The Permissioner - Episode #86 - 04/11/2012

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 86th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the second week of April 2012. The Permissioner. Dun dun dun. CloudFulks, we can spell to my Arkus! You're Cloud Computing experts! And makers of The Permissioner. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me for the 86th time is the co-host and head of Permissioning, Justin Edelstein. Justin, how are you doing?

Justin Edelstein: I'm doing just well. Thank you. We didn't have this big of a... Party for compliance for chatter, did we? I just snuck that one in. And then we have some Facebook news, we have some Mac news, Thank you. Yeah, talk about it, gotta keep the anticipation. Alright, I'm gonna tell you right before you pick this, I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna pick next week. Okay.

Jason Atwood: I'm gonna let the cat out of the bag. Alright, let's go. That's not gonna be good for our audience, they wouldn't want to tune in next week. which is good for all you Salesforce people, is actually a blog post entitled five Salesforce Outlook sync implementation considerations. Say that five times fast, then call me in the morning. You couldn't. This came about from the Blogmaster. Actually, that's that we like to call you who sets the agenda for the blog as in all partners of Arkus Actually all employees of Arkus at this point everybody gets in on the blogging but it was my turn this week and I have been doing a lot a lot of implementations where outlook Synchronization was one of the gotta haves. Yep. Must-dos. That's why I signed it to you. And in doing so, I've learned a lot.

Justin Edelstein: Another reason why I signed it to you.

Jason Atwood: And so that's, I wrote a blog post basically just talking about what you need to consider. It is not the how do you do it, although I give a couple hints. I'm because that would be a long blog post, but it's basically here's what you should be thinking about when you're doing some some Outlook

Justin Edelstein: Consideration I think your first consideration is is probably one that gets overlooked at the very onset But is a very important one which is I'll just go into not to go through all five of them, but I think the first one's very important is knowing your addition knowing knowing what you're gonna choose knowing what Platform you're sitting on meaning you know your your operating system and your version of Outlook that you're actually using Very important to pick the right Salesforce sync solution because as we know there are two of them for the time being that's right there's the old plug-in which we all know and Love and then there's another word for love. There's another word for love, but I'm gonna keep that out of this kind of service that's running in the background that I much prefer, I have a lot more control over as a system administrator can set the configuration for the user inside the Salesforce interface don't have to make them do a whole lot of Individual choices for what they want to sync, but again, it doesn't work with all system setups Like if we were at our old mega corp We wouldn't...

04:21 Jason Atwood: 200th anniversary of the Megacorp. Really? This year. No kidding. Yep. So go look that up.

Justin Edelstein: We couldn't use the new Salesforce for Outlook because we were on some old stuff So, you know, you got to keep that in mind and know the limitations. No know what you're getting into before you you even start defining what you want to do, know which one you're going to use. For me that was like an eye-opener like, oh I kind of don't even think about it. I ask the questions and I say what version of Outlook you're on and then I just make sure they can use the new one.

Jason Atwood: Right, yeah, because the odd people can't use the new one and they have to use the little plug-in and... Up until very recently, the plugin had, I think the plugin might have one more feature than the past few things. It has some things in there.

Justin Edelstein: Recently, I think in the spring release of the new Salesforce for Outlook, they finally added the ability to add cases cases, which I think was like the last outlier,

Jason Atwood: If I remember correctly. It was tasks and cases where the two last outliers and they've added those. So anyway, couple other things, but I'll just read all the topics and then you can go read them, but like what to sync, extend or replace outlook, picking sync, and then your plan of attack at the end, which I really talk about like, because it gets down to how do you get your data in there, because usually it's a lot of duplicates, so. Anyway, that's at blog.org sync.com. Please hit us up with a comment at the end if you like what you read. We will respond so that you can use a discuss, you can sign in with any of your social places.

