Dreamforce 2019: Day 1

As you guys probably know, Dreamforce 2019 is happening right now! I have the amazing opportunity to attend the largest Salesforce conference, happening every year in San Francisco, and I want to share as much as I can of my experience with you guys.

Here are the key takeaways from Day 1 :

Opening Keynote review:

- Salesforce is still the #1 CRM in the world in terms of market share.

- The Salesforce ecosystem is still growing and they are working really hard to offer deeper and seamless integration with Mulesoft.

- Einstein is really big this year, they are pushing really hard on the new capabilities, such as NLP (Natural Language Processing), voice recognition, image recognition, all integrated within the platform. For more information about Einstein, read this article from Salesforce.

- Salesforce is working with Amazon AWS to create new trails in Trailhead dedicated to the AWS ecosystem and Alexa. Read this press release for more information and visit Trailhead for the Alexa and Amazon Connect trails.

- Alicia Keys made a surprise appearance at the end of the keynote to sing us two great songs.

Sessions: 15 Salesforce Lab Apps

- Salesforce Lab is an initiative that allows Salesforce employees to build and release free packages on the App Exchange.

- This session was mostly a quick presentation of some of the most popular Lab application. You can access this list right here.

- I will write articles about some of those in the future, so stay tuned for more details!

A.I. Keynote :

- Salesforce created an AI innovation lab with the purpose of doing both fundamental research but also to create actual products integrated into the platform.

- The focus of this lab is to change the data entry process into a "data conversation" process. The idea behind it is that the easier we can add more data into Salesforce, the better the quality of that data will be.

- They are leveraging NLP, voice recognition and image recognition to create all kinds of the bot but also to create dynamic reports based on the query expressed vocally. They made a demo of someone asking Einstein to show him a report of all the sales made in San Francisco this month. The result was a beautiful dashboard automatically generated from data living inside Salesforce. For more information about this topic, visit the Einstein Voice Assistant website.

General Impressions:

- I'm glad I arrived yesterday to pick-up my badge, the line-up was ridiculous this morning. If you plan on coming to Dreamforce next year, I really really encourage you to do the same.

- Dreamforce this year is mainly taking place at the Moscone Center. All of Moscone West/North and South are used for the conferences. Some events even took place at the Yerba Buena Gardens or in some hotels in the area. Even the Metreon is closed to the public.

- The day ends with the Dreamforce Welcome Jamboree where some courageous Trailblazers are going on stage for some Karaoke.

So that's if for today! Keep an eye tomorrow for my review of the Developer Keynote, the Trailhead Keynote and a lot more!

Yet another Salesforce Blog

I had the luck to develop my expertise in an amazing company working with a lot of clients all over the world.

I had the opportunity to learn a lot by attending TrailheaDX in 2018 and 2019. I now have five Salesforce Certifications, working on my sixth.

We want to use Salesforce to get a global view of how our clients interact with us. That's exactly the purpose of a CRM right? That should be easy!

Try again.

Our Salesforce org, implemented by some consultants a few years ago, was pretty much all custom. We didn't have any expertise on how to use it. We didn't have any expertise on how to integrate with it. We didn't have any expertise on how to use the platform features.

That resulted in a cluttered org that the sales reps didn't like to use, and a completely entangled org that the development team didn't like to work in because of the fear of breaking things.

The goal is now to bring best practices I learned from my years of development into the Salesforce ecosystem.

We had an IDE we didn't really understood and had so many problems with deployments.

Our unit tests were flaky at best.

Debugging was a nightmare.

Our internal users didn't understand what was going on with what should've been their tool.

In a normal development project, none of that would have been acceptable.

Why should it be acceptable in Salesforce?