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Salesforce, the core database/CRUD bit of it if you ignore all the stuff they've purchased and tacked-on in the last few years, is essentially 'Access in the cl

Salesforce, the core database/CRUD bit of it if you ignore all the stuff they've purchased and tacked-on in the last few years, is essentially 'Access in the cloud', in terms of the sorts of things you can do and the ease with which you can do it, and how far you can stretch it before it starts to get cumbersome. And yes, they are making a killing. edit: And if that sounds easy, imagine how you would go about upgrading and patching and extending your access-like cloud platform twice a year without any significant breakage of any of your customers varied and extensive customisations, and without any significant downtime, and keep that up for 20 years. Thats the thing that Salesforce are good at, and not many people appreciate how difficult it is.

wil421 7y ago
ServiceNow is a lot easier for admins/developers to use for workflow automation. In my opinion it’s a little easier than Salesforce but it could become bloated like Salesforce if it want already. Quickbase is another one I worked with but I was migrating workflows off of it. Quickbase was good for non IT people but not much better than Access or Excel.
- linza 7y ago
  I was curious about ServiceNow and googled it and was excited as they offer demos. But they require registration and a lot of information about myself, so i stopped. Is it not meant for small businesses perhaps?
  - wil421 7y ago
    Try the developer site, link below. You’ll need to register but it doesn’t look too invasive. It is expensive for small businesses. The main part is an ITSM suite but I’ve built workflows for call centers and account managers. https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer
  - akdor1154 7y ago
    As a developer who is forced to use a service now interface for interacting with any other part of my organisation it's fucking awful in terms of user interface and friction. Unsure if that is because of our workplace setup or if it's intrinsic to the platform.
    - wil421 7y ago
      SerivceNow’s partners are godawful at implementation. Thanks to them I have decent job security unraveling the dog shit they left.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      At least at my org it's awful because dev teams wrote / spec'd their own UX for "their forms." Which, as you might imagine, resulted in a huge number of multiple choice, similarly-named properties, with all options also being inscrutablely named. Long story short: programmers are terrible at UX.
- mynegation 7y ago
  A lot depends on what is actually implemented on top of these systems. I absolutely loathe servicenow because of multi page multilevel forms with horrible, ugly, no good UX I have to deal with.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Yea not the worst UX I’ve seen but far from the best. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and most companies do. They have a new agent workspace to help improve usability. I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it’s hard to find stuff.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    The people who implement ServiceNow are usually, to put it mildly, idiots. It's usually combined with a religious conversion to some spin of ITIL, which is almost always by default implemented to facilitate a lowest common denominator operational outsourcing engagement. The nasty forms are always a result of internal politics and bad governance. One client that I worked with had 8 different ways to represent a physical location. Each operational director in the organization had a unique system, and nobody mapped them. If you put a real development team on the platform and the leadership gets it, it's an amazing tool.
flukus 7y ago
I'm not sure if a cloud version could ever replace access. Access is already paid for, works with on premise data, is easily deployed (no browser version madness), is ubiquitous, is easy to recover from bus factors (search the victims computer for .mdbs) and is easy to control access too. Salesforce seems like a particularly bad solution, you end up with a small army of high priced, low skilled salesforce contractors and a heap of vendor lock in.
- codeulike 7y ago
  Yes you are right, one minor point though, when people build things in Salesforce the 'source code' is all there and visible (apart from installed third-party packages) and so 'bus factors' are about as easy to recover from as with Access - and there are plenty of Salesforce contractors around. I've seen some organisations kick big consultancy firms off of their salesforce system and then just continue building it themselves.
deaddodo 7y ago
While I agree fundamentally with your premise, I would have to point out that MS Access was always software-as-a-service for developers. Ultimately, while it was accessible, the idea was to give powerful tools to developers to refine an interface/toolset for users. SalesForce, on the other hand, seems to be more a platform-as-a-service targeted at the user with aspects such as SOQL instead feeling like a bolt-on to give developers access to the data. So while they fill the same business case, they approach it from a completely opposite perspective. (Source: software engineer that had to work with SalesForce and other CRM tools extensively while working with data engineers; and that has worked with pre-dotNet ASP + MS Access)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Bombthecat 7y ago
I'm more on the side of: Salesforce is excel online :)

