Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for November. Join us as we review the top product, community, and career content for November, and celebrate National French Toast Day.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.
The Learn MOAR Quest is still going. If you complete it before November 30, 2022, you’ll unlock a special community badge and be entered to win 1 of 5 cert vouchers—see the link and Learn MOAR page for all the details. Get up to speed with the upcoming release!
MFA auto-enablement is coming on February 1, 2023. You’ve still got a couple of months to prepare, so read this blog post and learn why it’s not as scary as you thought.
Jennifer Lee continues to crush it with the “How I Solved It” YouTube series. This month, she joined forces with CeCe Adams to tackle how admins can design a better user experience. Dynamic Forms can do a lot of the heavy lifting—a significant improvement from the days of wading through page layouts just to add a field.
Gillian hopped on the pod with LeeAnne Rimel to talk about making your “Brag Book.” Having a place to record all your wins can be incredibly helpful, not just to grow your career but also to help those around you. We also had a fascinating conversation with Kathy Baxter and Rob Katz about data and AI ethics that you shouldn’t miss.
Mike and Gillian chat about a few things French to close out this episode. November 25th is National Parfait Day. A parfait, French for “perfect,” is a frozen dessert that has been around since 1894. November 28th is National French Toast Day, so we thought we’d include a celebration recipe. Finally, in December, Gillian will be keynoting at French Touch Dreamin’.
Apple-Cinnamon French Toast
Apple Topping:
French Toast:
Make the topping by melting the butter and brown sugar in a pan, stirring frequently. Add apples and cinnamon. Stir to coat, then reduce heat and cook until apples are slightly tender, about 6 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Allow to cool. Meanwhile, whisk together milk, eggs, flour, cinnamon, and vanilla until smooth. Pour into a casserole dish. Soak bread in mix for 1 minute, turn and soak for 1 minute more. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add battered bread to pan. Add bread and cook until golden brown, 1-2 minutes. Flip over and cook that side until golden brown. To serve, place bread on platter, cover with apples and sauce and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and the November Monthly Retro for 2022. I’m your host, Mike Gerholdt, and in this episode we’re going to review some of the top product, community, and careers content for November, plus anything else we find interesting. To help me do that, I’m joined by the very familiar voice of Gillian Bruce. Hey, Gillian.
Gillian Bruce: Hi Mike. Hi Mike. Good to be back with you on the pod. I like our little monthly tradition we’ve got.
Mike Gerholdt: We check in on each other.
Gillian Bruce: It’s good.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s a fun time.
Gillian Bruce: Good. November was a fun month.
Mike Gerholdt: It was. It was hot and it was cold. It was like a Katy Perry song, depending on where you lived in the US.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. Chaos. There was 70-degree weather in New York, and I’ve been quote-unquote “freezing” here in San Francisco at 50. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Literally, today when we’re recording, the high at noon is 70. Tonight, 12 hours later at midnight, the low is going to be 31 in Iowa.
Gillian Bruce: Ouf!
Mike Gerholdt: How do you dress for that? Come on.
Gillian Bruce: You just stay inside.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s my plan, and record podcasts. The other thing you could do, depending on when you’re listening to this, if it’s before November 30th, is you could go to our Learn More campaign and unlock the community badge for a chance to win one of five cert vouchers.
Gillian Bruce: It’s so cool. It’s cool to be able to win, possibly win a cert voucher, but the community badge is pretty awesome. Those are one-time deals.
Mike Gerholdt: Like the Trick or Trailhead badge.
Gillian Bruce: Mm-hmm.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh shoot, I forgot to get mine. Well, anyway, link is in the show notes. You have until November 30th, so hop on it.
Gillian Bruce: Hop on it, and then you’ll be totally prepared to make the most out of the winter release.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Gillian Bruce: There you go. We also had a bunch of content.
Mike Gerholdt: We did. We did, a little bit of content. You know what? I’ll start us off because I helped review this post from Tammy. So, want to put out, Tammy wrote a great post for admins on Get Ready for Multi-Factor Authentication and Plan for Auto-Enablement. Auto-enablement is coming February 1st.
