Make your Salesforce Project More Successful by Inviting a BA to the Party (Or Thinking Like One)


Today I welcome my good friend, Garry Polmateer as a guest blogger at CRMFYI. Garry is not only a Salesforce community rockstar, but he's planned and executed some great Salesforce implementations,

A Little Help from My Friends


In a demonstration of community and collaboration, Mike Gerholdt and I have created a blog post / demo video of utilizing inline Visualforce to display rich text info in standard page layouts without

Chatter-vantage #1 - No Need to Rush the Stage


Salesforce has created a conference attendee experience using Chatter that blows away all other conferences. Their Dreamforce Attendee Portal allows attendees to connect with speakers before, during

I Need You; to Join The Salesforce Channel Community


If you follow me on Twitter, it's hard to miss my regular status updates like,  "21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today," but what's that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website

Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce


Earlier this year, I wrote about being a hero to your users, and the gist of it was that through social media, you can surround yourself with fantastic people who will make you a hero to your users. I

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» Trust

Salesforce Users Reach Critical Mass on Twitter and Validate the Extent of the Salesforce Outage Today Live

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News, Social Networking, Tools | 2 Comments

BurstIt’s days like this that you can hopefully see a great reason to at least pay attention to Twitter, even if you don’t yet have an account there and participate.  This afternoon, I was adding notes to an internal support case on my ever-so-faithful Salesforce.com Case tab.  I hit Save, and it started chugging…..and chugging….and eventually, just got hung.  My first reaction was to fire up Tweetdeck (IMHO, the best Twitter interface out there) and I looked at my continual search of all Tweets, worldwide for the word “salesforce.”  And sure enough, right there, users started asking the same question to the world, “Is Salesforce.com down for you?”  We saw immediate validation that we all experienced the same problem.

Enough of Salesforce.com’s 1.1 million users are on Twitter and many of their first reactions were to do the exact same thing.  Unfortunately, today’s outage took out the http://trust.salesforce.com site as well so many were wondering how extensive the whole thing was.  Humor even came into play as people suggested it’s time for a worldwide coffee break.  Someone even mentioned that it would have been really cool if Starbucks had caught onto the outage quickly and offered a coffee special for people who mention that Salesforce was down.  I thought it was funny.

For the most part, Salesforce has been really solid and we’ve not experienced many outages for quite some time.  This is really a compliment to Salesforce making availability such an important issue.  The fact is though; it will go down again sometime again.  It’s just going to happen.

Here are my suggestions to you to be prepared for the next time.

 

  • Check the Trust site.  http://trust.salesforce.com/
  • Check Trust SaaS  http://trustsaas.com/ – They monitor the uptime of Salesforce servers as well as other services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Typepad.
  • Try a Twitter Search – This URL finds all Tweets containing salesforce.com, salesforce, or sfdc.  You don’t have to have a Twitter account to look at all these Tweets and know whether people are experiencing issues too.
  • Join Twitter and ask the question.  If you put “salesforce” in it, oodles of people like me are going to see it and respond to you.  If you post that you’re having trouble with Salesforce, include which server “your Salesforce” is on.  It’s in the URL of any of your Salesforce pages.  It’s either NA1, NA2, NA3, NA4, NA5, NA6, AP0 or EU0.  Participate in this one more facet of the Salesforce community.  
Be sure to follow me on Twitter.  http://twitter.com/CRMFYI