Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
In this Podcast, Migrating from Salesforce to Microsoft, we discuss…
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Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | It’s Thursday, June 27th and today I talk with Tommy Ryan about making the move from Salesforce to Microsoft. It’s a generally broad topic, so we dive into the different products and you’ll be amazed with how many, yes, how much overlap there is between Salesforce and Microsoft. So if you’re interested in learning more about, either making the move or the individual products themselves, give this a listen. How’s it going, Tommy?
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s going well. It’s going well.
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| Danny Ryan: | Is it? You actually-
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s a good sock day. Check out my socks.
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| Danny Ryan: | You hesitated for a second there. You checked your socks to make sure it was a good day. Oh Nice. Okay. Tell me what the, I need some background.
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| Tommy Ryan: | What do you think?
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| Danny Ryan: | We’re going to have to have some pictures of this. All right, give me the background on the socks.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Well, we had a wedding in Colorado couple months back and this is from the New Belgium brewery. We took a brewery tour. Is actually my first time doing a brewer, brewery tour.
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| Danny Ryan: | So you went to a brewery and you bought socks?
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| Tommy Ryan: | I sound like I’ve been to the brewery, but yeah, and we got glasses too. The socks were kind of cool looking socks.
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| Danny Ryan: | So you’ve probably wrapped the glasses with your socks when you put them on the air.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. How’d you know?
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| Danny Ryan: | I’m smart like that.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I know I had a package. That’s an old trick.
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| Danny Ryan: | All right. Talking about packaging today. We’re, we’re going to talk about a really important subject. So background on this is we’ve been talking through a bunch of different platforms and moving to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft in general and today we are going to cover one of the big ones and that is Salesforce. And we’re gonna talk about Salesforce-
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| Tommy Ryan: | That little thing called Salesforce.
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| Danny Ryan: | That little thing called Salesforce. And you know what, on the, when we talked about different platforms at, we talked about some of them that were more along the lines of enterprise social with things like Workplace by Facebook and Slack. And then we talked about some of the, what Gartner used to call the enterprise file sync and share. They now call it the content collaboration, things like Box and Dropbox.
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| And then we also could, we covered some of the Google stuff, which is more around office productivity types of things and started to get into a lot of overlap with Microsoft. What I find with this one is man, oh man, we’ve got, when I talk about moving from Salesforce to Microsoft, I sort of initially just thought, let’s focus in on Chatter to Yammer or Teams. But then I think, let’s start this whole conversation off with sort of, all of the different services that you could move from. And maybe we can jump into a little bit more detail and other upcoming podcasts. I’m breaking out some of these individually and sort of the benefits and challenges of doing that. But today let’s focus in on overall moving from Salesforce over to Microsoft. Sound like a good challenge for the day?
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| Tommy Ryan: | We can do that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Awesome. So I think as I look at getting this started off and Tommy and I are looking at a board and probably Austin, if you want to take a picture of it, you can add it into the blog post if you want to, but I just sort of threw up one column, Salesforce, the other column is Microsoft and then the area. Cause the more I started, we started thinking about this, the more we started recognizing the vast amount of overlap between the products that Microsoft has and the products that Salesforce has.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. This one probably has the most so far. I mean Google had quite a bit. To kind of move over had a broader platform. But Salesforce definitely has the most overlap.
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| Danny Ryan: | So let’s, I think probably the, if we start with the Chatter to Yammer slash Teams and that’s, that’s in the enterprise social area.
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| I think what we see there is, Chatter is a product from Microsoft around enterprise social where you’re able to really, what’s nice about it is how it’s so integrated into the CRM and how you can start conversations about an account or start conversations about an opportunity. The important thing with enterprise social is sort of context, like what are we talking about? And I think one of the benefits, of the benefits of, Chatter is, if you happen to be using Salesforce for your CRM and we’ll get to this later, if you, if you wore the benefits of sort of having those conversations about those particular objects or things within Salesforce, how you can keep it close to it. And that’s really crucial.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s a good point. Cause I think when you look at, let’s say Yammer as one alternative on the Microsoft side is that Yammer is kind of that centralized stream of information.
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| There’s groups the way to kind of channel some of that, a lot of people are staying at the highest level. Where do they see everything from their groups and things for the all company. And then when you’re in the world of Chatter, it’s more of kind of a add on to the objects there. So if I’m inside an account or if I’m on an opportunity, I can start a conversation and I don’t have to give it context. I’m already in that context and I go over to the chatter kind of tab and start pulling people into a conversation on that particular object. I think Chatter has in some aspects a closer relationship to Teams because Teams has that ability to have discussions around pieces of content. And so it gets to the context in a natural way where if you’re just in Yammer, you got to do a lot of extra effort to kind of pull in the context. You have to kind of link over and it’s a little bit more disjointed.
