What Is My Trust Center and How Does It Help Admins?

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Maxey, Senior Product Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how My Trust Center can help admins communicate incidents, plan releases, and operate with transparency.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Maxey.

From static status pages to personalized trust

When I was early in my admin career in 2008, keeping track of status updates was as simple as loading up Salesforce Trust. These days, with so many different products and services, it’s gotten a lot more complicated.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with John Maxey. He’s working on My Trust Center, a personalized, authenticated experience that only shows you information that’s relevant to your org.

Reducing noise and creating clarity for admins

With the new My Trust Center, you’ll be able to get more specific information about upcoming maintenance and how it affects your org. Everything is tailored to what products and services you’re actually using, instead of having to sift through unrelated incidents and interpret whether or not they apply to you.

As John explains, Salesforce can be much more granular about any specific maintenance or updates and how they will affect you. And that makes it easier to make decisions like when to promote new features, when you need to do testing, or when there might be downtime. You can coordinate better with your team and avoid surprises.

Greater transparency through targeted communication

At its core, My Trust Center is about improving transparency both internally and externally. For admins, it will provide more visibility into what’s going on when something doesn’t work and when a particular service will be back online.

If there’s an incident, you won’t need to ask your CSM or contact customer support to figure out what happened. RCAs will be attached to each incident, so the entire process is self-serve. And you can configure notifications via SMS, Slack, or email to keep your entire team up to speed.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from John about what’s coming with My Trust Center. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

Learn more

Admin Trailblazers Group

Social

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I am joined by John Maxey to unpack the evolution of the Trust Center into something far more than a status page. That’s right. It’s becoming a personalized command center for how you run your org. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s not just about uptime anymore. It’s about how you design systems that balance data, automation, and AI while keeping your stakeholders informed and confident.

We’re going to dig into what My Trust Center means for how you communicate incidences, plan releases, and operate with clarity across increasingly complex environments. So if you’re the person everyone turns to when something breaks or when they just think something’s broke, this episode’s for you. Let’s get John on the podcast.
So John, welcome to the podcast.

John Maxey:
Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, this is exciting. So I like it when I can have a podcast and a blog post on the same subject in the same day. And all of this stuff around trust and security, I feel like admins are right there, we’re the Sentinels every day.

But before we talk about some of the cool stuff that you’re working on, let’s learn a little bit about John Maxey. So John, how did you get to Salesforce and what is the cool thing that you oversee?

John Maxey:
Oh, well, thank you for that. So I came to Salesforce in late 2007. I joined as a customer support rep in CSG in our customer success group. I had just come from the FinTech, and if folks remembered, FinTech was kind of not doing well at that time in 2007. So it was an opportunity to switch industries and come to Salesforce. And that was pretty exciting being the … At the time, our moniker was no software, sort of breaking the mold of traditional software and sort of moving to the cloud.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. We were talking before I hit record. I think if you do the math, our Salesforce experience is definitely in high school at some point.

John Maxey:
Seems that way.

Mike Gerholdt:
They graduated from high school, which is kind of scary at some point.

John Maxey:
I wish.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know. Well, it’s about to head off to college and make questionable decisions and maybe be a paleontology as a major. Who knows?

But we’re going to talk about … So the blog post that went up today on admin.salesforce.com is the same topic as this podcast, which is My Trust Center, which I can’t tell you how excited I am for this. Because I remember back to my days early admin, like ’08, just going to having to pay. It never dawned on me until one of my users couldn’t log into Salesforce a long, long, long, long time ago. And I was like, oh, I wonder why that is. But I never thought about like, oh, cloud services can go offline. I need to pay attention to this.

And at the time, trust.salesforce.com was literally just like a handful of blinky lights. That’s all it was because there was a handful of pods that you paid attention to and you just checked to see if yours was up and that was it. And then over the years, I mean, there’s so much more to pay attention to. Everything that goes into trust.salesforce.com. So can you kind of take us on that journey of like Mike from 2008, just having to remember if NA1 is up to everything that the new My Trust Center is going to give us?

John Maxey:
Sure. Yeah. I remember using the Trust site when I first joined Salesforce as well way back in 2007, and it has changed a lot. So if you think about it, in 2007, Salesforce was really sort of selling one product, CRM, Salesforce automation. We had, like you say, we had just a handful of instances where we had customer installations. So even the field of boxes that we had there was small enough for folks to be able to find out what was going on with their stuff. And even in the URL of their application, it would say which instance you were on.

