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Back in September, as I posted that I was leaving Fight Colorectal Cancer to join Convio, I had a picture in my head of what my new job would be like. I’m happy to say that the reality is turning out to be better than I was imagining back then. I love my job. I love the people I’m working with now just as much as I did before. I don’t love sitting on a Windows PC all day, but I’m getting used to it. Outlook 2007 isn’t that bad.

First, let’s move the elephant aside. The people directly responsible for hiring me had no idea when they hired me. Everyone except for the folks at the very top found out on the same day, which was 2 weeks after I started. I have no idea what it means or how it will shake out. I can’t talk about it. I’ll delete any comment that even mentions it (reread the sentence that begins with “I can’t talk…”). From now until I’m told otherwise, it’s business as usual so moving on…

I was originally hired last year for the role/title of Senior Implementation Specialist on the Common Ground Programs team. After spending time with my Manager and flushing it all out, we agreed that the title didn’t quite fit. “Implementation” implies that I’ll only be working with Common Ground clients when they’re first getting started, and that couldn’t be further from reality.

Most clients don’t approach Common Ground the way I did at Fight Colorectal Cancer: knowing Salesforce and its ecosystem first. Most clients buy Common Ground as a stand-alone product that just happens to run on the Salesforce platform. It’s like getting this big, new house with all these empty rooms. Convio has put all its attention into the kitchen and bathrooms and added a heavily customized bedroom or two on to the garage. Folks can live quite comfortably that way. But look at all they’re missing out if they never touch the den, living room or the extra bedrooms on the 2nd floor? If they know nothing about the ground their house is built on? That’s where I come in. I look for the pain points (and opportunities) that clients are having on the Salesforce platform and help alleviate them. Not consulting, although I do handle a few support tickets and am working on some projects with clients directly, but systemically so it benefits the most clients at one time. It’s a bit of training, a bit of documentation, a bit of reworking processes, a bit of liaison and bridge-building internally and externally.

I still get to play a role in the larger Salesforce/nonprofit community. The big difference is that instead of bringing knowledge and connection back to one organization, I’m bringing it back to all organizations on Common Ground.

My title now? Senior Client Success Specialist, Common Ground. Much better.

Tagged: Common Ground, Convio, Nonprofits, Salesforce, success

Disclaimer: I am a Salesforce MVP and a soon-to-be employee of Convio, a Salesforce partner. Even though I have some insider knowledge through the Salesforce MVP program, I am not using any of that information in this post. The critical opinions and speculation I express below are entirely my own based solely on own experience.

It’s not even winter yet and we can poke around and see what’s coming in Salesforce’s next release, Spring ’12. I got my pre-release org yesterday and spent a few minutes exploring it. At this point, we’re flying a bit blind since the “Discover Spring ’12″ link in the corner leads to a “not found” page.

The newly revamped Salesforce Ideas is a good place to begin to explore what’s new. It has tagged ideas that are “Coming in the next release.” These are user-submitted and voted up ideas. Some are huge. And disappointing. Note that not all new things in Spring ’12 come from the Idea Exchange. There are some other things I’ve noticed right away which I’ll get to at the end.

Update: Thanks to @aognenoff for pointing out that the release notes are in the Help & Training section. Sure enough.

Let’s start at the top… Exception Reporting, also known as Outer Joins. Over 4000 users clicked the button to say this was something they wanted/needed. 9 other ideas merged into this one. Over 180 comments for years. I kind of like to call this the “raise your hand if you’re not here” report. Show me all the accounts that don’t have opportunities. Show me everyone who didn’t participate in an event. Sounds simple on the surface, apparently not so easy to do.

There’s a great 3rd party app, Apsona, that has exception reporting built in but the reports generated by the app can only be downloaded or viewed in the app. They can’t be added to a dashboard, for example. I know there are many other 3rd party applications that enhance reporting, some probably have a steep price tag.

Next there’s the ability to report on multiple children at the same time. This is very, very cool. Right now, you can report only in a parent -> child -> grand child line. There’s no parent -> sibling/sibling reporting. No show me everyone who has opened a case and made a donation. I have built a number of custom objects, most are the children of the account or contact. I continuously  run in the same wall when I can’t report on all objects related to a contact or its household at the same time.

