Familiar territory
The 4th of November 2017 marked the day I boarded a plane and flew to San Francisco (Virgin Atlantic, as per usual the service was superb). A month later in the year compared to last year, Dreamforce 2017 promised to offer more product announcements and innovation than last year. I was fortunate enough to get a day to experience a little tourism (which took me on a cycle ride to Sausalito for a pizza and beer at Bar Bocce) before settling into the conference proper for the week.
Slalom @ Dreamforce 2017
Slalom had a booth at the Dreamforce Expo this year. I was fortunate enough to represent Slalom a couple of times on the booth during the week, and thoroughly enjoyed my time talking about our mission to implement Salesforce ourselves, and discuss both recruitment and other partnership opportunities. If you didn’t know already, Slalom are hiring!
The fourth industrial revolution
Also known as the Marc Benioff keynote, a range of topics were discussed, including new product announcements.
Marc explained how we’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, and that we live in an age of nano-technology, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing and the like. These technologies are revolutionising the way we live our lives, and as a result we should be harnessing these technologies for the greater good of our customers to deliver the connected, personalised experience that they expect.
Marc also put a huge emphasis on Diversity, Inclusion, Equality, and Recognition. It was nice to see Salesforce using their industry might to shout the message of these important equality topics. Salesforce also announced equality in the environment, announcing that their cloud is a net-zero cloud.
Salesforce have announced a strategic partnership with Google to integrate Salesforce and G Suite and also have Salesforce running on the Google Cloud Platform as a preferred cloud vendor of Salesforce going forward.
My, my, my…
Salesforce announced the following major products during the main keynote:
myTrailhead
Trailhead will soon be personalised for individual business need, including custom branding and content. This will be a game-changer for change management and adoption of Salesforce implementations, and the up-skilling of folks using Salesforce within organisations, being able to have tailored training pertinent to their implementations. More info is available at: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/mytrailhead
myEinstein
Einstein Vision, Language, Prediction Builder, Bots, and Einstein for AppExchange are all available to use when building Apps on the Salesforce Lightning Platform through myEinstein.
myLightning
myLightning: Completely personalise Salesforce for individual business need and every user — apps, themes, flow, and components.
mySalesforce
Brand the mySalesforce mobile application with custom theming and components. Salesforce will handle publishing the custom branded app (using the Listing Wizard) to the App Store or Google Play.
myIoT
Salesforce are allowing for personalised IoT journeys using minimal code and orchestration to allow business users to highlight the IoT cloud capabilities in a personalised way, calling this capability myIoT.
Other announcements of note during the keynote
Einstein Search for Commerce
Einstein can now power search from within Commerce Cloud, utilising the on-tap machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing to bring back personalised, never-empty search results from Commerce Cloud-powered storefronts.
Einstein Bots
Einstein Bots are can power conversational AI for natural language interactions, which can be deployed on apps and websites to give businesses the ability to deliver services to customers.
Einstein Forecasting
Sales forecasts in Sales Cloud can have Einstein AI learning added to them to power predictive forecasts to Sales Reps.
Live Apps
Quip now supports live-updating apps such as calendars and Kanban boards to drive productivity on the Quip platform.
Success cloud
Less of a cloud and more of a portfolio of adoption support and advisory services, Salesforce Success Cloud is designed to put a “package” around the support and readiness services Salesforce provide around consultants, experts, specialists, and tools to set organisations and partners up with personalised advice and best practices from Salesforce.
Heroku
Heroku was given more prominence this year than in previous years, underlining the commitment to this platform from Salesforce. The large Trailhead area in Moscone West had an entire section carved out for Heroku demonstrations (which included some free Heroku credits as giveaways).
Heroku Shield
Heroku Shield was demonstrated at one of the booths in the Trailhead area. Essentially, Heroku Shield facilitates regulatory compliance for things such as HIPAA and GDPR. Start with a new Private Space and simply enabling the “Shield” setting in the Heroku Spaces configuration page.
Force.com is now the Lightning platform
At the Salesforce Platform keynote, the Force.com platform is now being re-branded as the Lightning platform, signalling the intent from Salesforce to push Lightning technologies going forward given the headway that has been made over the last few releases towards implementing Lightning functionality.
Until next year!
Dreamforce 2017 was a blast! I’m feeling excited about the new features of Einstein, IoT and Heroku in particular - so much so I’m hacking away on an idea already!
