Buyer Beware

Have you ever interviewed a contractor over the phone and agreed to bring them on the job site only to discover that they knew alot less than your interview might suggest?

A few years ago while doing Siebel work, I was tasked with finding a contractor to augment our staff to hit a critical deadline.  Myself and a colleague ran the candidate through the gauntlet asking very technical, very specific Siebel questions.  While language skills were not the candidates best quality, he seemed to know the material and so we agreed to bring him on site.  When he arrived and we provisioned accounts for him, we expected him to hit the ground running.  Instead, we ended up explaining very basic CRM concepts to him and found out that he was asking other contractors similarly basic Siebel questions.  I was furious and asked my manager to let him go.  She insisted that he stay because "he's already signed an apartment lease".

I recently learned from a friend in India that this practice of "proxy interviewing" exists and very well qualified people are approached with a good sum of money to interview on behalf of someone else.  While my experience with this suggested that this happened in our field, I was shocked to hear it confirmed from a reliable source.  Regardless of the motivations of either person, this is fraud and completely reprehensible to me.  My advice to anyone interviewing a technical contractor: do not assume that a good phone interview is enough.  Interview the candidate in person.

Where *not* to find salesforce help!

Our business partners recently requested that we relabel the out-of-the-box Note and Attachments object in Salesforce.  I had heard a rumor that salesforce could do some back end changes that were not possible through the Setup config and had searched the internet far and wide.  I had even posted a question on several LinkedIn forums, where the only two responses were 1) a pitch for consulting services and 2) this:

Anyway, after opening two cases and escalating one to tier 3, I finally got a definitive answer that it was not possible.  My case owner had actually queried every salesforce instance for any changes to this label across all of their customers and had confirmed that it was not possible without creating a custom VF page.

CastIron and your org's schema

I recently built a orchestration to go through our salesforce org and write to a salesforce object all of the object names and labels, field names and label, and field lengths and data types.  The orchestration was pretty easy to build and has been incredibly useful to provide a data dictionary to our business partners.  Its a different way to use castiron and something to consider if you need to do any data mapping or data migration activities.

Here's the recipe:
1 enterprise salesforce wsdl - this is your org's wsdl w/ all of its customizations
1 castiron dev studio
1 custom salesforce object to hold your object name, field names, length, data type, etc

Use the built in CastIron connector to salesforce to log in and use the session id in your subsequent webservice calls (where the enterprise wsdl was used to define the endpoint).  Once you've logged in you should be able to describe all objects, iterate through each object, and grab the details you want.  The last step is a the insert to your custom salesforce object where you map the object and its details.