Dreamforce 2022 Review

Dreamforce 2022 Review

by with No Comment Dreamforce

As the dust settles on another amazing conference in San Francisco, here’s our Cloud Galacticos Dreamforce 2022 review.

This year’s event was extra special, not because it being the 20th anniversary, but it being billed as ‘the big Salesforce Ohana reunion’. It was the first full scale event since 2019. There was plenty of excitement during the build up on Twitter.

 

Dreamforce 2022 Review

Dreamforce 2022 Review1We all know Dreamforce can be overwhelming with plenty going on. Everyone has their own experience and takes away something different. 

Dreamforce is a great chance for the team at Cloud Galacticos to be part of the biggest event of the year, get the latest updates on all things Salesforce, and re-connect in-person with our international Salesforce Ohana.

It’s also a great opportunity to attend various sessions and keynotes to learn things that can be used in our everyday work life.

 

 

 

 

Cloud Galacticos at Dreamforce 2022

Cloud Galacticos at Dreamforce 2022This year our CEO Phil was joined by our Salesforce Consultants Mark and Adam.

“It was great to be back in San Francisco for Dreamforce with the Cloud Galacticos team. There’s nothing like it. It’s always good to meet new friends, as well as catch up with people from the Salesforce community I haven’t had the chance to see in-person.

Dreamforce will always be the peak of the ecosystem, the Ohana. Every other event will be trying to emulate that buzz, that feeling. Alas it will fail. DF FTW!” Phil

 

Mark also did a couple of sessions which covered Flow, Slack, and presentation skills:

“Dreamforce was a real highlight for me. It was my first time visiting the US, and what a way to do it, right? I was fortunate to speak at not one, but two sessions. Not only that, I got to meet a bunch of amazing people for the first time including Jen Lee and Gillian Bruce. This was really cool as I’ve looked up to both Jen and Gillian for a very long time.” Mark

 

“There was a lot of information to soak in, but it was an awesome experience. I hear there wasn’t as many people as previous but if there’s normally more i think that would be to much.  It felt like the right amount of people, you could move and travel around without issues and bumping into people.” Adam

 

Dreamforce Keynote

Dreamforce 2022 Review2“With the Dreamforce keynote you can’t help but get drawn in by the hype. You can taste the expectation in the air, but this year was so much more than others. It wasn’t a case of comparing it to previous years, it was us all feeling this was new or we haven’t been here in years!

I was lucky to get a seat near the front with my fellow mvps. It was opposite Matthew McConaughy and Lars Ulrich of Metallica! And just 10 metres from special guest Lenny Kravitz. But back, front, or side, it was like my first DF keynote all over again, where the buzz is palpable!” Phil

 

 

 

Dreamforce Sessions

Dreamforce 2022 Review3“I have seen U2 three or four times over 15 years or so, but I’m not sure I have ever seen a long interview with Bono. I’m not a super fan, but Bono came across really well. Yes a genuine entertainer – I loved his quote “Don’t trust people who aren’t funny”’ – but also someone who can put across a message of a great way to live your life and do the right thing… without being preaching or patronising. I listened to a lot of old U2 on the flight home!

He also came up with a great quote …something like ‘I’m actually a salesman, I focus on the top melody and make sure that appeals. He definitely does that well!” Phil

 

“The sessions I went to will help me develop new ways of implementing things.  The silent sessions are good to go to because if you don’t feel one session is for you, without walking you can tune your headset quickly to another talk near you without walking to another building which could take 15 minutes.” Adam

 

“I got to go to a number of great sessions including the Admin Keynote and Release Readiness Live. A real highlight for me was seeing the focus on the Admin Skills Kit. I have been quite involved with this venture over the past 12 months. It was really great to chat to a number of new Admins in the Trailblazer Community about the kit and to see the announcements made about the Skills Kit going forward.” Mark

 

Salesforce Genie

Dreamforce 2022 CG ReviewAs per previous Dreamforce events, there were plenty of exclusive Salesforce announcements. This year it was all about Salesforce Genie. 

“Salesforce Genie is the real-time platform for customer magic. By harmonizing data that’s updated every millisecond, it enables your teams to meet your customers right where they are, like never before.”