Gillian Bruce: Still got a couple of months there to prepare.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep, but I think, I come back to this. You should read this post. It’s not scary, and I say that, but I’ve gone through MFA at organizations. I also went through it in my personal life, like during the pandemic, one of my fondest memories was binge-watching all of Tiger King-
Gillian Bruce: Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: And setting up MFA on all my accounts. I kid you not, I spent a Saturday doing that.
Gillian Bruce: That’s amazing, Mike. I love that combination. Now, the biggest question is, did you wear any Tiger-King-appropriate apparel while you were setting up all of your MFA, and watching Tiger King?
Mike Gerholdt: No. I’ll tell you why. I was too busy getting alerts from Instagram that somebody in Russia was trying to log in to my Instagram account.
Gillian Bruce: Well, hey, who doesn’t want to be Mike Gerholdt?
Mike Gerholdt: Seriously, honestly, parody accounts. I need a verified check mark.
Gillian Bruce: Well, apparently anyone can buy one now.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yep.
Gillian Bruce: That’s great. But yeah, MFA is super-important. That’s a good reminder. I’ve done it a little bit for some of my personal stuff. I need to do it for the rest, so it’s a good reminder. But yeah, MFA, it’s coming. It’s a real thing.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Get ready, everybody.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah, this is a good thing, seriously. You know what, Gillian? You and I both did a podcast-
Gillian Bruce: [inaudible].
Mike Gerholdt: So, let’s start off with the podcast you did, because that was just most recently released.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I got our amazing teammate, LeeAnne Rimel, on the pod because we’ve been having a lot of discussions. It’s the end of the year, and it’s figuring out how to capture the work that you have done, and figuring out what work you’re going to do in the next year. We actually talked about a concept that, Mike, you introduced to both of us, the brag book. So, the idea of how do you capture your work and your feedback throughout the year in one place, so that you can really explain and demonstrate the impact and the value that you added to the organization in your role.
It’s something that I think is really important, especially for every admin. LeeAnne and I go into that, about the why, about the how, and really talk about how you can start small and accumulate that, build that muscle over time. Then, especially, I think and remember, LeeAnne had such a hard time with this in the beginning, I did not. I was like, “Yeah, look how great I am, look at all the cool stuff I’m doing.” LeeAnne was like, “No, I just want to do the good work.”
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: So, talking about that mind shift of a) it’s not all about you, it’s about the impact you have. Then b) understanding that capturing your feedback and sharing your accomplishments is not really the traditional brag. It’s not like, “Hey, look how great I am!” No, it’s look at the impact you’re having and the value that you’re adding.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: That’s what helped LeeAnne get over the hump. It’s been a shift for me too. So, it was a fun discussion.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I will say… so, teaser… we have a cool podcast coming up in December. I’m not sure when it’s going to come out. Where we talk about stress and anxiety. When I listened to this episode, it made me think of when you put this together and you accomplish something. I always kept that brag book deck open in a browser tab, because then it felt like I got to cross a finish line and cheer a little bit before I moved on. That was the thing that I always explain to LeeAnne, is, “I know you want to do the work, but like stop and celebrate what you’re getting done.”
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: I don’t think we do that enough.
Gillian Bruce: Well, it’s hard. I think everyone works in a pretty fast-paced environment, and so it’s really hard to take a pause and be like, “Wait, no, that was really cool. Like, that’s something special.” So, yeah, I think to your point, having this as a way to, “No, no, like stop and think about how cool that was, that you just did that,” is important.
Mike Gerholdt: I know. Listen to Gillian. The other episode we did, and this sounds very pedantic, but I am going to encourage people to listen to it because I enjoy talking with Kathy Baxter and Rob Katz, Data Ethics and AI for Admins. Sounds like a mouthful, but it really was eye-opening for me when we were recording the podcast, to look at just the shift of where things have come and where things are going.
I bring up one point that I really think is relevant for admins. Gillian, you remember this, you’ve been around in Salesforce world for a long time. For the longest time and early in my admin years, it was, “How can we get data out of LinkedIn?” Right? “How do we get leads?” It was like Glengarry Glen Ross. Now… and Rob points this out, this is why you should listen to this… now, that’s not a problem.