Justin Edelstein: So you can sign in with Twitter or Facebook, whatever. but here's what I'm gonna discuss. Good to just say we had some good conversations going on on the previous blog post about the cross-object workflow rules Right and we were engaged. Yeah, we are there. We are part of this. We are part of the social enterprise

Jason Atwood: We make time to do that Alright, so next up Is a little bit of news, although I'm not really sure how this is news, but I guess it is news It's kind of in a slow cloud week. We also did a podcast last Did it on Friday and Friday so it's earlier in the week this week It's Wednesday afternoon, so we really maybe a big stuff will happen tomorrow Maybe but the stuff that happened last week was Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars That's a lot of billion. That's a lot of dollars.

Justin Edelstein: I will say billion dollars a billion dollars A piece of software that took initially eight weeks to write.

Jason Atwood: And yeah, has some filters and you can share photos. Pretty neat. Why couldn't Facebook literally build that in maybe seven minutes? They already have an app that sits on your device that takes photos. Yeah,

Justin Edelstein: I don't know why they couldn't just put the little filters on it. Buy some filters. i'll throw it on facebook and people will see it or i'll guess what i'll i'll i message it to you or whatever. but i know some, who are on inst, who just love it, they it it it's. they they really like the whole social aspect of the photos and it's not even so much about the cool filtering because there's a million of those apps out there right now. it's more the way that you interact with people in it, and i think that's facebook Facebook's thing, right? If you're gonna encroach on people interacting with other people on the internet We will buy you. By the way, we own the way people talk to other people on the internet. Jason Atwood Enterprises, LLC.

08:13 Justin Edelstein: Just Bill. Really? Yes on the Daily Show.

Jason Atwood: On the Daily Show. Very funny.

Justin Edelstein: He's always very funny. He's always funny. I haven't watched the Daily Show in so long, I really should. I watched it. With the presidential election and things, it's fun to watch him diagnose those things.

Jason Atwood: I watched it on Hulu Plus, I love it on Hulu Plus. Ah, Roku box. Yes. And then, oh, I just figured out you. But I thought the one thing, the stat that came up is they're paying $33 per user. So this, so whatever that,

Justin Edelstein: It's, yeah, 300 million users, is that right? So Facebook is paying that amount of money per user. Per user. And they're not even unique, because literally, they're unlikely they're already Facebook users. I will, I will,, I will, I will, 96, 98 percent. Because if you're an Instagram user, you're not on Facebook, like, you're in this. I've never used Instagram, it's likely.

Jason Atwood: So did you sign up with your Facebook account?- One of my others. I'm sure that that's how you do it, right? So just as a side note, let's spin this back to Salesforce. Yeah, spin it. Instagram is one of the glared things you can connect up in clout. Oh. you were trying to get close to the I just don't, it's like I see the funny picture and I'm like, oh, I want to take a picture of that, but I'm like, yeah, I can't do that. So I don't because I'm more of, I need an Instagram,

Justin Edelstein: Instagram, super Instagram. I don't, I don't do that. My girlfriend is like that, but she doesn't pull out her, she... She carries around cameras. She pulls out her camera and takes a picture of it. Uploads it to Picasa or Flickr.

Jason Atwood: So anyway, kind of interesting. I think this is part of the big merger in 2012. We're going to see big merger after big merger after big

Justin Edelstein: It's a chunk of the timeline of when iPhone apps, you know,

11:18 Jason Atwood: I think So, you know, it's kind of interesting because and Mac boxes don't come up that much. And as the Mac communities that are too MacBooks sit toe to toe here, they don't really, you know, they don't really do a little bit of research. I don't get infected by virus. If I got three or four viruses, or I would probably get it, but I don't. I used to have it on on my windows.,

Justin Edelstein: That stuff. Yeah. So. They always pop things up and like ask you to do things.

Jason Atwood: And I didn't like update every day. Interesting thing is when a virus comes out, the virus is always, you know, it's just associated to the thing. So it's always like. Mac OS has a virus and and I just what I wanted to bring up on the podcast is kind of like yeah It's a macro. It Based on a flaw in the Java code, you know in this Java JVM that's on so while there An boy alert. Yes, the prospective alert. So, you know, be careful what you say when you say there's a there's a Mac OS virus Yeah, there's a Mac OS virus, but whatever actually I have not checked even see if I'm infected. I'm infected I don't even care. How do you even do that? Yeah, there's, that's the other thing. To check to see if you're infected, you know what they tell you to do?