So fast-forward 18 years and we’ve acquired companies, we’ve developed new technologies and new products. Some of them are on the platform and others are what we call off core or they’re not directly in our application. They’re separate different types of architecture. And then we’ve also moved into the public cloud. We’ve also been selling to enterprise customers and we think about an enterprise customer and their implementations are far more complicated, multi-cloud. So they may have marketing and commerce, as well as sales and service. And then we have all our industries.

So in talking to customers when I became the product manager of the trust site in 2018, just sort of realized that their experience, especially for our larger customers was harder to deal with. When you look at, I mean, I think we have 950 some odd instances in our sales service industry, we have over a thousand DBs in marketing cloud engagement. It’s just kind of daunting to try and figure out where you are. And so at the time we were figuring out tools to make it easier to find that.

But really the answer was to get personal and to create an authenticated site. So then we know our customers. I believe that’s like CRM 101, know your customer. And then when we know who they are, when you log in, we can present you with what you have with the things you already purchased, the products and services. So in this first release, we’re starting that path, that journey to true personalization. And so there’s still some gaps here and there, but one of them is the support for all our products. So we have requests out to all of our different products like MuleSoft and Tableau to do a little bit of work to get them ready for the My Trust Center. But yeah, so that’s, I mean, it’s just grown and this My Trust Center really just has come out of customer feedback and wanting a better experience.

And the other thing about the personal, I know a lot of folks are going to probably jostle a little bit at the move away from a purely public site to the authenticated site. But there’s an opportunity there to not only provide the personalization, but also be able to expand the types of services we can provide, product communications, things like that, that we may do via email today, but we can provide an experience to consolidate all that into one single spot, seeing as we will know who those customers are, being able to target the communications. As if we did it today and it was public, it would just be too much. It would be information overload. And so being able to segment that because we know who you are is really a powerful driver for that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, if you think about it, so I remember going to a user group, this’ll totally date me. But they were like, “Well, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for your server status.” And that was it for me. I was like, “Dude, I’m set. This is great. And I’m going to get the emails. It’s perfect.” And then you kind of don’t know what you’re missing until you don’t know what you’re missing.

And there was rarely a case, but this also speaks to why My Trust Center makes so much more sense. If I were to go there, “Oh, my instance is down, but these three instances aren’t.” Well, it’s not like I could do anything. It’s not like if my lights are out in the neighborhood, but my neighbor’s lights are on, I can grab my dog and I can put my slippers on and walk across the street and be like, “Hey, can we sit at your house until our lights come on?” It never dawned on me when I would go to trust.salesforce.com and see, “Oh, well, everyone else is online, just this one pod is off.” Okay, cool. Next. Right?

And that matters now because now if you think about it from what admins, developers, architects, they have so much to pay attention to. And all of a sudden, especially in a highly regulated industry, you talked about being in Finserv, why is this down? And you can feel that user looking over your shoulder and then you having to sift through a trust site, multi-layers, multi-things, and kind of give them an answer. This is, why can’t you just present me with the dashboard that makes sense? I mean, the dashboard in my car only tells me about my car. It doesn’t tell me about every other car on the road. So it kind of feels like a natural evolution.

John Maxey:
Yeah. And that was definitely part of it as well. The information overload as part of a growth and when you have a company that sells many more products than you started with. And then also we find that sometimes somebody will see an issue and then they go into the trust site and they see another issue going on and maybe they attach themselves to that. And so that can kind of confuse things when they reach out and report that. If there is an issue, we’ll have ways to report that. But you shouldn’t just assume that because somebody else is having an issue that it’s the same issue that you’re having.

So yeah, definitely making sure that we’re giving you the information. And then also being able to expand on it more. Like I mentioned, the public nature of that, we’ve got press watching it, we’ve got competitors and things like that. And sometimes we just don’t want … We don’t have to be guarded with what we say because of how that could be used. When we know we’re talking to customers, we can be a lot more open, even drafty as they might say. We know that something’s going on. Maybe we don’t know exactly what it is.

And that’s not really necessarily appropriate when you’re speaking to a public audience. But when you’re talking to customers and they just want to know that you know that there’s a problem and that Salesforce is working on it. Like your analogy, when the power goes out, typically the customers don’t need to know when the application is having an issue. They know that the application’s that. They want to know that Salesforce knows that there’s an issue and what are we doing to fix it?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, ironically, it’s just like the power company.

John Maxey:
It’s just like the power company.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I’m looking at the screenshot and the other thing I noticed that I think is really neat that before back in the days of the blinky lights, it was like, it’s on or it’s off. Cool. And then we would pay attention to releases and you always got like a release date window. This shows a tab upcoming maintenance for the next 90 days. Tell me more about some of the thought that went into that.

