Michael Holt is a Technical Evangelist here at Salesforce. He really began to sink his teeth into coding in college when he started playing around with Visual Basic 6. From there, he started to learn Java and Accenture and eventually came into contact with Salesforce. He moved over to the company five and half years ago and has been an ISV technical evangelist ever since.
Michael is joining us today to talk all about ISV development. We discuss the ISV programs that help people get up and running as an ISV and success stories Michael has had the opportunity to be a part of. Finally, we talk about some interesting code he has written on GitHub that helps ISVs.
Tune in to hear Michael’s interesting insights and stories, all from the perspective of the ISV side of Salesforce.
Show Highlights:
- How Michael got introduced to computers and eventually Salesforce.
- His experience with operating system migrations.
- What attracted Michael to Salesforce.
- What his current role looks like.
- The blended ecosystem of partners he works with.
- The revenue model he and his team utilize.
- What the Business Builder Program is.
- What’s included in the ISV workbook.
- The tools included in the partner business org Michael and his team provide all their partners.
- Michael’s JabberJaw project and its use cases.
Links:
- Twitter account: https://twitter.com/SFMichaelHolt
- LinkedIn account https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelholtsf/
- Github account https://github.com/HoltMichael
- Business Builder Form: https://1.appexchange.com/salesforce-business-builders
- ISV Workbook: https://sfdc.co/ISVWorkbook
Episode Transcript
Michael Holt:
And we’ve got a great ecosystem of partners, so usually I want to help these… Well, not usually. I always want to help these people.
Josh Birk:
That is Michael Holt, an ISV Technical Evangelist here at Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, here with the Salesforce Developer podcast, and here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we’re going to sit down and talk with Michael about the ISV program, programs that help people get up and running as an ISV, some success stories out there, and some interesting code that he’s written up on GitHub that also help ISVs. But first, we will start, as we frequently do, with his early years.
Michael Holt:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I actually had to reach out to my brother yesterday. My first memory is my dad coming home with a computer, but I couldn’t remember whether it was a Windows 95 or a Windows 98, but my brother reliably tells me it was a Windows 95 machine. But I must admit, I didn’t do anything particularly productive with that machine. Mostly, me and my brother used it for games. My dad was kind of supposed to be doing work on it, I think.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Michael Holt:
But really, I got into computing when I sort of went to school and college. I mean, at school, my earliest of memories of sort of getting into working with computers and starting to kind of play around with writing a little bit of code and enjoying myself was actually using Macromedia Dreamweaver in high school.
Josh Birk:
Oh, wow.
Michael Holt:
I don’t know if you ever used Dreamweaver, but you may or may not be aware that one of our own product managers, Greg Ruiz, he was actually the brains behind, or at least one of the brains, behind the Dreamweaver product, so it was super interesting.
Josh Birk:
My gosh.
Michael Holt:
We ran a workshop with Greg in the pre-Covid days. He came over and he was doing the lightning web component kind of tour at the time.
Josh Birk:
Yep.
Michael Holt:
We were running a bunch of workshops, and I was talking to him about, I was one of the people who kind of first got into sort of writing the odd little bit of HTML. I mean, I didn’t do much more than kind of have a few marquee tags floating around on the screens in those days. But yeah, that was kind of my first introduction. And then, I went to college, and in college we had VB 6, Visual Basic 6, and that was what I kind of cut my teeth on. VB 6 gets a bad wrap, but for me, I loved it. I was a young kind of kid just starting to find a little bit of passion for something.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And it was really good because you could build your user interface almost sort of WYSIWYG, you kind of drag all the components onto the screen, and then your buttons and your text inputs, you could attach little bits of code to them. So that was really interesting. And me and me and a colleague, or one of the other students, we used to… That’s when I sort of transitioned into kind of really enjoying this stuff, and we used to spend our lunchtimes going in there, writing snake, writing space invaders. I built my first ever active X control, which was like a dice; and I ended up building Yahtzee, so it was a full end to end kind of Yahtzee game.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Michael Holt:
And I’m sure the code would be absolutely tragic to reflect on. And if I kind of picked it off the shelf at some point, I’m sure I would not be very impressed with myself.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. And then, it was off to uni when we started learning Java and stuff like that.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael Holt:
And then, post uni, I joined Accenture, and Accenture was a great experience for me. I spent a lot of time traveling, so sort of traveled the world around Africa and all sorts of places you wouldn’t typically go. I was sort of working in a team of people managing an operating system migration for a large organization from XP to Windows 7, ahead of kind of the XP official non-support.
