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+On Cloud + lots of bloatApps on top
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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It is a CRM application but it is also a platform. In other words, if you wanted a web app that has forms then SalesForce can make that very easy to do, without having to know how to code. It has workflows built-in and many, many other features. It's actually pretty awesome.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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The original "Salesforce" was a customer relations management application. As they have grown, they have expanded now into Platform As A Service for building application / services to meet your own specific needs.
You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research! 
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DaveAuld wrote: You could have of course just gone to their website and done some research!
But Lounge makes it lot easier . lol I got the picture a bit, but I wanted to register the fact here - "The definition of salesforce sounds very polymorphic" as I did my little research.
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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SalesForce is anther one of those apps that is supposed to turn normal (work cheap) employees into "programmers", thus allowing you to fire all of your real programmers (don't work cheap) until you realize that the product is indeed snake oil.
On the other hand, thank your stars that you don't have to use QlikView...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
modified 26-Jul-16 11:40am.
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Sounds like SAP stuff! 
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Vunic wrote: OR they're actually selling snake oil on cloud?
No. SalesForce is an amazing CRM, completely customizable in its database, UI's, table relationships, workflows, etc. The website is fast and responsive. I'm duly impressed with it, and frankly, some of their UI elements are outstanding.
That said, it's complicated, hard to understand, requires thousands of dollars of training if you want to do anything intelligent with it, and the web (and their web help) is polluted with answers that apply only to previous incarnations of their product, making it useless for the current product, where screens and buttons and behaviors no longer match.
Reporting is based on what they think you want, which usually (and I imagine correctly) assumes that you are doing table join queries to get the specific data you want. That's great, but if you want a dump of just all your contacts, it's a sub-level report at the bottom of a huge list of report choices.
Import wizard makes you think it's smart, but it's actually the dumbest piece of what I think is an amazing product. Get your header in your Excel document to exactly match your table field names, otherwise you're endlessly mapping columns, only to discover the import failed because of some data type mismatch, and it's so brain dead, it can't even remove the $ and , from currency and numbers, and the error reporting is so lame you're often wondering why it failed. For a non-programmer, that can at least guess "well, maybe it's barfing importing this number because it's a comma-delimited string field in Excel", one can usually figure out the problem, but for a non-programmer, oh my.
Such has been my limited experience.
Marc
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Thanks for the detailed Reply Marc! The definitions for "salesforce" always sounded blurred, now it feels a lot better
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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Marc Clifton wrote:
It is amazing and it sucks
FTFY
Elephant elephant elephant, sunshine sunshine sunshine
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If you use the Apex data loader, free from salesforce, you can automate the imports from the command line. You just need to be sure to watch password expiration if the process is automated.
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It's funny you should ask that question, because every time I see an article about "Salesforce" I automatically think it is a recruitment company.
They could do with a bit of rebranding IMO.
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Salesforce, Sharepoint, Willy Wonka Chocolate factory. All very well contrived fantasies to allure you to a 'one size fits all' idea of software. Who on earth wants to learn YOUR platform when you could just learn how to program.
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I have to step on this post a bit.
We wrote a successful app for our company that really streamlined business process flows.
We grew, but it lacked lots of things, like a web interface that people could use from anywhere.
They migrated over to salesforce.com, and with some stumbling, figured it out. The company has a product they sell, and now uses salesforce.com for managing sales/contacts, etc. They have 1 programmer nowadays as the product is in maintenance mode until it dies a slow death as companies using it go out of business...
But salesforce.com was there, and is there. it works. And from a business standpoint, I would rather change my non-critical business processes to match existing (written and debugged) software to leverage that than to risk writing it from scratch.
I bet you could write a word processor, too... But why would you?
The ONLY time to write your own home grown software is when there is no software that allows you to encapsulate your business specific advantages (Special Sauce, as we call it). If you lose that, then you lose a competitive edge... Then you need either a different solution, or a different way to keep the Special Sauce alive. (We are currently bolting on a Special Sauce piece for a client who is moving the operations to a similar product. They cannot afford to maintain 40 year old Cobol code, or to rewrite it. Nor does anything have the Special Sauce. So, they will use the off the shelf product, and bolt on the Special Sauce).
