The nice thing about it is I sat for the test on Tuesday and on Wednesday at DreamForce they had these boards printed up standing in the heaviest-traveled area of the show floor.

DreamForce '09 - My name amongst those who passed cert exams

My name amongst those who passed cert exams

A couple of months ago we started publishing our audio and video files on iTunes via Podcast and Video Podcast respectively.

If you have iTunes installed, you can find our channel here: Digital Realty Trust Knowledge Library

I had heard that you can get any one of 100,001 things from DreamForce, so my objective was to go and learn as much as I could about VisualForce and Apex. I’m certain I succeeded in reaching that goal.

Monday was a 14 hour day that included registration, the big keynote from the Salesforce.com CEO, session after session of learning, a two-hour hack-athon on the new Force.com Sites technology and ended with a Foo Fighters concert.

Tuesday was a 12 hour day that included several hands-on sessions with the Force.com platform, two keynotes and the nations presidential election.

Wednesday was a day of dragging yourself from session to session learning new things.

I can’t put scale to this event in words. I do know there were close to 10,000 people there, so you can only imagine the size of the keynote room that could accommodate 10,000 people (sitting nonetheless).

Regretfully, I didn’t get to sit the Admin certification exam, but I did pick up a voucher for a free certification exam soon.

In sum, it was great experience, I learned a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Technically, it is a sound move. Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 and .NET 3.5 are the latest generation Windows OS and web hosting environment. The site I am managing isn’t even that complex of a site.

Politically, it seems there are so many people you have to “sell” in order to make the move.

That’s fine, but it is teaching me a skill I didn’t think I would learn while trying to upgrade a web hosting environment – create a win for a customer, create a win for someone internally, and create a win for myself.

All good skills, I must say, but I never would have thought I would be honing the above skill this way.

This fits nicely with my SQL Server 2005 course and adds ASP.NET programming to my skill set.

So far this class has turned out to be quite timely. We are discussing a web application that shows power consumption data stored, of course, in a SQL database. We have only discussed this app being available on our company intranet. But I expect that it will public as the app expands in scope. At that time, I’ll be sure to post an example.

Things I have learned so far:

- there is a delicate balance how sophisticated your app is and the performance of your database query results. I like to review highscalability.com to here the developers that work on applications like Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, etc. talk about the millions of transactions they have per second and how their chosen architecture performs.

- virtualization is a fantastic invention. Being able to work with my IT group via a virtual machine has beneficial. Speaking from a developers standpoint, I can see how it aids in getting apps built and deployed quickly.

Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.

Work Experience

January 2007 – Present

I now work for Digital Realty Trust – http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com – as the Marketing Information Systems Manager. We lease out datacenter space to companies like Facebook, Yahoo, UBS Financial, BP, MySpace, etc.

There are four of us in the Marketing department and my role includes:

• Project Manager – every month this year we have a marketing campaign consisting of print ads, banner ads, direct mail, a microsite and email and I am responsible for making sure everything gets done (working with the creative agencies and getting the necessary approvals internally as well as ensuring that all Leads are getting to sales people ASAP)
• Market Research – we have an online survey that we invite our contacts in our marketing database to answer. I work with the market research agency for the online survey, I conduct the email invitation broadcasts, then I assemble all of the results, analyze and then the results end up in a white paper that we send back out to our marketing database and conduct a webinar
• Webmaster – managing and maintaining the coporate website including a 12-month search engine optimization project that started in January
• Salesforce.com admin – we have more than 80 employees using Salesforce in many different departments, which involves a lot of reporting to Senior Management
• Vtrenz admin – this is the tool we use to manage our opt-in marketing database and broadcast our email invitations regarding our events and webinars
• Webinar host/moderator – I run all of our online webinars; both promotion and production

May 2004 – December 2007

I started my career working at Starr Tincup. What an experience it was! I was there 3 1/2 years and, at the end of my time there, realized that I was way out of my league. The people there at Starr Tincup set an entirely different bar for hard work and intelligence. I am glad that I was part of it and got to help build parts of the company. However, it was definitely disengaging and deflating to come this self-realization, but I knew because of my own personal limitations that I would never become Partner in the firm and, therefore, agreed that it was my time to move on. For my first job, I couldn’t have had a better opportunity and I still thank the Principals for affording me the chance to work there.

Here is a bullet-point highlight of my tenure at Starr Tincup:

• I was hired as a ‘Rover’ to go around and be a helpful hand to all of our ‘Delivery’ teams
• Three (3) months after graduating college I was promoted by the owners to be the VP of Marketing
• I ended up writing the best marketing plan I had ever seen (subsequently, the plan was never funded)
• I did, however, have a team of people under me for that year to manage
• Quickly after that I was given the highly-coveted ‘Rover’ position for a while. Meaning, I had skills enough in most areas of marketing that I could help any of the project managers get things done for our clients
• Then I fell into data management where I became our firms expert in a few sales and marketing software applications (namely, Eloqua, Salesforce.com and Salesnet)
• Then I was pulled into an actual account manager position where I was in charge of client projects and delivering our service
• I had a team of people under me to deliver on client projects that I had to motivate, manage and herd towards success
• I was an account manager from that point on (~2 years total)
• I worked as part of a team on our business development strategy. As a result of that project, you now see some of the companies listed on the Starr Tincup Partners page
• I was a mentor to several people in the company during my tenure (e.g. staff, interns, peers) formally and informally and had some success making them productive, value-adding employees
• I had input into how project management plays a part into the way we deliver our service. See my resume entry on Project Management
• I was a part of several Salesforce.com implementations and roll outs. See my resume entry on Salesforce.com

There were two significant layoffs in my tenure at Starr Tincup and for some reason I seem to have found a way to survive both. There are millions of people smarter than I, but I seem to have been doing the right kind of work in our worst kind of times as a business and, thus, made it through the layoffs.

Ideas

I put a lot of effort into my ideas. Most people call me one of the more reflective people they have ever known and that comes out in my ideas and recommendations that I put forth.

People

I like people that are diligent; that are smart enough to challenge an idea on the fly; that have the critical thinking skills to understand the ‘why’ in a business strategy.

I’ve realized, though, that many times people just want the comfort of knowing that a file exists. Furthermore, the people that want that comfort are inevitably the people that end up deviating from the plan or making changes.

Project Management, without being too exhaustive here, isn’t the ability to just build a list of all the tasks that need to get done; it is the ability to know the ripple effects of any changes to your plan, it is the ability to know when to be a little more forgiving and when to be more strict, it is the ability to know when your project is in jeopardy, it is the ability to know how to change your project around completely and still hit deadline and budget, it is the ability to know where you can give and where you must take.

Email – Digital Realty Trust
Link
Learn: make the most important item the focal point for your eye

Landing Page – Digital Realty Trust
Link
Learn: simple really IS better

Landing Page – Digital Realty Trust
Link
Learn: you need to do some self-promotion from time-to-time

Microsite – Digital Realty Trust
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Learn: its good to have fun, even prospective buyers enjoy it