There are plenty of business benefits with Salesforce Genie. Get more information here.

 

 

 

 

Dreamforce 2023

Missing Dreamforce already? Don’t worry, the date for Dreamforce 2023 has been announced, it’s September 12th to 14th. See you there!

 

About Cloud Galacticos

Cloud Galacticos Team PhotoCloud Galacticos is a Salesforce consultancy with a growing all-star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. Our company has people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, and London.

So if you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience to help you make the most of your org, why not get in contact?

Best Nationwide Salesforce Services Consultancy 2022

Digital City Awards, Best Small Digital Company Finalist 2022

London’s Calling Platinum Sponsor 2022

Dreamforce 2022 Highlights

Dreamforce 2022 Highlights

by with No Comment DreamforceUncategorized

Dreamforce is the highlight of the year for the Salesforce community. And after the restrictions of the past couple of years, the conference is back in full force, in-person and on Salesforce+. There are plenty to look forward to as always, so here are some of our Dreamforce 2022 highlights.

 

Dreamforce 2022 Highlights

As we get closer to Dreamforce 2022, more information is announced. Some of the special speakers already confirmed include Stewart Butterfield, CEO at Slack, former Vice President Al Gore, and Anjali Sud, CEO at Vimeo. Plus celebrities such as actor Matthew McConaughey, NBA legend Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, and musician Jennifer Hudson.

 

Dreamforce Sessions

Mark Jones Dreamforce SessionsThere are over 1,000 sessions on offer during Dreamforce. They will cover all aspects of the Salesforce ecosystem and more. We may be biased but our go-to sessions will be ‘Supercharge Slack with Flow Actions and Orchestrator’ and ‘Deliver Compelling and Authentic Presentations’. Both sessions are by our very own Salesforce Consultant, Mark Jones. 

“I am beyond excited to be attending Dreamforce this year. This will be my first year going to Dreamforce in-person AND I will be doing a couple of sessions! I’m really looking forward to just being there and gleaming as much as I can out of the sessions happening this year. 

For the last couple of years I’ve heard stories about how great it is to go to Dreamforce. I’m ecstatic to not only experience that for myself this year, but to be able to contribute to it as well.”

 

DreamFest

DreamfestThe after-parties each evening are always a great opportunity to network and catch up with your Salesforce Ohana. Like the sessions, there are too many to choose from and definitely too many to try and attend. To make your life easier, Elements Cloud has DF22events. You can add your own events or simply search for ones you want to attend. And of course, like previous years, SalesforceBen has compiled their Ultimate Dreamforce Parties 2022 list.

The king of all parties at Dreamforce is, of course, DreamFest. There’s already excitement building around the headliners, The Red Hot Chili Peppers. They have played in previous years, but they will no doubt get the crowd rocking in style.

 

 

Cloud Galacticos at Dreamforce 2022

As well as Mark from our team attending, another of our Salesforce Consultants, Adam will be experiencing Dreamforce for the first time too.

“I can’t wait to go to Dreamforce. I’ve been wanting to go for many years and never had the chance, but now Cloud Galacticos are giving me the opportunity to go! Looking forward to seeing all the new products, Salesforce’s new announcements and all the possible swag…

For me, it’s all about meeting new people. Also, making new connections with people I may not previously be able to without going to these major events. I’m also looking forward to learning new things.”

Someone else from Cloud Galacticos joining Mark and Adam, who has attended Dreamforce many times, is our CEO Phil Walton.

“I’m very excited to be heading back to Dreamforce in September. Celebrating 20 years in style in San Francisco. Who else is going? Always good to meet new friends, as well as catch up again with other Salesforce Community Leaders and people that I haven’t seen in-person for TOO long!”

 

Meet us at Dreamforce

Meet us at Dreamforce 2022If you’re also attending Dreamforce, keep an eye out for Phil, Mark and Adam. Feel free to contact us or DM via Twitter to arrange a meet up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Cloud Galacticos

Cloud Galacticos at Digital City Awards 2022

Cloud Galacticos at Digital City Awards 2022

Cloud Galacticos is a Salesforce consultancy with a growing all-star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. Our company has people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, and London.