Jason Atwood: Go download some apps. And I'm like, you know, flash, flash checker dot whatever. And I'm like, no, because that seems to me that if I were a virus, yeah, that's where I'd put my virus. I'd put my viruses in the virus.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, that's like when you go to like speed test dot net and it's like, faster browser download Google Chrome. Yeah. And it's, it looks like you're starting the test, but you're not, you're downloading Thanks for watching! Something else don't do that.

Jason Atwood: So anyway interesting interesting thing again, not a lot of cloud news. there is one big bit. We have one big news, which again, you pointed out. so this is a little a little bit of a Homerism or a, but I think it's interesting for our Salesforce community. So a while back, back in dream forest, Arkus, the company that you and I work for. Released an app called Compliance for Chatter. And it's a... an app to log can Chatter posts and make them so you can report on them and you can log them and if anybody deletes You know, they don't delete the underlying object has copied to it's free It's on the Mac the on the Mac exchange on the app exchange go find it But at Dreamforce, yes, we were actually talking you were talking at Dreamforce in a permission sets.

Justin Edelstein: I heart permission sets. Yes.

Jason Atwood: A breakout session. A breakout session, which was about the new, at that point, the coming feature, or I guess it was in beta but not released yet.

14:20 Justin Edelstein: It was piloted. I think it was, mmm. It was pilot, but it was coming in that release right after Dreamforce. So it was in Sandbox's potential.

Jason Atwood: Why don't you talk a little bit about what permission sets are?

Justin Edelstein: Sure. So permission sets are abstracted layers of permissions that you can grant to individual users of Salesforce. So they're object level permissions. and such as the ability to edit an account or read contacts or delete leads or things like that. And also system permissions like API enabled or solutions manager, things of that nature. Those little check boxes on a profile. But Justin,

Jason Atwood: I'm a Salesforce admin. I've been one for, I don't know, a million years. I could do that all in profiles.

Justin Edelstein: You absolutely can and you're absolutely 100% correct. But the question comes when, you know, there's two or good use cases for permission sets, one of them very simple. You have a user that out of nowhere needs the ability to edit accounts. Everything else about them should be absolutely the same as it always was, except they should be able to edit accounts. and their profile says they cannot edit accounts and there's like 34 other people in that same profile. So if you change it on the profile for the one user, the rest of those 33 users have to also now be able to edit accounts and that wasn't the intended purpose. You could clone the profile because you want it to be exactly the same except for that one little change, but now you've created a whole new profile that you have to administer.

Justin Edelstein: For one user, which doesn't scale very well. You could create something called a permission set, and the permission set includes one or many individual permissions, such as edit accounts, and then assign that permission set to user. So you're literally getting that much more granular with the permissions that you're granting to a user at that given point. So I now have three layers of this permissioning.

Jason Atwood: I now have this the role hierarchy which is talking about... Sort of separate. But for Salesforce users we talk about role hierarchy as a way of showing invisibility to data. We then have profiles, which I can set across many users. And then now, now I can have these things called permission sets, which I can build and assign to one or many users at will and give them very granular, one-off permission.

Justin Edelstein: And they're meant to be additive, so they add to what the user's profile already allows them to do. So you don't take away permission sets. You don't take away with permission sets, you add, you give. So you give the ability to edit accounts when their profile would say you can't edit accounts. So that's like one use case, right? The one user who raises their hand one day and says, I need to edit accounts and their manager says, yeah, they have to, they have to edit accounts. A couple other use cases that have come up that are really, really interesting. When you want to... do a new roll out of a pilot application, or there's a new object that you've created that is related to an account. Maybe let's just call it invoices, just for argument's sake.

