me really excited.
Mike Gerholdt: Kara Swisher, future guest of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
Gillian Bruce: I am working podcast all my angles there to try and make that happen. So we’re just going to put that out there. Kara, we want you on the podcast.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Because Kara, listen, so many people do. So you could spend the weekend and watch some Stranger Things or How I Solved It on Salesforce+.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It’s not a huge time commitment. The last few episodes of Stranger things, which I still haven’t watched because there’s an hour and then a two hour episode.
Mike Gerholdt: Seriously? That’s like a plane ride.
Gillian Bruce: By the time I get the kids to bed, I have about 30 minutes before I fall asleep. So it’s really tough. It’s tough.
Mike Gerholdt: But you could watch your Salesforce+ video in those 30 minutes.
Gillian Bruce: Sure could, because I think they’re 10 minutes-ish, if that.
Mike Gerholdt: They’re consumable.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. There are really actual hands-on tips that you can start using yourself that you can play with, with your own Dev org or Sandbox. Every single one of these episodes, you’re going to be able to get something very tangible that you can put to use.
Mike Gerholdt: Your own non-production org.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. Don’t do it in production.
Mike Gerholdt: No. We did a bunch of podcasts, July was fun for pods. But one that stood out, Gillian, I actually listened to this on the way to a car show, so I’m a listener of our own podcast. But you did this great interview with Christine Magnuson. Can you tell us about it?
Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, it was really exciting because she’s not only the first Olympian that I’ve talked to, but the first two time silver medalist Olympian. She competed in Rio and Beijing and she’s a swimmer, and now she is got an amazing career. She’s a manager of solution engineers here at Salesforce, which means she manages a very technical team. So I wanted to get Christine on the podcast because as you’ll listen to her episode, if you have not, go listen to it as soon as you’re done with this episode, because-
Mike Gerholdt: It’s really good.
Gillian Bruce: It’s so good. She talks about the idea of transferable skills. How she really evaluated how she could take the skills that she had as an Olympic athlete and transfer those into another career. How she really had a very detailed strategy behind that. She explains the story. Then she also talks about in her role, she works with a lot of admins. So what things she has seen that makes a very successful admin, and how you get your admin team. Because again, she comes at it from a solutions engineer perspective. So she has seen a lot. In fact, her team supports the largest Salesforce implementation that exists. So they have a lot of knowledge. Anyway, listen to Christine’s episode. It’s awesome. It’s an uplifting one. It’ll put you in a good mood for the rest of the day.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Oh, for sure. There were so many things like, I was driving, I wanted to take notes.
Gillian Bruce: Maybe you can listen to it again.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Absolutely. Then just to round out our discussion of, I feel like it’s one of the last few months of summer, but we have Dreamforce coming up. We also have some community events that are happening.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Mike, you and I and Jennifer Lee actually got to go to a community event, I guess it was a duo community event this month, Midwest Dreamin and WITness Success. I got to go because, well, you were the MC of the whole event.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I popped up on the stage for a few highlights and Midwest-isms Midwest Dreamin.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, yeah. Actually, can you share one of those Midwest-isms because they’re pretty amazing.
Mike Gerholdt: So people in the Midwest use weird terms, one of them is op. Usually we say that as an excuse me or oh, I’m sorry, op. And I op a ton. Man, you go grocery shopping with me because the cart always leaves the aisle before and you’re going to run in somebody, op I’m sorry. But so I said, what if we took a whole bunch of Midwest terms and made them into Salesforce features. One of them is op, which I said is clearly a validation rule. Because if Salesforce could be very Midwestern it wouldn’t fire the validation rule, it would just say, op. I believe that was one of them. I did put it out there. So for those of you that live in the Midwest or visited the Midwest, you know we like to eat puppy chow, which is actually Chex Mix covered in chocolate with confectioner’s sugar all over it. Gillian, you and I kicked around what that feature would be.
Adam Olshansky actually came out on Twitter and said puppy chow is really like custom metadata because it’s wonderful and you can use it anywhere. I felt that’s very apropos because the second you get puppy chow out, it’s everywhere. That confectioner’s sugar, I swear it finds every nook and cranny of your life to be.
Gillian Bruce: It’s so uniquely a Midwest thing. I remember growing up as a kid, occasionally some kid would bring some to school and I’d be like, what is this magical craziness?
Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. You go to our gas stations, everywhere. You walk into a Casey’s and there’re cups of puppy chow for you to buy right by the register, along with with scotcheroos. I don’t feel like scotcheroos are very Midwestern.
Gillian Bruce: I have no idea what that is. So it’s clearly-
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, a scotcheroo is basically like a rice crispy treat, but made with a lot of butter scotch and then covered in chocolate.
Gillian Bruce: Oh. So it’s like a healthier rice crispy treat.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: I’m kidding.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. But it’s so good.
Gillian Bruce: It sounds delicious.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It’s so good.
Gillian Bruce: Okay. All right. Yeah. So those were great and there were lots more. So if you were there, you had lot more.
Mike Gerholdt: Or check Twitter for some people tweet them out, hot dish. What do you think that is as a feature? It was fun. Little time filler before Gillian gets up on stage and wows the crowd with admin skills. I think a few people even tweet about the heels you were in.
Gillian Bruce: Well you always got to have a good pair of heels to deliver a talk properly, at least for me. Maybe not the same for you, Mike. But yeah, I had the honor of giving a keynote and it was really great to get back up on stage in front of actual people. It was exhilarating to do it, and it felt really fun to share very important content about skills and transferable skills and how to really discover your skills, hone them, and then find ways to use them to help make you shine. So, really amazing experience. Then Jennifer Lee stayed for WITness Success and presented a session about Flow, which I also saw all kinds of Twitter love for.
The reason I wanted to bring up these community events is because Dreamforce is coming and we would love you to come to Dreamforce. If there’s some reason that you can’t swing it, there are community events happening near you all of the time. So whether that’s your local user group or there’s a Dreamin event in your region, you can find out all about that on the Trailblazer community. I highly encourage you to go, especially now that people are coming back together in person, it’s really incredibly valuable and powerful. I had so many amazing talks with folks. I had some people coming up to me with tears because of just the meaningfulness of being connected again. Especially in the Salesforce community, there’s so much you can get by being in person with each other. So I highly encourage you to check out your local community gatherings.
Mike Gerholdt: I agree. To be honest with you, I showed up, I wore a mask for a while.
Gillian Bruce: So did I, until I got on stage.
Mike Gerholdt: So we’re past that now. Yeah. There were times that I actually checked out of some areas because I’m not too comfortable with this many people. That’s okay, it’s up to you. But it was great. So many people that I hadn’t seen in person in forever.
Gillian Bruce: It felt good.
Mike Gerholdt: You mentioned Dreamforce. I will include a link in the show notes to the convince your boss letter, which is on the homepage. If you haven’t registered for this little event that we’re doing in September. I have actually used versions of this letter when I was a customer, rewrote it, changed some things around. I will say it’s effective. It’s super easy to customize. It’ll be great. We’re going to have session content up, so you can start talking to your boss about the sessions you’re going to go to and the keynotes you’re going to see. There’s that unspoken just ability to connect with people that doesn’t happen anywhere else. You’re sitting in a session and you’re both there to learn Flow or something, next thing you know, you leave with a new best friend that helps you solve that problem.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It’s people that you never would’ve probably connected with, either virtually or in your own local community. Also, it’s just going to be great. We’re going to have so much fun at Dreamforce. We talk about it being the ultimate family reunion and gosh, aren’t we all ready for that. So it’s going to be really magical, really fun. I know our team is planning all kinds of really fun, exciting things for admins.
Mike Gerholdt: A few things in the works.
Gillian Bruce: Just a few.
Mike Gerholdt: Stay tuned.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Can’t tell you anything yet. It’s top secret.
Mike Gerholdt: Nope. Not yet. Gillian, you said it’s going to be nice weather because it’ll be past the cold.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. San Francisco summer is late August through early November. I grew up here and every year I forget, and then I’m like, all right, we’re going to have summer. It’s just three months later than everybody else.
Mike Gerholdt: It just comes at a different time. Good.
Gillian Bruce: Late bloomers out here on the west coast.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about all things we talked about in today’s episode, please 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 @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. Of course, Gillian is on Twitter. She is @GillianKBruce, and I am @MikeGerholdt. Give us a follow. You can read about puppy chow or other Midwest-isms, more so on my Twitter feed. But with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.
Gillian Bruce: Roar.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Is that the first thing that’s going to be on the recording, roar?
Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know if that’s a lion or is that a cat?
Gillian Bruce: It’s like a lion cub.
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