Twice a year Salesforce looks for worthy people to become Salesforce MVPs. MVPs are people from the community that have demonstrated Salesforce expertise, leadership, responsiveness, and advocacy and with around 160 worldwide and it’s a growing group! There are currently around 160 MVPs worldwide and I was lucky enough to become an MVP back in January 2012, it is always an honour to be renewed in such an amazing group of people. The platform and associated products in Salesforce are so large now it’s impossible to know it all, knowing that there are guru’s around the globe focused in their own specialisation is awesome.

Salesforce has a rigorous process for evaluating MVPs, it starts first with someone nominating a potential MVP, anyone can do this here when the nominations open. Information is compiled and reviewed by a number of different teams within Salesforce as well as existing Salesforce MVPs before awarding with new MVPs or renewals. The MVP only lasts one year and if have kept up with the core tenants of being an MVP (Expertise, Leadership, Responsiveness, and advocacy) then you may be renewed for another year.

The New European MVPs!

What makes me most excited is seeing new MVPs appearing in Europe. Not to mention existing MVPs being renewed which includes myself, Jodi Wagner, Agustina García, Alex Tennant, Chris Edwards, Christopher Lewis, Fabien Taillon, Joshua Hoskins, Keir Bowden, Michael Gill, Mohamed El Moussaoui, Phil Walton, Samuel De Rycke, Simon Goodyear.

The full list can be found here.

Sergey Erlikh (@sergeyer)

Sergey Erlikh

Twitter: @sergeyer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergeyerlikh/

Based in Amstelveen noord, Netherlands Sergey is our first European Non-Profit MVP!!! and also co-leader of The Netherlands Salesforce nonprofit user.

Louise Lockie (@LouiseLockie)

Louise Lockie

Twitter: @LouiseLockie
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-lockie-a8250115/
Website: louiselockie.blogspot.co.uk

Louise runs the Women in Tech user group in London and has talked at a number of Salesforce events including London’s Calling this year. Checkout her talk on Tackling the “We’ve always done it this way”.

Fabrice Cathala (@fcathala)

Fabrice Cathala

Twitter: @fcathala
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fcathala/
Website: saas-components.com

Fabrice is a Technical Architect working for CLOUT! His blog is filled with great advice on Salesforce Architecture and he also presented at London’s Calling on ‘Migrating to Lightning‘

Sunil Sarilla

Sunil Sarilla

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-sarilla-4a49533/
Success: https://success.salesforce.com/profile?u=0053000000AJ82FAAT

Currently Ranked 5th in Success for answering Salesforce answers he has answered 11,885 questions so far! Based in London as well? I think but I’ve never met him, so hopefully we will meet soon!

Salesforce has announced that S-Controls are coming back to Salesforce classic. For those who don’t know what S-Controls are, they were the technology before VisualForce and allowed you to create webpages and use the Salesforce JavaScript APIs to communicate with Salesforce (hence the S in S-Controls). Around 10 years ago Salesforce stopped Salesforce customers from creating new S-Controls as VisualForce had replaced the need for S-Controls, but I still find S-Controls in customers orgs. You can still edit and make changes too… well that was until this announcement!

Why are Salesforce re-enabling S-Controls?

It’s all due to Lighting! Lightning is a JavaScript framework and by bringing back S-Controls, Salesforce will allow developers to develop JavaScript based Lightning apps directly in Salesforce classic without the need of VisualForce. S-Controls are much lighter than VisualForce so you can illuminate the need for an Apex controller or even VisualForce markup! It also means new developers coming to the platform with a client who is still using the Classic UI can skip learning VisualForce/Apex and jump straight into the JavaScript world that is Lightning & S-Controls.

New ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button

New ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button

So Salesforce as expanded the S-Control functionality to allow you to easily add Lightning Components into your S-Control using the ‘Add Lightning Component’ Button (see pic).

Adoption, Adoption, Adoption

I think also another reason for re-enabling S-Controls is to allow developers & businesses a softer introduction into Lightning components & development. Lightning components/apps can be created directly in the Classic UI using S-Controls or just using regular old JavaScript. It also means that those orgs still using S-Controls can refactor the controls into Lightning components/apps more quickly without the need for VisualForce.

So in conclusion, I think it makes a lot of sense it. Let’s make S-Controls great again!

So Monday night was a big night! We had none other than Mike Rosenbaum (@mike945778) who is in charge of the Salesforce platform including Sales, Service and Lightning. We asked him a load of questions that the community had come up with and here are some of his answers. I’ll be putting the full video up shortly:

• Performance; We had a lot of questions around Lightning performance, Mike said that for the forthcoming release all Lightning developers at Salesforce have been working on performance and you will see big improvements!
• Components Roadmap; Mike has committed to releasing the component roadmap so developers are not developing components that Salesforce is as well! (makes sense!)
• Next release feature (Safe Harbor): Declarative component visibility; I’ve been waiting for this! and Mike announced it’s coming out in the next release! This puts page layouts in the dark! Think of being able to declaratively change which components appear on the layout based on the data on the record you are viewing! This is one of my “Lightning Game changer” features that I spoke about at the Sydney user group.
• New Report builder; The next release will see a new Lightning Report Builder! which is much much better and more usable. But also with a focus on general users being able to create reports rather than being siloed in a particular team etc.
• More Wizards / Setup Flows; At the moment there are around 20 of these wizards but Mike is expecting there to be a load more to make it easier to setup things like single sign on, cloud console etc
• Classic is not going way; There is no secret date when the classic UI is going to be switched off. Although he did say that he maybe switching it on for all Salesforce employees in their own Salesforce org

