6 ms·

As a salesforce user, this disturbs me, since salesforce has been a terrible experience. That said, perhaps our organization just doesn't have it configured eff

by adzm 6y ago

As a salesforce user, this disturbs me, since salesforce has been a terrible experience. That said, perhaps our organization just doesn't have it configured effectively. We use both Slack and Teams though, so if this somehow makes it easier to get the whole org on Slack then it would be worth it.

kamyarg 6y ago
No, it is not you. Their chat api expects headers that they do not include in cors allowed headers, we had to write a proxy just for this. Salesforce as a company is a terrible experience. Had many incidents because of their bad practices or lack of knowledge or incompetency.
arusahni 6y ago
A better comparison might be Heroku, which, post SF acquisition, hasn't really changed to become more SalesForce-y as far as I can see.
- sb8244 6y ago
  Yea, the only SFDC stuff I've seen is the postgres-sfdc connector. Which is fine as it's kept as an add-on and away from the core experience.
- couchand 6y ago
  That seems apt. Slack comes in with a strong brand of its own, like Heroku but moreso. The integration will probably be more of a bridge model than a consumption one.
- freehunter 6y ago
  I actually don't think Heroku has changed much at all since they were bought by Salesforce. That's partially a good thing (Salesforce isn't making them worse) but also a bad thing because Salesforce doesn't seem to be making them any better either. Pricing is the biggest thing, despite running on AWS and AWS prices dropping pretty steadily but Heroku's pricing seems to have held firm. Their offerings don't seem to have changed much over the years either, you don't hear about them in the news much, you don't hear a lot of customer stories or companies talking about using Heroku... it just seems stagnant, which in the world of cloud computing is not great. It's hard to tell if Salesforce has been a positive for Heroku for keeping it alive, or a negative for mismanaging the company, since we don't know what they would have done if they stayed independent and had to actually compete. But I'm pretty sure if they were still independent and had to compete in the market with only the features they have right now, they would likely be out of business. There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.
  - gkoberger 6y ago
    Really? I think Heroku has gotten insanely good since Salesforce acquired them. The product is stable, there's a ton of new features (like pipelines), and can't imagine starting a serious project and not using Heroku.
    - freehunter 6y ago
      Pipelines was introduced 5 years ago, which also seems to be the last time they changed their prices. Their current model is based around the classic three-tier app (basically Ruby on Rails) no matter how much web applications have changed since then. Heroku still doesn't have any data hosting options. You have to go to a third party for this. Heroku doesn't have any static site hosting options. You have to go to a third party. But the biggest problem I have with Heroku's model is how much I need to pay. I've been a Heroku customer for years and I'm still not exactly sure what a dyno is. And if I get it wrong, I can have auto-scaling... but only if I'm paying a minimum of $250 per month. Now that's not a lot to big companies, but for bootstrappers that's insane. And I only get 2.5GB of RAM for that $250/mo? And if I'm using microservices, every service costs me a minimum of $25/mo, $250/mo if I want auto-scaling on those services. Like I said, Heroku is great and I use it in production and pay them money every month, but man if it's not stuck in 2015. Luckily so is my application so I don't have too many issues except for the ridiculous cost even as EC2 is dramatically cheaper now than it used to be (does Heroku support Graviton? I don't think it does), but PaaS in general is "the old way of doing cloud" and Heroku is becoming less relevant every day.
      - crcastle 6y ago
        Regarding data hosting options https://www.heroku.com/postgres https://www.heroku.com/postgres https://www.heroku.com/redis https://www.heroku.com/redis https://www.heroku.com/kafka https://www.heroku.com/kafka