Josh Birk:
Huh.
Michael Holt:
But then, after a while, I had a recruiter reach out to me and say, “Hey, there’s this consultancy looking for a developer on this thing called Salesforce.” And at the time, despite working for one of the largest Salesforce partners, I since came to realize I’d never heard of Salesforce.
Josh Birk:
Oh my gosh.
Michael Holt:
But yeah, yeah. I took it up and, you I met a lot of very knowledgeable people. That was a BrightGen. I know you’ve previously had Kia Bowden, the CTO at BrightGen on the show. So that was there. That was my first sort of three years of Salesforcing, as a developer. And then, I moved into Salesforce about five and a half years ago now, which is, to be honest with you, flown by. But during all that time, I’ve been an ISV technical evangelist. So, I guess that’s where the story begins for me, really, from an ISV perspective.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
I’ve been Salesforcing for about three years, but the ISV world kind of opened my eyes a little bit more to how some of our partners are really kind of using the platform.
Josh Birk:
I was very curious about that because as I was doing the whole LinkedIn research and getting in your history and stuff like that, I saw that you basically started at Accenture. And so, my question was going to be like, “Wow, it seems like you just jumped right into Salesforce. But then, I was looking at your Accenture bio and I’m like, “You never say Salesforce.”
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Josh Birk:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that with anybody from Accenture.
Michael Holt:
Funnily enough.
Josh Birk:
But Accenture is a huge firm.
Michael Holt:
Oh, it’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m sure I could still be working there today and potentially not have heard of it.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
But what we were doing was completely unrelated really.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
Yeah, it was an operating system migration, funnily enough, harking back to my old VB days, because it wasn’t VB script, but it was… Sorry, it wasn’t VB 6, but we were using a VB script to actually manage the migration of all of your my documents, folder, everything on your desktop, and all that kind of stuff, migrating it from your old machine, your old operating system, doing the build, and then restoring it. But yeah, completely unrelated to anything to do with Salesforce.
Josh Birk:
Got you. Africa’s an interesting demographic for that.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they were an energy company that we were doing the migration for, and they had a lot of kind of assets all over the world really. So I spent a bit of time in Tanzania and in Tunisia, those were the main kind of hubs where I went, and they have kind of expat communities there.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
Who all need access to the internet, and who all need up to date machines.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
Yeah, someone had to do it.
Josh Birk:
I will try to keep this anecdote as short as possible, but I’m reminded of a cab ride I took in Toronto, where the cabbie, I told him I was doing a computer workshop, basically. And he was like, “Oh, I just got my first laptop in a while.” And then, he proceeded to tell me the story of how he fled Africa because he was a network engineer that helped a major airline. He would never give names, right? It wasn’t like he would give the airline name. I never knew which country he was talking about, but he helped a major airline go from the old real to real days to client server. And then, his friends started disappearing because there was-
Michael Holt:
Oh my God.
Josh Birk:
… there was a change in authority, is I think how he put it. So he literally got on a plane, flew to Toronto, kicked himself off the internet. And it wasn’t until literally that morning, he had just gone to Best Buy to pick up a laptop because he was like, “I’m going to go try the internet again.” And I’m like, “You haven’t been on the internet since like the real to real days.” I wanted to skip my workshop and just like go home with him and be like… I had to spell Google for him.
Michael Holt:
That’s insane, isn’t it?