Mike would love your feedback! Just tweet him at @mike945778 (he even said why his twitter has the crazy number)

We're talking @salesforce Lightning ⚡⚡⚡ with @radnip interviewing @mike945778 at a mega London meetup pic.twitter.com/9LNcr3e0K9

— Louise Lockie (@LouiseLockie) April 3, 2017

@mike945778 @radnip talking all things Lightning! ⚡️⚡️#LAUG pic.twitter.com/nb71Oy5srJ

— ☁️ Tom Blamire ☁️ (@Salesforce_Tom) April 3, 2017

All the questions by @radnip sourced from the London @salesforceadmns group for @mike945778. pic.twitter.com/0vQlLdLJrK

— Christie Fidura (@cfidurauk) April 3, 2017

It was Salesforce Developer evangelist John Stevenson’s birthday as well but he didn’t say a word until the very end of the evening!! Now that’s dedication to the job.

Happy 80th birthday Mr S. @jr0cket pic.twitter.com/PTkKhoDgce

— Claire Jones (@cejhoney) April 3, 2017

A couple of weeks ago I was at CeBIT one of “the largest computer expo’s in the world”. At its height during the dot-com boom around 800,000 people would descend to Hanover in Germany to see the latest tech. Since then things have changed and people generally get their dose of tech via the internet rather than going to big tech events so now CeBIT has reduced to around 300,000 people.

Anyone for an Alexa implant?

Salesforce was there in full force running their German Salesforce World Tour, BUT in one of the adjoining rooms, there was a stand where you could get a RFID chip injected … yes injected! into your hand, so you could unlock your phone with a wave of your hand, or even unlock your front door? (check out the video above!)

Yes, this isn’t new but what was interesting to me was that there was a steady stream of people wanting this done to them. It’s interesting to see how attitudes to tech have changed over the years and how something in the 80s was a thing of horror is now becoming more acceptable…

I had the honour of speaking at the Salesforce World Tour this year with the amazing Stefanie Bialas. She showed us the power of “The Power of One”, this is her blog on really how powerful it is!

Superpower Salesforce with the Power of One

Yeaahh, you’ve managed to build some excellent reports monitoring the pipeline of your company or also enabling marketing to contact all your prospects in the DB. And suddenly someone comes along and asks “How many opportunities do we actually have in the pipeline? The record count seems way to high” or “That’s awesome, now I can contact all our prospects. How many companies do we actually contacts?”. So how to address this in order to answer those questions?

You’ve probably noticed by then that the record count for reports like Opportunities with Products or Contacts and Accounts count the total number of child records associated with the parent record. So for opportunities, this is, for example, the sum of each product line item. Or a number of contacts associated with each account. How can you do this now to have a record count of the parent record, counting every record only ones? The answer is, use the Power of One!

Simply described the Power of One is a custom formula which you best create on each object and holds simply the value 1. When you sum it up in a report, 1 will be the result for each line item.
Here now a step by step guide helping you to setup the Power of One. I am taking the account and contact example to demonstrate this here but this works in the same way for all the other objects.
Go to your setup menu and select the object you’d like to count each record separately of. Create a new field:

For Step 2, fill in a name for your newly created field in “Field Label”. With tab, a field name will be created automatically. Number is what you should select as formula return type with zero decimals.

With next you will go to step 3. Now you get to write your formula which will be used to calculate the value you’d like to have displayed in your newly created field. Think again of what the purpose of this field is, we simply want to count the parent record only ones within our reports. And therefore all you need to insert into the formula canvas is 1 as a number:

That was easy, wasn’t it? Now save your newly created field and test it out. For the test go to your report tab and select for our example here “Contacts and Accounts” as a report type.  As usual first select the records you want to look at, then group the account field. Now your report will look like this:

As you can see the record count next to each account name counts the number of contacts associated with each account. That’s great to tell how many contacts we will have and can contact, but we won’t be able to answer the question of our Marketing Director how many companies we are contacting this way. Now your newly created superpower formula comes into place. Add it from the side panel with the quick find and drop it onto your report builder. Hoover over your field to open up the menu for the field and select “Summarize This Field”. You will get a window as shown below:

Check the checkbox “Sum” and click on apply. Now save and run your report to see the magic. When you scroll to the very bottom of your page you will now see two numbers. One being the classic record count as we know it, in this case counting each contact held in the report. And a second one which is the SUM of the Power of One for each individual account record. This number is logically lower (or the same) than the total count of the child records and gives you the total of accounts in your report. Yeeaahh!

Now share this with your manager and make yourself a well-deserved coffee.

Stefanie Bialas | ステファニ ビアラス
@schdaephyie
Marketing Operations Europe | NTT Europe

Slides from the World Tour London:

‘A Force Guru’ has been more successful than I could ever believe since launching it earlier in the year, thanks SO MUCH for all those people and companies who have supported it!!