How about Campaign inclusion reports? I have to be honest and feel a tad smug on this one. Convio Common Ground already has a rather nice campaign segmentation tool which does this kind of “Show me everyone who is in Campaign A but not in Campaign B” type work quite nicely. There are other tools/add-ons that have helped close this gap as well. This is a huge thing for nonprofits.

All of the above features/ideas are coming in the next release! At last! Paar-tay! Not so fast. This functionality will be included in a new package from Salesforce called the Analytics edition. An add-on. Additional cost. Per user, per month. Every user must play. Ouch. Perhaps in direct response to criticism I expressed on the internal MVP forum for the misleading “Coming in the next release” tag, the product manager for Analytics posted a blog explaining that these ideas while indeed coming, was coming at a price. I won’t speculate here as to what that price is, but I’ve heard rumors and suffice to say, it may be tough for smaller organizations to swallow even with the Foundation’s discount.

To me, this feels like instead of fixing the rusted pipes, Salesforce has developed a really cool, super-special brand of bottled water and they’re selling that. I get that the new Analytics package is awesome. It’s probably going to be the best business intelligence tool out there. But I’m not looking for really cool, super-special bottled water. I want to be able to go to the sink, turn the tap and drink. I want to be able to report on two objects that are siblings of each other. I want to be able to edit a report to add in an additional object without having to start over with a new report. Is that really best-of-class business intelligence?

There seems to be a trend at Salesforce lately to sell add-ons and modules rather than fix the #core…unless it’s Chatter. It’s worrying me. And I can’t help but wonder where it might lead…when the most popular idea, multiple contacts on an activity, is finally done will it be delivered in a “Contacts Edition” because it took so much to make it happen? I hope not.

Update 1/31/2012: Salesforce does the right thing and all this goodness will be included in Enterprise Edition for no additional charge.

There are some touches in Spring ’12 that are right there in the Enterprise Edition:

There’s an expansion of the cross-object workflow field update functionality. I’m bummed that I’m leaving FightCRC before this is out, because there are a few areas where this will be very helpful. Used to be that you could only update the parent object in a workflow rule if both the objects were custom. Now this functionality is improved so you can update the Account based on Opportunity. You can also update an Opportunity based on something happening on the Opportunity Product. And you can update some standard objects from changes on child objects.

There’s also a nice feature that will be part of base analytics so you can drag & drop filters in the report builder. I admit that more than once I filtered down to a field in the left hand column, only to remember that since it’s a filter, I have to click somewhere else. Nice touch, and works exactly as you would expect in the pre-release org.

You can add dates to the new dashboard filters.

The Idea Exchange says that the default view on reports should be “All Items” rather than the hated “Recently Viewed.” But I don’t see that implemented in the pre-release org yet. With the new drag & drop report filtering you’re no longer limited to just 10 items, and it’s a nice touch that filtered fields are highlighted in the field list.

Searching got a little bit of love too:

And finally, the Idea Exchange indicates that we can tell which end is up in the schema builder, but it doesn’t mention that you can now create fields right from the schema builder by dragging the field type to the object. Interesting. Still no printing though.

The most obvious difference on first login to Spring ’12 is in Social Contacts. I’m still not sold on it, mostly for reasons that my fellow-MVP Elizabeth Davidson explained on her blog. But it’s better than it was before, and since it’s social, it will likely get continuous attention.

You can now unlink a profile that was set to the wrong person. And they’ve added YouTube and Klout:

Still rather useless for finding someone with a common name since you can’t see anything other than name and avatar:

What have I missed? I’ll edit/add to this post as I find out.

Tagged: pre-release, Salesforce

Well, probably not my last word ever, but at least the last on this chapter.

I now have an iPhone 4S and my Infuse is being used by a family member who will better appreciate it. It’s a long story, but I managed to do some switcheroo’ing with the phones on my family plan in such a way that I was able to upgrade. Lesson learned. Won’t let it happen again.

I miss the larger screen on the Infuse. I miss having my Google accounts baked in so logging in with my Google account to certain apps/pages was as easy as selecting my Gmail account from a list (I have 2-step authentication turned on so logging in with my Google account is often a series of hoop jumps). Feature for feature, Android may even be a better operating system. Right now, it’s such a fragmented mess I can’t tell. iOS is mostly stable. And when it’s not, it gets fixed. That’s good enough for me for the foreseeable future. I’m done being Google’s forgotten beta tester.

