When I first decided to make a career change into the film computer animation/VFX industry I wondered how to get in.

There are two main types of people who go into VFX/computer graphics. The artistic types; people who love drawing and doodling to people who have done fine art. They can also just be people who have a good eye for scene composition (be it just photograhy or art in general), these people typically graduate to the 3D world; 3D modelling, texture artists, animators etc. The other type is the more scientific person (this is where I fall into). Somoene who does programming or can easily pickup complex applications and create scripts to solve technical problems. These people in my experience generally go into the 2D world, blue/green screen compositing or TD (Technical Director) work. TDs create scripts or create small programs to for example speed up the rendering of a scene to creating new forumlas to make water look more realistic when it flows into a container.

Working within a Post company as a runner
First was the runner route. Most post production companies like The Mill, MPC, ILM have runners which run messages around the company do odd jobs etc. Now if your young, just come out of school and/or have little money this maybe an option. It allows you to learn the ropes of the company, how shots come into the company go through the companies pipeline and out the other end. Its a way to get a junior position in VFX to start your career. Also you get to know the movers and shakers in the industry which is of particular importance in the film/VFX industry because MANY of the jobs are based on word of month recommendations. But this can take time, there could be other runners ahead of you, or job openings may not appear.

For me being a runner wasn’t for me, i’ve been out in industry too long to go back to the beginning and start again.. so what were the alternatives?

University
Going to university definatly could be an option, you get a grounding in graphics theory etc and you get a degree at the end of the day. Which can be very useful later in life or if you want to move jobs. But for such an artistic industry I felt it just being too academic. Also it can be hit and miss, Rebecca Clay went to university to study Animation and graphics and ended up suing Lincoln University, now from what I’ve been told they have changed their staff and its better but its sometimes hard to know if you are being taught well without knowing what you could be learning and to find this out at the end of 3 years when you can’t get a job is a lot of wasted ime. Is there a way to short cut the process to do it quicker so that you don’t have the potential of wasting all the time? I’ve also already been to university so to wait another 3 years before going back into industry would be annoying to say the least. Finally i’d have to pay for university this time around.

I did computing at University which really set me up to work in the 2D world knowing the theory of programming. I also went to a really good university which really thaught me not just how to program a programming language (or many languages) but best pratice in writing programs (so thanks Kent University!).

Uni was not for me… again anyway, but if could be for some to have the “security” of a degree. So what are the other options? Well there was three (self paced, online & classroom).

Self Paced:
Firstly 100% self paced from books which can be hard unless your very diciplined. Also from what I learned later on, a book can teach you how to use an application. Many books don’t teach you how to use the application to solve common problems with shots or the best way to do something in different circumstances. But at the time didn’t have this tit bit of information. I duly hunted out what software was used in the industry so I could get the training books to start learning. I also looked at getting some gnomon DVDs. So I purchased the Maya manuals and started learning from home (you also don’t have to buy the Maya software because you can use the free personal learning edition).

I learned quite quickly that due to other things going on in my life and with work I just didn’t have the dicipline to learn on my own. The only way to get help working on your own was to post on website forums and hope someone replied with the correct answer which sometimes in some of the more complex modelling was hard to even describe what was wrong.

In house classroom training vs Online:
So I was going to have to find another way. It was either going to be online learning or classroom based learning at a specialist VFX training company.

There are MANY resources for online learning to name but a few:

• Escape Studios – Great Maya Training
• fxPHD – Good 2D training (Compositing with Shake, Flame, Roto etc)
  
• Gnomon Online – Really it looks like a copy of their Gnomon DVDs but just put online, but I haven’t used them
  
• Animation Mentor – Supposed to be very good for animation, including tutor one on ones from what other people who I know have taken a course.
  
• Lynda – More how to use an application rather than the important things you need to know (tricks of the trade etc)
  

There are also the classroom based courses, which can be anything from 3 weeks to a year:

• Escape Studios
• Gnomon
• Various short courses at universities.

I will go into these in a bit more depth later on but basically I sum up the classroom vs online argument as the following:

Ironically my job before going into the VFX world was eLearning for large corporations. So I know a little bit about learning theory. But the basics should be obvious. People learn in different ways, some learn better visually, others verbally or through having things written down in manuals. Knowing how you learn is sometimes hard to find out so a combination of classroom and online (called couse blending) would be perfect to cater for every way people learn. But I’m yet to find a place which does this well in the VFX industry…

In Part 2, more detail on online and classroom based courses and what I ended up doing… it wasn’t going to Animation Mentor but here’s their 2007 student showreel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Escape have just launched a competition to win �10k worth of free 3D/CG VFX training! Its in conjunction with Channel 4 and you can find more information at the 4Talent website. All you have to do is write in 50 words or less why you love 3D animation, what you aspire to do in the future and how the Escape course will help you get there!