Getting data isn’t a problem. It’s the opposite right now. There is a data glut. We have so much data, and you have access to so much data that it’s, what do you want to be responsible for, and how are you making those decisions? I was on the floor just reading through the show notes as we were prepping for the call. I thought, “This is so much stuff that, as an admin with a seat at the table, you need to sit down and ask these questions.”
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. God, Kathy, I remember having Kathy on the podcast a while ago, and just my whole mindset being shifted about how to think about data and what it means. What it really means, other than what the data set actually is. Yeah, Mike, it was a great discussion. I really enjoyed listening to the pod too. Yeah, it makes you think about things a little differently. Just because you can get the data doesn’t mean you should. Right?
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Well, and what’s it mean to be responsible for that data too.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and it’s a good podcast to sit down and take notes on a rainy day.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Probably not one you want to walk the dog with.
Gillian Bruce: You can’t really multitask very well and pay attention-
Mike Gerholdt: No.
Gillian Bruce: …to what’s going on. There’s a lot of really good diving deep.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, just to be honest.
Gillian Bruce: But yeah, it was a great pod, Mike. Good job with that one.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it was good. Jen, of course, leads the way in video. She is a face and a personality for video.
Gillian Bruce: She has got it down.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Another How I Solved It with Designing User Experience, A Better User Experience. I think this is always the thing that it’s interesting for me, comes up every now and then, when new automation tools or new things come into the ecosystem. I think immediately as admins, we think, “How can we apply this to a business problem?” We forget that sometimes creating a new user is the most thing-involved task-listy job that we fail to automate.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Cece, our amazing trailblazer that Jen features, is really good at… You know what? Hey, guess what, Mike? It ties into that Salesforce Admin Skills Kit, believe it or not. It’s all about the designer’s mindset skill.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Gillian Bruce: So, really thinking about that experience, and Cece really epitomizes that. So, it’s a great video. Everyone should definitely check it out.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep, and Dynamic Forms, which is-
Gillian Bruce: Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: … something I’ve waited a long time for.
Gillian Bruce: I was going to say, Mike, do you remember the days, the before times, when we had no dynamic forms?
Mike Gerholdt: I remember the days when I used workflows-
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Record types, and page layouts, to mimic dynamic forms.
Gillian Bruce: How many page layouts did you have to create?
Mike Gerholdt: Billions. Billions. Billions. It was a full-ti… Oh my. You need to add a field? Hang on. That’s a week. Why does it take you a week? I got so many page layouts I got to add it to.
Gillian Bruce: Exactly.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, man.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Thank you, dynamic forms. Thank you. Thank you.
Mike Gerholdt: No kidding. Last month, I hope everybody enjoyed our discussion about apple cider and pumpkin spice. The tweet on that was fun.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, I think it was the most viral tweet we’ve had in a long time.
Mike Gerholdt: I know, and I was surprised how people were dialed up about pumpkin spice losing. I’m fine with it. Anyway.
Gillian Bruce: You’re going to get them all activated again, Mike.
Mike Gerholdt: I know. All riled up.
Gillian Bruce: The pumpkin spice lovers are going to come after us.
Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. Well, I won’t reemerge until after fall when pumpkin spice goes away. That’ll be my plan. Housekeeping note… and so fun discussion… we’re going to take November 24th off, so there’s no podcast that’s going to come out, because the US holiday of Thanksgiving. We’ve done episodes on Thanksgiving that have been released, but I’ll be honest, just nobody listens to them. So, we’re going to give you the week off, but we will return the following week. Which is, I think, December 1st.
I alluded to it previously. We have a lot of really cool stuff lined up for December, and it’s starting to bleed into January. One thing I wanted to do is close up our November episode with, ironically, a few things French, because I found things in Google that interest me. So, Gillian, November 25th is National Parfait Day. I did not know that parfait is French for perfect, which is a frozen dessert that’s been around since 1894. So, that’s November 25th.
November 28th is National French Toast Day, which has ‘French’ in it. I’ll include the link, because I also found an apple cinnamon French toast recipe, and because you know I like apple cider. Apple cinnamon French toast sounds amazing. Gillian, you’re also keynoting that French Touch Dreamin. I feel like I just ended the pod with a Seven Ways to Relate to Kevin Bacon thing on [inaudible] parfait, French toast, and French Touch Dreamin, and loop all together.
