Salesforce Summer 12 and Disco Mirrorballs

My friend's house is never finished. An extension, new kitchen, patio on the garden, wires hanging down etc, absolutely lethal. Then knock it all down and start again. He loves it.

This got me thinking about the Salesforce upgrade path over the last few years. One of the reasons I moved to work with the Salesforce platform was because of the constant upgrades, making the platform effectively future-proof. However, after an initial good start, adding useful features such as APEX and better reporting etc, I am losing the faith. The focus on adding new 'look at me' functionality as opposed to developing the core platform is frustrating.

Going back to my friends house, he has recently redone the kitchen and redecorated the bedrooms. Good. Rooms that are often used and every day. He can walk into those rooms and appreciate the work that has been done. I can imagine though that if he had got Mark Benioff free reign to improve his house he would be sitting with a bill for a back garden water amusement park, a carousel in the living room and a lap dancing bar to replace the bedrooms. All very nice, but what about the missing wallpaper in the living room?

There are many ways in which the existing platform could be improved in areas such as build/deployment (too manual+resource intensive), or workflow tools (pales in comparison to Siebel). Since the introduction of Chatter, I think Salesforce have lost the plot a bit, and are focussing too much on whizz-bang new features to grab the attention of CIOs who are moon-walking to the tune of the social enterprise.

Anyway, enough metaphor. Let me get some quantitative proof by rifling through the Summer 12 upgrade release notes. Here is a summary of what is to be delivered, categorised as 'Replace the broken fridge' (useful) or 'Install kitchen disco mirrorball' (less useful). Ok, maybe not quite enough metaphor...

Chatter Messenger: Kitchen Mirrorball
Just get Google Apps - as a collaborative platform it trumps Salesforce.

Additional Chatter Enhancements: Kitchen Mirrorball
Chatter, chatter, chatter. Too much focus on this nice but certainly non-essential activity feed feature. Get me some decent way of creating a fully automated release build of an environment without any manual steps instead please.

Sales Cloud Enhancements - New Fridge
The bread and butter. No qualms here.


Case Feed Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball with added smoke machine
Unsure about Case Feed. Again, branching into new territory when the standard Service Cloud could really do with some better routing/queue functionality to bring it closer to Oracle's RightNow in that respect

Service Cloud Enhancements - New Fridge
A bit more bread and butter, but minimal

Salesforce Knowledge Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball
Who knows of a client that has the Knowledge module? Why this isn't free is beyond me.

Live Agent Enhancements - Kitchen Mirrorball
Nice but niche

Analytics Enhancements - New Fridge
Now it is going to tell you when it times out which is good. But seriously, some improvements to cross filters etc - I really like what they are doing here and all credit for going back on the initial charging model


Data.com - Kitchen Mirrorball
Lots and lots about this in the release notes. But the use of this is still fairly niche.

Schema builder - Kitchen Mirrorball
Noddy.

Site.com enhancements - New Fridge
I think this has potential, but ultimately any enterprise that wants to build out web facing apps are going to use Heroku. If they really beefed up this offering and made it scalable it could be very useful (abstraction layer on top of Heroku for instance?)


Force.com: Flow / VisualForce / Apex - New Fridge
Unfortunately improvements to the core platform in these areas tend to be quite minimal, but having said that they are certainly welcome. Flow has the potential to be useful if they bolster it a bit to be more of a behind the scenes workflow engine rather than a scripting tool. VisualForce and Apex are incredibly core to the platform, and the increases in limits and improvement developer tools in Summer 12 are welcome.

So I guess I would sum up the Summer 12 release as follows:

False Cloud, Cloudwashing and Dishwashing

I used to be a dish-washer for a restaurant when I was a lot younger. The value of my service was easily quantified - either the plates and pans are clean and the chef always has a good supply, or not and you get torrents of abuse and ladles thrown at you. Ahh, those were the days.

Unfortunately when it comes to Cloud, and specifically cloud-washing, the lack of value in a service is not as obvious. A definition (there are a few) is as follows:

"Cloud washing... is the purposeful and sometimes deceptive attempt by a vendor to rebrand an old product or service by associating the buzzword "cloud" with it"

It also equates to Mark Benioff's 'False Cloud' line, and is important when it comes to judging whether a service does offer the benefits of the cloud model (which have been well documented so not covered here).