They have also announced a 100% free course funded by SkillSet. Not only that you get paid UK minimum wage through the period of the training, you get 4 weeks work experience at a post production house (oh and you get paid for that as well)! I think you’d be stupid not to apply. The course runs from 11th August for 18 weeks and then the 4 weeks in industry. More info can be found on Escapes website

A couple of people have asked me where is the best VFX course to get into the industry. There are a lot of not so good schools and little gems that are hidden away which can really give you a change. But, at the end of the day its really hard to figure out what a good school without doing some homework. It will be very hard to find a school that ticks all the boxes but will give you a good indication if they are any good. Here is what I’ve done in the past to (dare I say it) “analyse” VFX schools.

First you need to decide what discipline you want to specialise in or if you’re not ready to make that decision, a generalist course.

What VFX software should you learn?
There are quite a few packages out their that are used in VFX and post production. Maya, XSI, 3ds max, shake, toxik each used to solve different problems. A lot of architecture companies use 3ds max as do games companies. Maya you see more in film and advert post production. But make sure you pick the software which will get you in the industry you want to get into. Search the net and see which companies you want to work for and what packages they use.

Is the VFX school Accredited?
Is the company an ATC (Accredited Training Center) in the software your training in?. Now this doesn’t give you the guarantee that the course is really good but it at least tells you that they are teaching students in an approved way or is up to a standard of teaching.

Tutors
I think this is one of the most important. You must have a good teacher! Someone who has been there and done it. Who can tell you who all the movers and shakers in the business are and where to send your showreel. A lot of the industry runs on who you know and who you would recommend. So getting a good industry expert teaching you, combined with your work and making a good impression can get them to recommend you for work.

How you relate and interact with the tutor, is also very important as it allows you to learn far more effectively. Its all well and good having an expert in the field but if they can’t teach or communicate well then you are lost. Schools like Escape Studios offer studio tours and learning days so you can get to talk to the tutors before you commit.

What to look for on the course sylabus

You will see a lot of course teaching you “How to use 3ds Max” or “How to model in Maya” etc. See how much of the course is on “Best Practise” or theory. For example in Maya there are 1000s of different ways to get to the same result but which is the best way for different scenarios?

Student Work
Look a the quality of the student work that have previously been on the course. A lot of courses have videos of student work, compare it against other schools. One think you should take into consideration is the length of the course. The student showreels for a 12 week Maya course in one school maybe a totally different quality to a university course or year course in Maya.

Success Stories / Employment after course.

Take a look or ask how many of the students get work after the course and where? Also take a look and see if the training company has a recruitment department which are dedicated to getting students work after the courses.

Online vs classroom
This old chesnut. My opinion you can’t beat a tutor in a classroom. But I’ve written a post on this subject previously that you should take a look.

Showreel Help

Does the course include help creating a showreel? This is what you need to give to companies to advertise yourself to them to get a job. Does the training course offer help creating your showreel? or reviewing it so they can give you pointers? I’ve seen so many good VFX artists not getting jobs all because they hadn’t done their showreel properly.

Any more questions please let me know.

So last week Autodesk acquired Softimage which is interesting… we live in interesting times. What Autodesk wiil do with XSI is another thing. XSI hasn’t been doing too well recently, they have been running more or less independantly from Avid and Avid really only purchased it for its intellectual property and wanted it to continue as it was and .. well have now dumped it because it hasn’t ben performing. Has Autodesk purchased XSI just to take out the competition and move people to Maya and 3DS Max? Or are they looking at doing the same as Avid and take what they need to improve the other products? Its been a bit of a rocky road for Maya to integrate into Autodesk and there have been buggy releases since the merger. Can Autodesk continue to develop three different 3D packages, at somepoint they are bound to converge.

With another 3D company heading to Autodesk will the lack of competition be damaging to the industry? only time will tell. But I am surprised they haven’t been called up against the ‘Monopolies and Mergers Commission’ as they really do have a monopoly now!

There is a lot of discussion on the autodesk website at the moment.