When we were planning the A Force Guru site last year we decided to have the AWS and Salesforce training as separate schools, each with a separate site focused on the specific cloud. But the underlying serverless platform would be the same, so users could log in to either school without an issue… BUT. We soon realised the cross-over between the two schools and the benefit of having the two schools together, and this far out weighted having them separate. Also, many customers just didn’t realise we did both Salesforce & AWS training. Also, we wanted to train in other clouds including  Certified CompTIA Linux+ & LPIC-1 Certification courses, would that be yet another separate site?

After helping run Serverless Conf and also the huge positive response to adding an AWS talk to London’s Calling, I realised the value of allowing our siloed communities to collaborate and learn best practice from all of us, across all the clouds. I’m a strong believer that multi-cloud approaches to architecting Cloud solutions will become more prevalent in the years to come, so lets start on the right foot…

So we made a decision…

Bye Bye A Force Guru, hello A Cloud Guru!

We decided to bring the Salesforce courses on A Force Guru into A Cloud Guru so we can teach the world to cloud in one ‘A Cloud Guru’ school.  Now our 250,000+ students can benefit from learning from each other, and learn industry best practice in a multi-cloud approach to learning cloud technologies.

http://ACloud.guru/

New Website

To celebrate the merger today we have launched the new look A Cloud Guru site, with the ability to see all the cloud courses in one place. All your course tracking and history remain exactly the same, so don’t worry about that. The only thing you may notice over the coming weeks is that the videos will be updated to the new A Cloud Guru branding. Now we are in a better position to teach the world to cloud

If you do find any bugs with the new website be sure to give us a shout, although I think most of them have been squashed now. You’ll also find a load more improvements to the platform including around tracking your progress! Let me know what you think!!

If you are interested in getting Salesforce Administrator Certified check out my latest course packed full of best practice and focused on giving you the training you need to pass the Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam!

Thanks so much to the 1000s of students who have supported A Force Guru over the past couple of months, I hope we continue our massive growth in cloud training!

Get Salesforce Certified

It’s the final day to nominate someone to be a Salesforce MVP. If you know someone that is helping the community either online or offline via user groups etc nominate them today!

Also I posted a blog a couple of years ago on how I became a Salesforce MVP. Also be sure to check out the Salesforce MVP Blogs List!

The boasting of Dev & network operations has changed. They ask the question “How many servers do you have?” looking for an answer to see if they manage more servers than the other guy. The question has stayed the same, but the response has been turned on its head. Now if you are managing zero servers, you are some genius. This is the birth of Serverless and maybe the end of for physical and virtual servers for all of us (except for those in data centres).

Salesforce’s jump on to the AWS bandwagon

Back in May Salesforce announced that it had selected Amazon AWS as their preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. For me, this event was incredibly exciting as I work in both the Salesforce and AWS worlds (in fact as well as my Salesforce certifications I’m also an AWS Certifed Architect). They said this was to aid their international expansion at the launch, for their core services including Sales, Service, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics cloud. Salesforce isn’t new to AWS; they have Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio and SalesforceIQ all running on AWS (although mostly through acquisition). But the bread and butter of Salesforce is its core Force.com platform that powers the Sales and Service Clouds. This platform is all currently hosted in traditional data centres on their hardware and infrastructure. But now based on their statement, I’m thinking they are looking at moving to Serverless!

Salesforce invented “Platform as a Service.”

In the same way, Salesforce-owned the trademark for “App Store” before giving it to Apple, you also may not know that Salesforce invented the term “Platform as a Service”, they pitched this to Gartner to make sure it stuck in the industry’s mind. Now AWS is an increasingly more powerful player in this space.

Why move to AWS?

In the 90s you needed to know Microsoft or Linux, now if you’re in the biggest enterprises, you need to know AWS. AWS is used for enterprise hosting, websites, virtual servers, big elastic compute and many other things. AWS was initially set up to solve a problem Amazon had. They had 1000s of servers sitting around doing nothing for most of the year and were only switched on for the “Black Friday” deals or Christmas to cope with the demand in traffic. AWS realised the waste and decided to resell this unused compute power to other people. This allowed those customers to spin up and tear down servers at a moment’s notice in a pay by the minute model. But now AWS have gone a step further into the world of a serverless architecture.

Once the Salesforce platform is on AWS how about refactoring elements in the Salesforce stack to auto scale the infrastructure when capacity gets high? How about leveraging the granular pricing within AWS and allow customers to purchase extra CPU time or SOQL/DML limits? Maybe if they start leveraging AWS auto scaling they can scale down instances during the night and potentially shift that compute saving over to peak daylight hours, increasing performance for customers and maybe allowing customers relaxed governor limits based on Salesforce saving a tonne of money?

BUT THIS ISN’T SERVERLESS! You still need to spin up virtual servers and infrastructure in the background when you get peak demand, either automatically based on CPU/load/time of day, or manually. If you are working in architecture with incredibly “peaky loads”, then by the time you have spun up the new servers it may already be too late!

So what is this serverless mumbo-jumbo?

Serverless is still a bit in its infancy, but I’m currently working with a company with quite an impressive web based service with not a single server in sight. They use some the serverless features within AWS to create a 100% serverless architecture. The goal is not to get charged for resources if none of your users are using your solution.

