Yesterday, July 23rd, was the sixth day of my
vacation, and so far one of my favorite days.
No, I didn’t go to the beach or anything like that. I attended the NYC Salesforce.com User Group and helped facilitate User Group Therapy sessions. You may be reading this and
looking at the title again, saying to yourself, “Didn’t she just say vacation
day?” Yes, you read correctly.
A few weeks ago, I received an email from Kendra Webb-Scott, the NYC Salesforce.com User Group Leader, stating that she was going to
be trying something new at the NYC User Group called User Group Therapy. The description of this read, “You asked, and
we listened! Our focus for the next meeting is all about YOU! One of the
biggest benefits of the User Group community is getting tips and best practices
from your peers to make the most out of your CRM. That's why we're introducing
User Group Therapy - an open forum session to allow all attendees to ask
questions, seek advice, share experiences and generally help each other out.” When I read this, I immediately knew I wanted
to attend this and offer up to help out.
I can’t think of a better way to give back to the community that has
helped me so much than to facilitate a session like this.
Kendra had this broken out into three different 45-minute
sessions, which were held downstairs from the main area where the partners were
presenting. There really weren’t
specific topics, but each session had different facilitators. The session I was facilitating with Jean Winget was first at 9 AM. That first
session had around eight attendees.
After brief introductions, we jumped right in and the questions and
comments just started flowing naturally.
The questions included making sure the right people were informed about Opportunities,
building mobile apps, data integrity, tools for data cleansing, and some
general adoption questions. My
co-facilitator, Jean, is a database/data expert and offered up some great
advice on what to do if you have dirty data coming in from an integration, and
who you may want to reach out to at your company to help you fix it. We ended the session by talking about some
great administrator tools that come out-of-the-box, such as workflow,
validation rules, visual workflow (flow), and of course, my favorite, publisher
actions!
After the first User Group Therapy session ended, it seemed
that word spread like wildfire about what was going on downstairs. As I was gathering my things to head back
upstairs, I realized how big the group had gotten in the room; it more than
doubled in size for the next two facilitators, Ohad Idan and Carlos Frias. I decided to stay because I
thought there might be even more interesting discussion, because Ohad and
Carlos both act as both admins and developers at their respective
companies. I have always enjoyed hearing
their perspective on things, so I knew this was going to be a great
session.
The second session started similarly with brief
introductions, then everyone just jumped right into it. The first question was around Documents vs. Content. Various people in the room, including myself,
were able to answer questions on Libraries, some best practices on Libraries
and some benefits of Content. Then,
someone in the room made a comment about the session in general, “I can’t say
the word workflow at my company, because I’m the only one who understands what
that word means. I love that I can come
here and talk to others who know what that means and can talk about challenges,
ask questions, and see what others are doing.”
This started to lead the discussion around the path of community, not
just community, but The Salesforce community and how great it is. Carlos pulled up the New York User Group page on
the Success Community and showed everyone how to access it. People
in the room started to share their stories of how much the community has helped
them over the years. Carlos and Ohad
started to go through the different tabs on the community. When they got to the Ideas tab, more
discussion started to happen on why you should vote on ideas. Ohad pointed out that they now put in the
release notes all of the ideas that were delivered in that release. I talked about how one of my ideas was
delivered in this release, and how many Ideas points Salesforce Product
Managers released this past release. I
also talked about the power of the community, and how if outside of these
meetings if anyone needs advice just post on the New York User Group Page. Once they got to the Answers tab, some of the
attendees started to recount Steve Mo answering
their question. There was a lot of
community love in the room.
One of the other major topics discussed was Chatter, on
successful rollout and adoptions. There was one name that must have come up
about five times during this discussion, and that name is Becky Webster. There were several of us talking about some
of her great blog posts as well as her Dreamforce presentations from last year. We plan to post them on the
New York User Group page so everyone can watch because they are so
helpful.
After the community discussion, the second session wrapped
up with questions around communication and training to users and some best
practices. There were so many great
suggestions in the room for the newbie admin.
In my opinion, this is why these sessions were so successful. You had
people from all types of companies, in various roles, helping each other be
successful.
Allister McKenzie and Vikram Kamra, who both have a wealth of Salesforce
knowledge and experience, facilitated the third session. It was actually Vikram’s first user group in
NYC, but even though he didn’t know anyone, he was completely willing to help
as many people as possible and share more than a decade worth of Salesforce
knowledge. I figured I had stayed for
the first two sessions, why not stay for all three? I’m so glad I did. The third session went through even more
detail on Chatter, including some of the benefits and how to convince your
manager to let you roll it out. There
were so many great suggestions around this.
We also talked about the different types of Sandboxes, what a Sandbox is,
and how you should use it. I talked
about how our developers use the different types of sandboxes for our
development process. I also encouraged
everyone in the room, after they make sure they are on the success community, to
go to developer.salesforce.com and sign up for a developer org. It’s free
and you can play with all sorts of stuff.
In the morning, I had set a goal for myself that I wanted to
try and help five admins at the user group.
Together, we helped around 40 admins of all levels. We received extremely positive feedback about
these sessions, and Kendra has now made this a staple for the NYC User Group! I am so happy to have been a part of this.
I will never forget when I first attended the NYC User Group
and how happy I was to get help with my formulas. If it weren’t for those people, I may not
have the career I have today. I’m hoping
that at least one person has the same feeling and maybe at the next meeting
they will help facilitate a session and pay it forward. After reading this, I’m hoping now you will
see why this was my favorite day of my vacation so far. To me, this isn’t work, this is fun.
As always, thank you for reading.
Cheryl
P.S. – if you haven’t attended your local user group,
definitely do so, you can see a list of all user groups here.