Escape has announced today that they are holding a free XSI course at Escape in London its being delivered by Graham Bell, Softimage Product Specialist, on Friday November 7th � 10:30 am until 3:30pm.

The training is split into morning and afternoon sessions. The morning session will cover deformations and basic ICE-building concepts, including building a simple deformation and controlling the influence of a deformation.

The afternoon session will primarily cover particles: building a simple emission, controlling particles using states and interacting with surfaces.

For more info check out the Free XSI article on the Escape Website.

I’ve just re-registered with FXPHD and they have a compositing course with Ron Brinkmann! Ron Brinkmann is the master of 2D compositing and his book “The Art and Science of Digital Compositing” is the must have book for all compositors. In fact I don’t know a compositor who hasn’t got his book. I studied his book when I first came into compositing. I’m interested to know what the course is like… well off I go to find out!

I received an email a couple of days from someone asking what they should put on their showreel for someone getting into the industry so I thought it would be the perfect time to write about the rules of the showreel

Don’t show everything
I think the most important thing is not to do everything and just target your strengths. I’ve seen many showreels where the VFX artist has been a really good modeller but rubbish at texturing. If your texturing skills arn’t up to scratch then don’t texture your models. Just have a couple of really good models which you can show off. The same goes with compositors especially if you want to get into the industry. If your going to be a junior you will be rotoscoping or maybe camera tracking/motion capture, so make sure you have some really good roto work and really show off your roto skills.

Put the best work at the start of your showreel
Companies get A LOT of showreels and those that watch them if they don’t see anything they like very quickly its just straight onto the next showreel. So put your best work at the start. You don’t need to do fancy DVD menus or fancy intro credits to your showreel they just want to see what you can do and how good you are.

Not too long
A general rule of thumb is don’t make your showreel longer than 5minutes, to be honest 3 minutes should be plenty of time.

People wanting to get into Compositing:
As mentioned before the key things for those wanting to get into compositing to show on your showreel are rotoscoping and camera tracking, as companies use a lot of people to do these jobs. Now they maybe not that glamous to start off with but it gets you through the door. Escape have just launched an online camera tracking course to try and get more people into camera tracking in London due to the upcoming need for artists (a couple of big budget films are going to start doing VFX in March in London).

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more info visit the Escape Camera tracking page.

Its important when showing of your roto skills that you show how good your roto is. That there is no bubbling of the roto splines etc. So overlay the roto splines on top of the object/character you have rotoscoped and provide a good shot breakdown so you can see exactly what you have aproached the work.

People wanting to get into Games:
If your a junior working on a game you won’t be creating characters for games you’ll be creating barrells, trees, walls, all the little items which crop up in games so make sure your show real has examples of these objects.

To be honest I know nothing about RenderMan, the nearest I get to rendering is doing the odd mentalRay render in Maya and thats VERY occational. I was given a sneak peak at the RenderMan Courseware and

Well I’ve now booked my flight to San Francisco for Dreamforce 2012! Which is going to be the biggest cloud computing conferences of all time! Also one of the greatest British businessmen will also be at the event, Richard Branson. From humble beginnings writing a student newspaper at Stowe School he went on to lead over  200 companies in over 30 countries! The Virgin Group has now expanded into leisure, travel, tourism, mobile, broadband, TV, radio, music festivals, finance and health and through Virgin Green Fund they are investing in renewable energy and resource efficiency.

It’s brilliant that Richard Branson is appearing at Dreamforce, one of his key ideals for all his companies is brilliant customer service and to do things differently. Do things that his competitors wouldn’t even dream of doing, pushing the envelope. My local gym was taken over by Virgin recently and you could tell almost immediately that the Staff had been trained up by Virgin. Even before it had been re-branded Virgin, staff were more helpful and driven to give a better service for their customers. It was really interesting to watch the transformation.

So my Virgin Atlantic flight is booked, and I’m going to share my experience on v-flyer.com which was setup for people to share their experiences flying Virgin. If your interesting in learning more about Richard, he’s written a couple of really interesting books about his life. How he managed to end up in a prison cell all the way to fighting British Airways in the courts, fascinating reads!

Just hope I get a chance to meet him at Dreamforce!

I’m just sitting at San Francisco airport reminiscing on Dreamforce this year. I was thinking of all the questions myself and fellow MVPs have been asked over the week and one that sticks out is: “How do I find a Salesforce Partner?“. Its a great question as it can be a bit of a potential minefield. There are so many partners around and more appearing all the time and it can be hard to find the good from the bad. At the moment I do not work for a partner.