Now, this is where Saleforce.com and similar models can be amazing. They let you customize their datastructures and screens. We can literally add to their system, the data we need, add a BUNCH of screens to make it operable, and have a consistent system that the reporting system works on.
This, to me, is where the industry will go. Your data will be in the cloud, your access will be everywhere, your customizations will be available, and your ability to expand will grow, without growing your IT staff by nearly the same amount. Fewer programmers, and more business analysts.
To compensate for the shortage of programmers, and also the loss of the good ones over time.
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Note: this is not meant to be a "rant" ... more of a "case study" ... and I'm interested in how you react to this. I deeply appreciate the countless hours of effort that creators of open-source software (and, of course, the incredible variety of useful content that sites like CP host/nurture) !
Case in point, I posted an issue on the HandBrake (written with .NET) GitHub site about how the app is unusable on a 1360x768 screen (with some font "enlargement" enabled because of my vision problems). I noticed other similar issues reported there.
The issue was promptly closed with this reply by (I assume a principal) dev [quotes from my issue post in italics]:Quote: As a .NET programmer, I wonder how it's possible_ to create a Window that behaves like this.
It's not quite as trivial as you might expect, especially when you have multiple dynamically sized regions that need to both up and downscale correctly.
It's not hard, it's just tedious to get it working correctly in all situations.
1366x768 should actually be fine, but only if you run at 100% or 96dpi which I'm guessing your not.
At the end of the day, we have so few people using HandBrake on low-end hardware that it doesn't warrent me diverting any time to tweak the UI to downscale better. I already have a huge list of stuff to do that would come in front.
I suggest you put a clear message on the download page on the HB site suggesting you do not use HandBrake if, in fact, there is a requirement to have a screen res > 1366,768
Then we'd have to mention 100 other things, at which point it's no longer clear. The new documentation when it comes online in the near future will have a recommended system requirements page that details all the in's and outs but I doubt most people will bother reading it.
If I or anyone else ever gets around to replacing our installer with something more flexible, some of this can be checked before the app installs.
Too bad that such an excellent app (implements HEVC H.265 encoding) is encumbered with such a problem.
Of course, one can take the attitude that free software, and the generous people who implement it, should never be criticized. In my experience, the "attitude" shown in this reply to an issue is not typical of open-source software !
I wonder if it would be in "bad taste" to post a response to the person who replied to me at HandBrake with a link to an answer to a QA question I wrote today on this very topic: [^] ?
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I don't think (s)he is displaying 'attitude' in that reply, I think it's quite polite and detailed. They've taken time to acknowledge your problem, to explain that they understand the underlying causes and to set out how it could all be addressed, but because yours is an edge case they don't have enough resources.
It's open source though, so if you know how to fix it you could do so and help others in your situation.
Regards
Nelviticus
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Well, if I were the first person to ever report this problem, and it was unique to my hardware/software context, I wouldn't have any problems with the response.
But, the problem has been frequently reported, and they continue to allow new users to download their app, and find they can't use it because of screen-resize/resolution issues, and waste their time posting new issues on the GitHub site.
That I call negligence. If I were involved in this software project, I would be busy putting a simple notice up on the download page advising potential users that the software required a certain minimum resolution screen-setting to function properly. And, I would be apologizing profusely to someone who had just made me aware that there have been multiple instances of the problem reported; I would not be rather sarcastically expressing my indifference to users.
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I read no "attitude" or sarcasm in the dev's reply. The telling point is:
"At the end of the day, we have so few people using HandBrake on low-end hardware that it doesn't warrent me diverting any time to tweak the UI to downscale better. I already have a huge list of stuff to do that would come in front."
If anything, the dev sounded tired.
Your problem is not high on their list of priorities. Sure, the resolution problem may have been reported 20 times ... but it affects a small subset of the users. I expect they have defects that affect the majority of the users, and the needs of the many come first.
BillWoodruff wrote: That I call negligence. If I were involved in this software project, I would be busy putting a simple notice up on the download page advising potential users that the software required a certain minimum resolution screen-setting to function properly. And, I would be apologizing profusely to someone who had just made me aware that there have been multiple instances of the problem reported; I would not be rather sarcastically expressing my indifference to users.
Ok. Get involved. If it bothers you that much, contribute to the project and fix it.
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BryanFazekas wrote: Ok. Get involved. If it bothers you that much, contribute to the project and fix it.
