About

Welcome!  This blog chronicles my journey as a SalesForce system administrator, which began in November 2014.

I work in a large academic department of a mid-size university.  We were the first department to purchase a SalesForce org, although the school at large has now purchased one as well.

Before taking my current position, I worked at the same university managing data entry into, and Cognos Report Studio reporting out of, our Entrprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Banner, on top of an Oracle back-end.

Although I have not written PL/SQL to control DML (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) professionally, I am familiar with it through graduate school and personal experimentation.  In other words, I'm just dangerous enough to think I can talk about my blunders through enterprise-grade database systems without having the chops to really impress people who come here for the word "Oracle."  Hope you enjoy your visit anyway!

The university's ERP is still a major source of information in our SalesForce org, but not the only one.  As of the founding of this blog in March 2015, we have some interesting constraints on our work (such as working around a fixed-structure daily import until we have JitterBit to replace the PL/SQL behind it, and such as the rest of the university still doing primary data entry into the ERP).

I have found it quite a paradigm shift to design solutions to problems integrating our ERP data into our SalesForce org for the Admissions department--one I'm still "shifting" through every day.

SalesForce Success Communities, YouTube videos, and StackExchange boards have been invaluable, but sometimes I feel a bit lonely as an "Oracle person in a SalesForce world."

So...if you do too, welcome!  As I come up with "SalesForce-y" solutions to problems I used to know how to solve in Oracle, I plan to share them here.  May you find them useful in your quest to master your new world as well.  :-)