        freehunter 6y ago
        Sorry, by "data hosting" I meant S3, not a database. Generic file storage.
- eb0la 6y ago
  What do you think about Mulesoft? Lasyt time I was on SF they had lots of we are hiring ads in the BART (it was before SF bougth them).
  - rawgabbit 6y ago
    I worked with SF extensively. I agree the APIs are complex. Mule though is the worst. Mule is like Talend. It compiles everything in to Java. Mule’s Anypont studio is an Eclipse shell. Mule fools decision-makers with their Informatica wizard GUI. But you are forced into using Anypoint Studio if you want to do anything beyond beside a copy.
Touche 6y ago
Salesforce is one of those companies that I know does a bunch of stuff but I don't understand most of what it's for or how those niches combine into a gigantic company. I get the sales lead tool, but everything else goes over my head. Don't understand how a sales lead tool became a "platform" either. Reminds me of SAP in this way.
- sb8244 6y ago
  Salesforce is not a sales lead tool, it's a way to codify your sales and marketing processes into a SaaS product. To me, it becomes obvious that it's a platform then, because users need integrations to properly codify their business processes. SFDC probably has more integrations than any other piece of technology that I can think of. When you codify your business processes, actual code is going to be needed as well. Enter Apex and heroku. Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication. That said, SFDC does a lot of things that fairly give it a bad rap. Their developer experience is really bad, their apps are not that great, and lightning is still not adopted at many companies years after its release.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > it's a way to codify your sales and marketing processes Are there no better ways to automate sales and marketing? Once you start using Salesforce, do all of your leads get stuck in the platform, or can you export them and do your own analytics queries? How deep is their lock-in? > Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication. It feels too freeform to be automated. It's just chat with a so-so search interface.
    - sb8244 6y ago
      I don't equate codify and automate. That's sometimes a piece of it (automating state changes), but more specifically I'm thinking about all of the validations, human processes, etc that go into customer and sales management. I'd need to think about how slack can "codify communications", but I'm sure there's some people that already have answers for this. SFDC has one of the most robust APIs I've seen...you can export pretty much everything. I actually really enjoy working with the soql rest API, because it's simple, effective, and discoverable. The lock-in is instead in their integrations. It is almost guaranteed that there won't be another platform that has all of the integrations you need, so you stick with SFDC. You add more integrations over time and the lock-in deepens.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> As a salesforce user, this disturbs me, since salesforce has been a terrible experience. That said, perhaps our organization just doesn't have it configured effectively. Suppose that we said that Salesforce (or JIRA) itself is fine, except for those sites that have implemented it poorly. Would that be an example of the One True Scotsman fallacy? (I mean the question honestly. I'm not 100% I properly understand that fallacy's definition.)
- flarg 6y ago
  I've worked with five Jira based teams and it is uniformly horrible
- noarchy 6y ago
  Since you mentioned JIRA, it is basically there to support bloated Scrum teams. And one often hears No True Scotsman fallacies regarding Scrum. Salesforce has always seemed to me like something that, indeed, falls into this category of things that are never "done right". And likewise, I am sure there are Salesforce coaches, and maybe even some books that people try to sell.
lobotryas 6y ago
Why has it been terrible? Do you have a customer success contact? Is your employer giving you time to learn SF or budget to hire a consultant? If there’s something missing all you need is either time or budget to have it built.