The biggest betting event maybe the Superbowl in the US, but in the UK its the Grand National. I think for those of us that never bet you have probably bet at some point in your life on the Grand National. But forget “Black Friday” where people are making sales over 24hrs, bet on the Grand National and most customers are doing it in a couple of minutes before the race starts. Due to this Sky Bets has incredible “peaky loads”. One minute they could be serving 300,000 request/secs then suddenly 700,000.

The beauty of a serverless architect is the entire architecture can handle 1 request a second or 1million requests a second, from second to second eliminating the time it takes to scale up your hardware… it just works.

Example of a Serverless architecture

The above example is a typical serviceless architecture in AWS.

• Route 53; Think of this as a highly available & scalable DNS service which also manages traffic flow based on different routeing types e.g., Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, and Weighted Round Robin as well as DNS failover.
• CloudFront CDN; As it says on the tin, this is a CDN service.
• S3; This is a static file storage which can store petabytes of storage if you want, with 99.999999% durability.
• API Gateway; This is a REST based service which allows you to create, publish, monitor and quickly scale & secure API services.
• Lambda; Think of this as server side code. This is a compute service where you can upload your code and when a request comes in the Lambda code is executed.
• DyanmoDB; This is a very scalable database which guarantees the same consistent speed of read and write requests.
• SES; Mass emailing service

The important thing to understand with serverless technology at the moment is the majority of the code is executed on the client and then has Javascript web service calls to the AWS REST API Gateway which is used for specific server side requests. So there isn’t a PHP, Java framework/layer behind the HTML/javascript code. Just a REST API Gateway but this is what makes it so scalable.

So, when a customer hits the serverless architecture, they are presented with the HTML/javascript of the website served by AWS CloudFront and S3 services (this could, for example, be using the ever popular AngularJS framework). If the user logs in to the website their login details/request are sent via a REST call to the API Gateway and the server side code is executed in the lambda function. The lambda function then does whatever is needed and returns the REST result which may mean the navigation to another page which is stored in AWS S3.

The beauty of this is the solution completely scales regardless of the number of requests, and you are only charged (more or less) for just the data transport and execution of the request. Once the request is complete, there is nothing to charge for. Now, in reality, AWS does charge for the storage of the static web content and database storage, but that is minimal compared with the compute required in traditional architectures.

Want to learn more?

I’m going to be at Serverless Conf which is an event dedicated to serverless technologies and learning from the industry experts. The event is on between 26th – 28th October. Check out the website for more info; there is also a similar event in Tokyo, and you can watch the videos from the New York event in May!

Hope to see you there!

Fellow YouTuber Salesforce Huck & others

I’m now sitting in New Delhi Indira Gandhi Airport ready to fly back to London. Actually, ready wouldn’t be the correct word, I want my Indian adventure to continue

I arrived 3 days ago and since then it’s been a whirlwind immersion into Indian culture, passion & learning. After working with so many people in India over the years it was great to finally meet some of them!  The welcome and kindness from everyone was incredible.

When Shiv & Viney invited me to India Dreamin I asked them what they wanted me to talk about. The answer, ANYTHING. So I got my thinking cap on and then it dawned on me. This month, 20 years ago I started University and so my talk as about how technology has changed over the years, how to find a career you’re passionate about, and looking into the future how to keep relevant in a changing world.

Culture

What I loved about this Dreamin event was how brilliantly everyone showed us the Indian culture, in dance, hospitality and fun. The passion and energy from the cultural dancing was infectious and Erica Kuhl did brilliantly keeping the energy throughout her final keynote.

Selfies

Anyone who has met up with Shiv knows he loves having selfies! What I didn’t know is that so does the rest of the attendees at India Dreamin It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm that everyone had to talk, engage … and take a selfie It was a true honour.

Hands-on Training

One of the great moments of the day was doing a Hands-on Training workshop with lots of eager minds wanting to learn more about the Salesforce platform. The aim of the workshop was for the attendees to build their first application in Salesforce.

One of my favourite moments of the hands-on was teaching @SFDC_Kid who as was really motoring through the trails! His t-shirt said it all. A genius in the making! so much so I added him to my talk about passion. For me, he summed up the passion in wanting to learn and succeed.

Women in Tech

One of my favourite sessions was the Women in Tech session. Right at the end of the session someone stood up and talked about their challenges with juggling a career and childcare, and the help she had received from a Women In Tech group in India. She talked about how she found the group so valuable to talk to other women with similar challenges. The session also talked about imposter syndrome, something that until a couple of years ago I didn’t know anything about. I think its such an important topic to tell to men and women alike.

The Scale

It’s hard to describe how big this Dreamin event was. The largest global Salesforce Dreamin event used to be MidWest Dreamin, but no more. India Dreamin had over 1300 registered to attend.

Here is a picture I took from the Stage that gives you a little bit of an idea of the scale of the event.

The Salesforce MVPs

It was also great to so many Salesforce MVPs who had come out to support this inaugural Indian event. I hope this continues!

I can’t recommend India Dreamin more to anyone in India wanting to learn cloud computing but also to all those who present at other Salesforce events around the world. I really do hope Shiv, Vinay and all the organisers do this event next year so that others can go out, present and embrace the India culture.