The motivation for writing this post was a recent article I read which seems to me either to be a blatant attempt at cloud-washing, or just a demonstration of misunderstanding. This frustrates me because 'cloud' is not a new concept any more and NIST have provided a widely accepted standard definition. Please, have a quick read:

Article charged with Cloud-washing: Case Study: Making Cloud ROI a Reality
Cloud-washing indicators: "Outsourcing made the most sense." "install new off-site servers", "leases physical servers"

What they really mean: Outsourcing and virtualization


It is pretty easy to take the essential characteristics of cloud outlined in the NIST summary and make a judgement against any offering as to whether it it 'true cloud'. So in this instance does the article fit the cloud definition at all? Here goes:

On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

No: No indication of putting provisioning in the hands of the consumer


Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

Yes: The capabilities are available over a network


Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.

No: This is normally the easiest was of judging whether a service is 'Cloud' or not - simply outsourcing does not give you the economies of scale associated with a multi tenant architecture


Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand.

No: No indication that the consumer can scale up and down rapidly. The fact 'leasing physical servers' is mentioned suggests this would not be as easy to scale as a proper IaaS platform such as AWS.


Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability1 at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts).

Yes: The virtualization element here and moving from 50+ servers to 4 suggests this is true


So, I come to the conclusion that although the term 'cloud' is mentioned 17 times in the article, what they really mean is outsourcing and virtualization. Not Cloud. So please, anyone who starts an article on 'cloud', have a quick look at the NIST definition so we are all on the same page. Otherwise I will throw a ladle at you.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Multi-Multi-tenant Upgrade Jigsaw

One of the most commonly cited advantages of an app sitting on multi-tenant architecture is the fact it is frequently upgraded so each customer is always on the 'latest version'. Historically the upgrade path for on-premise enterprise software had been a complete pain. Taking the 'one-click' upgrade path was about as effective as throwing a bag of spanners at the thing, as it had been butchered beyond all recognition. Not 'out of the box' anymore, the box had been burned and the ashes whacked repeatedly with a baseball bat. So the standard upgrade routine would basically have a look and then run away laughing.

With a multi-tenant app, the abstraction layer prevents customers from butchering their app to such an extent. This results in a fairly smooth upgrade process, but then a new issue rears its head. The upgrade itself and the timing are forced. It is not possible on a true multi-tenant platform to choose when the upgrade occurs. All customers are upgraded around the same time. So, let's take a couple of multi-tenant examples from my experience:

Salesforce.com : Upgrade occurs to the Production instance every 4 months.

The fun: One month prior to the production instance upgrade, certain sandboxes are upgraded by the Salesforce upgrade fairy. Now, in an enterprise environment you will likely have at least 2 sandboxes - Dev and Test. You may also have a separate UAT sandbox, maybe a Staging sandbox also. You might have a parallel development stream with another Dev and Test. Anyway, the point is that to avoid a sandbox being upgraded early by that naughty but ultra-keen fairy, the only way is to refresh it in a certain window of time, differing depending on what server instance it sits on. This kills the current sandbox and creates a new instance copied from Production. So this needs to be planned well in advanced into the dev schedule to avoid for instance your dev sandbox being on a different version than your test one, and to make sure the release path sandboxes are on the same version as production. And of course if you are midway through your dev schedule when the Production upgrade occurs, and your sandboxes are upgraded at the same time, you need to regression test the in-development functionality. It is also a good idea to have one sandbox upgraded early to regression test current Production functionality against the forthcoming release. To get the refresh schedule right I try to get my head around it all by drawing a couple of timelines. Firstly for the Summer 12 Salesforce release I drew myself this:

And generically as a reminder for the future I summarised the above paragraph into this:

Now lets look at Zuora:

Zuora: Upgrade occurs to the Production instance every month.

The fun: One week prior to the Production upgrade, all Zuora sandboxes are upgraded by the Zuora upgrade pixie. This necessitates a regression test of the current dev cycle, and a regression test against the current production functionality to pre-empt any Production issues. However, outside of this schedule is an absolute avalanche of patch releases by the mini-pixies, which with the best intentions, it is impossible to keep up with. Usually there will be about 1 days notice before the sandboxes are patched, then a few days until production. If you are lucky you get some release notes, but usually not until after the sandboxes are patched.


NOW integrate Salesforce with Zuora, and the solution as a whole has 2 multi-tenant platforms, with sandbox and Production environments upgraded on different schedules. Bloody fairies and pixies running around all over the place. The joy of forced upgrades. Then maybe add on Eloqua, or BigMachines - the more the merrier!