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| But I think both chatter and teams give you that close to the content conversational context.
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| Danny Ryan: | And I think with this, for us, I think we use a little bit of, our approach is, we, we have some conversations and chatter. If it’s, if I want to ask somebody, hey, what’s going on inside this account or what’s, what’s the latest without, sorting, starting these little conversations about different things that are, are in Salesforce for us. Then I think, I, I put Yammer slash Teams because I looked, what was it yesterday, yesterday or maybe earlier today and like looked in our Yammer feed and like, it’s, it was probably six months ago was the last time somebody puts something in there.
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| I mean, Teams has replaced it. So I think the enterprise social, and I understand we’re a small company, so for larger companies for the outer loop stuff, Yammer just makes sense. But I think some of this, some of those types of conversations are really going over into Teams and then you have, you have whatever the appropriate structure inside of Teams for those social conversations, they’re set up there. We now with Teams, we also have the, you have the smaller groups and also the entire company. So trying to collaborate across the entire organization where it’s more of a talking about something, Teams seemed to be enabling more of that nowadays.
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| So what would be, why would you, why would you move from chatter over to, is there, and again, I think we’re, we’ve talked about this with enterprise social, which is the content around this is really, it’s, it’s transient, it doesn’t, it’s stuff that’s conversations from awhile back, which is good metadata. But is it really stuff that you need to migrate over if you decided to move from chatter to Yammer teams? It seems like there might not be a whole lot of value out of PDF.
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| The only thing, and it’s kind of a stretch, is Chatter around file content. So if you’ve got binary content and Salesforce and for some reason you are, let’s say you’ve got contracts that you’re collaborating around in Chatter where you’ve, you kind of see the history of how did we land on this final piece of content, and moving that over that conversations over to Teams, if you’re moving the file content into SharePoint might be, have some value that it’s not as transient. It’s like I want to go back and look at this file and I want context to how this file landed to take things and push that into Yammer.
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| I really don’t see a lot of value in that and there has to be special cases that bring some value, say I need to go search these conversations and where do I wanna quote stage or move these conversations to to stay in the office 365 platform. Maybe that could be Yammer, if it’s, if it’s knowledge, the next, that leads us to the next piece, which is really around files inside of Salesforce. I don’t know whether that’s nowadays with, it’s called Chatter files or Salesforce files, but essentially you’re storing binary content or files that you want a store inside of Salesforce. We, we’ve a while back we created that integration between Salesforce and Microsoft 365 where you can, you could sort of see, you could store files about accounts, opportunities and inside of office three 65 and you sort of had that full experience, which was really nice, the, the files component within Salesforce doesn’t have that sort of, I want to go edit it and make it very easy for you to edit files.
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| At least it, it’s a little bit more of a multiple step process, let’s put it that way. And this might be, for content that is in like a binary format is, would be something that’s a value to move to. And, and for the MC on the Microsoft side, it’d be OneDrive or SharePoint online, that it makes sense to really migrate that content over. If you were wanting to, to make the move and you’ve got to, I think we really do start to see a lot of benefits of storing files within the Microsoft platform where you have that integrated office experience. You really, it’s, there’s a lot more that you can do once those files had been moved over.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, we do have context to this where we built the, the integration that was an app in the app exchange and, and the ability to have cheaper file storage because they’re storing it inside of SharePoint versus inside of Salesforce and document management in general, it’s, SharePoint is, is more of a document repository towards your content management system than Salesforce. And I think one of the challenges we had is people don’t want to pay much for it. And at the end of the day, and I think Salesforce was trying to create some of that, that integration. But I, I do see, that can be a migration source, taking Salesforce files and moving them into SharePoint.
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| Danny Ryan: | So then the next, the next sort of place that I would like to go to, so we hit Chatter and we hit files is, is the Salesforce community cloud, which is really maps that was, this is sort of like the intranet, extranet portals piece of, of the Salesforce platform. And that would typically move over to something like, would move over to SharePoint online. And it’s sort of its components as well. That is something that that’s out there that typically, we’re somebody wanting to, to migrate. I’m just trying to think of what sort of, what sort of content, why would they make the move, what are the benefits of doing this? Any thoughts on that Tom?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Well, I think we look at this as a extranet scenario. When you look at the community cloud, I, I think some scenarios are our teams that you had externalized. You’re trying to get collaboration across organizations. And so, we kind of pointed at SharePoint online. Could we even maybe even say teams is an example there.
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| Danny Ryan: | Maybe the front end is teams and you’ve got components of it, going to share it-
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| Tommy Ryan: | We’re doing that today. We’re, we’ve got some of our clients that we create a team that’s, we call it an external team, and we’re finding more attraction of people coming in to collaborate with us in a team than we did with say a SharePoint extra net just because it’s simplified. It has very distinct streams of what do you do in this versus SharePoint online. It’s, it’s documents, and, and discussions are, are not very rich and and natural as they are inside of a conversation and Teams.