1. Do you want the partner to be based locally?

Its becoming easier to work with companies outside of your own country/state, especially with cloud technologies. Salesforce makes it very easy to do implementation work remotely very easily. But be careful, do your homework on the companies. If you are going to do your project with a remote partner it does help if you have a good internal ability to map your business processes that will be implemented in Salesforce. I usually find that Salesforce projects that don’t go as well as expected, are not because of Salesforce, but either by mis-interpreted lacking requirements/business processes, or not realising the amount of work required to clean up data before its uploaded or integrated to Salesforce etc.

2. Checkout the Salesforce partner list for your country/state:

The AppExchange Salesforce site is a great place to start, it allows you to get a list of all partners in your local area. It also allows you to see which partners have been reviewed and what partner level they have. Just start typing your country/location in the search box and select “Consulting Partners”. There are three levels Silver, Gold & Platinum. To get platinum status the partner usually must have at least one Certified Technical Architect on its books but this is still quite a rare certification.

3. How many Certified staff does the partner have?

Ask the partners how many certified staff they have and if the certified staff would be working on your project in the following areas:

• Salesforce certified consultants; If your implementing the Sales Cloud check if they have Certified Sales Consultants and the same for the Service Cloud.
• Salesforce certified developers; There are two types the standard certified developer (click configuration experts) and “Advanced Developer” (code developers), there are not to many advanced certified developers around but always good if they do have some especially if your project will involve coding.
• Salesforce certified technical architects; They are still few and far between (only two in the UK at the moment) but a great sign if a partner has a certified technical architect.

4. Do their client projects match your own?

Ask the partners for at least 3 case studies from their clients on projects that match the work you want done. If the partner has done similar work before this is a great sign they know what they are doing especially if their customer is willing to provide/agree to a case study.

5. How big is the partner?

Whenever I look for any partners I tend to try and find partners that are of a similar size to your company. This is really only personal preference as a much larger company may not care so much for the project as its considered “small fry” or a smaller company just doesn’t have the same resources to put on the project if it suddenly needs it. Saying this even with a big blue chip consultancy ask the same questions. I know one global blue chip consultancy only had 10 Salesforce staff.

Happy partner hunting!

Wednesday we had the first London Salesforce developer meet up for the new year. It was great to catch up with some old timers but also great to see so many newcomers! This was the second time Make Positive have hosted us, and thanks for all the beer and pizza!!

John Stevenson (@jr0cket) kicked off the evening, well after the pizza and beer anyway, giving an overview of developer user group and the Meetup.com group (slides here). But the key takeaways from him were:

• Salesforce is working on creating a developer day in March 2013 to allow up to 200 developers to spend a day learning and developing in the platform.
• John mentioned that eclipse will increase in speed in a release later in the year. [This I'm assuming is due to the work they have been doing on changing the way Salesforce compiles code, so looking forward to that!]
• Checkout Salesforce.StackExchange.com a great resource for getting answers to your Force.com questions.
• The user group is for London Salesforce developers. What do you want to get out of the event? Dojo’s or sessions on certifications?… anything else? let us know what you want.

The First speaker was Robert Ward from Cloud Objectives a cloud implementation parter, he gave an update on the Marketing Cloud and that he believes there is now a great opportunity to integrate marketing solutions.

Our second speaker was Rob Cowell, Senior Analyst from Ticketmaster. He showed us a demo of a cloud mashup he had worked on at Ticketmaster. The problem he was given was to create a system to allow contractors to upload health and safety documentation and answer a multi-part questionnaire. It needed to be externally available, easy to use, ability to track changes and versions and finally it needed to be implemented in a couple of weeks.

He solved the problem using a Heroku and Salesforce mash-up. He went with the Play! Framework with a bit of jQuery. Iris Couch a hosted CouchDB database provider which has version control and supports attachments and finally the Force.com platform.

So how did he stick it all together? Firstly he created a new play! Framework application. Its Java but with all the pain and hassle taken out. If you change your code and hit refresh on the browser, you see the changes immediately with no manual compiling! It also has a great library of components including the Ektorp library for CouchDB (a noSQL document based database), jQuery, jQueryUI and PLUpload (nice little plugin for multiple file uploads and drag and drop). This allowed him to implement the “save for later” functionality before the submission was finally submitted to Salesforce.