Josh Birk:
I’m like, “You have no idea the wonders you are going to go home and be able to see. Anyway.
Michael Holt:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Josh Birk:
So then, tell me about getting introduced to Salesforce itself then. When you jumped into BrightGen, what was the attraction then, to go from the stuff that you knew about, like VB script and operating systems and things like, that to go into Salesforce consultant?
Michael Holt:
Yeah. I think one of the appeals was moving into the kind of cloud technology world. It was something I’d been keen to get involved with for a while, and the opportunity presented itself. Yeah, so I took it really. Once I was in, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn’t aware of the Salesforce platform until I kind of went through the interview process, and my previous experiences had all revolved around Java and things like that. And a lot of the Java stuff, you’re building a lot of these applications kind of from the ground up.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
Whereas, with Salesforce, you could kind of get stuck in, a lot of the hard work was already taken care of for me, so I could go and do the kind of the interesting things and the stuff that the clients were really interested in.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
Meet the requirements, I guess, a lot quicker than you might otherwise have been able to. And that was a huge appeal.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). How would you describe your current role at Salesforce?
Michael Holt:
That’s a great question. So, I mean, the technical evangelist role, I think we’re looked upon both internal and external audiences as kind of problem solvers, really. We wear a lot of different hats, and that depends on the expertise of the ISV, because there’s a lot of ISVs out there who have got a huge amount of Salesforce knowledge.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And there are also ISVs who, potentially, Salesforce isn’t their main channel through which they’re they’re selling. So you’ve got a big diverse audience that you need to be able to communicate with. And you also need to tailor your conversations depending on, obviously, the needs of the business and the mutual customers that we’re meeting. So for those reasons, kind of no two days are really the same.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
One day, I might be kind of working on a proof of concept, researching some new cool technology and something that’s that I think is going to be interesting for a partner, and the next day, I could be presenting, I could be listening to partners, just understanding what their needs are.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And then, working together to kind of find a solution.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
The great thing about the role is, over the last sort of five years or so, I feel like I’ve really had the luxury of being able to kind of shape my role and be really flexible in it. I mean, when I first joined the team five plus years ago, I was working in a team where we were focused primarily on what we described as kind of our one to many channels, so we were creating blogs; we were creating webinars; we were running workshops. And our aim there was to kind of reach as many ISVs as we possibly could, or interested parties as we possibly could. And we ran regular webinar series once a week, twice a day for different time zones. And we collated all of those webinars. I couldn’t tell you how many we did, but we must have done, I don’t know, 30, 40 webinars. And we collated them all and we put them online. They’re a little bit dated now, because technology’s moved on in the last sort of four, five years.
Josh Birk:
Oh yeah.
Michael Holt:
In particular at Salesforce. So they’re not available anymore, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we decide to do something like that again.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
But it’s not something I do today. I mean, last year I did some really interesting work in our Business Builder team, and that’s a fairly newly established team, where they are going out and they’re actively seeking entrepreneurs who are interested in bringing new products to market. And in a lot of cases, these entrepreneurs are potentially, well, it sort of varies, but in some cases, they’re very familiar with Salesforce. So maybe they’re developers, or CTO, or whatever it might be, who’s decided to go out and start a product venture on Salesforce. But they’re not so familiar with the ISV world. They don’t necessarily know about packaging distribution and all of the tools and technologies that they need to get familiar with in order to actually distribute applications on the Salesforce platform.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
So there’s those folks. And then, there’s the other folks, where they’re entrepreneurs who aren’t familiar with the Salesforce platform, but they want to bring a product to market with relative speed, and they believe that Salesforce is the right platform to do that with. And so our role in those positions is to work out, “Okay, well, how can we help this partner to understand Salesforce technologies? How can we help them to build their products, to launch their products, to get to market quicker, and to build applications that ultimately are going to satisfy the needs of our mutual customers and have our ISVs in the ecosystem be successful?”
