This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re happy to have Gillian Bruce back for a special show we’re calling, well, the What Do We Call This Episode. On the last Thursday of every month, Mike and Gillian will run through Salesforce content that caught their attention this month and give you some takeaways. Really, though, we need some help coming up with a name, so please reach out on Twitter and help us brainstorm.
Join us as we talk about all the great Salesforce content from this month, and a flashback to what was going on in March, 2018.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation between Mike and Gillian.
From the Evangelist team, LeeAnne Rimel has a timely article about telecommuting. She’s been doing it a long time with our team, so she has some great insights about how to successfully navigate the transition into working from home. From setting up a dedicated workspace to tips for creating a new routine you can stick to, there’s a lot to learn.
Salesforce.com MVP Amber Boaz shares a workaround post about customizing the idea of My List View when you’re looking at custom objects that you’re not necessarily the owner of. If you’re hungry for more workarounds, Mike recommends looking at your global variables within your organization. The tips in this article can help you bring more ease to users when they’re trying to do something they expect to be able to do.
We also wanted to flash back to one of our favorite Salesforce Admin Podcast episodes this month, “The Chemistry of Salesforce” with Jerrel Ramos. This was a really interesting one because, first of all, he’s the first chemist we’ve had on the show, and second of all, he’s new to Salesforce but really digging in to make the platform do something new. It covers not just how he’s adapting his org to suit his needs, but also how he’s approaching Trailhead as a newcomer. And don’t forget to check out Jerrel’s podcast about vaporwave music, the Virtual Ocean.
Around this time in 2018, we were actually doing the podcast twice a week. Just to take you back to those heady days, GDPR was new and organizations around the world were rushing to keep up. Gillian had a great conversation with Ian Glazer and Lindsey Finch to go everything admins needed to know. Now, of course, we’ve got a Trailhead for that. We also talked to Marc Baizman about the DOITTT framework, the process to go through before you go through the Process Builder.
Also in March of 2018, LeeAnne wrote an excellent (and super relevant for right now) post about the “5 Ways to Include Your Remote Meeting Attendees.” It’s chock-full of helpful information about technologies and strategies to help your collaboration on a mixed team, for both people in the office and those beaming in.
Gillian Bruce:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, the, What Do We Call This episode where we talk about product, community and careers to help you become an awesome admin. I’m Gillian Bruce and I’m back. It’s been a while, but I am so happy to be back on the podcast. Mike, thank you so much for keeping the awesome content coming while I was out.
Mike Gerholdt:
Gillian, we’re happy to have you back, so welcome back officially.
Gillian Bruce:
Thank you. Thank you. It’s one of the things I think I missed the most about not being around was not being able to do the podcast, so I was a devoted listener for the entire time I was out, so it was fun to hear you and Mark and all the different guests and different topics that we had come on. So excited to be back in the fold.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, shout out to Kelly Walker for doing The Lightning Champions Spotlight as well.
Gillian Bruce:
That’s right. Lightning Champions___, that was really fun to hear all of those amazing stories and there’s more coming I think, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
There is. I believe we’ve got more in the works. So definitely give a tweet to Kelly Walker or a shout out if you want to hear more of those.
Gillian Bruce:
Excellent. Well, so we’re calling this the, What Do We Call This Episode? Why are we calling it that, Mike?
Mike Gerholdt:
So I had an idea and it was listening to the listeners. Ha ha, that’s so meta. And like what if we did an episode that was the Gillian-Mike episode and we recap some of the content that we had this month and kind of told you the cool stuff that we liked about it and what we nerded out on. But we’re really not sure what to call this episode. So we kicked around a few ideas. Internally, we called it the Millian podcast because that’s Mike and Gillian.
Gillian Bruce:
It’s a good combination.
Mike Gerholdt:
Sure. Yeah. Except you’re only using the M out of my name. So kind of losing the naming battle there.
Gillian Bruce:
Or the I. I Guess the I could be yours or mine.
Mike Gerholdt:
Sure. Yeah. I don’t know. Spell Gillian without an I. It’s a lot harder.
Gillian Bruce:
True, true. Well, so we wanted to kind of go over some of the topics over the last month. So let’s get to it.
Mike Gerholdt:
So kicking off, we had a blog post that I thought was super amazing. LeeAnne put this out on March 11th and it was Tips and Tricks for Telecommuting Success, which is very relevant and of all the people on our team, I think LeeAnne’s been telecommuting the most.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. Because she’s been telecommuting even longer than you I believe. Right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me. I mean LeeAnne’s the forefront of figuring things out right away so.