Thanks everyone! The Vlog is coming soon!!!

#IndiaDreamin17 is a GO! pic.twitter.com/vVYqkod1EL

— Francis Pindar (@radnip) September 30, 2017

Travelling with Francis… AGAIN!#IndiaDreaming pic.twitter.com/r3gQ2K6w1V

— Fabrice Cathala (@fcathala) September 29, 2017

The youngest in the hands on training at #IndiaDreamin17 His t-shirt says it all pic.twitter.com/A0NHiAYdwG

— Francis Pindar (@radnip) September 30, 2017

#GLBajaj #IndiaDreamin17 Indian Salesforce Community Conference #CloudCertitude @SFindiadreamin #Salesforce pic.twitter.com/tdL8nHgQMv

— GL Bajaj (@glbajaj) September 30, 2017

Enjoyed #culturalevent in #IndiaDreamin17 with @radnip @Shrey_Shrma @SurbhiT_Sfdc @payalsfdc pic.twitter.com/TIAMNI5f7R

— Surbhi Narula (@NarulaSurbhi) October 2, 2017

Travelled too long to share his knowledge. Down to earth, humble. Had a great time with your session.#IndiaDreamin17 #id17 @radnip pic.twitter.com/YiizOAit8O

— Deepak jaishankar (@Deepakjaishank5) September 30, 2017

Winner of the Kindle from @autorabit !! Thanks so much for supporting the community #IndiaDreamin17 pic.twitter.com/mEItu2hoZ5

— Francis Pindar (@radnip) September 30, 2017

Thanks @Swati_Taunk @JollyPaarth and everyone else that helped during my hands on training #IndiaDreamin17 pic.twitter.com/D2nDTlTdm5

— Francis Pindar (@radnip) October 1, 2017

@radnip & @JitenJoysar pic.twitter.com/h1EuBUVsUc

— Shrey Sharma (@Shrey_Shrma) September 30, 2017

Look at this Picture.. We Really Enjoyed over the discussion. What will we say about this moment? @SalesforcePhil @radnip @fcathala pic.twitter.com/0oAe38RZeH

— Suraj Gupta (@SurajSFDC) October 1, 2017

https://twitter.com/fcathala/status/914082724721446912

With @radnip #IndiaDreamin17 pic.twitter.com/dl5czkbhel

— Abhishek Kolipey (@AbhikoliK) September 30, 2017

With @radnip #IndiaDreamin17 pic.twitter.com/8FP30xFjyc

— Danish (@idanishh) September 30, 2017

@radnip is an amazing person. You can see my happiness in this selfie,
with my company @CCCInfotech pic.twitter.com/uGWfFsOEw3

— Vijay Sharma (@VijayKSharmaG) October 2, 2017

#Salesforce #MVP photo @sfindiadreamin @ericakuhl @hollygfirestone @Tiffani_Bova @SalesforcePhil @VINAY_SFDC @shivanathd @pritamsfdc pic.twitter.com/3YCAXiK20e

— Amy Oplinger ☁️⚡️ (@SalesforceAmy) October 4, 2017

Salesforce Saturdays were started (I believe) by Stephanie Herrera who would meet up with like-minded Salesforce people to learn the platform on a Saturday. She started meeting in coffee shops and slowly as the group increased in size and they would hunt out a bigger coffee shop. Since then Salesforce Saturdays have been setup across the globe as an informal way to learn Salesforce. Some of the things that people get up to are:

• Catching up on the latest Salesforce Release
• Study for a Salesforce Certification or Release exam
• Take Trailhead badges or Super-badges
• Get help troubleshooting a formula or Apex trigger
• Help answer questions on Salesforce Success, Developer Forums or StackExchange
• Answer questions on the #AskForce Twitter hashtag
• Help your peers to any of the above!

So… I was thinking that maybe we should try a Salesforce Saturday in London! Hopefully, if people are interested in it we could make it a regular monthly event. The first event is on 16th December starting from 9.30am until 1.30pm. But unlike a user group if you can’t make it for 9.30am or have somewhere to go at lunch, don’t worry. Just pop in/out when you can. If people are interested we could also grab some lunch nearby!

The event is in a room at Wimbledon Library which is just a 15-minute train from London Waterloo Station, or you can also get to Wimbledon via the District Line or Tram. Tea, coffee & biscuits will be provided and the library has super-fast internet!

Make sure you bring your laptop and you can sign up below!

Look forward to seeing you there!

Salesforce Saturday! Come find out more & learn!

Saturday, Dec 16, 2017, 9:30 AM

Wimbletech, Wimbledon Library, Wimbledon,
Wimbledon Hill Road, SW19 7NB London, GB

1 Members Attending

This is the first “Salesforce Saturday’s” event. Salesforce.com is a CRM tool used by businesses to improve their customer experience and back office processes. If you use Salesforce every day as an Admin, Developer or business user… or know nothing about it! Pop down for an informal event as we use Salesforce Trailhead to learn Salesforce togeth…

Check out this Meetup →

I get a lot of questions asking how to start a career in Salesforce. First off is you need to set a goal and plan on achieving that goal. Without a plan, you won’t achieve success, I also get a lot of messages generally from three groups of people:

• Those who are in IT and have a background in development or Administration/Configuration of other similar tech systems.
• Those who come from a totally different industry and want to “get into Salesforce”,
• Finally students with maybe little or no IT experience.