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
Because we know it can be done. We’ve seen huge successes from ISVs in the past. We’ve seen acquisitions take place from both external software vendors, buying Salesforce ISVs, as well as Salesforce ourselves, making acquisitions of ISVs. We look at things like velocity. So there’s a huge amount of potential there. And that Business Builder program is really oriented towards enabling those entrepreneurs to build applications to get to market, and to build businesses that are going to be successful on top of the Salesforce platform.
Josh Birk:
Got you. I find it fascinating, if the timeline works out right, we just had Matthew Frank on the mic, he’s a technology evangelist, head of technology evangelism over at Blackthorn.io. And I’ve been a developer advocate. I’ve been a developer evangelism. And it’s fascinating to me like how the roles can have very similar overlaps to them, but you just change the audience slightly, and it kind of changes the whole mission to a certain extent, right?
Michael Holt:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, our rhema is, we want to be the trusted advisor to our ISVs. And I suspect that’s the same for any evangelist or advocate role. It just depends on the audience for whom you’re trying to build that trust and ultimately enable with the right technology or the right tools to be able to do their jobs and be successful.
Josh Birk:
Right. And to level set for everybody, although, I think everybody in our ecosystem [inaudible 00:13:53] this, but ISV is independent software vendor, right?
Michael Holt:
That’s correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Got you. Got you. Now, I’m going to throw the same question I threw to Matt, or it’s not really even a question, it’s something I always told people when they interviewed for an evangelism role, but I always told them, “If you really want a nine to five job, this is probably not the job for you.”
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s absolutely true. I mean, as I said before, every day is different and you never know what you might be faced with, and that could mean that some of your evenings aren’t necessarily spent in the way that you might otherwise choose to spend them. But that being said, there’s a reason I’ve been doing it for five and a half years, and it’s because I love it. It’s because of that variation in the role.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And the ability to kind of be flexible. And we’ve got a great ecosystem of partners, so usually, I want to help these… Well, not usually, I always want to help these people.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And I want to help these businesses, and I want to see the Salesforce ecosystem thrive. So it’s very rewarding. Very, very rewarding.
Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit about the mix you were describing. How many people have an existing entrepreneurship of some kind and aren’t familiar with Salesforce, but then want to connect to it versus the other way around.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. So we have a few different, I don’t know how best to phrase it, but I suppose you could say categories of partners, right? And actually, there are some well defined programs or categories, and I can talk about those in a moment. But yeah, really, we’ve got partners who want to build software on top of the Salesforce platform. They want to extend some existing capability of Salesforce, or they believe that they’ve got a great idea that can extend Salesforce’s existing capabilities. You’ve then got other partners who want to build on the platform, and they want to bring brand new capabilities to the Salesforce platform, so perhaps they’re launching an HR product or a product project management product. But regardless, these folks are building native applications on top of the Salesforce platform.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
Then, we’ve got the partners who kind of want to have some sort of combination, where maybe they’ve got some external infrastructure that doesn’t sit on the Salesforce platform, but they want to build some reasonable intellectual property on Salesforce as well, in order to expose those capabilities. So there’s a kind of a connection between these two systems. And then, the third category is basically just the connector, where, okay, it’s syncing account records from some external system into Salesforce.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
And we describe those as native apps, as composite apps, and as connector apps.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Michael Holt:
So you’ve got the natively built products, those which have some substantial intellectual property on Salesforce, but also use an external system. And then, you’ve got those which are basically just a data sync. And all of which can be valuable, depending on the customer’s needs. But to that point, we also have two different kind of programs for partners as well, and perhaps program’s the wrong word. Maybe it’s better way to phrase it is, we’ve got two different types of contract. So we’ve got the ISV force contract and the OEM contract. And ISV force partners, typically those will sell into existing Salesforce environments. So as a customer, you go onto AppExchange, you see something, you search, you find something that’s of interest to you, and you can install that into your existing Salesforce environment. And that’s kind of the ISV force flow, if you like.