But the biggest win: It was totally free. CouchDB is really good value, $5 usage credit is credited for free each month which based on their estimates would be more than enough, and Heroku would only need one web Dyno which is also free. Very compelling. Nice job!!

Look forward to seeing everyone at the next meetup!

Salesforce London Dates for the diary:

30th January 2013: Heroku & Heroku Postgres Office Hours with Craig Kerstiens
30th January 2013: Spring ’13 Release Webinar
9th February 2013: Hack the Tower
26th February 2013: Salesforce.com London User Group
27th February 2013: Salesforce.com London Developer User Group

developer.force.com/calendar

Salesforce user groups are a great place to pick up tips and tricks on how to use Salesforce, apps that you didn’t realise existed or even just to network with other gurus in the industry to get your questions answered.

There are two types of user groups. The normal user groups for Salesforce administrators and users and the developer user groups for people building or wanting to build on the Salesforce platforms.

There is quite a bit going on in the UK Salesforce Community over the next couple of months so here is a run down of the Salesforce user groups in the UK and where to find more information:

Click here to view the embedded video.

London User Group
This is the largest user groups in the country with around 100+ people turning up. Typical structure is a couple talks one being a customer and another being a partner then three breakout sessions to choose from after.
General info: Success Chatter Group
Next event: 15th October – BlueFin, London, SE1

London Developer User Group
There are a couple of different events we do from regular meetings with discussions to hands on training getting people into the Force.com platform and collaborate code hacking events.
General Info: London Salesforce Developers Meetup Page
Next event: 23rd Oct – Make Positive

London Non-Profit User Group
This user group is typically a half day event and is great for Non-profit users, consultants and partners to come together and discuss topics specific to Non-profits.
General Info: Success Chatter Group
Next user group meeting: 11th Oct

Bristol ForceWest User Group
Based in Bristol this user group is run by Salesforce partner Desynit.
Discussion: Success Chatter Group
More info: www.forcewest.com
Next user group meeting: 26th Sept

Bristol Salesforce Platform Developer user group
General info: Meetup group
Next user group meeting: 6th Nov

North West User Group
This is a new user group that is starting up in Manchester.
More info: Success Chatter Group
Next user group meeting: 26th Sept

Scotland User Group
Checkout the Success chatter group for more information.

The genius bar is one of the great places at Dreamforce to get help on more or less any Salesforce product. Experts will be on hand to help you out and this year its in the Hilton Hotel slap in the middle of the Community Zone next to the Foundation Zone. I’ll be there on Tuesday 2pm to 4pm and Thursday 9am to 2pm.

Also be sure to checkout my Dreamforce Sessions.

I’m speaking all about the Spring 14 Release at the Non Profit Salesforce User Group on 27th March. At the last time of checking there are only 5 tickets left, so if you want to come, book now.

So I’ve digested the Salesforce Spring 14 release notes and I was going to give a list of my highlights; being able to mass update permission sets, file usage being increased to 2GB per user, having contact email addresses changed when you refresh a sandbox to stop apps accidentally emailing your customers. But for me the biggest changes are in Visual Workflow. Ok, most of the features are pilot features, but it really shows that Salesforce is serious about visual process development. I can’t tell you how hugely MASSIVE this really is.

Why so massive? One thing and one thing only: “More clicks, Less Code”. Its pushing the code away and replacing with declarative logic! giving more power to the users not developers and Visual Workflow is where it’s all happening. I used to work for Ciboodle, a process driven CRM so having the ability to create processes into Salesforce without the need for code BRILLIANT!

For those who don’t know Salesforce Flow checkout Salesforce Visual Workflow getting started on ButtonClickAdmin.

Up to now Visual Workflow has needed user interaction to progress through a Visual Workflow. For example asking the user to type something in, searching Salesforce, showing the results and then maybe updating something else. But now you don’t need this user interaction. A Visual Workflow can be fired directly off a standard Salesforce Workflow rule. This means that you could design a Workflow to update records previously inaccessible by a regular field update workflow rule and more complex business logic can be developed in clicks in Visual Workflow rather than resorting to Apex development. I’m looking forward to seeing how this matures over the coming releases.

There have been several blogs saying why you should go to Dreamforce. But coming from the UK adding flight, ESTA costs etc can get quite a lot. I’ve been going to Dreamforce now for the past 3 years and as a freelancer spending the money to get to Dreamforce was no easy pill to swallow the first time I did it.