This is my take on these groups and where you should start with potential ideas in developing your plan to achieve a successful career in Salesforce.

From nothing to Salesforce Admin/Developer?

Just this morning I received a message just on this:

The great thing about Salesforce is when you start out you don’t need to know any programming languages. When you create business applications in Salesforce, a lot of it is “click development” or “click configuration” to create applications. Not to say this is “easy”, but it’s all learnable! I have a great belief that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything even if you and others think you can’t. I wanted to be in a Harry Potter film, it took me around eight months but in the end, I made it… but that’s a story for another day.

Get Certified, get Experience!

Key to getting a job if you have no experience is to get certified and some work experience. I recommend starting with the Salesforce Certified Administrator certification (see details below). Then is the tricky thing with experience and there are a number of things you can try to get experience (again see below).

From a totally different industry?

It’s odd that people from different industries don’t think they have transferable skills. I think this comes from the perception that Salesforce is a “technical system” (ok it is but hear me out!). Salesforce is a system that enables companies to manage their day to day operations. That could be Sales, Service, Finance, Operations, Marketing, Manufacturing… you name it! It can touch every part of a business. The businesses that implement it well, are those that consider it a business system that is there to enable and support their workforce. Then there are those companies that think of Salesforce is an “IT system” and should be implemented by IT, but realise too late that actually it’s a business system and should be run by the business. Because of this you still have invaluable experience that can complement a career in Salesforce.

Play to your strengths

In the post above James wanted to change his career from accounting to Salesforce. That’s brilliant, BUT you may be up against other people who have been in the Salesforce world a lot longer than you. But there will be a lot fewer people that have both Salesforce experience as well as a background in accounting. Use your strength in Accounting, and marry it with Salesforce. Try and find a company using Salesforce and using or wanting to implement/integrate an accounting system (eg FinancialForce, Xero, Sage etc) or researching the apps available and how finance fits into the Salesforce eco-system. Doing this will make you a lot more valuable in the market than someone who has just “1 month’s experience with Salesforce”. Now Salesforce has started bringing out their own specific industry cloud offerings (Health Cloud, Financial Services) so now you are in an even better situation if you come from these specific industry verticals.

From an SAP/Oracle/Siebel/Other CRM to Salesforce?

CRM Growth World Wide

I admit it, I did work for an SAP consultancy as well as another CRM company before working with Salesforce. Trust me you have transferable skills! You have knowledge on how CRMs can be used to automate business processes, you may have experience in integrating a CRM with internal systems (this happens a lot in Salesforce projects) so you may have even used the same internal systems, but also understood the challenges (eg: bad data quality). Now, of course, it depends on the role you Business Analyst, Developer etc but you do have some valuable skills. I found this when I moved to Salesforce from the previous CRM company as a Development Team Lead. I spend just a month studying and learning as much as I could about Salesforce. I then applied for jobs and received two job offers! one from a very large consultancy!

In my career, I’ve always tried to be one step ahead of the tech curve. IT moves SOOO fast and you don’t want to be left behind. As you can see from the growth rate of Salesforce… do you really want to wait?

How to get started in Salesforce?

Your first goal is getting a paid job working with Salesforce. To achieve this goal everything comes down to making you look as attractive as possible to a new employer. I think this comes down to three areas:

• Certifications
• Experience
• Passion

Certifications

There are A LOT of Salesforce Certifications. But the one I recommend the one to get first ‘Salesforce Certified Administrator’. The reason for this is it gives you a good overview of the whole of the core Salesforce platform. It allows you to “understand the lingo” when people talk about workflows or Opportunities, you understand what they are talking about. There are two main ways you can learn to get certified:

My ‘Salesforce Certified Administrator’ Online Course Access from Udemy

Salesforce’s online Training Training that Salesforce provides

My A Cloud Guru course gives you focused training on the Salesforce platform with test questions for the exam. I’m also there to help you every step of the way. Trailhead is a site that Salesforce has set up to allow you to learn Salesforce in a modular way, and is a great resource for all kinds of areas of the Salesforce platforms and tools.

Experience

If you can get experience in Salesforce this always looks good on your CV. But can be hard to come by but there are a couple of ways you can do this:

Salesforce.org

Salesforce.org is the charitable arm of Salesforce gives out their platform to charities around the world (In fact my charity uses Salesforce). But charities can be tight on money so volunteering with a charity that uses Salesforce is a great way to get some experience on your CV.

Create some apps in Salesforce!

Prove your knowledge of Salesforce by creating some business apps in Salesforce. Salesforce provides free “Salesforce Developer Orgs” which is a fully functioning Salesforce tool but limited to a couple of user licenses and limited space. But you can create business apps within it. If you can say on your CV that you have created for example an invoice management application with approval processes and automation then this could go a good way in proving your ability with Salesforce.

