I've looked at clouds...

I sent out an email a while back saying "Pivot's moving to the cloud!"

I like this cloud computing stuff. My use of it started with my work at my church. (On Fridays I work as a "techie" for my church. When I found out that you could get Google Apps for free if you're a non-profit, I immediately thought that'd be perfect for a church -- no servers to maintain, no worries about the fact that the minister and the youth leader have Macs while the rest of us has PCs, no back-ups. Sounded great. And it has been good for us. I wrote an article about it for a networking website I use.

Here at Pivot, our first foray into the cloud is with Salesforce.com. I'm glad that Pivot is moving to this technology and also personally happy that I get to learn more about Salesforce.com.

Why do I think it's a good thing to move to the cloud, you ask? Well, since you ask, I'll tell you. Personally, I have always preferred the software side of IT over the hardware. I enjoy making databases work, creating processes through technology, getting feedback from users on what helps them work better and implementing that through software. I'd do those kinds of things all day rather than update or build servers, take apart computers, hook up monitors and cables, blah, blah, blah. I know some people tend to think of IT people in a similar way as mechanics, but that mechanical side of things is what I have to do, rather than what I really like to do.

Cloud computing, therefore, is right up my alley. There is no hardware. Well, there's no software, either. In fact, Salesforce.com's tag line is "no software", as in the image at the beginning of this post. But, even though there's no software to install, it functions like software, except through a browser. The fun part of Salesforce.com for me is the designing part. I can create custom fields and objects, arrange them in the way that makes the most sense, and also do more advanced things such as creating work flows and automated tasks (which I still need to learn how to do).

Salesforce.com, like Google, also offers their product to non-profits for free so I began using it when I got it for my church. One thing that impressed me greatly is the way I could do so much customization, yet not "break" it. You know how Khameleon has a bunch of Herman Miller customizations, and because of that when Khameleon is updated, we lag quite far behind because they have to do a bunch of testing to make sure the HMI customizations will work with the new software upgrades? With Salesforce.com, they've done a great job of making it so that the customizations continue to work even as they're adding new features all the time.

In my next blog, I'll talk about some of the customizations I'm working on in Salesforce.com for Pivot. I'll be interested to hear what you think of my plans.