Gillian Bruce:
Well, and she knows all of the tools and all of the tricks. I mean she is the demo master so she totally knows how to master technology side of it and has come up with some real strategies for success, which I learned a little something because telecommuting is not entirely new to me, but telecommuting full-time is new to me. And some of the things I thought were really helpful about her post was setting up a specific workspace that’s dedicated to working from home. Because with our laptops, we can pop up wherever we want to go and that doesn’t necessarily mean A, it’s the most comfortable position for a long period of time or B, that it’s easy to kind of separate, oh this is lunchtime versus this is actually work time.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. Yep. I would agree. I will see your setup a workspace and add the create a new routine. I think that’s, for me, when I transitioned, which I transitioned to working from home about seven years ago. The biggest thing I struggled with was my getting a new routine. I think it’s one thing to get up and you kind of have your, I’m going make coffee and walk the dog and get ready for work and I know if I leave the house at this time, I have this kind of drive time. I suddenly didn’t have a drive time. And so I shifted everything that I did and I actually set up a negative routine where I wasn’t kind of fully engaging with how I got up and got my brain ready to go to work. And so those extra few minutes, finding that throughout the day and then having that routine, especially for me, every day getting up and going in, that’s so key, so key. Because as you said Gillian, it’s super easy if you’re outside your workspace to just, I’ll just do some work real quick.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah, those boundaries are very important, especially when you don’t have a physical boundary necessarily.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. And there’s a video in the blog post, don’t forget that there’s a video in the blog posts, which is super cool. So watch the video.
Gillian Bruce:
LeeAnne makes great videos.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right, she does.
Gillian Bruce:
So another piece of really interesting content that came out over the last month in the blog was by Amber Boaz. It was a blog post on How I Solve This: List Views for Object Ownership. And this was a really cool kind of work around post about how you can customize the idea of my list view when you are looking at custom objects that you’re not necessarily the owner of, which was pretty interesting I thought.
Mike Gerholdt:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I mean kudos to Amber. She’s always kind of out-thinking us. And having read through this, I did something similar and I think it’s worth, if you’re an admin, really looking into global variables within your organization. So I did not figure this out. I will give credit to a former colleague, Mark Slayton, who actually figured it out for me. But I love the way that Amber shows this and it helps bring that little bit of ease to your users when they’re trying to do things that are expected.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. And the best thing I love about Amber is she broke it down and made it sound really simple. And clearly she had to do a lot of thinking to get to this point, but it’s written in a way that you can replicate this within your own org pretty easily, which is really nice.
Mike Gerholdt:
And I can’t recall the last time I seen a Schema Builder as a screenshot in one of our blog posts. So, ah, yay, first Schema Builder screenshot in a blog post.
Gillian Bruce:
Schema Builder makes everything look so much prettier and easier. It’s one of the things I remember when I was first learning about Salesforce, part of like my initial admin class was Schema Builder. They showed it up there and I was like, oh, now I understand how these relationships work. So I’m always a fan of Schema Builder.
Mike Gerholdt:
100% yeah. If you do one thing for yourself today, go log into your org and look at Schema Builder and your light bulb will come on. Even if you’re doing a Trailhead module, go in and look at Schema Builder just for the dev orgs that are set up. It’s so, so informative.
Gillian Bruce:
For visual learners and visual people, yeah, it’s totally key. In fact, it’s one of those cool tools that you can also use to like, “Hey everybody, look at how our org is. Look how all these things work,” and people will be like, “Whoa. That’s the complexity? That’s amazing.” More respect to you admin.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. Oh, and that’s related to that. I understand now.
Gillian Bruce:
Exactly. Exactly. Well, Mike, you also did a really cool podcast episode this month with a Salesforce chemist.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yes. So I’d be curious. I hope people enjoyed this episode. I had a ton of fun talking with Jerrel Ramos. He was introduced through the Sacramento user group and I’ve not talked to anybody A, that has a chemistry degree, at least that I know of and it was a really fascinating episode to get a take on that I’m brand new into Salesforce, but really digging in and the ability for Jerrel to relate his world of chemistry and Salesforce, I was just blown away. And Gillian, I know in our doc the idea of ingredients, right? I loved his discussion of how he looks at everything chemistry world as ingredients and what he’s trying to make. And he did the same for Salesforce. I have all of these ingredients that make up the data of the profile that I’m trying to track and how do I put this stuff together? And he even took it kind of meta and one step further of I have all these ingredients of Trailhead and the community and I’m combining this to build his knowledge base. I just love that concept of ingredients.
Gillian Bruce:
Well, yeah, I mean it’s like the scientific approach to Salesforce and I think I’ve met several, more than several, probably quite a few people who are now in the Salesforce ecosystem, whether admins or developers or even architects that actually came from a formally trained science background.
Gillian Bruce:
So whether that’s biology, chemistry, all sorts of different, really amazing, incredible scientific traditional trainings and then kind of made their way into the Salesforce ecosystem. And bringing that in mindset is a really, really relevant way to think about how you customize and set up Salesforce, how you think about all the ingredients, all the parts, how do you combine them to create different outcomes. I think it’s a really interesting strategy if you kind of think about it that way. I liked that perspective.
