Dreamforce Wrap Up 2015!

Attended Dreamforce this year, my first time in forever and its been an awesome experience with great learning.  Travelled all the way from Singapore to San Francisco and Dreamforce didn’t disappoint a bit.  This time Dreamforce is bigger than before with whopping 1,70,000 user registrations and 1600+ sessions and some rock entertainment in the Dreamfest (the Dreamforce gala event).

I attended Dreamforce with the sole intention of learning something/pick new Salesforce stuff that is useful for me and most importantly for the company that I have been working for to improve its overall business.

Here are the key announcements (which are relevant to me) made during Dreamforce

• Salesforce has revamped its user-interface for the first time!  This UI has never been touched.  But they decided to move-on and bring in a brand new Lightning Experience UI
• It introduced a brand new “design system” also called “Lightning Design System”.  So, you no longer are dependant on the external/third-party designs like bootstrap.  You can check out the Lightning Design System
• Developer Certifications have been upgraded. Three new certifications have replaced the existing (now old) 2 developer certifications. More on this here
• Salesforce acquired RelateIQ last year and as a result of this, they introduced SalesforceIQ for Small Businesses and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud.  The product announcement was met with big applause during the keynote and rightly so, as it leads the transformation from reactive to proactive communications and sales.
  • Easy to start for businesses. Connect Email and Contacts with Salesforce.
    – creates events, tasks using calendar
    – suggests meeting times
    – auto updates records from emails
• It introduced a new IoT Cloud, powered by Thunder, which harnesses the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) and transforms all the data generated by every one of your customers, partners, devices, and sensors into meaningful action.

Apart from the announcements made from Salesforce there were lot of useful sessions from experts of varied domains.  There were:

• zones specifically for Developers and Administrators where you learn a lot of new stuff (with hands-on training)
• cloud expo booths/stalls setup by partners explaining their own products/apps.

My Favorite

I will end the blog post with my personal favourite session in the dev zone (apart from the trailhead hands-on).  It was this specific stall setup by Salesforce.com Trust called “Security Source Code Scanner”.  The Force.com Security Source Scanner is a cloud based source code analysis tool built directly into our Force.com offering.  Once you connect your instance to this, it scans all the code and comes up with the apex coding and design issues.  The results will be emailed and takes time (up to a day depending on the size of the org) for processing.  I was able to scan my personal developer organising there and got the results in an hour.  The staff was kind enough to explain all the flaws in my org and the ways to fix it.  You must try this!