You could say I have an obsession with the Salesforce.com platform. My first trial of the platform was back in the early 2000's. I was working for a telecommunications company in South San Francisco and I was charged with finding a new solution to replace our current CRM software.
I remember doing a search for "software sales solutions" and Salesforce.com jumped out at me. I quickly signed up for a trial and was hooked. Even though the application was not what it is today, I couldn't believe how easy the application was to setup and use. I knew my VP would be ecstatic and the company would save thousands of dollars on servers and maintenance costs. I quickly wrote up a proposal, adding in fancy graphs, spreadsheets, an awesome comparative analysis, and setup a meeting with my VP. I remember being enthusiastic, clear, and precise in my presentation. As I sold him on all the benefits of switching to the Salesforce.com platform I could tell I had his attention, especially when presenting the cost savings.
I then started to present to him how the platform would not require servers and the costs savings on hardware and maintenance would be huge. I explained how Salesforce.com hosted and maintained the servers for us, the term "cloud" never even came up, because no one was even using that term. Then it happened, I received a puzzled look from my VP and the questions started to roll; Where is our data stored?, How is our data secured?, Who has access to our data?, What if their servers fail, or we can't connect? In the end, my hopes of using this awesome new platform had been shot down. It was not until a few years later while working in sales that I would be able to use and become obsessed with Salesforce.com. My only regret from that first taste of Salesforce.com is that I didn't run over to Marc Benioff's office and ask for a job!
I created this site to give back to the Salesforce.com community in the Ohana spirit by sharing my experiences working as an Admin/Developer on the platform, provide links to other related sites, tools, documentation, and answer any burning questions others may have. I hope this site helps you with your own journey working with the platform.
Enjoy,
Dave Ross