17:45 Justin Edelstein: And you have this new object called invoices and you wanna roll it out to the finance department over time, but you want one or two of the finance department's power users to take it for a test drive. So you could create a permission set called finance object permissions and give it, you They'll be the only users who can see this new object and interact with it and give you feedback as an administrator. you can pilot new functionality using permission sets without having to clone profiles, give it new permissions. Remember when you want to roll it out for real to then migrate those users back to their old profiles and then change it, you know, there's a lot of administration that goes along with piloting an application in a production environment. Permission sets allow you to do it rather easily by just giving the permissions to the new functions to The three or four or ten or twenty users who you want to pilot new stuff Yeah, and they're definitely used more I mean the bigger your org the more

Jason Atwood: You're gonna want to need you're gonna need to use permission set so We've run into orgs with 60 70 80 profiles. Yeah, that's a you know with hundreds or thousands of users That's a problems.

Justin Edelstein: And, not the last, but another really good use case for permission is when somebody goes on leave. You know somebody somebody has a specific job that they do Inside the Oregon and they go on leave right they they You know they go on maternity leave or they go take a sabbatical or something and somebody else has to take over their job You don't want to change their profile to that other person's profile because you don't want to change their whole world. You just want to give them a few added permissions because that person is responsible. You know, merging contacts or like deleting things or doing something specific. So you just create a permission set for them for the time being when the person goes on leave. give the new person with the new responsibilities, that permission set, and then when the other person comes back, you just take it away.

Justin Edelstein: But you didn't change their profile, you didn't do anything, you just created a permission set, assigned it, and then took it away.

Jason Atwood: So this all sounds wonderful, you were talking about this, and basically, I think what came up was that you know when you get into assigning multiple permissions, the ability to assign multiple permissions to multiple users became kind of difficult. Yeah,

21:03 Justin Edelstein: There was no really good admin screen for... to take a permission set or four permission sets and assign it out to more than one user. To assign a permission set in a standard interface, you navigate to a user record, which you either go through the customized screen and go to users and then find their user, you search for them, you click their name, you land on their chatter profile, then you click the user detail link. So already you've clicked a few times. Right. And there's a related list for permission sets where you click edit and then you find the permission sets that you want to assign to them you Sort of like use that side arrow that multi select picker and then hit save so you've gone through like three or four five steps To assign one or many permission sets to one If you want to roll that to 10 users, you have to do that times 10.

Justin Edelstein: If you want to do that to 40 users, you have to do that times 40.

Jason Atwood: So it just keeps going. So how much would you pay for a tool that would allow you to assign multiple permissions to multiple users?

Justin Edelstein: I'd pay $0. Right.

Jason Atwood: So therein lies the fact we at Arkus decided actually, speared on by the product manager of permissions, we can give them, or the permission sets, you can give a shout out. Adam Torman. Adam Torman. you know, we basically said, why don't we build a utility to help do this process? A, we happen to do a lot of work with permission sets because we have an expert. in the house, aka you. And B, we like to build stuff that's kind of unique and kind of helps out in the community. and again, you, we're not into building pay apps yet, or probably ever, but yet. And so we built this and it's called the Permissioner. It went live yesterday. And it is an application that allows you to do exactly what it is. it. What I like to say it is simple elegance because it does one thing and does it very well.

Jason Atwood: It's a scalpel, not a utility net. That's right. It's a scalpel. So it's on the app exchange now and it's called the permissioner and the tagline is permission sets made easy. There you go. And it's got a real cool logo.

Justin Edelstein: So I want to hear about your thoughts about the logo.

Jason Atwood: The permissioner logo. So headed out. That is our joint pick of the week. the permissioner. It is free, you can take it for test drive, you can't, we do not have a video. We did a video for compliance for Shatter,

Justin Edelstein: But we didn't do a video for this. Didn't do a video for this. This is, you know, install it in your sandbox and play with it. If you are, if you are, I'll say two things. Number one, if you're not using permission sets at this point in time. you're missing out because it is the future of where permissions are going within Salesforce so you're gonna want to familiarize yourself with permission sets because it really is gonna be the future of where these permissions are going you know in with pro as far as like profile type permissions and secondly you know you may as well get used to it and install a free app in your sandbox and you know give it a shot it's totally worth it. That's nice. For anyone who likes to play around with free stuff.