So if you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience to help you make the most of your org, why not get in contact?

Digital City Awards, Best Small Digital Company Finalist 2022

London’s Calling Platinum Sponsor 2022

 

 

 

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Highlights from Dreamforce 2021

by with No Comment Dreamforce

As the dust settles on Dreamforce 2021, we take a quick look back at some of our highlights. The main change this year was that it was part in-person (in San Francisco) and part virtual (on Salesforce+). It’s a small step to getting back to ‘normal’ again after so many other events have been virtual only or simply cancelled or postponed.

 

Dreamforce 2021: Special Guests

As per previous events, Dreamforce delivered in terms of special guests. Jane Fonda spoke about ‘the movement to protect our oceans’. Will Smith was interviewed about his life and one of his personal causes, ‘Storytellers of Color’. While The Foo Fighters entertained attendees alongside some familiar faces…

 

Cloud Galacticos Dreamforce 2021 Highlights

Phil Walton, CEO

Our CEO, Phil Walton, did a ‘Dreamforce 2021 Special’ Tip of the Week with his highlights.

One: DF21 on Salesforce+

Two: Back it up

Three: Trillion Trees

Four: WFR RIP

 

Mark Jones, Salesforce Consultant

“The first one that I want to highlight is Trailhead for Slack. I love Slack and Trailhead, so it is fantastic to see a way that brings both together.

My second highlight is a personal one (and maybe a little selfishly) is when a question I submitted for True to the Core was answered live. I’m a self-diagnosed Flownatic, and when the eventual retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builder was announced at the recent Admin Preview as part of Release Readiness Live ‘for Winter 22 the first question I wanted to see get answered was when will this happen? 

You can get more thoughts from Mark and his highlights from Dreamforce 2021 here.

 

Luke Menzfeld, Salesforce Consultant

“I enjoyed watching Dreamforce 2021 on Salesforce+. There’s definitely some cool things coming out of Dreamforce. In no particular order, I’d say: 1 – Slack First Analytics, 2 – Ask Data, 3 – Multi-Object Pages, and 4 – Dynamic Related Lists.”

 

Dreamforce 2022

So how was Dreamforce 2021 for you? Like many people from the Salesforce eco-system, we are looking forward to 2022 and fingers crossed we will be able to attend in person…

You can still catch highlights from Dreamforce 2021 here.

 

About Cloud Galacticos

Cloud Galacticos is a Salesforce Consulting Partner with an all-star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. We have people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, and London. If you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience who can help you make the most of your org, why not give us a call?

 

fallbackcg

Cloud Galacticos 2019 Highlights

by with No Comment CertificationDreamforceNewsSalesforce EventsTeam GalacticosUser Groups

Being the CEO of a Silver Partner Salesforce Consultancy and managing a UK-wide team of people is no mean feat. So it’s no surprise that Phil Walton, who is also in the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, has a rather busy calendar. As we reach the end of another successful year, he reflects back on some of his personal highlights of 2019.

World Tour London and our Client Drinks Reception the night before (May)

Cloud Galacticos at Salesforce London World Tour with paul Sturgess

Team Galacticos with Paul Sturgess at Salesforce World Tour London 2019

 

For most Salesforce-ers Dreamforce is the highlight of the year. But for me, the London World Tour is the big one. OK so we didn’t have Fleetwood Mac or Alicia Keys, but it is a great chance for the UKI and European Salesforce Community to meet up in person.

We had a great day, meeting Clients and Partners old and new at our Gold stand. Plus we were joined by ex-Harlem Globetrotter and Britain’s tallest man Paul Sturgess, who not only attracted a lot of attention, but was a great guy to chat with!

North Africa Dreamin’

Phil Walton speaking at North Africa Dreamin

Phil Walton speaking at North Africa Dreamin

I was very proud to be invited to speak at Africa’s first Salesforce community event – North Africa Dreamin! It was a great trip to Casablanca, where I met some great people, and had some amazing food. It is amazing to see the Salesforce Ohana spreading around the globe.

Team Galacticos

2019 has been a fantastic year for Cloud Galacticos, with excellent growth in revenue and people. We have also picked up a number of new certification skills, and industry expertise. Between the team we have bags of experience in Healthcare & Life Sciences and also Financial Services, so they are now our official specialisms (although we work in many other sectors). 