Mike Gerholdt:
And I couldn’t help but think of when I was talking through that podcast of my 10th grade biology teacher and the first time she showed us how to make caramel or caramel, I don’t know, tomato, tomato.
Gillian Bruce:
You got to learn how to make caramel in your science biology class? That’s awesome.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, we learned different things here in the Midwest. Caramel is important. It just happened to come back to the ingredient thing. It’s just like, yeah, that kind of a some point, somebody had to think this stuff up. Right?
Gillian Bruce:
Totally. Oh man, I love science. I was a big science nerd and I remember moments like that. We never made caramel, but I do remember dissecting a frog, which was pretty exciting.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. So onto better things. Before we leave the podcast, did you listen to Jerrel’s Virtual Ocean Podcast? Because I’m a lot intrigued by vaporwave music. We include the link in the show notes so definitely give it a listen because it’s interesting and it’s fun and I love that he introduced me to something I quite honestly probably never would have stumbled across. But you can so hear his passion in that podcast and I just think it’s cool and I just want to touch on that.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah, I had no… I had never heard that term before. I had no idea that existed. And so listening to that podcast you did with Jerrel, I was like, “Whoa, I had no idea this was a genre. This was a thing.” I definitely played around a little bit and it’s been really fun. It’s really interesting.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. It’s good music to listen to in the background.
Gillian Bruce:
Totally. Especially now that we’re all telecommuting. You know what? It’s really good Trailhead music.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh yeah.
Gillian Bruce:
It’s a great Trailhead soundtrack.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s what we need is music to do Trails by.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. I mean I definitely, given kind of the recent events, I needed to kind of just turn my brain out of what was happening in the world and focus on something. And so I just powered through a few hours of Trailhead and I didn’t listen to the podcast until after that. But that would’ve been the perfect music to put on to kind of compliment my, let’s focus and let’s build some flows, which by the way, I did for the first time with the new UI and it was so cool. So much easier than it was previous. And I am definitely a flow addict now, so I’m really excited about that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I get to do that Trail. All right, so Gillian, I added a topic and it’s out of selfishness because I love kind of as you go into different social apps that you can go back in time and see what happened two years ago or five years ago and so I wanted to have that be a part of our, we don’t know what we’re calling this episode, but people aren’t going to tell us. And then heretofore, it’ll be referred to it as that.
Gillian Bruce:
It’s our Timehop section.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. It’s our Timehop section. So I pulled up a few things. So going I think you have to do the Wayne’s World, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, right? Like back in time.
Gillian Bruce:
I totally did the hand movement for that by the way, the fingers.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh and if people are listening to this, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo, you have to do the hand movement. Otherwise, we don’t go back in time. The flux capacitor doesn’t work without the hand movement.
Gillian Bruce:
Totally.
Mike Gerholdt:
So 2018, which feels a long, long time ago, you were actually doing two times a week podcasts.
Gillian Bruce:
I sure was. I sure was.
Mike Gerholdt:
Just podcasting all the time.
Gillian Bruce:
I was having fun with it and it was an opportunity to play with it a little bit and get all kinds of fun content out there. And yeah, I got to talk to a lot of amazing guests and I definitely treasure that because I think it was right after you kind of handed the podcast to me and I was like, all right, I’m going to go at it and we’re just going to like get a bunch of amazing people on the pod and we did. It was a lot, but it was really fun to get two different interviews a week. And I know one of the ones that this month in 2018 was one of them that actually the favorite ones I ever recorded was the GDPR podcast. So it was getting ready for GDPR with Ian Glazer and Lindsey Finch, who are two incredibly smart, longtime Salesforce execs who I have worked with in different capacities over my long tenure at Salesforce as well.
Gillian Bruce:
But it was really fun to sit down in a room with them and talk about this very important change that was going to affect every single person in the Salesforce ecosystem. And now we look back now and we’re like, oh we got that. GDPR, no big deal. We figured that out. But at that time it was a big deal. And so it was really fun to get the expertise of Lindsey, from the legal perspective, and then Ian, from the product perspective. We had a lot of fun sitting in that room together and chatting about it.
Mike Gerholdt:
And there’s a Trailhead module for GDPR now too.
Gillian Bruce:
There sure is, yeah. And now GDPR, it’s funny thinking back then again it was a new thing, but now we’ve got different kinds of privacy regulations in many, many different jurisdictions. I know California now has our own special version of that that we’ve had to rethink how we do some of our marketing strategies and we’re all adapting as it comes. So it was a kind of the forefront of that wave of privacy regulations.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. And let’s see, so that was your interview episode because you had interview and insight.
Gillian Bruce:
That’s right, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
We’re being illiterate, right? Is that what it is? Illiteration?