This. It's how open source works. If you care enough about something, add it/fix it yourself. Otherwise you don't care enough. That might sound harsh, but it's also the harsh reality that people working in their free time only have so many resources, and have their own personal interests.
If you - someone who needs the fix - don't care enough to at least try and fix it, why should someone else, who has no need of that feature and has 100 other bugs to take care of? It's not because of attitude, but because the day only has 24 hours and you are one of a large number of users - all of whom think their personal needs are more important than some other random feature they will never use, and all of whom are lobbying the poor devs
So the devs have to make decisions and determine priorities. In an ideal world, every good idea would make it into the software, and every issue would be fixed. In the real world, a more pragmatic approach is needed that weighs up the benefits and effort to determine which things make it onto the To-Do list.
You say yourself, you are a programmer. Surely, you have also had to make decisions of this nature: do I spend 2 weeks trying to track down and fix a weird esoteric bug that only 2 people have experienced, or do I add a much-requested feature that will improve the experience for the vast majority of users? You can't always do both.
That's not to say I don't sympathise with you! It's a crying shame that there is generally very little awareness about how to make software more accessible. I like to assume it's not a case of people not caring, but of simply not being aware that what many of us take for granted can be a real problem for other people. For example, a green/red traffic light status indicator might not be such a good choice for the colour blind. But if you're not colour blind, it's quite a challenge to realise this could be an issue without someone pointing it out to you.
So at the end of the day, I think this is less about you and a lack of understanding of your needs, and more about cost-benefit. It's simply not worth fixing the esoteric bug when there are far more users who have other pressing needs.
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Stephen McCafferty wrote: If you - someone who needs the fix - don't care enough to at least try and fix it, why should someone else
I'm stunned that you can say such things without fainting from embarrassment.
"If you don't like the way the trains don't run on time, then why don't you fix it?"
The question that should be asked is: "If you can't handle this project, then why the *u** are you distracting us from the efforts of people who can?"
"Oh, it's free", is no excuse for bad work or bad customer relations, because the people who work on such projects really don't do it for the fabled "nothing". If they don't profit financially, they gain some other way.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That's not what I said at all.
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You've left off an important alternative, which is part of the OSS credo/manifesto/whatever: you can fix it yourself or pay someone else to do so. I'm betting the project has a PayPal button somewhere on it. If you and the 20 others who have reported this issue even threw just a few buck apiece at the project owners, it would go a long way towards prioritizing your issue. It'll also go a long way toward showing your material appreciation of what the project does for you, when it does work.
Put your money where your pixels are.
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I'm going to have to agree with Bill here to an extent. Maintaining a minimum system requirements listing is hardly a huge burden.
At the same time one Winform app I maintain has known problems with DPI scaling settings other than 100%; for the last half dozenish years. Given its narrow set of end users I suspect the one internal tester we have is the only person who's been affected by it. I also suspect it'd only need at most a few days to fix: layout issuses on one form with custom resizing code and one or two custom drawn controls (not 100% sure because Win7 makes testing different DPI settings painful by forcing a logout to make the change stick). But every time we bring up potential enhancements for v.next they always decline the DPI scaling support feature in favor of other stuff.
If I didn't know how lethargic the customers IT spending was and that the hardware the app is supporting is in the process of being replaced with a final sunset date only a few years out I'd bet the issue would eventually come to a head when they tried it on a high DPI system; but as is - I suspect the app'll die before that happens.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: I'm going to have to agree with Bill here to an extent. Maintaining a minimum system requirements listing is hardly a huge burden.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But there are too many unknowns, like the current workload of the people involved, who manages the web site, etc. We (those not on that team) don't know what burden this really is.
The big problem with free software is that it's free. People are donating their free time to make things happen, and family and day job come first.
From my own experiences I'm honestly impressed with any open source group that publishes frequent updates. Doing something like this for a few months is not typically difficult, especially with initial enthusiasm. But after a couple of years go by? It's not so easy.
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To behonest, I have to agree. There was no snark in the response. It seemed an honest attempt to explain the situation.
Who knows how busy this guy is.
I've personally had the frustrating experience of trying to get open source software projects off the ground to find that family and work often gets in the way. If he is in that situation, prioritisation is essential to get *anything* done.
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