• Flight (current lowest London return fare) – £502
• Dreamforce Ticket about – £480 to £790
• Accommodation – Ranges £400-£900
• Food (you get lunch at Dreamforce) – £150
• Other (transfers, ESTA Visa etc) – £100
• TOTAL: £1832*

* see tips below to see how you can reduce this!

So is it worth it? Here is value comparison:

• Salesforce Certification Exams; Take your exam at Salesforce and you
  Saving: £61 per exam
• Training; With over 1000 sessions over in multiple different streams ( developer, admin, architect) in a number of different formats (theatre sessions, hands on training with laptops provided, seminars, small group discussions.
  Saving: £2300 (average cost of a 4 day professional technical course in London)
• Materials & Manuals; A load of free workbooks, manuals and guides that you can pickup.
  Saving: At least £20
• 1 to 1 Developer code reviews; Have an issue with your code? just want an expert to look at the architecture of your project, just sign up for a code review and get them
  Saving: £100 (based on the average daily rate for an Apex Developer in London)
• Cheaper Salesforce Training; There are training courses before DF starts which are shorter more condenses courses which are cheaper than the longer courses, you also get your own laptop.
  Saving: £2162
• Bruno Mars gig ticket; Ok Bruno Mars may not be everyone’s cup of tea the gig maybe not your
  Saving: £180 (based on the price of tickets currently being sold on the internet for his sold out gigs)
• Lunch; Lunch is included in your ticket for all 4 days.
  Saving: £40
• Collaboration with like mind individuals; So many experts from the MVPs to other customers that you can collaborate with. This is INVALUABLE!! This is where I get the biggest benefit! You could know the platform inside out and backwards but there are so many different ways to skin the can you can really find new ideas and “quick fixes” that solve difficult business problems.
  Priceless

Rough Value: £4863

Ok, its very subjective and still 100 other things I’ve missed, the sound stages playing live music throughout the week, the expert booths to answer any questions you like, the campground where you can speak to individual product experts, the partners… but believe me its worth it!

*Tips for reducing the price:

Dreamforce Ticket
The earlier you book the cheaper the ticket, also never get it at face value. Partners get offer codes to get cheaper tickets. Search the net for discount codes and the amounts off can vary. Also talk to your Account Executive as they may be able to get you a discount to especially if you are a Non-Profit!

But a way to get it FREE is to do a talk. Salesforce opens up at the beginning of the year a call for entries to do talks. These can be Developer talks or Admin talks and if you get selected you get a free entry with anyone else that is on the talk with you.

You can get a ticket for $899 using the developer discount code: D14DVLPR right now!

Accommodation
Rates go high for Dreamforce. With 100,000 people hitting the city it can be a race for hotel. Salesforce block books many of the main hotels in San Fran so check the price when you are booking your Dreamforce ticket before checking hotels yourself but it can be a lot cheaper looking a bit further afield. A good spot can be near the airport, with good transport links straight into the city.

An alternative is dive to the success portal and look for people willing to flat share.

Flight
To be honest there is not much I can say about this. Either get chummy with cabin crew and get mates rates or Book early! I do now try to save as main airpoints/air miles as I can during the year so that I can use them with my flight.

One question that came up at a user group recently was how on earth do you keep up on the ever changing Salesforce. One way I do it is by listening to podcasts on Salesforce. There are now quite a few good ones out there. If anyone knows of anymore please let me know!

Code Coverage Podcast
www.codecoverage.org
A great developer podcast run by two great MVPs Steven Herod & Matt Lacey. This podcast has had a load of great developers talking about how they use Salesforce. Reid Carlberg, Andrew Fawcett, Keir Bowden, Josh Birk to name just a few.

Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Stitcher
Subscribe to RSS

ButtonClick Admin Podcast
www.buttonclickadmin.com
Run by the great admin guru of them all Mike Gerholdt. He started off running the site while he was a Salesforce MVP but it became so successful he joined Salesforce and is now a Salesforce Admin Evangelist and the site is run by him at Salesforce. Focused more around Salesforce Admin this is a great podcast to keep up to date on the declarative side of Salesforce but have some great guest speakers as well as some great blog posts.

Subscribe on iTunes

CloudFocus
http://www.arkusinc.com/cloudfocus-weekly
Have to admit I haven’t listened to them for a while but CloudFocus are now just past their 200th episode!! Congrats guys!! They are good a giving out release information and general news.

Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Stitcher
Direct Download

The Cloudlife Podcast
http://www.desynit.com/category/blog-article/cloudlife-podcast/
This podcast is run by the guys at Desynet Matt Morris and Shaun Holmes and they blog quite a bit on the events that are happening and the Salesforce UK community as well as features/new releases as well as getting quite a few guest speakers on the show.

Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on RSS

www.CertStudyGroup.com

One of the reasons that I’m active in both the admin & developer worlds is really to make sure I keep up to date with the declarative side of Salesforce. I remember I had a stretch of about a year when I just developing Apex, VisualForce Javascript etc.. I remember designing a solution in code and then suddenly realised that it could have been done easily declaratively (a common mistake for Salesforce code developers). For me this was my wake up call to continually keep engaged in the declarative side of Salesforce.

Salesforce Certification Study Group (www.certstudygroup.com)
The group was setup by the amazing Deepa Patel (@HalakConsulting) a fellow Salesforce MVP. The group helps people get through their Salesforce exams by weekly 1.5hr webinars each week for around 15 weeks. Each week students get homework and get their questions answered with the aim of taking the exam at the end of the 15 weeks.

I’m going to be session leader for the EMEA based Admin study group which starts with an introduction talk on the 10th Feb. But one word of warning. We can only accommodate a certain number of people so you need to be committed to every session! If your interested in attending or want to learn more please sign up / ask me questions or checkout the www.certstudygroup.com website.

When: 10th February 2015
Time: 6.30pm GMT
Sign up: www.radnip.com/adm201

And it all started from a Tweet this morning:

Learn’t something today… anyone know what the 4 character of #Salesforce ID represents? EG 003 = Contact but whats the next character?

— Francis Pindar (@radnip) January 26, 2015

But it got me thinking. But first for a bit of background:

Sometimes when you are developing in Salesforce you need to identify what object a record relates too. You can do this quite simply by looking at the first three values of the record Id. For example: 001g000000PM12O you know this is an Account record because the first three characters are 001 which is the identifier for the standard Account object in Salesforce. Salesforce a handy page “Standard field Record ID Prefix Decoder” to identify these. But do you know what the 4th character is used for?

Whats the 4th character in a Salesforce record ID?
Well the 4th character in the record id is the server id. This identifies the server on which the record has been created. So in my account id example above you will see the 4th character is a g (001g000000PM12O). The character g represents instance CS17, D = NA1 and so on…

So that peaked my interest as only having one character to determine the instance essentially means you have a maximum of 62 possible combinations:

0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

and it JUST happens that currently there are 61 instances live on trust.salesforce.com… plus the pre-release org means 62 current instances, can anyone see an issue here?

Has Salesforce now hit a architectural limit on the number of instances it can create?

Does this mean that our 15 digit IDs are about to increase to 16? 18 digit ids to 19 etc…?

But actually locking a record down to an instance/server may have made a little bit of sense when Salesforce was first conceived (to easily route traffic to the correct servers), but not so much now. In fact there are certain operations that break this. If you create a new sandbox the id’s are preserved from your production organisation (except the sandbox’s new org id). So actually you can have records with different server id’s to the instance the org is running on.

Salesforce could break the reliance of the 4th character being tied to an instance. But there could be a potential fly in the ointment. What customer code currently relies on it?. For example Salesforce Workbench, has code that references the server id’s, and Salesforce StackExchange has questions answering giving this as the example so people are using it.

In conclusion I doubt it will be a big issue. The great thing about cloud computing is Salesforce can be beavering away under the covers to re-architect parts of Salesforce to fix these architectural challenges and we are completely oblivious to them. Yes some customers will be impacted (maybe) when Salesforce removes the reliance on the 4th character being a server id. On the plus side it increases the id pool for everyone else, but that does beg another question but thats for another time

I leave with a warm fuzzy feeling that even the big companies can get it wrong and have to deal with legacy architectural designs, sometimes

Learning any development platform online is always a bit haphazard in my experience. The quality of the content, it being up to date, how to test or validate your learning. “Nothing is better than classroom training” and in some ways I agree… but maybe this is changing…

But first I’m going to evaluate trailhead using the Kirkpatrick model to make things more interesting and remind myself of the Kirkpatrick model, and see how it can be incorporated in assessing a students learning

For those who don’t know the Kirkpatrick model was created by Professor Donald Kirkpatrick back in 1959 to come up with a way to evaluate learning outcomes. It was subsequently updated in 1975 & 1994 and that was when he published his famous work “Evaluating Training Programs”. It consists of four levels but I’m going to evaluate based on the first level my “Reaction”.