But we choose to enter the multi-tenant world so can't complain. Three points to make:

-When planning your dev/release schedule, review the upgrade schedules and ensure the impact of forced upgrades on resources and release dates is taken into account
-Automate your regression testing to the max to gain confidence in the upgrades quickly, because you will have to! Review release notes and prioritise areas that have changed.
-When cloud platforms prove themselves to be more robust in the future, the need for regression testing may reduce. Maybe.

Upgrades are more likely to have an impact on the more complex implementations which are found in enterprise implementations involving lots of integration, customisation etc, and spanning more functional breadth than smaller implementations. You probably don't need to worry too much about your little standard Sales Cloud thing you stood up for the old lady next door. But who wants to work on a small implementation?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Cloud Lone Ranger and A Chinese perspective on Salesforce.com

There is apparently only one
man representing Salesforce
in Beijing, the 'Lone Ranger'.

I popped across to Beijing recently. What a huge place with tons of people. Takes a bit of getting used to, not quite the same etiquette as the UK when it comes to queuing or letting people get off the Metro train. Lots of 'scuffling'. Culturally it is certainly a bit different and if a day went by without me getting zapped by a static electric shock it was a surprise. Anyway, besides 'holidaying' and all that, I was curious where they are in terms of the current shift to Cloud Computing. The move to the various cloud computing models is quite well advanced in the US and UK, how would China compare?

I thought a good barometer would be Salesforce.com and so I decided one day to meet up with a consultancy there that specialise in this area, Meginfo.  I wanted to see if Salesforce has any foothold in China and also learn a bit about their offshore delivery approach in general.

Meginfo specialise in Salesforce for Chinese and overseas clients. they have done Salesforce work for some very large multinational enterprises and top tier system integrators. Their owner Aaron Lau has worked with Salesforce since 2005, firstly for a top 10 Salesforce end user then as a freelancer. This culminated in him starting Meginfo in 2008. The company now has 30 employees and has been consistently profitable.

I did also want to visit Salesforce in Beijing but Aaron said 'he' is out of town. One person to cover Beijing!? A mysterious 'Lone Ranger'? Digging deeper into this I found the perception that Salesforce could really improve their efforts to cover China. Anyway, here is my discussion with Meginfo:

NP - How did Meginfo start given that back in 2008 Salesforce was still pretty unknown, especially in China?

AL - I knew many foreigners and went to different countries such as Singapore, Australia, and also the Salesforce headquarters and salesforce online community. Many people had requirements, so i connected with them  and put myself forward to do the work. Eventually there was too much work for just myself so I started building the company. We basically know everything about Salesforce and focus completely on it - we have a team that is able to resolve most difficulties without help.

NP - Are the companies you work for mainly overseas companies?

AL - Most of them are US companies, most do not have any people in China. We have 2 type of customers - Partner (SF consulting companies who have their own customers) and other are End Users. For our partners we are generally the offshore development team for them. For other customers we need to do a lot more work because we need to work with them to gather the requirements directly. US companies prefer not to have lots of documents, unlike companies from Japan, they prefer to have very detailed specs that the developer can read. For US companies we need to spend a lot more effort gathering requirements, do the spec then provide the quotes and options before we do the actual work.

NP - Quite often some kind of documentation can be handy as output to get the right level of thinking/architecture done before embarking on build but quite often a client only knows if the application is 'right' once they start using it.

Aaron Lau, Owner of Meginfo

AL - Yes that is right.

NP - Do you buffer in some time for reviews and changes to the built application along the way to account for the fact not everything can be anticipated/captured by documentation?

AL - That depends on the size of the project. For many projects they are really small - 80 hrs, we use a very basic development cycle - we did the documentation then the development work then testing and deployment. But for some bigger projects, the onces we have been doing for years, we really need to have a process where customers can get involved and we are having updates every day. Also we have integrated Chatter into that so customers can have realtime interaction with our developers, testers and project managers. They review the system and whenever they have comments they can post them into chatter - our people are immediately aware.

NP - How do you communicate with clients - web conf etc?

AL - Skype, GotoMeeting, we recently switched to Webex as it has much better performance. For developers they can read and write english but not speak so much, so mostly they use email and Chatter.