Michael Holt:
OEM is actually the ability to build products using the Salesforce platform, but then market, distribute, and sell those to non Salesforce customers. So in those instances, the end customer may not even know they’re actually using Salesforce. So the way that works is that we allow those partners to actually resell some limited kind of Salesforce platform capability. So they can use the platform to build their application.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
And then, they get access to some standard things like accounts and contacts, but they wouldn’t have access to all of your CRM objects, because that’s obviously where we play.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
But they can build those applications on top of all of the Salesforce platform capabilities and distribute them and resell them. And they can resell a whole bunch of things like communities, and even CRM analytics, and a few other products, sandboxes and all that kind of stuff, and data storage to those customers. So they can fully manage that relationship with that customer using the Salesforce platform as kind of the battery, if you like, to power their application.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Got it. Nice. I used to go to workshops that were really kind of directed towards college students, and I was trying to describe a little bit more of like that style of application that you’re just talking about, because when you’re talking to college kids who are in computer science, it’s always like what’s in it for them, right? “Why is this guy telling me about Salesforce? I don’t work in an office.” sort of thing. And my pitch often went to AppExchange.
Josh Birk:
And I remember an example: Leila Saka once told me about a guy who worked with big animal vets, and then realized he had this kind of like specialized knowledge in specifically, what big animal vets needed. And so he went and built a basically CRM for big animal vets, right? Like this really niche thing and was really successful at it. And at the same time, he was like, “It was just me.” And as I was telling college kids, “Look, this is free, low barrier entry, free to use, free to learn, free to develop. And potentially, you could be that person who does the next big animal vet application.”
Michael Holt:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Do you think we see a lot of not necessarily younger, but the independent developers, the one to two person shops, as opposed to the velocities of the world?
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. We absolutely do. And it’s an interesting point that you’ve just raised there about the whole free thing. And I think it’s a great part of partnering with Salesforce, right? Because you can build your entire application without actually spending a penny before you-
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
… Before you kind of do any marketing or anything like that. So you can build everything. Everything that we provide to our partners is completely free. It’s not until partners start selling their application that we start to see some returns from a Salesforce perspective. So we work on a revenue share basis. So when partners start selling their application, that’s when we will start generating revenue, and we take a revenue share from that partner. So we work with the kind of the mantra of, we are only successful when you are successful. It’s only when you start making money that we’ll start seeing money.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
But going back to your question: Yeah, it’s absolutely the case that we see a lot of smaller partners. It’s not always about building an enormous business.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
And I think a lot of what the Business Builder team are currently working with as well. I mean, they do have a mix of sized businesses, but there’s nothing stopping a developer from, if you’ve got a great idea, going away and kind of putting pencil to paper or finger to keyboard or whatever it is, and start building that application, and, potentially, even working with that Business Builder team to launch and running your own product business. And we see lots and lots of those examples on the AppExchange. We have two models for kind of selling and distributing on AppExchange. And one of those is called checkout, and that’s essentially an entirely self-service means of kind of managing your application on Salesforce. So you build your app and you can list it on AppExchange, and then that payment process goes through checkout, which is actually through Stripe. Salesforce takes the revenue share as part of that transaction. And that allows these partners to kind of self-serve and manage their business using basically AppExcahnge as kind of the storefront, shall we say, for the software that they’re selling.
Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. So we keep referencing the Business Builder program. What’s the entry for that? Like how do, how do people learn more about it? How do they get involved?
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So there is a website where partners can go, it’s the Salesforce Business Builders program website, and there is an entry form on there. So if you have an innovative idea and you’re interested in kind of building your product idea to life, then it’s worth going onto that site and filling out your information. I assume there’s a way we can kind of get that in the show notes or the description or something.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yep. We can get a link into the show notes and give it a call out.
Michael Holt:
Perfect.
Josh Birk:
I want to hop over to some of the stuff that you’ve got on GitHub.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Sure.
Josh Birk:
And so you’ve got some LABS App out there.