We were really excited to welcome both Nkosi Ncube and Mike Gill (who you can see below at MuleSoft CONNECT 2019) to our development team. Both are smart, experienced, knowledgeable and great guys – exactly the type of people we want on the team!

Nkosi and Mike who joined the Cloud Galacticos team in 2019

Nkosi and Mike at Mulesoft Connect 2019

We also welcomed Malcolm Heeley to the team towards the end of the year. Malcolm has a lot of experience as a business analyst and project manager which we cannot wait to use!

Nell Meghani and Phil Walton with Malcolm Heeley (centre) who joined Cloud Galacticos at the end of 2019

Salesforce Consultancy

Certificates

Also between the team we have picked up a number of new Consultancy and Architecture certifications, which we are very proud of! We have also begun to deliver training for Salesforce, fantastic recognition of our deep knowledge of the platform.

Admin and Developer User Group

MuleSoft speaking at a User Developer Group

Manchester Salesforce Admin User Group

We also attended and helped run a number of user and developer groups in Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds – bringing Salesforce to the North of England! We had a variety of speakers including MulseSoft as you can see in the photo above.

Here’s to 2020!

About Cloud Galacticos

Cloud Galacticos is a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner with an all star team. We are user and developer group leaders, bloggers, MVPs and all round Salesforce nerds. We have people all over the UK including Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield and London. If you are looking for a Salesforce partner with experience who can help you make the most of your org, why not give us a call?

 

Dreamforce 2019 Highlights

Dreamforce 2019 Highlights

by with No Comment DreamforceSalesforce EventsTeam Galacticos

As the dust settles on another Dreamforce and his jet lag fades, our head of marketing Ben Duong writes about his Dreamforce 2019 highlights:

Dreamforce 2019 is the sixth time I’ve attended what undeniably the main Salesforce event of the year – even with all the new upstarts like TrailheaDX and various Dreamin’ events.

As per previous years, this year’s Dreamforce had a jam-packed line up of sessions, speakers, parties, and much more. Add to that around 170,000 international attendees, it’s always going to be a full-on four days.

 

 

 

 

#Flying Solo

The main difference this year was that I was flying solo (normally it’s in attendance with the CEO of Cloud Galacticos, Phil Walton). This meant taking a different approach whilst attending the conference. First thing I did was to sign up to the ‘Dreamforce Ohana Golden Gate Bridge Walk’ – which I discovered through the Twitter community and Eric Dreshfield. It was a great pre-DF19 social meet up. I met various members of the Salesforce Ohana from Brazil, Japan and Ukraine. I also ended up bumping into them again at various times during the week which was nice.

Mainly, it was good catching up with James Ellis who is a regular at our North England user group.

 

#SalesforceOhana

Continuing the theme of meeting my #SalesforceOhana, there was an EMEA Trailblazer Get Together. It was a casual meet up of the #TrailblazerCommunity from the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. As well as familiar faces from the UK, I also met people from Spain, Switzerland and Morocco.

And of course, one of the main party highlights was the UK & I reception party at the rather grand Hibernia Bank.

 

 

 

Learning

I attended some of the main keynotes, including the opening keynote with Marc Benioff, the Partner keynote, and Marketing keynote. I got a good overview of the latest updates relevant to me and Cloud Galacticos.

Plus I went to a few useful sessions relating to marketing such as, ‘5 Tips for Writing Awesome Salesforce Community Content’ with Lucy Mazalon (Salesforceben), and ‘5 Lessons Learned from Interviewing 50+ CMOs’ with Ian Faison and Benjamin Wilson (The Mission).

 

 

Mindfulness

Most attendees find Dreamforce overwhelming. It’s a perfect cocktail of four full days of sessions, parties, hoards of people, and LOTS walking. Luckily, this year there was a dedicated area of calm in the guise of the Plum Village Centre in Moscone South. I managed to do a 90-minute meditation workshop which helped centre myself again and was ready for DreamFest that evening.