Yes, it sucks that Apple has such a closed system in iOS. But the Android model replaces an undesirable system with a broken one. Agile software development (release what you got and fix it as you go) and 2 year phone contracts don’t mix when the software developers have absolutely no control over the carrier and manufacturer.

This wasn’t something I learned recently. I knew this. What I didn’t anticipate before I owned a phone running an outdated version of Android was just how much the little things would matter. Stuff that’s hard to put in to words. ZDNet’s James Kendrick probably comes as close as anyone to summing it up and he’s talking about the latest release, no less:

Ice Cream Sandwich is the best version of Android yet in my experience, but it still annoys in a lot of little ways that add up to a frustrating user experience. Google has made Android an open platform, a good thing, but there’s such a thing as being too open. Android is too open for the user’s own good. It’s as if Google set out to make sure Android app developers could have a good time by doing things however they wish. In all that touchy-feely openness, me the user is not having a good time. And the user is the only one in the ecosystem that ultimately matters.

And he’s talking about Ice Cream Sandwich…can he imagine how I felt running a brand new phone with Froyo?!?

For a model that is so open, I never felt so trapped and closed in by technology as when I owned an Android phone.

It’s not Google’s fault that the carriers and manufacturers are screwed up, but I certainly hold Google accountable. This is the world they created. If Google & Friends want to break Apple’s control and dominance over the smartphone space, then they need to come up with something that’s better, not just different.

Yesterday, something glitched on my iPhone and I couldn’t use the Messages app. It would either lock up or crash. Restarts didn’t help. So I restored the phone. 30 minutes or so, start to finish. When done, my phone was working perfectly and everything was exactly where it should be. If I still had problems, I knew I could visit a Genius. I thought about what restoring my Infuse would have been like. Since I was a good girl and didn’t root the phone, my backup program only kept data, no apps or settings. I would have had to reinstall every app. It would have taken hours and hours, with no guarantee that it would fix the problem or that I’d get everything back. Then hours of frustrating runaround as I looked for someone at AT&T or Samsung who could help. No thanks.

Why is this okay with Google? Why isn’t a fantastic user experience a priority? Enough with the features and bells and whistles. Fix. It. And then do whatever it takes to show that you care about the community you already have by making those fixes available to them.

But that’s not the way it works. When I bought an iPhone, I became Apple’s customer. When I bought a Samsung Infuse, I wasn’t Google’s customer. Any more than I’m Google’s customer when I use Gmail. On the web, the advertiser is Google’s customer but at least when Gmail innovates, I’m not left out in the cold. My experience using a phone running a version of the operating system that Google no longer cares about was of no consequence to them, even though it was on a brand new phone. And that’s kinda sad.

Tagged: Android, buyer beware, iphone

My daughter turned 13 this past summer and we just celebrated her Bat Mitzvah last month. On her actual birthday, her Father and I gave her an iPad 2 to mark this milestone year (we don’t normally give huge birthday presents like that).

A few weeks after 8th grade began in September, she asked if she could start bringing it to school. My first reaction was “hell to the no!”

She kept asking. Her middle school has a SSR (silent sustained reading) policy. Students must have a reading book with them at all times. When there’s time left at the end of a period, or a delay before a program, they’re expected to be reading. If they have nothing with them to read, they’re given demerits.

Our local library is small and lacking. It was cheaper/easier for her to read her books on the iPad as iBooks or Kindle. But then in school she was complaining that she didn’t have an SSR, or she would be reading something on the iPad that she wanted to continue reading in school.

We relented and let her bring the iPad to school on a few conditions:

1. It was entirely her responsibility. If it got lost, stolen or broken there is absolutely no excuse we would accept. It would not be replaced under any circumstances. She keeps begging us to test how responsible she could be. This was her chance.
2. If I got even a single report of the iPad being used to entertain or distract there would be no second chance. It would never go back to school. There is no wifi for students in the building, and her iPad doesn’t have 3G.
3. She had to ask permission of all her teachers (they all said yes, given the conditions we already set).

Last week I visited each teacher for parent/teacher conferences of the first marking period. Her report card was excellent and one of the best of her middle school career. Only one grade below 90 – an 86 in honors math – her toughest course. Last year, she was a solid B/low A student in her academic subjects. Definite improvement this year.