NP - In terms of the projects that you have done, what do you think are most important factors

AL - Communication with customers, the right people to to the work, and the dedication of the team. There are so many companies providing offshore services but working on multiple projects at the same time. When the developer is working, they need to be to be focussed on the project, not distracted by some other work. Some years ago I worked for a company who provided very similar services but the success rate was not very high and a major reason was that people at the time were working on multiple projects.

NP - How important do you think the dedication and ability of a client is? From my point of view I may have a very good team, but if the client has not allocated a good project manager for instance or the client does not allocate time for the right people to be involved, then it can be difficult.

AL - When we are working on a project we need to let them know the importance of being dedicated to a project, we push them to reply to emails etc and sometimes client does not like that. But if we deliver the project successfully that makes everyone happy. In process of doing the work we need clients very involved in project. It is hard and sometimes clients do not like being pushed.

NP - In terms of the companies you are in competition with in China, what is the main differentiator for Meginfo?

AL - I think right now we are the biggest Salesforce consulting and development company in the Greater China region. There are many big companies in India. India is famous and popular for outsourcing and they speak English well. In China we do not have a lot of competition, not because others are not strong, rather that Salesforce is not used too much in China, there is not much awareness. Those companies focus more on MS CRM and SAP, some other technologies. Those other companies are really good at marketing and sales, dealing with people, they are very good at selling to clients and we want to get better at that.

NP - Are there any cultural differences between working for companies from different regions? A Japanese company vs an American companies etc?

AL - I thing that the culture difference is very big. Eastern culture is dramatically difference from Western culture and is one of the difficulties that our developers are having right now. American people tend to be very dedicated and very straightforward, and whenever there are mistakes that they make or we make, they point that out. In China, I am not saying it is bad for the Chinese culture, but it is just the culture, that when we make mistakes we do not say anything and try to fix it, we try to not show we made mistakes. We are not very good at being open. It is almost like an opposite of cultures, a conflict. When I brought my people to US to Dreamforce when, when we got out the airport everything was different, it is something that people living in China do not know. I send lots of articles and blogs that I read and I send them to our internal Chatter to help them understand the culture and the difference.

NP - Salesforce as a company is very big, bold and open and very much has this 'Social Enterprise' vision. This is about being more open and sharing things internally and sharing things externally with customers over Twitter and Facebook. Salesforce isn't big in China now, but I get the impression that this kind of vision would never be something that Chinese companies would aspire to.

AL - I think they would. There are a few Chinese companies that are providing very popular social networks and there are hundreds of millions of people using the micro blog services. We have customers who want to integrate their system with social networks. Chatter is going to be a big one - its going to change the way that people interact with other people within a company. We use Chatter to talk about tech stuff and daily lives - people review and post comments. In my company I have a few opponents - they point out my mistakes and it is totally fine using email, chatter, any way - as long as their voice can be heard i am totally fine with that. We are trying to build a company that is more like a US company.

NP - Is a typical Chinese company very hierarchical?

AL - Yes, that is right. Lots of bureaucracy and people at different levels telling people below what to do and the end result is people down below they prefer just to listen, they cannot express their ideas, and that is something I believe is pretty bad and we do not want that to happen in our team.

NP - In terms of Salesforce what do you think the major strengths and major weaknesses are?

AL - A major advantage was the free edition but hey have stopped that now which is a pity, we did set up a few free editions before it was shut down. I think the free edition has lots of potential in China. It was a way that companies could start feeling the benefit of the salesforce platform easily.

There are so many companies providing cloud computing platforms that are essentially 'fake clouds'. In china there are so many companies saying their services are cloud computing services but they are really not. So the free edition was a good way to promote Salesforce advantages and get as many companies as possible to start using Salesforce. I think Salesforce need to do some more marketing activity in China because at this time I don't believe salesforce put any major effort into marketing campaigns in china.

NP - They do everywhere else...

AL - Yes, but china is not a market they care about. The companies using Salesforce in China are generally US companies and for local companies they still do not know salesforce, they do not know what Salesforce can do.

NP - They buy their own servers, have their own data centres etc?

Al - Yes. Though the is a Chinese company which provides very similar services as Salesforce does.

NP - 800apps?

AL - Yes, I think so. They even have the same user interface.

NP - I talked about that in another blog. That must have some Salesforce code in there, the similarities are too striking.

AL - Yes, I also tried it myself. It is not a company that can provide the same level of services as Salesforce can do however.

NP - No.