John Maxey:
Yeah. So we look at the different personas that we want to support on the trust side, on My Trust, and we think about the jobs that they need to do. And so you have an admin. Admin is obviously concerned about any incidents going on to make sure they can communicate with their user base. But they’re also working on developing new functionality for their user base. And so they want to know what’s coming up, what would impact them.

And in the past, it would have been as much of how much downtime would there be, but that’s almost a thing of the past. But really it’s more about when will my features? Maybe I’ve been working on those in Sandbox and I’m ready to promote them. When do I know to promote them? If we’re talking about an operations persona, they need to know when there need to be a little more diligent because there’s a release going on.

Some of our customers do testing after we do a release to make sure that there’s no conflicts or anything. Obviously as people customize their orgs, we do our best at Salesforce to make sure that there’s no conflicts in the code that we release, but there’s always, folks are very inventive in the way they do their solutions. And so there could be a conflict. A lot of customers like to test that, they want to know when. Especially if you have a large application, a lot of people in to test, you want to know the best use of their time because it’s usually on a weekend.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know. Yeah. And I mean, even scrolling down, we could talk more about this too. I’m looking at a maintenance window of four hours. I remember before we would get a release as an admin, I’d always tell my users, every now and then that scheduled maintenance window would come up when you’d log in and be like, “Okay, well, just don’t log in this weekend.” And it’s kind of like it’s fun to think of the days when companies would only work Monday through Friday. Please salespeople just … I know you’re not working on Saturday, right? Wink, wink.

John Maxey:
Right. Well, a lot of the … The major releases now, especially in Hyperforce are zero downtime. It’s just really, it’s more of a notification, “Hey, this is when your features would be ready,” as opposed to it actually being downtime. The first party, it does have a little bit more. But I think we’ve got most customers off of first party now. And then we have some others that we’re still working with to get their messaging better and because now we can target. So those timeframes, those windows will start to shrink because we’ll be able to target folks at a better granularity and make sure they know exactly when they’re going as opposed to a more generic sort of announcement, “Hey, we’re doing a bunch of work. You may or may not be impacted in this time.” We’ll get it down to, we know when you’re going to be deployed and exactly when the impact may happen.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. And this is also going to help our inboxes because they’re not full enough.

John Maxey:
I hope so.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know. Man, I’m telling you. The one line, say goodbye to instance wide email blast. Well, those were just fun. Okay, I think it … Does it mean us or not? But still, one of the features is you can still subscribe to notifications, right?

John Maxey:
Yep, exactly. Yeah. Today we support email. We’re looking to expand that in the near future to support SMS like we do in the legacy status site. And looking to add some more as well. I mean, obviously Slack is top on our list to investigate how to do that in a meaningful way so folks can subscribe to their notifications.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, like a Slack notification?

John Maxey:
Yeah, exactly. Like a Slack channel you subscribe to and get your notifications right in Slack. I mean, another one of our goals in our group in general is to try and push our information into the workplaces where folks are working. So if you spend your time in Slack, why not get that stuff in Slack? And then it’s more meaningful and you don’t have to switch to a different application. I mean, I love developing the trust site and the portal. But the main goal is to make sure folks are informed and get what they need.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, so that was exactly … I mean, to kind of ask you a best practices question, it could be, and in my case, I was the only admin, so it was easy for me to subscribe to everything. But there are a lot of companies that have teams, right? There’s admins, developers. So putting it to Slack, obviously then it’s anybody can join that Slack channel and get the status update. And if you need to know that, then join that channel, that makes sense. In the interim, how do you address that as a best practice for organizations with maybe multiple admins or multiple developers?

John Maxey:
Sure. That is a challenge. I mean, the quick and easy answer is we use Trailblazer ID, which is the same authentication method for Trailhead or for help, for AppExchange, all of our external facing portals. So there’s a good, better experience there and one authentication through all those portals.

But then because Trailblazer ID just takes an email address, you could use your group email to sign up for a Trailblazer ID. And then that ID, that email address, would have to be attached to a license in the orgs you want to see. So that’s the way to do that. Today, we understand it’s a challenge. Not everybody has a bunch of extra licenses to use for this type of purpose for folks who are monitoring. So we are working on a solution for a license that would have very limited or maybe no access to the org at all. But you could attach it to say a group email and then be able to get all the monitoring information you needed from that.

Mike Gerholdt:
I like that.