I’m a trustee of a Charity, Technical Architect at NetStronghold, organiser of London’s Calling, create and support my online Salesforce courses with now over 20,000 students… ugh, dabble in the financial markets, have a 7-month-old son, support the Salesforce community, not forgetting having some fun in-between… I can get quite busy and can get distracted too. But at some point, you need to focus on what’s important right now while juggling all that life throws at you, which can be tricky. I always want to achieve more or learn something new (was bread-making yesterday for the first time) but it is so easy to get distracted. So I thought I’d share how I try to keep focused day to day and the tools I use (although I don’t profess to be an expert in time management). But you never know it may help someone out there…

Calendar – What & Where

I make sure that everything has the right amount of focus, I block out days on my calendar for different clients/company work and fun. This forms my broad brush stroke on WHAT I’m working, in broad half day or day increments. I then choose WHERE I’m working on it. I like to associate different locations to different types of work. It may be at a particular coffee shop to do one type of work vs working in a particular office meeting room for another. It gets me in the correct mindset of “Oh this is where I do my Salesforce eLearning work”. Another rule I have is never to work in the bedroom. It’s for sleeping, you really don’t want to associate work with sleep!

The morning ritual

While travelling to where ever I am going to do work I always do the following:

1. List what I aim to achieve today – making sure this matches my 12-week rolling goals
2. Write out how my day is to unfold – More detail than my blocking out of days, this also works well when I’m working in an agile/scrum environment for a client so I can focus on them and what I am going to achieve that day.
3. Review the most critical things that need to progress – This may not be getting the particular piece of work completed, but pushing it onto the next stage.

Evening Ritual – Reflect on the day

I actually usually do this just before I go to bed…

1. What didn’t do well
2. What went well
3. What was achieved
4. What could I change?
5. Quick review on what I’m doing the following day.
6. Now… I took this evening ritual from an American blog several years ago, they also had an extra evening ritual of “What are you grateful for?”, now it personally didn’t help me in the slightest but hey if it helps you!

I like to review what went well at the end so I go to bed thinking (hopefully) positive about what was achieved.

D.G.A.F. Days / Mental Health Day

I started doing this as a kid and continued into adulthood. Sometimes things just get too much and you just want to pull the ripcord and get out (Toyota production line eat your heart out!). This is very much how I run my agile scrums. If something goes wrong, if someone breaks the salesforce build/release the ripcord is pulled and everyone stops and swarms the issue. You don’t want people piling on more changes on things that may be broken and then further down the line trying to unpick everything to identify what the root cause was.

Anyway, a DGAF day is a “Don’t Give a F**k” day. My wife and I allocate each other of us a couple of them a year. If someone pulls the DGAF ripcord everything stops, and that person can go off and do whatever they want with the full support of the other. It’s the re-set day, the day where you can just have time to yourself or do something you want to do with no repercussions.

No TV

I don’t have a TV. This is one of my biggest time savers. It started out as an experiment around 6 years ago to see if removing a TV actually made me more productive… I’ll let you guess the outcome!

Disable Phone Notifications

Now I don’t disable all notifications but all social media are off. I also have an app that manages notifications and my phones state in different locations and times of day. Eg at 9pm my phone goes onto Do not disturb and only people that I’ve favourited can ring me etc.

Check emails twice a day only

If it’s really important people will call you.

Measure, Review, Improve

I’ve been measuring what I get up to for several years. I’ve found it invaluable in finding ways to improve my focus and delivery. The most interesting is understanding and spotting trends in mobile/desktop usage. I use RescueTime to do this and have done for many years. One of the best features is “FocusTime” (I’m using it right now), setting this blocks all distracting websites so you can’t access them, you can also set it to mute your phone and set a do-not-disturb on your calendar when you enable FocusTime… bye bye facebook.com & news.bbc.co.uk, I’m in focus mode. The following are graphs from my time today:

Day breakdown of application usage/phone calls etc 9am to 6pm

Day breakdown of productivity 9am to 6pm

Get Lazer focused, SCRUM your life

You can only focus on one thing at a time and changing task takes time for your brain to adjust (Read Thinking, Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman and also the basis of our keynote speaker talk at London’s Calling) but I’m always trying to focus on the important stuff. Back in 1997 (yes I know, I’m old!) an Ex-boss of mine used to manage his work coming into his paper inbox in the following way. Every time he was given some work he would put it on the top of his in-tray. Every time someone asked if he had completed some work, he’d reply no and put the task to the top of his in-tray. Then periodically he would take the bottom part of his in-tray and chuck it in the bin stating “If there is something important, someone will tell me”.

I know it sounds kinda crazy, but I think back to that time as the beginning of SCRUM for me.

If it’s not important don’t spend any time on it until it’s the right time.  I have to say I do get the odd comment every now and again from people saying “You’re not ignoring me are you?” and of course I reply but it’s usually at that point you know that maybe it’s time to re-prioritise.

Task list

If it’s not on the list, it ain’t getting done. I use the application Todoist an awful lot. It’s integrated into my calendar and Alexa. It’s great if you’re in the house and you shout out to Alexa to add something to your to-do list so you don’t forget. Then I prioritise my day based on my todoist list.

Going on holiday? Set an out of the office to delete email

My out of office reply says that I’m on holiday and that I will be deleting all email on my return and if it’s important to send it after I return. It’s amazing how many people will actually do this and how much junk you can just make disappear!