 

 

 

 

DreamFest

Being a big music fan, Dreamfest is always one of my highlights, having managed to see the likes of the Foo Fighters, Blondie, and U2. This year was no different, with Beck supporting Fleetwood Mac.

It was held at the baseball stadium which is the perfect venue for any music event.

 

 

 

Salesforce Evergreen

Salesforce Evergreen

by with 3 Comments DevelopmentDreamforceSF News

Last week was Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. It’s when over 100,000 Salesforce fans descend upon the city to listen to the latest innovations from Salesforce. I was unable to attend this year, but followed along closely at home to the announcements. The one that stood out to me in particular was not Salesforce Blockchain, Einstein Voice or Customer 360 – it was the Salesforce Evergreen announcement. For me could be the real game changer.

 

The Impact of Serverless

To understand why, you have to perhaps take a step back. Look at how the rise of AWS and in particular, the AWS Lambda and the serverless paradigm has impacted development.

Take the following example – you want to upload an image in Salesforce against a case both before and after work is completed. These images should be stored off platform in Amazon S3. You want to have both the original and a thumbnail, with the thumbnail being displayed on the case. Whilst uploading the images to S3 could be done via Apex in Salesforce, the resizing must be done off platform currently. So how do we do this and where?

 

Heroku

We can either have an endpoint available on a platform like Heroku with a dyno running, or have a Lambda function that will run whenever called. That’s the key difference here, we have to have the Heroku dyno (at least 1) running to handle requests whereas with Lambda we are only paying per executed function. (Note this example is based upon a Lambda example from AWS you can read about here.) Whilst I am a big fan of Heroku, use cases like this lend themselves more to Lambda for running small jobs and repetitive functions where there is no need for a full web server framework to be setup, just receiving and processing some data from an event.

Such scenarios are becoming more common as organisations want to connect more pieces of their process seamlessly. This has driven a number of people towards using serverless based solutions to handle these simple problems – they just need the code to run and perform the action. Many organisations are also working to modularise their systems into more discrete functional blocks, often referred to as microservices. I’ve written before on Salesforce and Microservices and spoken on the topic previously at Dreamforce 2015 and Dreamforce 2017.

Previously, the conversation has always been how to make Salesforce interact nicely with serverless systems, or how to rearchitect parts of your existing Salesforce setup to operate in a more modular way. As soon as some more complicated processing was required (such as image resizing) you were forced off platform and had to decide which platform to use. How would you manage security and authentication? How could you invoke the new service – API via code or a Platform Event? You couldn’t think of doing all this on Salesforce – until now.

 

Enter Evergreen

Salesforce Evergreen is a new toolkit that will allow developers to write small functions and microservices using Apex, Java and Node.js which can be invoked natively from within Salesforce using both declarative and code based tools, as well as having native visibility to the platform – so no need to manage authentication.

Salesforce Evergreen Architecture

Taking our previous example, instead of a service running off platform, whether Heroku or AWS, we could now have a small set of functions that are called directly from the declarative tools in Salesforce. Whenever a case is closed. upload the images from Salesforce to S3, process these images and update the case. No additional infrastructure needed, no authentication required, all on a single platform.

This is truly game changing, by allowing developers to build these functions using existing languages in Java and Node.js, you are enabling the developer to utilise all of the existing ecosystem of functionality out there. For example, npm, the package ecosystem for Node.js, has somewhere in the region of a million packages, covering all types of functionality – csv parsing to providing random jokes. Almost all of these libraries become available for use alongside your existing Salesforce applications with all the plumbing and authentication done for you! You simply add in what you need, leveraging the existing tools and off you go.

Similarly, if you have an existing complex function in Java from an existing application, you can migrate that to become an Evergreen function and deploy it for use from within Salesforce! As wonderful a language as Apex is there are some things that it cannot do or that Java or Node.js will be a better tool for, now you can leverage these languages to do more with your Salesforce data.

 

Summary

The new Evergreen toolkit is going to make a huge difference to what is possible for Salesforce developers. It opens up exciting new possibilities which should lead to some incredible new solutions. I am already signed up for updates from Salesforce on the Developer Preview. And I will be looking ahead for different applications for this toolkit for our customers. If you want to read more, Salesforce have posted a blog here.