Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for January. Join us as we review the top product, community, and career content for January, and talk about New Year’s resolutions.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.
The march toward Spring ‘23 continues, and we’ve got your back with content covering everything Generally Available, Beta, and Pilot. Mike wants you to pay close attention, especially, to some enhancements for reports and dashboards. And a reminder that MFA auto-enablement is coming with this release!
Staying on the theme of Spring ‘23, we wanted to point you toward Release Readiness Live. There are so many notes with any new release, but we highlight the important information that admins need to know, all in one place.
Check out Mike’s episode with Janet Elliott from this month. We talked about her first public speaking gig, which happened at a little event you might have heard of called Dreamforce. Since then, she’s given many talks at many events, so we brought her on to find out how you too can get started as a Salesforce speaker.
I also interviewed Kat Aquino, who gave us a fascinating look into what it’s like building a Salesforce org from the ground up to support a multinational event—the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in LA.
Mike and Gillian reflect on their less-than-successful past New Year’s Resolutions.
Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and the January Monthly Retro for a brand-new year of 2023. I’m your host, Mike Gerholdt, and of course, joining me for this episode to talk about product, community, and career is Gillian Bruce. Hey, Gillian.
Gillian Bruce: Hi, Mike. Happy 2023.
Mike Gerholdt: I know. We have another new digit.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Yeah. It’s going to be probably another three, four months before I actually write it correctly when I’m signing things. But…
Mike Gerholdt: Where you going to… Oh, ah, ooh, I was hoping you were going to say a check, because remember, you used to write checks.
Gillian Bruce: I still write a check every month. Day care does not do digital payments yet. That’s the one check I write every month. It’s a hefty one, let me tell you.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s not the quantity, but yeah, I remember scratching it out. “Oh, wrote the wrong year. Darn it.” Anyway, nobody has to worry about that. Now all our clocks change automatically too.
Gillian Bruce: That’s right. Yeah. You don’t have to do anything. It’s just when you physically write with a pen or a pencil [inaudible 00:01:11].
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, who does that?
Gillian Bruce: What?
Mike Gerholdt: Silliness. Unless you’re graffitiing a mailbox or something, which you shouldn’t do. Be good, people. Yep. There’s where the retro is. We had some really fun content in January, as we always do, and we’ll start off there. Of course, it wouldn’t be January if you weren’t putting the tinsel, lights, sugar cookies away, and also reading release notes.
Gillian Bruce: Ah, yes. Here comes Spring ’23.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire as you open up the release notes, but in your iPad, I suppose, digitally, back to the digital thing.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I hope no one’s printing those out anymore. That’s obnoxious.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, my goodness. That could be your firewood for the whole year.
Gillian Bruce: There you go. Yeah. Well, Jen wrote a great post, right, to get us all ready for the Spring ’23 release.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So, of course, at the beginning of the post, we call out what’s Pilot, Beta, and GA. I cannot be reminded of that enough, but it’s good to know as we’re walking through. There’s some report and dashboard enhancements. We probably don’t talk about that enough. I’ll confess. Confession time. I was horrible at reporting as an admin. I always looked at those enhancements like, “Oh, that’s neat. I should really try that” and then never did. But I’m looking at some of these as like, “Wow, I really would enjoy digging into reporting again.”
Gillian Bruce: It’s funny you say that, Mike, because I actually think you taught me more about reporting than anybody else, when I first got my admin chops. So-
Mike Gerholdt: I taught you the value of reporting, not the report itself.
Gillian Bruce: I don’t know. When we were doing Dreamforce prep, you showed me some things in our-
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, true. That’s true.
Gillian Bruce: … in our board that we used. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I get it now.” But-
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, but next level is the dashboard stuff. Because I’m going through the post now, and I always feel like I would create a report and then LeeAnne would be like, “Yeah, cool. Look, I turned it into this dashboard, and then it’s got all these widgets, and then it automatically updates, and it’s contextual for the user.” I’d be like, “Okay. I just got this cheeseburger over here.”
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And then I, in the last month, have learned a lot more about CRM analytics. And wow, let me tell you, you want to take your reporting the next level, it’s a whole nother world. But it’s not that different. It’s really interesting. But hey, listeners, stay tuned. We’ve got some CRMA content coming your way in the next few months.
Mike Gerholdt: Woo-hoo.