Gillian Bruce: I love a parfait day that leads into French Touch Dreamin. I think that was parfait, sir.
Mike Gerholdt: It was parfait, yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. No, I’m really looking forward to it. I got invited to keynote at French Touch Dreamin, which is happening on December 1st in Paris. It’s going to be really amazing to connect with the EMEA community. I haven’t had a chance to do that since before the pandemic, honestly. So, it’s going to be great to meet some new faces and reconnect with folks I haven’t seen in so long. Hey, if you are inclined to go to Paris from December 1st, please come join us.
Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible].
Gillian Bruce: The registration is still open, yeah. Yeah, it should be really good times, and it’s going to be a really fun keynote. It’s going to be a little different than stuff that I’ve done in the past. So, just teaser, just teaser hanging out there. Come play with us in Paris.
Mike Gerholdt: I expect to find out things that you ate while you’re there, because I promise they probably don’t have French toast. They have something better.
Gillian Bruce: No, but they probably have parfaits. I don’t know.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, parfaits are good. I like parfaits, to be honest.
Gillian Bruce: I definitely plan on consuming quite a bit of crepes.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, crepes are really good. Oh, man.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, crepes. Definitely a fair amount of wine, because that’s just, you have to.
Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible] French. It’s in France.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Good pastry.
Mike Gerholdt: Savory crepe or sweet crepe?
Gillian Bruce: I am a sweet crepe person. I like maybe a little Nutella or just a little powdered sugar. Nothing too complicated.
Mike Gerholdt: All right.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. How about you?
Mike Gerholdt: Same. Strawberries.
Gillian Bruce: Oh yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Strawberries and powdered sugar. That’s it.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Go all day. I also like funnel cakes that way. Oh!
Gillian Bruce: I was going to say, it sounds very funnel-cake-like. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: It does. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Gillian Bruce: I love Mike on our retro pods. We always talk about food. It’s great.
Mike Gerholdt: Imagine that, but also French Touch Dreamin and French toast.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. Oui, oui. Oui, oui.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yep.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, if anybody has fun French sayings that I need to know, please tell me, because I clearly do not speak French.
Mike Gerholdt: Or not know, Gillian, because I will say I’m really good at figuring out things you shouldn’t say in Europe too.
Gillian Bruce: Right. Especially when you’re up in front of a packed room-
Mike Gerholdt: A whole bunch of people.
Gillian Bruce: Delivering a presentation.
Mike Gerholdt: You learn.
Gillian Bruce: And you say something you think is going to play and be really funny, and people look at you like, “What did you just say?”
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yep. The London admin user group knows that.
Gillian Bruce: Mm-hmm.
Mike Gerholdt: Anyway. Well, I’ll include the apple cinnamon French toast recipe in the show notes, because it sounds amazing. Just flip over and cook that side until golden brown. To serve, place on a platter with apples and sauce. Mmm!
Gillian Bruce: I’m going to have to make that over the holidays. Just, it looks too good.
Mike Gerholdt: The main ingredients are sugar, butter, cinnamon, vanilla.
Gillian Bruce: Come on!
Mike Gerholdt: And apples. All of those taste good on apples, so we’re good there.
Gillian Bruce: See, and this is a theme from the last pod, or was that two pods ago, when we talked about apples? Right?
Mike Gerholdt: We did, last one. I tried to stitch together… It’s for you that I do this. The time spent creating a through-line, it’s all consuming. [inaudible].
Gillian Bruce: I appreciate it, Mike.
Mike Gerholdt: And sometimes completely accidental, to be clear. If you want to learn about all things admin that we talked about in this episode, including the links to the blog, and the podcast, and the video, we will include those links in the show notes, and you can find them on admin.salesforce.com. You can also stay up to date with us on all things social for admins, including pumpkin spice or apple cider.
We’ll have to figure out, maybe we do a parfait and French toast tweet. You can follow us on Twitter @SalesforceAdmns, no ‘i’. Of course, Gillian is on Twitter. She’s at @gilliankbruce. So, be sure to tweet at her, not only when she’s in France, but other times too. Then, of course, I am at @MikeGerholdt. With that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.
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