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| Danny Ryan: | Awesome. Next area is, this is from an acquisition from Salesforce, but they bought a company called Quip and that’s-
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| Tommy Ryan: | Quip it good.
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| Danny Ryan: | And that, and that would be in the, what we classify as sort of the office productivity area and the, the equivalent to that would be Office online and with, with the Office client products as well. I think this, I don’t know if we’re really sure how much of a, of a longevity you would see in the, something like Quip where they’re trying to compete with office online as, as I said of, it’s similar to Google docs and Google sheets and that, it seems like Office is in, and Google or that the main players, and they’re definitely going into a mature market to, to have a competitive product to office online.
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| And I think some of it is probably coming from we want to own the ecosystem and, and there is, there is a lot of value in having online experience to work with, binary information about binary documents. So if they have to kind of be thrown over to Google docs or thrown over to Office, they kind of lose that seamless experience. So you kind of get why they’re doing it. But I think most people, they’ve made a decision on either office or on Google and they don’t think a lot companies are looking to have something better than that. They’ve decided one or the other and the, they’re not necessarily looking for a third alternative.
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| One has just happened within the last couple of weeks and I don’t have it up here on the board, which is Salesforce bought Tableau, which would be the, something like power BI would be the Microsoft equivalent so that they’re trying to round out the market.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I can see that Tableau’s, that seems like a good acquisition.
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| Danny Ryan: | So they and they, so that’s, that’s one I’ll have to throw up on the board here as well. So that would be a wow. The next lap. Yeah. That’s amazing. As you can see who’s trying, who’s taking on who, right. Let’s go onto the next one, which, let’s start getting off into some of the, the apps pieces, which if I looked at like cloud infrastructure and services, don’t you love the way I spelled infrastructure up there? Heroku. So Salesforce has Heroku, Microsoft has Azure, this is a, this is a, you wanting to build out custom cloud based apps. So they have, you might look at moving some of those over from one to the other. Then we have the custom apps while call custom apps area, which is the, Salesforce has the Lightning apps and then within Microsoft it’s really a lot of different types of apps like Custom. You have custom lists within SharePoint you have PowerApps, you have Flow and sort of like these, for building out those line of business apps. You have those available to you as well. Thoughts on those two pieces?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Well, if I, if I jumped first to the custom apps, I found that kind of the entry level jumping into it, I’ve been able to get into some of the Lightning stuff in some of the workflow associated with Lightning pretty easily. I just, I don’t understand the depth there. I think there’s a lot of power in there kind of very quickly. They’ve been honing that over the years. Their whole SharePoint custom lists PowerApps Flow. What I like about what Microsoft has done there is PowerApps and Flow or not coupled at the hip, let’s say with SharePoint. They can kind of exist on their own. And I’m also very friendly to different data sources and a wider ecosystem of inputs and outputs. When you look at things like Flow, where it’s, gives you a little bit more than of a if than, than this type feel.
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| And then if you want to get deeper and deeper, there’s, there’s extensibility there. So I think there’s, they’re, they’re running fairly neck and neck there. Depends on what you’re trying to do. Which one would be more appropriate. And then from a migration from one to the other, I, I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of that where people are migrating from a Lightning app to a customer lists and PowerApps and Flow. Although if they’ve, sunset Salesforce and they don’t see that in ecosystem, you’d have to address that to say, what do I do with these kind of low code, no code solutions that, that’s getting the attention of some of our customers looking at low code, no code where they’re investing in PowerApps and Flow and some kind of third party solutions that would allow them to do a business problem in a week or one or two weeks, two weeks, which is pretty interesting where they’re creating the ability to enable the business and do that quickly.
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| So there is some momentum towards these low code, no code solutions and then Heroku versus Azure or Azure I would say. That’s interesting. I don’t know how many people are comparing the two. I think they might be using Heroku because again, they’re on the platform for Salesforce and want to simplify things and go to one conference that they learn about all of it. Just like, people go to a Microsoft conference to learn all about the platforms. I, I would say Azure is head and shoulders above Heroku. I, I don’t and some of that has to do with, I don’t see a lot of momentum and press around that. That doesn’t seem to be something that they’re putting as much energy in as maybe three years ago where I saw a lot of hiring into kind of the account team and product team around Heroku. It’s been pretty low key from my exposure to it and it seems like Azure is just kicking butt in terms of what it’s doing and how broad is become as a set of services.