Gillian Bruce: Woo-hoo.
Mike Gerholdt: Really cool things that Jen points out. Features for admins, of course. The MFA auto-enablement. And click on the link there because it’s coming in Spring ’23. I like MFA. I don’t know if I’ve told the story, but when I first started at Salesforce, one of our podcast guests that we actually had on early in January, Lynn Simons, pulled me aside and talked to me about the importance of security for admins, which I’m on board with, but also showed me multifactor authentication and LastPass. And I’ve been banging that drum. So I like MFA. I also have MFA on literally everything. I think that was my pandemic hobby, was watch some of Tiger King and MFA all my log-ins.
Gillian Bruce: Ah, one of the fond memories of the early days of pandemic.
Mike Gerholdt: Right? So few.
Gillian Bruce: Yes, I remember Tiger King fondly. It gave me a reason to wear these obnoxious tiger leggings that I have around the house and just be absurd. It was great.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, my.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay.
Gillian Bruce: Rawr.
Mike Gerholdt: DevOps Center. Big fan of DevOps Center. And we saw DevOps Center live at Release Readiness Live at Dreamforce. So Karen was there.
Gillian Bruce: Yep, sure did. Yeah, she and George, they did a great update about what DevOps Center is and what it looks like, how you can get your hands on it. It’s going to be very, very cool.
Mike Gerholdt: And of course, one of our favorite, beloved product managers, Cheryl Feldman, permission enhancements is coming. So check that out. And [inaudible 00:05:40].
Gillian Bruce: Yep. All kinds are good admin tools there. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Seriously, I don’t think I cared so much about permission sets and permission set groups until Cheryl joined the company and pointed that stuff out to me.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. One thing that I will say. So, Cheryl is a huge advocate for admins because she was one for a long time. Another fun thing you can get by reading these posts that Jen puts together is there are some fun Easter eggs in there. I just found one as I was reading through, so-
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, did you? Well, you can’t say it.
Gillian Bruce: Sure did. Let’s just say look for some Easter eggs. There’s some pretty funny things in there.
Mike Gerholdt: Nice. And of course, I think we should point out that this podcast is coming out after Release Readiness Live.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. But there are-
Mike Gerholdt: But you should catch up.
Gillian Bruce: Absolutely. So, we did Release Readiness Live in person and live via broadcast at Dreamforce. Since we don’t have a Dreamforce right now, we’re going back to the kind of standard broadcast version of Release Readiness Live, which means you’re going to get full one for admin. Course, I think developers are also having one as well as kind of the individual, some of the individual clouds. And you’ll see some of our team’s familiar faces on many of those broadcasts. So definitely tune into the admin one, and then tune into some of the other ones too.
Mike Gerholdt: So much to catch up on in Release Readiness. Shifting gears a little bit, I did a fun podcast with Janet Elliott, based on a Dreamforce session she did. That was released earlier this month. The reason I picked it, so I was scrolling through some of the Dreamforce content, and I realize that not all of our listeners can make it to Dreamforce and wanted to have some of the speakers on that presented some content that I thought would translate really well into a podcast, that you don’t necessarily need a slide or a how-to in terms of finding it. And Janet presented a session called Find Your Voice: Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Speaker. And I really thought she had a lot to talk about.
I love, she tells briefly her journey of going from, “Hey, I’m doing stuff, and I think I should speak about it, and I should go to user groups, and I should speak about it, and I should go to Dreamforce and speak about it.” But also really getting kind of personal and understanding you don’t have to present the way everyone else presents. So I love that Janet talked about finding her voice and her perspective, which may not be your voice and your perspective, and then getting up on stage and being okay with that and understanding that not everybody has to present in a certain way, but you need to be up on stage for the very same reason that you saw someone else up on stage, and that it’s very empowering to see somebody like you on stage. So it was a fun podcast to record. And course, Janet had some resources in her deck that I also included in the show notes. So, Gillian, I know you and I have done a ton of presenting, but it really, really brought kind of a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about home.
Gillian Bruce: That’s good. I think, especially at Salesforce events, right, you see one or two styles of presenting, and you think, “It must be done this way.” And so I think broadening the scope a little bit to say, “Hey, no. There’s a lot of different styles you can do. Tap into your own, and there’s a space for it.” So I think that’s really cool. It’s something I’ve struggled with over the years, thinking I need to be a certain way and being like, “No. This is me. I want to do it my way.” So it’s a-
Mike Gerholdt: Exactly.