by adzm 6y ago

kamyarg 6y ago

No, it is not you. Their chat api expects headers that they do not include in cors allowed headers, we had to write a proxy just for this. Salesforce as a company is a terrible experience. Had many incidents because of their bad practices or lack of knowledge or incompetency.

arusahni 6y ago

A better comparison might be Heroku, which, post SF acquisition, hasn't really changed to become more SalesForce-y as far as I can see.

sb8244 6y ago
Yea, the only SFDC stuff I've seen is the postgres-sfdc connector. Which is fine as it's kept as an add-on and away from the core experience.
couchand 6y ago
That seems apt. Slack comes in with a strong brand of its own, like Heroku but moreso. The integration will probably be more of a bridge model than a consumption one.
freehunter 6y ago
I actually don't think Heroku has changed much at all since they were bought by Salesforce. That's partially a good thing (Salesforce isn't making them worse) but also a bad thing because Salesforce doesn't seem to be making them any better either. Pricing is the biggest thing, despite running on AWS and AWS prices dropping pretty steadily but Heroku's pricing seems to have held firm. Their offerings don't seem to have changed much over the years either, you don't hear about them in the news much, you don't hear a lot of customer stories or companies talking about using Heroku... it just seems stagnant, which in the world of cloud computing is not great. It's hard to tell if Salesforce has been a positive for Heroku for keeping it alive, or a negative for mismanaging the company, since we don't know what they would have done if they stayed independent and had to actually compete. But I'm pretty sure if they were still independent and had to compete in the market with only the features they have right now, they would likely be out of business. There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Really? I think Heroku has gotten insanely good since Salesforce acquired them. The product is stable, there's a ton of new features (like pipelines), and can't imagine starting a serious project and not using Heroku.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    Pipelines was introduced 5 years ago, which also seems to be the last time they changed their prices. Their current model is based around the classic three-tier app (basically Ruby on Rails) no matter how much web applications have changed since then. Heroku still doesn't have any data hosting options. You have to go to a third party for this. Heroku doesn't have any static site hosting options. You have to go to a third party. But the biggest problem I have with Heroku's model is how much I need to pay. I've been a Heroku customer for years and I'm still not exactly sure what a dyno is. And if I get it wrong, I can have auto-scaling... but only if I'm paying a minimum of $250 per month. Now that's not a lot to big companies, but for bootstrappers that's insane. And I only get 2.5GB of RAM for that $250/mo? And if I'm using microservices, every service costs me a minimum of $25/mo, $250/mo if I want auto-scaling on those services. Like I said, Heroku is great and I use it in production and pay them money every month, but man if it's not stuck in 2015. Luckily so is my application so I don't have too many issues except for the ridiculous cost even as EC2 is dramatically cheaper now than it used to be (does Heroku support Graviton? I don't think it does), but PaaS in general is "the old way of doing cloud" and Heroku is becoming less relevant every day.
    - crcastle 6y ago
      Regarding data hosting options https://www.heroku.com/postgres https://www.heroku.com/postgres https://www.heroku.com/redis https://www.heroku.com/redis https://www.heroku.com/kafka https://www.heroku.com/kafka
      - freehunter 6y ago
        Sorry, by "data hosting" I meant S3, not a database. Generic file storage.
eb0la 6y ago
What do you think about Mulesoft? Lasyt time I was on SF they had lots of we are hiring ads in the BART (it was before SF bougth them).
- rawgabbit 6y ago
  I worked with SF extensively. I agree the APIs are complex. Mule though is the worst. Mule is like Talend. It compiles everything in to Java. Mule’s Anypont studio is an Eclipse shell. Mule fools decision-makers with their Informatica wizard GUI. But you are forced into using Anypoint Studio if you want to do anything beyond beside a copy.

Touche 6y ago

Salesforce is one of those companies that I know does a bunch of stuff but I don't understand most of what it's for or how those niches combine into a gigantic company. I get the sales lead tool, but everything else goes over my head. Don't understand how a sales lead tool became a "platform" either. Reminds me of SAP in this way.

sb8244 6y ago
Salesforce is not a sales lead tool, it's a way to codify your sales and marketing processes into a SaaS product. To me, it becomes obvious that it's a platform then, because users need integrations to properly codify their business processes. SFDC probably has more integrations than any other piece of technology that I can think of. When you codify your business processes, actual code is going to be needed as well. Enter Apex and heroku. Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication. That said, SFDC does a lot of things that fairly give it a bad rap. Their developer experience is really bad, their apps are not that great, and lightning is still not adopted at many companies years after its release.
- echelon 6y ago
  > it's a way to codify your sales and marketing processes Are there no better ways to automate sales and marketing? Once you start using Salesforce, do all of your leads get stuck in the platform, or can you export them and do your own analytics queries? How deep is their lock-in? > Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication. It feels too freeform to be automated. It's just chat with a so-so search interface.
  - sb8244 6y ago
    I don't equate codify and automate. That's sometimes a piece of it (automating state changes), but more specifically I'm thinking about all of the validations, human processes, etc that go into customer and sales management. I'd need to think about how slack can "codify communications", but I'm sure there's some people that already have answers for this. SFDC has one of the most robust APIs I've seen...you can export pretty much everything. I actually really enjoy working with the soql rest API, because it's simple, effective, and discoverable. The lock-in is instead in their integrations. It is almost guaranteed that there won't be another platform that has all of the integrations you need, so you stick with SFDC. You add more integrations over time and the lock-in deepens.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

> As a salesforce user, this disturbs me, since salesforce has been a terrible experience. That said, perhaps our organization just doesn't have it configured effectively. Suppose that we said that Salesforce (or JIRA) itself is fine, except for those sites that have implemented it poorly. Would that be an example of the One True Scotsman fallacy? (I mean the question honestly. I'm not 100% I properly understand that fallacy's definition.)

flarg 6y ago
I've worked with five Jira based teams and it is uniformly horrible
noarchy 6y ago
Since you mentioned JIRA, it is basically there to support bloated Scrum teams. And one often hears No True Scotsman fallacies regarding Scrum. Salesforce has always seemed to me like something that, indeed, falls into this category of things that are never "done right". And likewise, I am sure there are Salesforce coaches, and maybe even some books that people try to sell.

lobotryas 6y ago

Why has it been terrible? Do you have a customer success contact? Is your employer giving you time to learn SF or budget to hire a consultant? If there’s something missing all you need is either time or budget to have it built.