Salesforce.com Admins - Does it make you want to go up and down the road, too?

[BigBarney]

holy god,

it's so freaking powerful, but dear god is it a pain in the ass.

Our original deployment was a cluster, I made it work and now we are trying to make it work better, but it's BADDDD.

like

• Acct Group
• ​
  Acct Group Store 1
• ​
  Account Group Store 1 Site
• ​
  ​
  Account Group Store 1 Site 2

And that's not even getting to a product level. Because of how convoluted our deployment is...

And we use a crazy difficult billing system that connects with SF, and makes it even MORE convoluted.

i want to go up and down the road, not just across it.

 

[ZaneNBK]

holy god,

it's so freaking powerful, but dear god is it a pain in the ass.

And that's not even getting to a product level. Because of how convoluted our deployment is...

And we use a crazy difficult billing system that connects with SF, and makes it even MORE convoluted.

i want to go up and down the road, not just across it.

I used to be a SFDC admin/developer and now I'm a SFDC ISV partner developer. Sounds like it's your business logic that's a PITA in this case, no offense. If you need to track products/assets/opportunities down to a site, not just store, level then you'd run into this issue with pretty much any CRM solution. I think most implementations tend to start with external systems for non-CRM functionality (billing, ERP, etc..) integrating with SFDC instead of finding solutions that run within SFDC just due to the cost and difficulty of migrating/replacing multiple systems at the same time.

Hell, when I started working with SFDC I had to integrate it with our old CRM system support still used which was a Power Builder based piece of crap and a PICK-based (non-relational database) ERP system that was still text interface only in the mid 2000's along with a training system running on MySQL. After that I got to migrate several other subsidiaries based in other countries using multiple CRM systems in other languages (Act, etc..) into Salesforce. So... it could be worse.

If you want some recommendations for products to perform specific tasks let me know. I will tell you if any of the products I recommend are made by my company out of fairness of course. Our products are primarily data management and cleansing tools, not really integration or ETL tools though one of them does get used in that manner by some of our customers.

The best recommendation I can make without knowing anything about your company's needs is to seriously think twice and then think again before building custom objects and functionality that are similar to what is already available in SFDC but slightly modified. It's better to do minor tweaking to the provided functionality than to go nuts on customizing to meet every little edge case your company thinks it might need. Sometimes it's better to tweak your business processes than customize the software as you can set yourself up for tons of work/maintenance issues down the road.

 

[BigBarney]

I used to be a SFDC admin/developer and now I'm a SFDC ISV partner developer. Sounds like it's your business logic that's a PITA in this case, no offense. If you need to track products/assets/opportunities down to a site, not just store, level then you'd run into this issue with pretty much any CRM solution. I think most implementations tend to start with external systems for non-CRM functionality (billing, ERP, etc..) integrating with SFDC instead of finding solutions that run within SFDC just due to the cost and difficulty of migrating/replacing multiple systems at the same time.

Hell, when I started working with SFDC I had to integrate it with our old CRM system support still used which was a Power Builder based piece of crap and a PICK-based (non-relational database) ERP system that was still text interface only in the mid 2000's along with a training system running on MySQL. After that I got to migrate several other subsidiaries based in other countries using multiple CRM systems in other languages (Act, etc..) into Salesforce. So... it could be worse.

If you want some recommendations for products to perform specific tasks let me know. I will tell you if any of the products I recommend are made by my company out of fairness of course. Our products are primarily data management and cleansing tools, not really integration or ETL tools though one of them does get used in that manner by some of our customers.

The best recommendation I can make without knowing anything about your company's needs is to seriously think twice and then think again before building custom objects and functionality that are similar to what is already available in SFDC but slightly modified. It's better to do minor tweaking to the provided functionality than to go nuts on customizing to meet every little edge case your company thinks it might need. Sometimes it's better to tweak your business processes than customize the software as you can set yourself up for tons of work/maintenance issues down the road.

The issue is they won't let me roll out a proper implementation of it.

We half assed it at the beginning and now the re-write would break a lot and cause a few headaches. They don't find it valuable to do things right, just as quickly as possible.

 

[ZaneNBK]

The issue is they won't let me roll out a proper implementation of it.

We half assed it at the beginning and now the re-write would break a lot and cause a few headaches. They don't find it valuable to do things right, just as quickly as possible.

Yeah, that's a pretty common issue with any large system. Good luck solving that problem, it's usually more of a management issue than anything else.