Gillian Bruce: That’s a good point. Mike, I also released a really fun podcast earlier this month to kick off the year.
Mike Gerholdt: You did. You did.
Gillian Bruce: I just want to brag about it for a minute.
Mike Gerholdt: You should.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It was with Kat Aquino, who is the Salesforce administrator for the LA28 games, the Olympic and Paralympic games. So, I’ve gotten to know her quite a bit over the last few months. I actually met her at Dreamforce and since then have been developing a relationship with her. It’s so freaking crazy how they run the Olympics and the Paralympic Games, because every single games, no matter what city you’re in, starts as a start-up. They start with nothing.
And so she is building, from the ground up, an entire Salesforce instance to manage all different aspects of how the games are run, so everything from venue management to athlete management, to working with different media and sponsors. It’s really interesting to see how she’s starting to set up the architecture for all of that, because in the next few years that organization’s going to grow immensely, exponentially, to host one of the biggest world events that takes place. It was really fun to get in the deets a little bit with her about how she’s thinking about setting that up, how she’s building it, what are the specific custom objects and different processes she’s rolling out, and what she’s learned along the way. And yeah, we are going to keep in contact with Kat over the years and really kind of follow her journey as she continues to build out this massive Salesforce instance to help support the LA28 games. It’s going to be really fun.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and event planning is no small feat, because every event, there’s nuances and differences too, not just outside of the Olympics. Yeah, it’s just insane.
Gillian Bruce: There’s different scales of events. Yes. One of the cool things they’re doing for the LA28 games is they’re using existing buildings and venues, which isn’t typical, right, especially the last few Olympics, if you look at it. Entire cities are built to host the Olympics. Right? And this is very different because LA, they don’t have the free space to do that. So they’re-
Mike Gerholdt: There’s no space in LA. I mean-
Gillian Bruce: No, so they’re maximizing and using the existing venues and spaces, and customizing them. And she’s helping figure out a system to manage and track all of that-
Mike Gerholdt: Wow.
Gillian Bruce: … which is just so cool.
Mike Gerholdt: Is the LA games winter? No, summer.
Gillian Bruce: Summer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re not going to do a winter. There’s no snow in LA-
Mike Gerholdt: I know.
Gillian Bruce: … unless it’s in a movie set.
Mike Gerholdt: Literally, as the words were coming out-
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: … I was like, “This is a stupid question.”
Gillian Bruce: It’s okay, [inaudible 00:11:50]. There’s no such thing as a stupid question. It’s all right.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, are we having the Winter Games, the Winter Olympics in LA? Got to tell you, it’s not going to rank up there.
Gillian Bruce: I don’t know. With all this crazy weather we’re getting here on the West Coast, anything’s possible, so-
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, we got plenty of water, let me tell you.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep, yep. Well, you needed it. Needed it.
Gillian Bruce: We do. Yeah, hopefully this does actually get us out of the drought. To be seen.
Mike Gerholdt: I feel like it needs to rain on the other side of the mountains, though. Right? The side it’s raining on, the San Francisco side. Needs to make it over, past Sacramento, little bit more into the Lake Mead area. Am I right?
Gillian Bruce: Well, so, there’s not a whole lot of mountains until you get to the Sierras. Those are just some hills. So yeah. No. The whole state’s getting drenched, and basically, you hit the mountains, and then it all-
Mike Gerholdt: It stops.
Gillian Bruce: … turns into snow, and they get-
Mike Gerholdt: I know.
Gillian Bruce: … everything. And then on the east side of the Sierras, it’s just desert.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: It’s really interesting how it all works.
Mike Gerholdt: You forget, I’ve driven that.
Gillian Bruce: That’s right.
Mike Gerholdt: We went to… What was that event?
Gillian Bruce: Tahoe Dreamin’?
Mike Gerholdt: Tahoe Dreamin’, yes.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Up in the snow. And we also mentioned, so, our video shout-out for January is Release Readiness because there’s a ton that you should watch. And Release Readiness is fun. I just love watching Release Readiness, mostly because I’m not a reader.
Gillian Bruce: You’re a watcher, not a reader?
Mike Gerholdt: I am. I mean, let’s be honest, if there’s a movie version and a book version, Mike will have not read the book version.