Michael Holt:
I do. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
I think maybe your core one here, your ISV workbook. Is that something you’re actually actively using in your workshops right now?
Michael Holt:
Yeah, so that’s an interesting one. So yeah, you’re right. I do have a bunch of LABS Apps out there. But actually, the ISV workbook, although there is a kind of a version of that on AppExchange, which is called Map My Records, the idea there was going back a little while when we were running a lot of workshops in kind of the pre-Covid days. And what we would do often is, we would say to partners, “Okay, well, bring an idea along with you, or bring your idea along with you, and we’ll teach you about the Salesforce platform and we’ll kind of talk you through all of these things, and we will help you get started on building that application.”
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
But one of the things that came up quite a lot was, the partners would like to see kind of end to end. We can help you maybe build a few lightning components or we can help you understand packaging a little bit better, or do this, or do that. But a lot of what we were hearing from partners was, can we do something where there’s kind of an end to end build of a product?
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
So I went away, and I think the first place where I ran this was actually in Amsterdam, but we’ve run it in a few places since then. And actually, the workbook that you reference, which is available at sfdc.co/isvworkbook, that is since been translated to Japanese as well, and they’ve used it for a few workshops out in Japan. And the idea of that workbook was to take a complete beginner, all the way from kind of signing up to the partner community, getting their hands on what we call a partner business org, which is an environment, it’s a Salesforce environment with two free licenses for ISV partners.
Josh Birk:
Hmm.
Michael Holt:
So getting their hands on all the tools that they need and going completely from start to finish. My idea there was to sort of shove as much Salesforce technology as we could. So we’ve got flow, we’ve got apex, we’ve got lightning web components, we’ve got reports, we’ve got dashboards. Chuck all of that stuff into this workbook, and then after a one and a half or a two day workshop, they’d be able to package that up and have their first distributable solution.
Michael Holt:
So the idea of that workbook is all based around this kind of property management solution, so there’s a couple of custom objects there that allow them to manage properties, and you can create your custom fields with the address fields and all that kind of stuff, map those properties out on a map using a lightning web component, and book some maintenance for your properties using a lightning flow, and then visualize it all in a report.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
So the idea there, where it’s really take partners completely end to end to build their first AppExchange app, and then take those learnings away and apply them to building their own products.
Josh Birk:
Nice. Yeah. Back in my workshop days, I used to do what I would call app improv, which is where I would just get a random noun from somebody in the room, and then we would build an app to organize whatever that random noun was.
Michael Holt:
Nice.
Josh Birk:
I think my favorite was, somebody was like, “Cork.” I’m like, “Okay, fine. We’ll build CRM for some atomic particles. I’m okay with that.” Why not? Let’s go.
Michael Holt:
I bow to your knowledge. I’m not sure I would’ve been able to do anything on that topic.
Josh Birk:
Thankfully, I knew S.
Josh Birk:
Pin and all this kind of stuff. I don’t know how I nerded out about it for like an hour.
Michael Holt:
Oh yeah.
Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit about the, what was it again? The org shape that you’re using there.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Because I’m familiar with the developer edition, and that sounds similar but different.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. So we provide all of our partners with what’s called a Partner Business Org. It’s an enterprise edition of Salesforce. We give it to partners with two free licenses, but more importantly than that, it’s got a whole bunch of tools pre-installed within it that ISVs need to take advantage of, and this kind of goes back to what I was saying before, where, okay, you might be a developer out there who’s very skilled, well established Salesforce developer, but moving over to the ISV world, there will be a lot of unknowns. There were for me when I moved from the consulting world to the ISV world.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
So inside of this org, we’ve got tools, for example, called the license management app, which kind of does what it says on the tin. It allows our partners to manage the licenses for their applications. So our customers might not necessarily be aware, but every time you install an application from the AppExchange, what’s happening in the back end is a license record is being created somewhere out there in one of our partners PBOs, their Partner Business Org, and that allows the partner to see some basic information about what’s happened. So they’ll be able to see when that customer installed it; they’ll be able to see the org ID. They’ll be able to see things like whether or not it’s a Sandboxx environment.