Each teacher I spoke to, in between raving about what a pleasure my kid is to have in class ::kvell:: remarked that the iPad has been a positive influence on her education. She’s been taking notes and emailing her teachers when she has questions (they all say they don’t mind). She uses iStudiez Pro to keep on top of her assignments instead of the messy paper agenda. They haven’t seen one minute of her using the iPad inappropriately or carelessly. In fact, a few have recommended apps to her she should try.

Finally, when she’s home she’s texting less and using Facetime to keep in touch with her friends. Full sentences. Eye contact. Conversation. Less misunderstandings, fights and teenage drama. Yay!

As many know, knitting is “my thing.” When I’m stressed I can knit something in my head and it relaxes me. I can stare a picture of beautiful yarn the way a foodie would study a picture in Gourmet Magazine. I know, it’s strange. Only my fellow fiberaholics can understand.

I knit on and off through college and after I got married. In 2008, I found Ravelry. Knitting became an obsession in my life again and I haven’t stopped. It helps that I have a yarn store less than 10 minutes away and have a whole bunch of real-life friends who are as serious about knitting as I am.

In late 2009 I knit a pattern from the Fall 2009 issue of Knitscene magazine. As everything else I knit, I logged it in Ravelry. In the middle of knitting the project the designer, Mathew Gnagy, emailed me through Ravelry to say that there was a mistake in the printed pattern and if I gave him my email address he’d send me the correction since the magazine hadn’t printed the errata yet.

That’s what’s awesome about Ravelry. The people who make the yarn and the patterns are also members, and they can communicate with the folks who do their work and see and comment on their progress. This wasn’t the first time I had direct communication with a designer due to Ravelry.

Mathew sent me the correction. I quickly realized that the correction needed correction and Mathew and I had a nice email exchange about his pattern. He then asked me if I had ever done any sample knitting. I had not, but I expressed willingness to try.

A few weeks later he sent me a box of yarn, a very rough pattern and a full size schematic of the design. Communicating entirely through email and sending him pictures taken on my phone, I completed the sweater pieces, taking notes on stitch counts and making changes as we went along based on Mathew’s feedback. I sent the finished knit pieces back to him and he assembled them into the final garment.

Then Mathew signed a book deal with Interweave Press! Along with a number of other knitters, I signed on to knit for the book. That book is Knitting Off the Axis, available now at a bookseller near you!

In the end, I knit 4 of the sweaters photographed for the book, including the cover.

Here’s the full cover sweater (Becca):

This was actually the last of the sweaters I knit for the book. As it was late in the book prep process, time was tight. I knit the pieces for this sweater in just 5 days!

I knit Deille before beginning the book project with Mathew, so glad it was included. There’s a bunch of pretty details in this jacket that the photographs don’t accurately capture.

Next was Merielle. In the description, Mathew notes: “this design was literally turned 90 degrees on its side. I had planned a bottom-up dolman, but as i pinned together the first incarnation for a fitting, I accidentally folded one of the fronts along the center—what was once a hem became a wrist and the cable ran up the arm rather than up the front. instead of a hip-length dolman, I had a cropped jacket with a triangular silhouette. internal shaping produces the great angle of the body; a shawl collar adds warm style.” That bottom-up dolman was the first piece I knit for him. Mathew noted to me that he loved the way it looked when he accidentally pinned my pieces to his dress form in the wrong direction, and this is the evolution of that idea:

And finally, there’s Meredith. What’s most interesting about Meredith is how much of a mystery it was. I remember knitting it. I remember loving the detail at the elbow. But this was one piece where I just had to trust the process, trust the schematic and know that Mathew would make something beautiful out of what I sent back to him.

When the book came out, I had to look back through my notes to remind myself that I did  knit that sweater! Here’s an in-progress photo from the elbow detail knit in September 2010. I also remember how feathery and beautiful the Tivoli yarn is.

I’m so proud of Mathew and his success in his first book. After nearly well over a year of working together, we finally met in person for the first time this past January in New York City. Since then I’ve worked with Mathew on an afghan blanket pattern that appeared in a Knitscene magazine:

And on a sweater that is in a new “Best of” Knitscene book:

I have another sweater sitting on my lap right now that should be done in the next day or so and will hopefully be published somewhere soon (can’t say what it is or what it’s for yet).