Gillian Bruce: See, especially if there’s a movie and a book version, I always want to read the book first because then I want to imagine it, and then I want to see how [inaudible 00:13:28] somebody else imagined it.
Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible 00:13:29].
Gillian Bruce: But yes, I get you. When it comes to releases, though, I don’t read all the release notes-
Mike Gerholdt: Imagine that.
Gillian Bruce: … unless it’s my job to do a release post for the [inaudible 00:13:38].
Mike Gerholdt: Exactly.
Gillian Bruce: But watching our Admin Preview is one of the best ways to get up to speed on all the things you need to know for the release.
Mike Gerholdt: I would think so. And of course, we always end on some sort of seasonal, fun topic. January’s New Year. I’ll share. So, Gillian, you can think about any kind of silly New Year’s resolution you’ve ever made. I made a silly New Year’s resolution one year that I was going to eat healthy. And by “eating healthy,” if I made eggs, I was only going to eat egg whites. And it spawned from one of the great movies that I love, came out in 1995, Get Shorty, where Danny DeVito, who plays himself, goes to a restaurant and like, “No, no, no. I want to order something off the menu.” And he orders egg whites with scallions and a strawberry Slurpee, Frosty thing.
Gillian Bruce: That’s where it got real unhealthy, right there.
Mike Gerholdt: It did. Well, balance. And I was like, “Oh, that’s what I’m going to do, is if I’m going to make eggs, I’m going to eat egg whites.” And so that was one of the silliest New Year’s resolutions because I only made it like three days. I didn’t even make it through a carton of eggs. It was like, “The yolks add something.”
Gillian Bruce: They sure do. And they’re good-
Mike Gerholdt: So-
Gillian Bruce: .. for you. They’re healthy for you.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, now. Back then, we didn’t know.
Gillian Bruce: Right, right, right. Well, yeah, I remember very vividly, one of the resolutions I have made a few years, maybe not sequentially, but every couple years, is stopping to play a stupid game on my phone that I used to be addicted to, Bejeweled.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Or Candy Crush. Excuse me.
Mike Gerholdt: Candy Crush.
Gillian Bruce: It’s basically the same thing. Candy Crush. I was so addicted to Candy Crush that I think there’s been at least three years of my life where I resolved to delete it off my phone and not go back.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh.
Gillian Bruce: And for the most part, I’ve been pretty successful, although now I just have another game that I play that’s very similar, and I don’t have a resolution to get rid of it, because it makes me happy. So [inaudible 00:15:51].
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like one of those games has an awfully lot of commercials on TV.
Gillian Bruce: It’s Candy Crush. Candy Crush.
Mike Gerholdt: Is it?
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: There’s always people walking down the street, and then they boop their dog on the nose, and he turns into a gummy bear, and it explodes with soda everywhere.
Gillian Bruce: It sounds about right. Yeah. So now I just replace it with another game called Project Makeover, which is basically the same thing. But [inaudible 00:16:15].
Mike Gerholdt: That also sounds like a Bravo show. That’s the next game show. “Is it a game, or is it a Bravo show?”
Gillian Bruce: Well, I do get to rehab apartments and people’s lives after I complete the level and earn the coins. It’s very complex. It’s not at all.
Mike Gerholdt: Interesting.
Gillian Bruce: Really embarrassed that I actually even admit to this, but-
Mike Gerholdt: It’s okay.
Gillian Bruce: Any Project Makeover fans, hit me up.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Gillian Bruce: I feel ya.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. All right. Well, we’re wrapping up this Retro. This’ll actually be the last Admin Retro for this year. We’re going to stop doing these Retro episodes and just deliver quality content 75% of the weeks of the year. So, every Thursday but the last Thursday will be a new Salesforce Admins Podcast. That frees us up to find more amazing guests and plan more amazing content. So enjoy this final Retro for 2023.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And thank you for listening. And if you’ve got more ideas for great people or stories or topics you want us to talk about on the podcast, please feel free to send them to us. We are always looking for new ideas.
Mike Gerholdt: And if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin or anything that we talked about in this episode except for egg whites, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. Course, you can stay up-to-date with us on social for all things admins. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I, on Twitter. I’m on Twitter, @MikeGerholdt, and Gillian is @gilliankbruce. So, with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.
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