John Maxey:
Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s awesome. It says one of the plans is to have major release notes and root cause analysis for eligible incidents. How is that beneficial? Like what were customers asking for that we weren’t providing root cause analysis on?

John Maxey:
As much of anything, it’s a delivery mechanism. So if a customer is impacted by an issue, they may have to engage with their CSM or go to customer support and say, “I need an RCA.” And so instead of that, we have certain criteria on incidents when an RCA is going to automatically be provided. So our first iteration would be that when that RCA is provided, we would attach it directly to the incident and you would get a notification that it’s been attached. And so you could then go reference it. No need to ask anybody.

In the future, we’re thinking about ways maybe we could provide some visualization to say that it’s in process and maybe how far in the process. I mean, the more we can self-serve, the better. And then we’ll look at other ways of being able to surface that type of information and similar type of communications directly in the portal and through notifications and all of that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Before we press record, you said some customers already have their hands on it. What was some of the feedback they gave you?

John Maxey:
Oh, we were in Pilot for about a year with a handful of customers, and then we were in beta for … Our open beta for almost a year as well, nine months. Lots of different types of feedback.

I mean, in small things is accessibility, making sure that we’re accessible to finding out about the need for the license solution so that folks can see this. Whether we have big companies that outsource or have operations teams that manage all of that for the whole company. And Salesforce is just a piece of that. We also have a gap of getting an API that matches our UI, so it’ll be personalized. And if you use a monitoring application, you can just feed the signals right into that so you can have a single place to monitor all of your operations across your whole company.

So those are the types of things that we got in formatting. And actually the initial iteration of the 90 days upcoming maintenance and releases was originally 30 days and people were like, “But you only do a major release every 90 days. You can’t see enough.” And so we expanded that. And I think we need to add a little more navigation capabilities because some of that … Sometimes like for me, I have a bunch of instances that I have orgs on. So I get a bunch, a bunch of those and it’s just hard to deal with. So we’re still improving. We have a feedback farmer. We’re always looking at that feedback to see if there’s an opportunity to improve what we have.

Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. This is so cool. I can think back to only how many times I wish I would’ve had this as an admin. I mean, I was glad for what we had, but always getting that personalized feel is super helpful.

John, I’d be curious, in the past I’ve asked people, when we work in tech, often our hobbies or the things that we love to do are a little more tactile because like I told a friend of mine, I said, “Well, when the power goes out, you can’t ever see what I built.” And he was like, “Wow, that’s super powerful.” And I was like, “I know, right? It’s kind of crazy.” But I’d be curious, outside of security and building the My Trust Center, is there something fun that you like to do on the side?

John Maxey:
Well, I like to visit my kids. My youngest just started college, so we’re second semester empty nesters.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh boy.

John Maxey:
We love to travel and see … Especially internationally and see new countries and experience new sights and smells. And like you say, very tactile, sort of getting out and about, getting away from the computer a bit and enjoying the world, going hikes in different countries and meet different people and whatnot.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I completely understand because I get into yard work over the summer.

John Maxey:
Oh, yeah. My wife loves to garden.

Mike Gerholdt:
Very gratifying.

John Maxey:
My wife loves to garden, so I spend a lot of time supporting that as well.

Mike Gerholdt:
See, that’s always … And then the first time you get to make something with your vegetables, that’s always the best. That’s the most rewarding.

John, thanks for coming on to talk about this, I’m sure. Well, I know for certain, when you have stuff to talk about, you’re going to come back. Because this is so, so incredibly useful for admins and it really helps us kind of understand the whole state of everything that’s going on with our orgs so that we can communicate that internally to our stakeholders, which keeps the wheels running. So I appreciate you filling in all of the dots and keeping our status green for us.

John Maxey:
Oh, and thank you so much, Mike, for having me. My whole life at Salesforce has been supporting mostly admins, making sure that they have the best experience that I can provide is one of my goals. So it’s really exciting and it’s great to see people start to use it and play with it and maybe find some things we missed. So definitely have a lot to add and would love to come back and talk about some of the new features that we implement in the next little while.

Mike Gerholdt:
I want to thank John Maxey for walking us through how My Trust Center is reshaping the way admins manage trust, not as a reactive task, but as a core part of running a system. If you take one thing away, it’s this, visibility drives confidence, period. And when you connect incidents, releases, and communication into one clear view, you’re not just supporting the business, you’re leading it.
So give this episode a share with somebody on your team who’s always there and trying to answer, “Is Salesforce down?” And make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so that you don’t miss what’s next. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Is My Trust Center and How Does It Help Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Related Posts