Hello lovely members!

Last night was our first informal meeting.  We met at King's Hardware in Ballard.  The place was very retro logger hip. The bar has a doorway into Rudy's Barbershop which is very handy for those drunken spur of the moment haircuts, heaven knows we have all had a few of those, right? ;-)  

We were able to grab a row of tables with a loooong bench.  We swapped seats a few times so hopefully everyone got a chance to chat. Someone said it was like speed dating - funny!  I think there were over 20 of us in attendance.  Our budget bought the perfect amount of beer and snacks. I got to meet a few new people and chat with a few more that I had only met in passing before. 

A few of my favorite things were Per's Norwegian sweater, the fact that Loren recognized our waiter from other venues, and Joel's vintage cufflinks.  Barry will bring his camera next time so we can share photos.

If you attended please add comments/suggestions to this post so we can improve future events.  We got a rush of new members registered today and I am hoping it is because you all told your co-workers about how much fun you had last night!

I asked several members to recommend other places to meet and mostly heard that they liked where we were, just fine.  I did get recommendations for 2 places to try for breakfast. Barry and I do want to have an informal meeting in south Seattle so we can lure our pals from Green River CC to come, Judy-Dan-Mike we miss you guys!!  If you know of a good spot in the south or on the eastside, let me know.

Barry has a sponsor lined up and is working on the agenda for our Feb. meeting.  Keep the morning open on Feb. 11th.  I will see if I can get "the cream puffs" from Beard Papa's that early in the morning - or would they keep overnight?

Hope to see you all on the 11th!

Suzanne

Do you already know about RSS feeds aka subscriptions?  I am not clear about the technology but I figured out how to use them and I am not afraid to share my limited knowledge. I think one of the s's stands for Subscribe because that is what it does.  They let you view current entries from your home page, like this:

Here is how to subscribe.  Go to http://usergroups.salesforce.com/seattle/

Then click on subscribe and pick your home page provider.  Pretty easy?  I think so.

I loved this post on Courtney House's blog so much that I wanted to share it with you all.  I liked being called f**ers by Dave Grohl, does that make me bad? This post reminds me that I still need to study/take the cert exam, sigh.  Suz

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Foo Fighters!

I forgot to mention one of the best parts about Dreamforce 2008, the Foo Fighters! They played the Global Gala on Monday night. And boy did they put on a great show, well except for the part where Dave Grohl kept calling us all "F**kers".

A woman came up to me before the show and said "Are you here alone, I am too, maybe we can hang out." So we did, and we had a blast. We enjoyed the free cocktails, and pushed our way to the front of the stage to rock out to the music. Fun fun fun times!

Posted by KikiRiki at 7:28 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Neil Young - Dreamforce 2008

One of the best things about Dreamforce is the amazing speakers that they draw. This year Neil Young was in attendance to speak to us about LincVolt. LincVolt is attempting to build a zero emmissions auto that would elimitate re-fueling and generate power to the home when it is parked. If you haven't heard of LincVolt yet, take a look at their website (which Salesforce.com is building for them) and see the amazing things they are doing.

At the conference I sat about 5 chairs away from Neil Young before it was his turn to speak:


Here he is on stage with the LincVolt and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com:


Pretty inspiring.

Posted by KikiRiki at 6:59 AM 1 comments

Dreamforce 2008

November 1st - 5th Chris and I traveled to San Francisco for Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference. As usual the conference delivered....big time! I learned, networked, ate, drank, and was very merry.

The week before I went to the conference I took a certification test for Salesforce.com. I have been an administrator of the application for over 5 years now but was still surprised by how difficult the exam was. Talk about obscure questions! Luckily I passed and was one of the first 500 individuals to become certified on the application.

My name was displayed on this awesome sign at Dreamforce:


Close up (too bad I'm not longer actually with this company, but I'm still certified!):


And here is my nifty logo I can add to my email signature:

This post is by one of our Seattle UG members, Nick Pujol, from www.productevo.com .  I am hoping he will be at the meeting today (1-14-09) for discussion!  Sorry about the font issue, I am still learning how typepad works.  Suz

During the 2008 Seattle group meeting, one topic of discussion turned out to be partner sessions and their relative usefulness (or lack thereof). One of the attendee comments from salesforce.com user groups is apparently that the concept of sponsored sessions is uninteresting. The topic of discussion grabbed my attention for two reasons: one, because we’re a salesforce.com partner, and two, I’ve seen this happen before! So I’d like to share my thoughts with you all and solicit opinions.

The challenge with sponsored sessions comes down to this: the content provided by partners is often not interesting enough to be free. So in order to present the uninteresting content, vendors pay to speak. Attendees reluctantly listen to the infomercial, waiting for the “meat” of the meeting to come around. This is in good case scenarios. Bad case scenarios, attendees don’t even show up. Over the years, the same phenomenon has happened in various industry events such as user conference sessions provided by vendors. The problem is not about charging more money to vendors. The problem is about content quality. And to that point, there have been many vendor-provided talks that have received raving reviews, with full rooms where you couldn’t even get in if you got there on time. Why? This time the content was very good!

What about presentations with subject matter expertise? Let’s take an example. If the vendor is here to speak about the topic of sales references (since it was a topic presented at the last meeting), what about an insightful presentation on why sales references are important, how they help close more deals in the pipeline, data points that support the statements, what are the best practices for collecting references (SPIFs to sales? Level of detail? Collect by industry?), and what are the best ways to store and retrieve references in salesforce.com? Personally, I would find the presentation quite valuable because it would be educational and would go far beyond the “vendor pitch”. If each salesforce.com partner coming to user groups provided subject matter expertise on a topic of interest, the amount of knowledge and value to user groups would increase exponentially.  

Good idea? Bad idea? I’d love to hear your thoughts.  

I am going to attemp to get caught up on posts before our meeting today.  Then the guilt will be gone!

First of all West Monroe Partners is looking for a SFDC Manager.  If you know of anyone interested, contact Val for the scoop.  Valentin Grasparil | vgrasparil@westmonroepartners.com.

We have a post from guest blogger Nick Pujol and a dreamforce review that made me laugh out loud from Courtney House to go.  Hopefully I can make typepad work. So put on your reading glasses and I hope to see you at King's later today!

xxxooo Suz