A Force to Reckon With

I’m a geek and a mom.  I’m a Star Wars fan, love Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor and I refuse to let go of either my phone (HTC EVO) or Kindle.  In May of 2009, I left the world of IT for a new position doing analysis and reporting and all sorts of things that make my geeky heart go pitter-patter without the stress of systems being down and getting calls to fix something at odd hours.

I loved my new life.  I have great managers and coworkers and the work is challenging but I get to leave it at the office.  No more laptop, no more blackberry… if I did something afterhours it was because I wanted to.

Then came February 2009 and Salesforce.com into my life.  As Neo said after being shown the Matrix-

Whoa.

I jumped headfirst into Salesforce, took the Admin 201 class and hit the ground running on my return to the office.  Over the past year I’ve cleaned up what was built before I came on, built tons of new items and learned a lot about the platform in the process.  I get in trouble at home for working on “work stuff” but it is just that much fun and I love it so!  It beats Mafia Wars, that’s for certain!

In my office I’m it when it comes to performing admin work in Salesforce.  It can get pretty lonely when you don’t have anyone else who “speaks the language” and I found myself seeking information anywhere I could.  Books, blogs, twitter, Salesforce.com sites, user groups- the first thing I realized was that while I may be solo at the office, at the tips of my fingers is a connection to the best community think tank I’ve ever experienced.  Through Twitter and the Dreamforce application, I found “my peeps” as I like to think of them.  Folks from various backgrounds who jump on a challenge, are very friendly and share a desire to help others on this Salesforce.com path.

Which brings me to why I’m here and writing this now– there are tons of great blogs already about being an admin.  However, as every instance of Salesforce is different, I believe so is every admin’s experience.  I look forward to sharing the tricks and lessons I’ve learned and the insight I’ve gained.  What I really want to do is give back to the community that has given me so much assistance and laughs in the past year as I started on this journey. 

So pull up a chair, feel free to play with the box of LEGO, and let’s see what kind of magic we can make while we work together to be a force to be reckoned with!