Even when I was doing graphic design work, I preferred the production side of the process to design. I much prefer taking other people’s ideas and layouts and making them “real.” So this work allows me to do what I love (knit!) and plays to my strengths. Can I make a career out of knitting samples for designers? No. But it did help feed my yarn habit over the past couple of years.

A little over 3 months ago, I gave up my iPhone 3GS and replaced it with a Samsung Infuse 4G running Android OS. I knew it was a bit of a leap, and I knew that if I hated it I could always go back to iOS when I was eligible for an upgrade again in early 2013.

Android is going to be a great mobile operating system. It’s improving all the time, and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) looks promising. But I can’t get excited about a new OS that I’ll likely never touch. An iPhone purchased 3 years ago can be upgraded to the latest operating system, but an Android phone purchased 3 months ago is stuck with an evolving operating system nearly 2 complete versions behind. My phone launched in May 2011 with Android 2.2 (Froyo). I bought it in late August. An update to Gingerbread 2.3 was announced in July 2011. It never happened. It’s unlikely that this phone will get any further attention from AT&T or Samsung since the Galaxy S II is the latest darling. I feel as if I bought a brand new computer running OS X 10.1. Great promise. Buggy as heck. Very unfinished.

I knew all this going in. I knew that this was a huge complaint about Android phones that don’t have “Nexus” in their names. I didn’t realize until I started using Android day in and day out how much it would bother me. How frustrated the quirks and bugs would make me. How depressing it is to know there is no relief in sight.

My husband put it best: When my phone is working well I like it, but it’s not working well enough for me to love it. There’s still a lot I do love…just not on the whole. I love Google Maps. I love widgets. I love how quickly developers update their apps in the Market. But even they can only do so much. Case in point this email I received from a developer after reporting a bug that he earnestly tried to fix but couldn’t:

Sounds painful. I think we may have a hit a bit of a wall though, because Android is meant to handle all that routing, not our app. And to make it worse it varies per phone
So long story short I’m not entirely sure what we can do to help you out…in some ways this is why I prefer coding for iOS, so much simpler from a developer point of view.

When I go back to iPhone it will be one of the first apps I get, if for no other reason than to support the developer.

I love how integrated Google services are (duh). But the bugs. So many bugs. Apps that start and stop at random times. Inconsistent wifi and bluetooth. I try and use voice control to “Call (person) mobile” when (person) is in my address book and the phone searches and dials a pizzeria in Idaho. I could go on.

My phone is not rooted. I only install apps that are well-known/popular. I keep my caches as clean as I can. Yet I am rebooting the phone way too often to solve various software ills. Sometimes by force (removing the battery) due to hard freezes that are unrecoverable. I’ve already exchanged the phone once due to a bad antenna. I’ve had enough and it’s only 3 months in.

I don’t think I’m going to make it to 2013. I had a nice little chat with AT&T today about my options. I’m waiting for someone further up the chain to call me back to see if they will grant me an extra early upgrade due to my long history with AT&T. In 10+ years with Cingular and then AT&T I have never played this card before. I’ve always completed my contracts. At first I was offered an early upgrade to any phone but an iPhone. I couldn’t even buy a no-contract phone. I didn’t accept that. Sure, I can get the Galaxy SII which at least has the hope of getting the latest OS at some point. But then 3 months later something shinier will come along and that will be that. I’ll be stuck with the bugs that still exist in Ice Cream Sandwich, just as I’m stuck with Froyo’s quirks now. Not sure I’m willing to go down that hole again. I am so frustrated that I’m almost willing to break my contract and start over…but if I did that, I assured her that my replacement iPhone wouldn’t be on AT&T. Her supervisor seemed willing to allow the override, but apparently it has to be escalated and now I wait for a decision. The woman I spoke to, Micky, was wonderful. Very understanding and friendly and willing to do what she could to resolve this. I’m sure I’m not the first, nor the last, frustrated Infuse owner she has spoken to.

For my friends who also leaped from iPhone to Android…are you happy? What am I missing? And yes, I know there are tons of folks who love Android and don’t have any of the issues I’m having. I’m sure I’ll hear from all of you in the comments too.