wil421 7y ago

ServiceNow is a lot easier for admins/developers to use for workflow automation. In my opinion it’s a little easier than Salesforce but it could become bloated like Salesforce if it want already. Quickbase is another one I worked with but I was migrating workflows off of it. Quickbase was good for non IT people but not much better than Access or Excel.

linza 7y ago
I was curious about ServiceNow and googled it and was excited as they offer demos. But they require registration and a lot of information about myself, so i stopped. Is it not meant for small businesses perhaps?
- wil421 7y ago
  Try the developer site, link below. You’ll need to register but it doesn’t look too invasive. It is expensive for small businesses. The main part is an ITSM suite but I’ve built workflows for call centers and account managers. https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer
- akdor1154 7y ago
  As a developer who is forced to use a service now interface for interacting with any other part of my organisation it's fucking awful in terms of user interface and friction. Unsure if that is because of our workplace setup or if it's intrinsic to the platform.
  - wil421 7y ago
    SerivceNow’s partners are godawful at implementation. Thanks to them I have decent job security unraveling the dog shit they left.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    At least at my org it's awful because dev teams wrote / spec'd their own UX for "their forms." Which, as you might imagine, resulted in a huge number of multiple choice, similarly-named properties, with all options also being inscrutablely named. Long story short: programmers are terrible at UX.
mynegation 7y ago
A lot depends on what is actually implemented on top of these systems. I absolutely loathe servicenow because of multi page multilevel forms with horrible, ugly, no good UX I have to deal with.
- wil421 7y ago
  Yea not the worst UX I’ve seen but far from the best. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and most companies do. They have a new agent workspace to help improve usability. I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it’s hard to find stuff.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  The people who implement ServiceNow are usually, to put it mildly, idiots. It's usually combined with a religious conversion to some spin of ITIL, which is almost always by default implemented to facilitate a lowest common denominator operational outsourcing engagement. The nasty forms are always a result of internal politics and bad governance. One client that I worked with had 8 different ways to represent a physical location. Each operational director in the organization had a unique system, and nobody mapped them. If you put a real development team on the platform and the leadership gets it, it's an amazing tool.

flukus 7y ago

I'm not sure if a cloud version could ever replace access. Access is already paid for, works with on premise data, is easily deployed (no browser version madness), is ubiquitous, is easy to recover from bus factors (search the victims computer for .mdbs) and is easy to control access too. Salesforce seems like a particularly bad solution, you end up with a small army of high priced, low skilled salesforce contractors and a heap of vendor lock in.

codeulike 7y ago
Yes you are right, one minor point though, when people build things in Salesforce the 'source code' is all there and visible (apart from installed third-party packages) and so 'bus factors' are about as easy to recover from as with Access - and there are plenty of Salesforce contractors around. I've seen some organisations kick big consultancy firms off of their salesforce system and then just continue building it themselves.

deaddodo 7y ago

While I agree fundamentally with your premise, I would have to point out that MS Access was always software-as-a-service for developers. Ultimately, while it was accessible, the idea was to give powerful tools to developers to refine an interface/toolset for users. SalesForce, on the other hand, seems to be more a platform-as-a-service targeted at the user with aspects such as SOQL instead feeling like a bolt-on to give developers access to the data. So while they fill the same business case, they approach it from a completely opposite perspective. (Source: software engineer that had to work with SalesForce and other CRM tools extensively while working with data engineers; and that has worked with pre-dotNet ASP + MS Access)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Bombthecat 7y ago

I'm more on the side of: Salesforce is excel online :)