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| Danny Ryan: | So, saved the biggest for the last which is Salesforce CRM to Dynamic CRM. I think as we look at this there’s obvious obviously, there, this is a big, big move. If you were looking to move from one to the other large efforts, large, cause typically your CRM, you’ve got not just the data stored within it, not just for supporting your internal processes around CRM, but you also have, typically have integrations with other products. You have lots of apps that are built on top, just things that you’ve built out to make it your own. And there’s com, there’s whole companies focused in on, if you decide to which it’s not to be taken lightly to move from one to the other is a pretty significant effort. But then, you might be looking at it for alignment to Microsoft reasons or for some I, you’re, you’re just, everybody talks about the Apple tax.
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| There’s a Salesforce tax I think as well. You’re just looking at other alternatives that are out there. I think that’s something that some folks-
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s an order of magnitude more. It’s a big, yeah, it’s a big jump. Yup.
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| Danny Ryan: | Especially when you’re looking at any of the add ons and things like that. But I think there’s an obvious that’s a, that could be a whole discussion upon itself is talking about moving from Salesforce CRM over to Dynamics and, and there might be a whole area of part of this, part of the reason why we’re having some of these discussions is just trying to find out from the community, sort of like what areas are people looking at and want to go after. I think if there is interest from people when we hear people that they’re interested in delving into more of this, we can, with our background understanding, primarily Salesforce is our back, understanding Salesforce CRM. I think our expertise, we haven’t done a lot with with the Dynamics, but just interested to see where this goes and whether there’s a lot of opportunities.
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| Tommy Ryan: | We always tool around with that.
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| Danny Ryan: | And I think there are some companies that hone in on that. And there’s, it’s, there is a broad set of things to consider, the integrations and the customizations that go on than CRM. I think we, we know it from a working model of using the tool and knowing some of the ecosystem of building apps in the Salesforce app exchange. That one, it’s, it’s one we keep our eye on. And that probably what interests us the most is Dynamics has, is getting pulled together with PowerApps and Flow and being the power platform. And that is, for building business apps, it’s that dynamic CRM. So some of the things that you see in Salesforce Lightning and CRM together is similar to the power platform where PowerApps Flow and Dynamics are coming together for low code solutions that are addressing business applications.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’ll be interesting to see how that plays, whether we end up getting into that over time or not.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. Cause with the SharePoint stuff there’s more things that are going away from building solutions in SharePoint to SharePoint being a service and where it’s kind of moving over to PowerApps Flow and dynamics, which is where more of the business apps are being built.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Awesome.
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| Danny Ryan: | So part of this, hopefully in this conversation when number one might get some takeaways from it, there is quite a bit of overlap. There are some areas where people might be looking at, at making the move and sort of coming up with an appropriate strategy of making a move from one to the other. In this conversation, Tommy and I are just sort of talking about these, about these things that at a high level we’d love to continue this conversation. If you’re looking at doing something like this and want to talk maybe about a certain area where you know where you’re trying to move off of Salesforce Lightning apps and over to Microsoft with PowerApps and Flow or I’ll use that as an example, and want to continue on those conversations. threewill.com go to the contact us page. Just let us know you want to have some of those conversations and we’d love to follow up on it.
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| We’re just trying to stay on top of what’s, what’s needed in the marketplace. I think we, with our expertise in building more and more different types of platform type migrations to Microsoft. We’re just trying to stay on top of what people are trying to do. And so if you’re looking at one of these options, we’d love to hear from you. We’d love to get your thoughts on what you’re, what you’re trying to do and some of these things are multi year efforts and some of these are coming up with inappropriate strategy to get them done and we’d love to be a part of that conversation at least initially with you about doing this. Anything else, sort of things that your, through this conversation you’re sort of walking away with Tommy?
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| Tommy Ryan: | No, I think we’ve covered quite a bit.
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| Danny Ryan: | And at the end of the day this is where we see probably the most overlap, maybe not the most migrations.
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| Part of it is because they’re both very strong players and so I think there’s, in a sense loyalty to some of these platforms where people, it’s fairly sticky. They get in these platforms, they’re, they’re pretty happy with the innovation and how things are moving forward. Two very great companies.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, I think that’s for us, I mean even with us, we using both sales, Salesforce CRM and all of, as many of the Microsoft suite. So it’s, it’s even worked out for us. But it’ll, I think a part of this as well as just having, having the option of if you need to move off of one and onto the other is a help from an outside partner to do that and coming up with the right strategy for it. But a lot of these I, they are both great companies are both partners at ThreeWill and so it’s sort of interesting just sort of getting into this and seeing what people, sort of, a lot of this is looking into the future and trying to understand what people will want.
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| Danny Ryan: | Great. We appreciate everybody taking the time to do this. Thank you so much Tommy for your time.
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| Tommy Ryan: | You’re welcome.
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| Danny Ryan: | Thanks everybody for listening and have a wonderful day. Bye Bye. Bye Bye.
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