AL - So I believe the chinese market has lots of potential for Salesforce but again Salesforce need to care about that, they need more people promoting their advantages and they need to support Chinese customers.

NP - Is Salesforce perfectly accessible within China, no problem with access given the Great Firewall?

AL - No problems. There were a few cases in the past when the earthquake happened in Taiwan when the internet between China and US was broken at the time but it did not last too long, a few days. Also Salesforce moved their data centre from Singapore to Japan, so the connection between China and new data centre has been great since the move. It is almost the same as US people get.

NP - Where do you see Salesforce and Cloud Computing in the next 5 years?

AL - I think Salesforce will finally become a very popular system not just in the US but also in China. It is a platform that is so flexible and easy to use and very powerful so a company can use Salesforce to manage almost everything. We are using Salesforce to do project management, to do financial work, manage expenses, invoices, salaries, everything is managed within Salesforce.

NP - China is maybe how the UK was about 5 years ago in terms of the adoption of Salesforce, 5 or 6 years ago most companies would say 'no way am i using that', not secure etc.

AL - I think another reason is 5 or 6 years ago Salesforce was not really as powerful as it is today. Now it is a fully fledged cloud computing platform that is really really flexible

NP - I keep hearing about China building massive cloud computing data centres as big as many football pitches etc. What is going on there?

AL - I think most of these projects are sponsored by big companies like IBM, but they are not being used by companies. I am not a person who can say they are failures but there are really not people using them. They are not as popular as those cloud computing providers in the US. But you are right, as far as I know there have been so many projects in China that claim to be cloud computing but again they do not have users.

NP - Where do you see Meginfo in 5 years time?

AL - Our goal is to become the best Salesforce consulting and development company in Asia. We have succeeded with every project. So in 5 years we are going to be an even bigger team and will be able to work with a greater number of customers.


So, looks like Salesforce either are not too bothered about the Chinese market right now, or are biding their time. Rest assured I did not spend all of my Beijing holiday debating this. No, I also spent a good amount of time doing my Service Cloud and Sales Cloud certifications as well. That's the life.

Just as an addition - see this video of the Meginfo office - silent. Big difference between this and a typical UK development team (which can be fairly boistorous) , and emphasises the difference in culture that Aaron talked about.

Oracle MightNow FightNow with RightNow

So Oracle have bought RightNow. Ahh, RightNow. Memories. See my proud certificate to become RightNow certified. Not many people can say that. The RightNow approach to wooing partners to implement their product was far removed from Salesforce.com, possibly explaining why it is seen as more of a niche product with not much of a partner ecosystem.

My experience in 2008 was one of being an extension to their in house Professional Services at the Euro HQ in Maidenhead. The training I was given by the PS guys there was second to none, and it was clear there was a passion not only for the product, but for 'best practice' in implementation. To this day I have never received better training in a product.

From a technical point of view, having come from a Siebel background, the thing that struck me was the speed of configuration (and of course 'no hardware'). In a similar way to Salesforce, UI and data model changes were very fast to implement. There were also very powerful routing, escalation and knowledge base elements too. The best way I can describe it is a set of service contact centre building blocks, with rafts of 'configuration settings' to turn functionality on and off. This, as opposed to the 'prettified database tables but not much else' approach of some apps. What this resulted in was incredible value, incredibly fast. The whole application, including web knowledge base could be set up in as little as a week or two. Longer timelines would apply for integration/migration etc as usual, but that takes the same amount of time regardless of SaaS/On-Premise/Cloud/whatever.

When compared to Salesforce, Oracle CRM OnDemand or Siebel, the Service functionality RightNow had back THEN was superior to what those platforms have in this area NOW. It frustrates me when certain products are hell-bent on bells-and-whistles before they have got the basics right. Get the internals of routing/knowledgebase/escalation/workload management etc right FIRST, then dabble with Twitter and Facebook. Or you could just do nothing. Ever. As per Siebel.

In 3 years since I last saw RightNow it will only have improved, so it is no surprise that Oracle have come in for them. Oracle CRM OnDemand is woeful in the Contact Centre area, Gartner do not even see it as a player. Salesforce charge separately for their Knowledgebase (crazy) and are somewhere over there in Social Fairyland (though they acquired Assistly which looks good), and I would need to ask my Grandad about Siebel.

