Monday, December 8, 2014

The similarities are amazing.

I got laid off not too long ago (not bad, 4 times in almost 40 years and twice I asked to be laid off) and I started to use Salesforce to track my job search. It is a sales process after all. Then I started looking under the hood and found that Salesforce is not just a CRM.  You can build many different kinds of applications with Salesforce, just like Domino. You can use a drag and drop interface to create simple forms and views, build relationships between different document types, do field validations, and even use simple formulas to perform calculations. And there is a more powerful scripting language to add some automation or workflow. Sound familiar?

But wait, there's more. This easy to use interface means the person that knows some Excel formula's is now a 'developer'. And these newborn developers don't know what a development environment is, much less source code control, so changes are made in production with the resulting occasional loss of productivity while corrections are made.  It is so easy to create new applications that it is hard to keep track of what is being used. And have you ever seen an out of control security model where admins don't make changes for fear of breaking someone's access?

But the similarities between Salesforce and Domino do digress. Many of you are looking forward to going to Connect shortly, There you are expecting maybe 10,000 attendees, and hoping more than half are not IBMers. Well, Salesforce just had their big trade show called Dreamforce, and there were 140,000 attendees.

Another difference is if you go to your favorite job search site and look for Domino developer positions and then search for Salesforce developer positions, let me know what you find.