Reaction:
This level measures the reaction of the trainees being trained. It could be a happy or smily face that they submit at the end of the training or something more detailed. Its important to find out from the trainees so you can continually improve the content and delivery of it.

My Trailhead Reaction:
Over all I think it is a really great way to learn.

Was it worth my time?
Totally, Even if you feel like you know Salesforce completely I’m sure you will find at least one tit-bit of information that you didn’t know previously.

What as the biggest Strengths & Weaknesses?
What I feel trailhead does brilliantly is its ability to verify you work that you have done. As part of the training you set up your own development org. This is essentially a full salesforce standard system just for you to play around in. Then as you work through the questions on trailhead you build everything in your org. Then when you get to the end of the question trailhead checks how you have built your answer in your org and tells you what you have got wrong or what you have got right.

Its like having an AI tutor sitting on your shoulder.

Automatic checking of your work is very impressive and this alone out weighs the weaknesses. So my weaknesses are minor and simple to fix, they revolve round the questions asked which I didn’t 100% agree with (but as of writing I haven’t completed all the modules). One particular question was around Sandboxes and how you would stop protected data appearing in the sandbox, there were two answers. One said delete the protected data after you create the sandbox the other was to use the sandbox templates to not include the objects that have personal data in them. The “correct” answer was to use the templates. But this would generally not be feasible in the real world, accounts & contacts generally hold the most protected data and they generally have so many dependancies to other objects you just can’t exclude them.

Did the training accommodate my learning style?
Different people have different styles. I’m a lot more a visual & audible learner than either a written word or Kinesthetic learner. Generally Trailhead does a really good job at including videos with the tutorials but I would like to see more.

Overall check it out, its a great way to Learn Salesforce and I’ve been using it as part of my study group and the participants have loved it and its really helped them prep for their Salesforce Admin Certification.

So it started from a tweet (it’s amazing how many of my talks and blog posts do) which got me thinking …

@radnip @jenwlee @cloudysan @TheChrisDuarte @rakeshistom I've thought of it, how cool but you have to really be an expert in SF, right?

— Jennifer Lee (@jenwlee) May 28, 2015

Well… Yes but no. It’s only part of it. I’m now in my 5th year of being a Salesforce MVP and it got me thinking about how much I actually knew when I became an MVP. Things have changed a lot since then.

I actually learn’t Salesforce from the community. At the time there was classroom training, Salesforce help (joy!) or a collection of workbooks and not a lot much else and Salesforce Trailhead? well if only! I wanted to learn salesforce fast without paying out for training. Salesforce had an older version of what is now the Salesforce Success Community and Salesforce Developer Discussion Boards and I came to the conclusion that if other users had problems or questions about Salesforce, I would probably a have the same questions.

So I started answering questions. Questions I had no idea how to answer. But I would dig around in the Salesforce help and play in my free dev org until I found the answer and posted it back to the community.

I have to admit I may have got a little obsessed…

Some people say I still am…

I was answering questions, learning the platform and getting to know these other equally obsessed people, so I carried on and not long after I became an MVP.

I was on a monthly call that was arranged by a member of Salesforce. I suggested once that they maybe move the call to after work or in the evening. It would be easier to join as you don’t get caught up with ‘normal work’. The reply was ‘Sorry I have a strict work life balance’. Then it struck me. Wow they think this is work? The second being blimey maybe I am obsessed after all

I don’t think it’s possible to be an expert in Salesforce. It’s too big for one thing. Also salesforce keep pulling the rug from under you by doing 3 releases a year! so it makes it harder to keep up. For us old timers I think it’s harder still because the things you throught you couldnt do a year ago you can now… Argh! Salesforce stop being so… driven to improve!

A couple of weeks ago I was at the MVP Summit where MVPs from all over the world come to San Fran on Salesforce’s dime. Its hard to verbalise what the characteristics of an MVP is, but everyone has a little glint in their eye. A passion for Salesforce & talking about it, a passion to collaborate and ask and answer each others questions. I wouldn’t say expert came into it that much. Everyone have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas of Salesforce.

Erica (I have to say) is a bit of a genius in harnessing and focusing this passion (see this video about the Salesforce community she did). For example we were all given a GoPro at the summit (among other things). So I created a video as thanks:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Its a great community… find a niche and learn, teach, collaborate and answer peoples questions all around it or setup/join a user group. It will be worth it!