24:25 Jason Atwood: If you take it for a test drive we actually have an org,

Justin Edelstein: I think it's live now. There's a test drive board so you can just take a test drive from the app. It has a few permission sets in it that you can play around with. get yourself People when they are writing app exchange products will start if they're Using their noggin to include permission sets within their application to use their application and you will need Permissioner

Jason Atwood: To assign that right on all these all right so go ahead is free It's our gift back to the world of Salesforce Adam. So now let's get to our actual crowd focus app picks of the week. I will have you go first What is your pick of the week?

Justin Edelstein: Alright, so my pick of the week involves a little story So I'm gonna tell it right now. So I've been using seamless web, which is now seamless calm for a long while to order food. I used, it's an online menu service that is in a bunch of cities across the country, but we're here in New York. So you get to see menus, you get prices, whatever you pick what you want, you put it into your little cart, you hit go, it takes a credit card, it pays for it. It shows up at your door 30 minutes later. I love it. I never have to call ever again to order food. I just go online, takes my credit card, beautiful.

Jason Atwood: So, go on. By the way, you've been using Seamless forever.

Justin Edelstein: You've been telling me about it forever. I've yet to use it. I want to use it. I only order out. It's getting better and better where we live. In our neighborhood. In our neighborhood. When I first moved to our neighborhood, a little over a year ago. Yes, we lived in the same neighborhood. A little over a year ago, there were like... eight restaurants on it. Now there's like 20 to 30. It's getting there, it really is. But in the city, we're in Times Square. I order lunch all the time. I mean, there's hundreds of restaurants on there and that delivered at Times Square. I mean, everyone will. So, but the other day, speaking of our MacBooks here, I had to put my MacBook, I had to give it,, I had to give it to the genius bar.

Justin Edelstein: Okay, I I needed to give it to them because I needed a new logic board awesome, whatever so I was sitting in in the apartment without a computer and I wanted to order some food So I downloaded the seamless app to my iPhone and it used my location and it actually since I have an account it pulled for my recent my my addresses that were stored in there and With like four clicks on my iPhone. I ordered dinner Paid for it ordered it came to the apartment 30 minutes later. It was fantastic good experience Seamless is great, great website, really good iPhone, iPad app. I recommend it highly for those who order out quite a bit and want to take the pain out of calling up and needing to have the menu. Like you don't need the menu anymore.

27:57 Justin Edelstein: It's there. You just click what you want. Like I won't order from a place that's not on Seamless anymore because I don't feel like calling them. It's really weird. Well, and I think that's,

Jason Atwood: As someone who's lived in New York for most of my life, and we do order out a couple times a week, maybe once or twice a week, which would be a couple, and have for many, many years. In my household, the deal is that I pay, she orders. Because I don't like ordering. No, it's a pain. It's a pain.

Justin Edelstein: And sometimes you're talking to people who don't speak so great English. They put you on hold. Put you on hold. You got to give them the credit card number because you don't have cash. That's a whole big thing.

Jason Atwood: You have an old menu. So when you say I want the number 14, instead of chicken fried rice, you get chicken fried pork. No good. No good. So yeah, it's funny because I love the concept.

Justin Edelstein: I have yet to do it I gotta try it because the neighborhoods growing and there's a lot more restaurants on there these days Just went and picked I just went

Jason Atwood: And checked it out and there are some of your favorites are on there too Some of my favorites Although again the one that we order the one that we order from all the time is still not here

Justin Edelstein: So but till it gets but you can go in there. I've done this to other restaurants and tell them yeah I'd be like why aren't you on seamless? And then you just tell them about it and they're on.

Jason Atwood: They just say, oh that's easy, I'll do that. So seamless for the iOS, of course you can just use the website if you want. Yeah, seamless.com. Zero dollars free. Free, free, free.

