Tag Archives: Dreamforce

Where to find me at Dreamforce

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I’m sitting here on Tuesday morning, reflecting on the New Year and all that has gone on as 5772 has ended. I find myself with something I’m not familiar with…a few minutes of free time. I’m off today, no one is home and I’ve got nothing I absolutely have to do at the moment besides pack for Dreamforce, finish a pair of socks and rest up. I’m taking a ridiculously early flight to Dreamforce tomorrow morning. Car is picking me up at 2 am to catch a 5 am flight that will get me to San Francisco in time for Marc Benioff’s opening keyonte. Sad to have missed the first day. Hopefully it will never be a problem again.

I cut my hair very short (for me). Cathartic to leave more on the floor than my head. And here I am, blogging again and experimenting with new themes. Why all the change? As most folks in my life know, my position at Blackbaud was eliminated when the company decided to “sunset” Common Ground, the product I was working on.

My last official day of employment is next Friday, September 28. I’ll need some distance both emotionally and legally before I can talk about it here. I’m so blessed to have an amazing network of friends personally and professionally who have reached out. I’ve signed some consulting contracts that will hold me for a while while I work on settling in to the next opportunity. I’ve signed contracts so far with KELL Partners and with Lisa & Martin Kornstein. These are projects where I’ll be using my knowledge and love of Force.com to help organizations make the world a better place. These are projects where I know the people behind them are are as passionate about serving communities as I am, and they’re not in this to return a profit to disinterested investors.

This week, it’s all about Dreamforce! No time to be sad and mournful when there’s 3 days of crazy with 85,000 friends to look forward to!

I’m speaking at 2 Community-led sessions this year and last I checked, neither was completely full so not too late to add to your agenda.

Apps, Apps & More Apps: This session is being led by Rhonda Ross of Appirio. Joining us will be Mario Duff and Sarah Cooper from Rhonda’s user group. We’re going to be showing off some of our favorite apps. For my four selections, I focused on “unsung heroes.” I wanted to pick apps that I am absolutely in love with, are approachable for both nonprofits and commercial organizations and don’t necessarily have the same front-page PR that other apps have. So come join me tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1:30 pm in Moscone Center West 3009/3011 to hear me gush about Rollup Helper, Apsona (and Multi-Step Reports), Loop Document Services and CalendarAnything.

Bring Good Karma with Your Admin Skills: This is my baby. I pitched the session and got a fantastic panel joining me. Tal Frankfurt of Cloud For Good (a nonprofit-specialist consulting organization), Matt Bertuzzi of Bridge Group (who has experience volunteering his mad Force.com skills to nonprofit projects) and Carol Guttery of the Salesforce Foundation (whose job it is to help build philanthropy programs). Every year, Marc Benioff honors the nonprofits in his keynote by asking them to stand up. He then urges everyone else in the room to reach out to the nonprofits and help them. But so many don’t know how. Or they think they do and they really don’t, which is worse because you never want to push away a volunteer. How are nonprofits using Salesforce that’s different than other organizations? How do nonprofits get started (so a volunteer can help them get going)? What’s the state of nonprofit apps that might be useful to a volunteer for-profit admin? Where should they go to find out more about volunteering their tech skills? Where’s the nonprofit community? The Foundation urges folks to volunteer at Dreamforce every year doing tasks like stuffing bags, and that’s absolutely fantastic. But do these folks know where they can go to help an organization build a better process for managing their programs within their Salesforce instance? Come to our session on Thursday, September 20th at noon in Moscone Center West, 3022 and find out.

See you in San Francisco!

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It's conference week! Dreamforce and Convio Summit

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There are only 3 conferences I make a point of going to each year if I can: Convio Summit, Salesforce Dreamforce and NTEN NTC.

Wouldn’t you know that this year, Convio Summit and Dreamforce were the same week? Originally, I was only going to go to Dreamforce. Not to say that the Convio conference isn’t excellent. I just feel more connected to the Salesforce nonprofit user community. And let’s just say that Marc Benioff knows how to put on a show. At least next year, Convio Summit will be in Baltimore in October, while Dreamforce will be in December in San Francisco.

Convio invited me to present at a Common Ground session at their Summit and made it possible for me to do both conferences. I flew out to Austin, Texas on Monday afternoon. I was honored that C3 received a notable mention in the CRM/Common Ground category at Convio’s Innovator Awards on Monday night. I prefer to call it the, “what you can do with Common Ground when you have a small staff and no budget for custom development” award. :-)

I presented in a panel with Astadia’s Jerry Huskins and Convio’s Tompkins Spann on Tuesday morning. The focus of the session was the wide and wonderful world of the Force.com platform beyond Common Ground. We live-demo’ed how easy it is to install an app off the appexchange, and I showed some real-life use cases for some of the applications and integrations that C3 uses.

It was wonderful to finally meet the great folks on the Convio Common Ground team that I hadn’t already met. I’ve said it before: they’re taking this very seriously. This is no side project. I have no regrets whatsoever for making the switch. I enjoyed talking to people who approached me who were either on the fence about Common Ground or just beginning to roll it out.

I arrived in San Francisco late last night, only to find that I had been bumped from my hotel. “Despite your confirmed reservation, you were the last guest to arrive and you have been eliminated.” They put me in a cab at 11 pm to Villa Florence on Powell Street. Okay location but the room is freezing (circa 1980s wall unit air conditioner is making noise and blowing cold air but it’s set to “off” and at the warmest setting), the wifi sucks, it has no windows and I have to climb over the double bed to get to the bathroom. Welcome to San Francisco.

I hope to post more about Dreamforce later this week. I don’t know for sure what will be announced later this morning, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of “Pro” offering for Twitter powered by Salesforce, along with better integration of Twitter into the Salesforce UI. Which is good, because I find the current Salesforce/Twitter offering to be a bit ho-hum.

If you’re in town for Dreamforce and would like to say hi, drop me a note on Twitter.