What does confuse me though is what the next step for Oracle is. I would expect it to be an extension of their Fusion applications, but are they going to skin/integrate it as such or leave it as-is?  Kate Leggett has just done a great blog post on this topic, including an important point about the culture of the two companies. Oracle is a lumbering behemoth of a company, RightNow has been known as agile, friendly, well quite modern really. Cool. When I was there they had free cans of pop in the fridge. For instance.

What I can conclude, is that this is the first time Oracle have managed to position themselves with a superior offering to Salesforce in the SaaS space. You want an SFA solution? Go to Salesforce. You want an extendable enterprise platform? Go to Salesforce. You want a best practice, pre-built Customer Service Solution? Now at last you can consider going to Oracle.

iPhone 4S, Knight Rider, and refusal of Siri to talk dirty.

Regardless of the murmurings of disappointment regarding the iPhone 4S release, I was always going to get one to replace my 3GS, just makes sense. In fact the tide is turning now and everyone is saying, along with IOS5, that in fact, all is fine, all is still great with Apple. 

So, after wading through a few reviews, I swallowed my pride and the day after release joined a queue of equally keen people on Oxford Street outside the O2 shop. This really did look quite sad, and indeed I was trying to pretend that I was 'just looking in the window', but it didn't fly. Even random passers by were asking me 'what is the queue for'? I was tempted to say that David Beckham was doing a book signing in there or something, but I just told them straight: 'We are all spending our Saturday queuing for a mobile phone'. Actually, the queue was not that long, which kind of made it worse as we looked like the dregs who could not manage to get it on the actual release day. Anyway, I stood firm, I didn't care. After all, I was only hours away from being able to talk 'with' my phone so how cool would I be by the end of the day!

Anyway, after a reasonable 20 mins of queuing I was led inside the shop by a very professional O2 person, and inside to my surprise was a further waiting room of 6 more people. It was like being in a doctors with an L-Shaped couch and some iPhone accessories on a table for you to muse over buying. You know, cases for £12.99, well worth paying for what equates to a bit of rubber. 

Anyway, I finally got my call and sat down opposite a sales guy who said 'what would you like'? I thought about trying to be funny and surprising him, but I gave the stock answer "4S, black, 16gb". "And that bit of rubber over there I suppose". Then after a bit of chat about my favourite football team I got the phone. Brilliant. Back home for setup........

Setup was super easy, restored from my 3GS. I was already familiar with the main IOS5 functions and quirks having installed it on the 3GS. Basically to get everything to work amounts to ensuring you do the following things :

-iCloud Backup - both on your phone AND on iTunes when you connect your phone, then synch in iTunes and all subsequent backups will be via iCloud.

-Work out what gets backed up to iCloud - Settings, contacts, apps, SOME photos (last 1000 in the 'Photo Stream' thing), Apps and Songs can be re-downloaded on demand, but not movies, or podcasts....takes a bit of working out.

-Siri - off by default on the phone so needs switching on, more about that in a bit

-Contacts - looked like they were deleted on my phone but switching iCloud option for them off then on sorted that

-Auto iTunes store downloads - off by default, needed turning on in the settings

-Podcasts had disappeared - this whole change does not have much respect for podcasts - still need to manually synch

Anyway - most improvements of the 4S and IOS5 are quite incremental, but the most interesting is of course Siri. I have a huge grumble about the fact that we still need to use keyboards, it is such as legacy tool and not very well suited to mobile devices. So I think this is the first step towards a big progression away. Will take some time, but I would expect keyboards to be gone in about 10-15 years.

On the night of purchase I did the standard thing of asking it random questions. There is loads of that on the web now, I just tried 'Can you talk dirty to me' and it responded 'I can't, I'm as clean as the driven snow'. Nice.

I then tried a few more useful things (generally it supports requests related to 'standard' Apple apps):

-Text Messages: 'Text Michelle Procter, Hello Michelle I am texting this from Siri'. Effective and probably faster for short texts, propensity for errors increases if you try longer ones

-Emails: No-go for me, need to have email addresses in my address book. I use gmail so they are all stored there so not much use

-Creating appointments / reminders: Works well. You can also say 'what appointments do I have this afternoon' etc and it will list them.

-Facts: Good for facts: "Who is the president of the United States", or "what is ten divided by three".

-Music: Probably faster using Siri to play individual songs that you know the name of: "Play Better Than Today by Kylie" worked perfectly
-Directions / local information / traffic - Siri admits to you that this only works in the US (via Yelp integration). Hopefully they will sort this out in the UK soon, am sure they will.