Justin Edelstein: Awesome service. It doesn't cost you any more money. No. So they make a cut. They must make a cut. They must take a cut out of the delivery service or something. I don't know if they're... See, I don't know if... Because sometimes it comes in a seamless bag and sometimes it doesn't. So I don't know if like they're the delivery service and they charge back the restaurant for that or how they do it. They must take a cut. Sometimes they have deals like 15% off because you're ordering through seamless. They wouldn't get elsewhere. That's very cool. And you just add your tip and away you go. Yep. My pick is the most cloudiest of all the app picks ever. I'm picking my television next week. I'm gonna pick my record player next week. Alright, because I was gonna say you should have picked Roku next week, but now you've blown it.

Justin Edelstein: I'm already taken away from you.

Jason Atwood: Because I was using this the other day. I was using this 45 minutes ago. A tool that we both have because the holiday spirits gave us all one. And. And... It's just something that I've been enjoying and I want to spread the love.

Justin Edelstein: The love for this product should be spread without further further ado. What is it is called the Jambox.

Jason Atwood: So basically ever since the iPhone, iPad, all these things, what you've gotten is I have this device that has songs or music or whatever on it, but a crappy speaker. Right, so my iPad is great, but it's basically as a. It's not a good speaker to sit and listen to music or to have a conference call or to whatever. And the one on the phone is still not good. So what I went looking for was one that had basically they have this new category called these portable Bluetooth speakers. There's lots of them. There are about four or five of these. I went and read all the views. The one I landed on was the Jambox by Jawbone, the makers of the Jawbone... The Bluetooth. The Bluetooth thing. And it is a, I'm picking up actually yours, because we're in your studio.

31:17 Justin Edelstein: And it is a, I don't know, six by... It's a rectangular... Two by one. Bye, Lord.

Jason Atwood: Cube. It's a cube. It's battery operated, internal battery. It has on off switches and a couple things on top. But basically it's a Bluetooth speaker. So what's nice about it. It looks like a brick. It looks like a brick. And you can come in different colors.

Justin Edelstein: Mine's red. It looks like a brick. I have a black one.

Jason Atwood: And basically you can pair it to your phone or iPad or even computer. Any Bluetooth device. I've paired it to my computer before. And you can then stream your audio. So in some cases, like what I use it for is Pandora. I put the thing in front of me on the desk and I have my iPad off to the side and I put on Pandora or the other day I was putting together some cabinet and so I had my iPad up on one shelf and I had the thing over on another shelf because it's Bluetooth. They don't have to be anywhere near each other. It's battery operated.. And so like you just let them have, you know, and then it plays music. It's just a very cool app. I mean, a very cool thing.

Jason Atwood: It's you can, plug it up to the internet and download like new features into it or new like voices has a voice, has a voice. It'll tell you how much battery it has. It's very simple. It's very well built. It's it's like you can pack it up. So like I take it on vacation with me. I have done that as well because you put in your hotel room and just listen to music, but it's not just a speaker.

Justin Edelstein: It is also a microphone, which for myself, I use it for conference calls constantly. It's at my iPhone, which has a crappy speaker for a speakerphone, and this thing's a great speakerphone. It just turns my iPhone into a office speakerphone that allows me to be hands-free. So you can literally have your iPhone in my pocket or sitting across the room, the phone rings, the Jambox rings, you hit the button on the top of the Jambox, it answers the phone. It's really well done. So it's very cool and it's why I to bring it as a CloudFolkside

Jason Atwood: Pick of the Week because it is a good pick. It's a cool pick. I love it.

Justin Edelstein: , shopping. Looks like I could get it for $149 as a thing to pair with your iPhone. I will say I would say well the iPad if you watch a lot of movies on your iPad

34:59 Jason Atwood: Or you know Google it Jambox a J a Facebook.com slash we have the new time. I actually have Google plus just came out with a new same picture, Show them.

Justin Edelstein: To go to a place where you can go to a place where you can go to a place where