Gillian Bruce:
I don’t think illiterate. I think-
Mike Gerholdt:
No, alliterate. It’s the Midwest in me.
Gillian Bruce:
I don’t know. Maybe I sound illiterate sometimes.
Mike Gerholdt:
Sure. It could be. But your insight episode was with our very own Marc Baizman on the DO ITT pod framework.
Gillian Bruce:
The DO ITTT, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah.
Gillian Bruce:
This was the process before the process builder idea of hey, before you start going and building automation, you need to do these things first to set yourself up for success. And it was the very beginnings of what ended up being a really great TED Talk, or TED Talk, TDX Talk, the Salesforce version of a TED Talk.
Mike Gerholdt:
Exactly. And DO ITTT stands for discover, optimize, inefficiencies, translate, test and train.
Gillian Bruce:
Yes. DO ITTT. Just DO ITTT.
Mike Gerholdt:
Looking at all of the topics we talked about, we were talking about the process before the process builder and yet kicked off this episode with talking about how you’d done a new flow module and how much you love flow.
Gillian Bruce:
Automation. Automation is a magical thing. It’s one of those awesome admin super powers that I think is just unparalleled in the power that it gives you as an admin.
Mike Gerholdt:
It is. I remember back in, I want to say like 2009, I heard the word automagically. I think that kind of sticks for what automation is.
Gillian Bruce:
I love that.
Mike Gerholdt:
And so interestingly enough, we kicked off the podcast of stuff that we were talking about was Tips and Tricks for Telecommuting Success. We’ll end with a blog post from two years ago that LeeAnne wrote, Five Ways to Include our Remote Meeting Attendees.
Gillian Bruce:
Well that’s thematically appropriate.
Mike Gerholdt:
Of all times, right? Evergreen content.
Gillian Bruce:
Well I think if nothing else this just affirms how much of an expert LeeAnne is in the remote working experience and all the technologies and all the strategies to help make that successful from both someone who works in the office and someone who does not work in the office.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right and the big takeaway I had from that, and I think something that we’ve definitely worked really hard at Salesforce to implement, is the idea of a remote ambassador. So if you’re doing a team meeting that somebody is paying attention to the remote experience, and just the online experience. So I think that applies, and paying attention to the chat, so you have somebody moderating that and not just everybody is everywhere posting all of the things.
Gillian Bruce:
Yeah. And I think one of the ways I think that kind of translates to kind of the ultimate remote experience that we’re all experiencing now is it’s not just for meetings, idea of being a remote ambassador, right? You can actually bring that to… I mean, hey, for the last week, our team every morning in our Google chat room is like, “Hey, good morning, here’s a funny dog video.” It’s a good way to kind of keep connected with each other, thinking constantly of like, all right, so there’s a person who is in a room alone but still working and we’re on a team. How do we just like check in and say like, “Hey, what’s up? Happy day today.”
Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. Exactly. I like it. So the big to do, if you’re listening and you’re still listening, well A, kudos to you, but we need you to tweet, what should we call these episodes? We are committing to doing these episodes the last Thursday of every month. And so look for a new episode to come out in April and hopefully with what overwhelmingly our Twitter feed seems to want to call this. Hopefully it’s not Boaty McBoatface.
Gillian Bruce:
I mean, if that’s what they want, then that’s what they want.
Mike Gerholdt:
It wouldn’t be that bad, wouldn’t be that bad.
Gillian Bruce:
But yeah, I love it. You name this episode. We’re going to do it consistently every month and it’s meant to be kind of a fun exploration of the content of the past month and kind of putting together some puzzle pieces and talking about how all of those pieces of content and all of those themes and topics can really help you become a truly awesome admin. So give us your ideas. Let us know what you think we should call this. Whatever you come up with. I’m sure we’ll be better than what Mike and I have tried to come up with, which is why we’re asking for your help.
Mike Gerholdt:
I promise you because otherwise I’m calling it the Whatchamacallit episode.
Gillian Bruce:
I mean that’s not bad, but I think our community can do better. [crosstalk 00:20:27].
Mike Gerholdt:
I think so. So if you want to learn more about All Things Salesforce Admin, be sure to go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources. And of course as a reminder, please, if you love what you hear, be sure to pop over to iTunes, give us review. I read them, I send them to Gillian. I’ll tweet out the good ones, so look for those. You can stay up to date with us on social for All Things Admins. We are @salesforceadmins, no I on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter. I am @MikeGerholdt and of course, my host, hostess, host, other host, cohost, I don’t know.
Gillian Bruce:
Sure.
Mike Gerholdt:
You’re not co-hosting.
Gillian Bruce:
The other host.
Mike Gerholdt:
Also hosting? The other host @GillianKBruce. So with that, stay tuned for the next episode and tweet us what we should call these episodes and we’ll see you in the cloud.
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