-Anything it doesn't know: It defaults to a web search generally. Some things like asking it to 'Tweet' it acknowledges it cannot 'Tweet' but I would expect that at some point.

It is a good start. And ok if you are by yourself. Kind of. But what about if you are in public? I wonder how long it will take before this is acceptable in public without looking like an idiot. I tried it walking down the street in Shadwell, and although you can kind of mask it by holding your phone to your ear to pretend it is a call, the way you speak to Siri is certainly not like you would talk to a human. It's very stop-start and 'clipped'. I tried 'Create reminder for 2pm: Put the rubbish out' and 'Change reminder for 2pm' etc while walking past and opposite people in the street. You just get funny looks. 

I think the only person to help with this is David Hasselhoff based on his experience in Knight Rider! I have 'met' him before (bottom pic) and am sure he will remember me from that 2006 book signing (his book, not mine). So I have tweeted him:

The Tweet:

@DavidHasselhoff I have just got my iPhone 4S and it is voice controlled. Any tips for making talking to a computer publicly acceptable?

I am sure any tips The Hoff has for this will be much appreciated by 4S owners and will update this blog post should I get a reply, which of course must only be seconds away :-)

Bootleg Salesforce? Trojan Horse? Investigating the CRM App at the heart of Salesforce's China Investment in 800apps.com

Looks like Bootleg Salesforce, but
probably 'heavy respect'

China is interesting. Certainly when I was over there, some of the things I was being offered at markets such as the 'iPhone4' were suspect to say the least. Completely serious sell, but on close inspection it looked like something from Toys-R-Us.

A few days ago I read an interesting story about Salesforce.com investing in a Chinese CRM company called 800apps. After looking further into this, I found something particularly interesting about the CRM app they have developed. At first glance I thought it was salesforce.com itself looking at the distant screenshots. Then I got a trial, and the iPhone4 incident popped back into my head...

I am particularly interested in this because I have been trying to follow the Chinese Cloud Computing market to see how it stacks up in relation to the West.  Stories of 20kmx20km datacentres being constructed, billions of money pouring into it, it seems they are getting together one hell of a capability. This interview with Reuven Cohen of Enomaly gives as good an insight as I have seen.

Anyway, I have done some digging around over the past few months to see if salesforce.com have any traction there. The general impression that I got was that there are companies who do great salesforce.com work over there like Meginfo in Beijing. I had the pleasure of chatting with their director, Aaron Lau when I was over there: a dev at Meginfo goes through 8 months worth of training! But companies like this are more likely to service overseas companies, the US etc - I don't think companies that originate in China buy much into procuring a SaaS solution from somewhere like the US.

Ok, now back to 800apps. Like I said, I looked at the screenshots on the website and it looked like Salesforce.com. However reading some background information on the website, it gave the impression it is a different product:

 "Launched World first Chinese PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) on-line application software development platform 800APP Native. Just one month after Salesforce.com's launch of a similar product."


Right, so it's not Salesforce then. But I was curious so I signed up for the 'free version' so I could have a click around. After a healthy bit of missing around with Chinese forms and Google Translate, I finally completed the basic details to get an account, and got an email with my login details. Like Salesforce, there is a login link on the 800apps website which takes me to a login screen:

Once logged in, the home screen is quite familiar:

It looks very much like an older version of Salesforce. The thing that made me certain that there is no co-incidence in similarity was when I went to create a new record:

Its just too similar. The way a mandatory field is highlighted, the convention for Lookups, even the positioning of the 'Save' buttons. But it is NOT Salesforce. I had a quick check of the setup area, and although extremely similar, proves it is not the Force.com platform as I know it:

Can't create custom objects. 'Supply and Demand' standard object? 'Set Indexes' button? Not Salesforce, but not far off! 


So what IS this? Does it include any Salesforce code, or is it just heavily influenced by the platform? And interestingly, why have Salesforce chosen to invest in this company? If there is no existing link between 800apps and Salesforce, it seems that rather than Salesforce getting annoyed, they have chosen to invest. After all, Salesforce themselves tend to take heavy influence from Facebook etc, so they can probably empathise here. It may be a very clever way for Salesforce to get a footing in China in a kind of Trojan Horse way, and maybe one day the 800apps customers will receive an 'upgrade' to what is actually the latest version of the 'real' Salesforce.com?