If from my point of view, day one was more focused on marketing and selling, day 2 went more into tech, function and possibilities.

So after a long day 1, I got some sleep, although not maybe enough during the day, but nothing an extra cup of coffee couldn’t fix as day 2 kicked-off at 7:00 am Finnish time.

Day two was kicked-off with the interesting topic of “Explore Slack and Salesforce’s Successful Path to Integration” which handled the acquisition of Slack, and the path of the integration of the companies.

The following session that was interesting was one called “Right Here, Right Now: The Power of Community”. It was very interesting hearing about the case of Gavi, The Vaccination Alliance, and how the Salesforce platform was used to pull forward together with the goal to end the pandemic. Gavi has thru it’s work so far, made it possible to vaccinate 822 million children, preventing 14 million future deaths to date, with a variety of vaccines for different illnesses.
In the session, one of the hosts Marie Rosecrans, SVP of Product Marketing in Salesforce.org, compressed very well the headline into: “Community is about connection”. And these days as people work from home, as well as soon from the offices again, the tools are in a such critical importance, that there’s really high demand on what companies uses.

“Community is about connection”

Marie Rosecrans, SVP of Product Marketing in Salesforce.org

From a community headline I headed over to the “The Future of Admin Success” session, the main show of the #AwesomeAdmins trail at Dreamforce. There was a pretty good real world case presented, where a message was sent to Slack, once a lead was converted. It was pretty simple but can in larger organisations really distribute lead conversion info to many others. As a Salesforce admin, you are in a very central and vital role at your company. You need to have Business Skills + Technology Skills witch result in Admin Success. But one slide in my mind presented well what many of the understandings and knowledges an admin has to have.

So how many of these headings can you see in yourself at your company? One piece of interesting information appeared, which is huge, is the fact that there are some 15M Trailblazers in the admin community. That’s not all Trailblazers, but in the admin community. Wow!
One of the videos contained interview parts of different admin Trailblazers, and one called Amit Arya said it well, when he described admins task as “Helping people realise the potential of Salesforce”, and to that is so true!

A thing that was shown was a demo of using a new tool called Flow Orchestrator. As I’m far from seasoned or posses deep knowledge on Flows, even I can see that this tool is going to enable some great things in the future at my employer. Another really exciting thing is the possibility to run shortcuts from Slack, to create records into Salesforce. This is definitely going to be looked into and taken advantage of.

The next session for me continued on the admin path, and was titled “Design and Build Apps Fast for #AwesomeAdmins”. The demo in this session was focused on demos by J. Steadman, a Lead Admin Evangelist from Salesforce did great. There was a good calm, but forward going pace of the demos. What really was focused on was Flows and Dynamic page layouts. One new feature presented in this session was App Builder Dynamic Interactions. Out of the demos I retracted some ideas that I will evaluate if they could be used at work. Hopefully there will be found some time for this during the rest of 2021.

The theme of #AwesomeAdmins continued in the next session, when title changed to “Automate Apps Fast for AwesomeAdmins”. In the demo it was mentioned that a new feature coming in the next release (Winter ’22) is to have a autolaunch flow into an another flow, thus creating large and complex processes into segmented flows. I for instance am visualising at our company having one parent flow, that guides our users creating different internal records both in the Case object and our IT Order object. Hence the users start one screen flow, but within it being able to go down a path of creating support ticket or IT order seamlessly. The scheduled path is a great addition too, there within building the support case process with case status to be changed from resolved to close, after a preset amount of days. Now all in one and the same flow.

Also announced was the info, that within near future, the development and support for Workflows and Process Builder for record creation is going to be halted, so this indicates Salesforce really going full speed ahead into Flows. One repeated slogan thru Dreamforce was

“Remember to go with the Flow!”

New is also going to be the Flow Orchestrator which is in Beta stage. This will combine multi-step, multi-user and multi-action with creating records and approvals. Interested to see how this will evolve, and will return to this later on, and see how it can support our business.

From the admin bubble, I then did a jump over to the data side, and listened in on the session “Tableau: Unleash the Power of Your Data”. In this session Tableau president and CEO Mark Nelson opened with going thru building blocks of a data-driven organizations. These are

To the stage after Mr. Nelson, came Francois Ajenstat from Tableau, who shot an unbelievable information; “the average enterprise, has over 900 applications generating data.”.

One of the demos was hosted by Philip Cooper, and in his demo he showed how to use dashboard templates from Tableau, and then went on to show how in combination of Salesforce Einstein, Tableau and Slack, the ones using data can be efficient and stay on top of their business thru data, from where they work.

Following Mr. Cooper, came Aleene Webber, Director of Product Marketing at Tableau to talk about the topic of collaboration around data, and she then presented new features.

David Lou then hosted the demo part of the collaboration. And there really is cool features, how to take the data, reports and dashboards, and share them to Slack.

I do understand the drive to activate the future for newly acquired Slack, and Salesforce, but I could not help ponder, why everything should be forwarded to Slack. For instance, the sales people are using Salesforce for leads, opportunity, contracts and quotes, so why is everything presented in a way that now everything should be forwarded to Slack?

Data as a topic can be heavy, as it was in the middle of the night in Finland, so I took to maybe a little bit more easy topic next, with the session “The Roadmap to Get More from Experience Cloud”. As a product it’s not small, as VP of Experience Cloud product at Salesforce, Khushwant Singh presented that a magical 1B users of experience, powered by Experience Cloud is going to be surpassed soon. Or the info that there’s over 70K live sites, portals & apps that’s built with Experience Cloud.

The micro-sites functions seems interesting, and it could be fun to see how that could be implemented into our Experience Cloud site.

The day…or for me the night was ended with the session “Be a Trailblazer: Skill Up and Connect from Anywhere”. As with every other session, even here, the Slack purchase has created new things, and one example is the Trailhead for Slack app. With this connection, you are able to se your Trailhead progress right from Slack, and even encourage others to take trails and modules from Trailhead. Within our company, I don’t think there’s many others utilising Trailhead at all. So there is a lot of possible progress to have here, and if a possibility appears to suggest a module, I will definitely will now as there’s a easy way to do it.

I’ve used Trailhead pretty much, but mostly just to go thru trails and modules, but after this session the interest has grown in other ways too. Like the community has not been much used by me. But inspired now to use Trailhead on a broader scale, I installed the app on my phone, and hope to be more active here. Maybe there’s even help I could provide others, as I’m at Ranger -level.