Michael Holt:
But more importantly than that, they’ll actually be able to manage that org to some degree. So they would be able to, let’s say, if they set their defaults up for their application to be a license with five seats that lasts for 30 days, maybe it’s a 30 day trial five users, what a partner can do is, if the customer decides, “Okay, we want to buy this for our 200 users and we want a year long contract.” Well, the partner can then use the License Management App to actually increase the number of licenses assigned to that organization, choose to expire it in 12 months time. They also have the ability to suspend it, Should they so wish, if THE customer’s not paid their bill or whatever. But it gives them the power to manage the products that they’re distributing on AppExchange.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
So that’s just one of the tools. We also have tools that allow partners to manage checkout, which I mentioned earlier, is the kind of credit card payment on AppExchange, as well as the Channel Order App, which is the different way of kind of reporting revenue to Salesforce, which is for maybe more enterprise sales, shall we say, when a credit card isn’t sufficient to buy enterprise software, the partner can place their orders through that tool.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
And in the case of OEM, that’s the tool that Salesforce actually uses to provision licenses into those orgs as well. So a partner might say, “I’ve sold a hundred licenses to this OEM customer of mine.” And they report that to Salesforce, and Salesforce then fairly quickly provisions licenses into that environment. So that’s how that kind of resale process of the OEM partnership works.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Now, heading back over to GitHub, before we went in and rudely acquired a company, little company called Slack, you apparently wrote something called Jabber Jaw. What is Jaber Jaw, and what was like the origin of that?
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Well, firstly, I’ll say I’m still waiting for my multi-billion dollar check for that.
Josh Birk:
You could have cut off a few billions. You could have gotten a little bit cheaper there, mark. You could have gotten a little bit cheaper.
Michael Holt:
Exactly. Yeah. But no. Yeah, Jabber Jaw was a great fun little project. I can’t exactly remember, but if it wasn’t my first, it was one among my first little side projects with lightning web components. I don’t know if you know, but we tend to run competitions here at Salesforce, every, I don’t know how often, but a couple of competitions a year, I would say, come out of the labs team to build applications. And at the time, it was a, an LWC competition, and I had the idea to build a chat app, but on Salesforce.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
So embedded into the utility bar. And so, I kind of started digging into lightning web components and built it out. So it’s a fully fledged messaging app. It’s available for free on AppExchange, that sits within Salesforce and allows you to communicate either one to one with other people within your Salesforce organization, so long as they’ve got the appropriate permission set to access Jabber Jaw.
Josh Birk:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Michael Holt:
Or with chatter groups as well, so if you have got chatter groups defined within your org, then that’s basically the kind of the behind the scenes way in which you can set up groups to chat with groups of colleagues instead of one to one. And it’s got a few cool features in there. You can export your chats to chatter as well. And when you do that, they’ll all post, so if it were you and me talking, Josh, and I made a post, sorry, and we had a conversation and I selected sort of three or four of our messages, it would post them all as one nice tidy thread, and it would post them coming from us as well. So it kind of, it shows the conversation as it happened there in chatter.
Josh Birk:
Yes.
Michael Holt:
So it’s a fun little project. It is used. I don’t have the numbers to hand, but last time I checked, there was about 30 production orgs, non-developer edition production orgs, that were using it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
So it does have some uses.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Michael Holt:
And it was a great fun little project. And I learned a lot as well.
Josh Birk:
Well, I would assume that it’s got some pretty interesting use cases when it comes to things like the UI and event handling and things like that.
Michael Holt:
Exactly.
Josh Birk:
That do real time communication.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. So the underlying infrastructure, well, the underlying capabilities are powered with Platform Events.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Michael Holt:
So every time an event comes in, Jabber Jaw will say, okay, well, is this message intended for this recipient? If it is, okay, which conversation does it go into? And all that kind of finicky little bits and pieces that you need to work out.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
It’s also fully encrypted with an encryption key that’s unique to every single org. So admins, whilst every message is stored as a record, an admin can’t just go around snooping on your records, because they’re all stored as encrypted strings basically.
Josh Birk:
As cache, yeah. Got it.
Michael Holt:
It’s just a jumble. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Josh Birk:
Nice. Having been an admin on what turned into a rogue corporate email server, I can say that that’s also very good for the admins themselves. Sometimes you just don’t want to jump into other people’s conversations, even accidentally.
Michael Holt:
Yeah. I can believe that.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. We keep the show clean, so that’s all I’ll say about that. You’ve also got a couple LABS Apps kind of specifically utilitarian. Are there a few of those that you want to give a shout out to?
Michael Holt:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Map My Records is probably my most popular one. Across all of my apps, I checked this morning, and it was about 750 production installs across them. And I think of those Map My Records is about four or five hundred.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Michael Holt:
It’s a very, very simple app that allows you to basically visualize any record in Salesforce on a map. So you just tell it what your address fields are, and then you pop the component on the screen and then it will show you that record on a map. So super straightforward, but people seem to like it. The other one is the Org Expiry Notifier, and that one is relatively new to the portfolio, shall we say. The orgs that we give out, there was a good reason behind this, the orgs that we give out for free, the Partner Business Org, when a partner signs up for the partner community, there will be given access to a trial Partner Business Org for 12 months, and once they sign a contract, they will be able to activate that org so that it never expires in future.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Michael Holt:
But if at some point, if for whatever reason, that process to signing a contract takes longer than expected, that Partner Business Org will expire, which can cause frustration. And it caused me a little bit too much frustration, and I’d seen that occur a few too many times.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
That I decided to sort of do something about it, so I built the Org Expiry Notifier. And it’s just basically a component that sits on the screen that tells you, when is this trial org due to expire? It will work in any trial org.
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael Holt:
When is it due to expire, and it comes with two default notifications. One is one week and one day, sorry, one week. Yeah. The two notifications are one week and one day before the org is due to expire. So you’ll get an email that says, reminder, your organization is going to expire if you don’t extend it or do something about it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Michael Holt:
But you can also customize those notifications as well, if you need to. So that one I created, I suppose, out of a small necessity to try and stop having to manage situations where people’s PBOs have disappeared.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Michael Holt:
Which isn’t always a fun conversation to have.
Josh Birk:
That’s our show. Now, if you want to learn more about Michael and get access to some of those links that we talked about, go on over to the show notes. Now, before we go, we did ask after Michael’s favorite non-technical hobby, and all I can say is cardio.
Michael Holt:
I would say for me, running, running. I’ve become a keen runner over the years. Well, I say over the years, over the last sort of two or three years. I think back in 2018, I sort of enjoyed myself a little bit too much. I was living in London, too many takeaways and too many beers. And I found myself a weight I wasn’t totally comfortable with, and I decided sort of time to do something about that, so since then, I’ve kind of lost over 20 kilos from running, so I’m pleased with my progress.
Josh Birk:
Got you.
Michael Holt:
But yeah. And I managed to do my first marathon last year.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Michael Holt:
So running is definitely something that I’ve taken a keen interest in. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Congratulations.
Michael Holt:
COVID I suppose is part of the-
Josh Birk:
Sure.
Michael Holt:
… Part of the motivation.
Josh Birk:
Get outside and run real fast. Not a bad [inaudible 00:35:30]
Michael Holt:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh Birk:
I want to thank Michael for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about the show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show now, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Now, a quick production update. I know I’ve been putting a little disclaimer at the end of these episodes, that due to COVID, my production cycle was slightly disturbed. Right now, it’s looking like we are maintaining the weekly pace, but I’m going to be honest with you, it’s by a razor’s edge. So we’re going to try to keep getting content out there. And I really, really hope to talk to you next week. Thanks again, everybody. Talk to you soon.