Try not to work every day & have fun

I’m lucky that I only work 4 days a week and when I do work I’m rarely more than 15mins walk from my house. This means I’m not wasting time on transport moving from home to work. If I do have to commute I make sure I’m doing something during my commute. It may be reading up on something, listening to a podcast or listing to Audible books (I’ve listened to 146 audible books in the past 6 years of using Audible, it’s a fantastic way to chill or learn about a new subject).

So Salesforce has just announced pricing for myTrailhead at $25/user/month but only as an add-on to a Salesforce Enterprise license so can come out on the pricy side. Keir Bowden has created a great blog all about myTrailhead, but for me, the pricing is (kinda) typical Salesforce, and I have some ideas why they have made the requirement for an Enterprise license too (although a guess).

Couldn't agree more with the pricing issue. @JustEdelstein and I went over this in the latest podcast (will publish next week). https://t.co/TDcFtzHy2l

— Jason Atwood (@JasonMAtwood) March 23, 2019

Launching as an MVP

I’ve noticed that when Salesforce is launching something new themselves, they seem to typically launch the product as a minimum viable product (MVP). It makes a lot of sense, test the water and see if there is interest and if there is, chuck money and resources at it to build it out. I’m not saying myTrailhead is an MVP product (it’s been in the planning for a long time). BUT, by putting the price point high/barrier to entry high they are going to be reducing the number of customers that are going to purchase it, but for an MVP product, this is perfect. It limits the number of customers they are having to give support to and potentially juggling gaps in functionality while giving time to evolve the product to more than just an MVP.  The high price point also helps pay off the implementation costs. But who wouldn’t? increasing the price your customers pay and reducing the number of customers you have to juggle and support? a win-win.

External Objects aka Lightning Connect aka Salesforce Connect, when this was first launched I believe the price tag was around $200k. For some companies, the cost of implementing a similar integration could have been more so $200k is quite reasonable. Even when chatter was announced at the London “World Tour” many years ago I remember when the slide popped up stating that chatter was going to cost somewhere in the region of $50/mth/user (you could hear the jaws hitting the floor).

Why is it tied to an Enterprise license?

There are probably quite a few reasons but here are potentially two:

Technical

Firstly, it may have made it easier to build? technical limitation initially, without an enterprise license you potentially won’t have the API access to make myTrailhead test challenges work etc which could reduce the value of myTrailhead??

The Future license spend

But I think the main reason might be the long term view of the myTrailhead product, and that is it may get bundled into an Enterprise license in the future. Why give it away for free? Why is Trailhead free? The same reason, It comes down to Salesforce’s core Salesforce business of selling licenses. If you can educate the users to use their products more effectively they are going to sell more licenses but at the moment trailhead is very separate to the main platform. Could this converge in the future? I can see the benefit in license terms. If you can get a CPQ trail in front of a business user/influencer you could potentially sell the product by itself. This means bringing trailhead head closer to end users.

Learning should be free and open to all

I hope that Salesforce will see the power of Trailhead and actually see how myTrailhead could be a force for good in providing free learning for all and also a potential upside to license revenue growth, a win-win for all. But we’ll have to see.

One thing for sure… I can’t wait for my first project where I get to implement and create myTrailhead modules

So Anup and I have decided to create a new Salesforce podcast called the ‘Salesforce Posse Podcast’. We’ve just launched our first podcast episode last week and so far, to our surprise, it’s been more than just our parents listening in! We’re going to be experimenting with the format a bit over the next couple of months, seeing what works and what doesn’t but we’d love your feedback on what you want to hear.

The podcast will have a Salesforce Developer/Architect slant but also providing what’s happened in Salesforce in the previous month. Our first podcast was just a news wrap up from the previous month and also Anup giving a top tip for developers. Our next podcast will be focused around the Summer ’19 release for developers.

You can find more information on the Salesforce Posse Podcast website and you can also subscribe on either Spotify, iTunes, RSS.

One diagram I seem to come back to time and again, is the Salesforce Functional Capability Map. Its main benefit is to be able to picture all Salesforce functional capabilities or features across the Salesforce platforms at various levels of abstraction. The key things I love about this particular diagram is that I can answer any of the following questions in one picture:

1. What is Salesforce’s functionality?
2. What of the Salesforce functionality set have I purchased?
3. What of the Salesforce functionality have I purchased but not using?
4. What is my maturity of use on a particular piece of functionality?
5. What is the maturity of the Salesforce functionality compared with X CRM/Tool/Application?
6. Where are the cross-overs in Salesforce functionality with other applications in the companies application landscape?

Now EVERY software technology company (who knows what they are doing) has a capability map of their software solution(s). The primary reason because it allows them to compare their product with competitors to identify gaps that could be resolved by building out the product or buying a company that has a solution that fits the gap. Sometimes you can play hardball and ask for their capability map so you don’t have to build your own or ask someone from the company who doesn’t know how valuable a capability map for the business is to “dig it out”. But mostly you have to create them for yourself.

One of the hardest parts of constructing the capability map is working out how to group functions across the different Salesforce clouds as there can be quite a bit of duplication and how to classify those functions into but once that has been created it becomes a very powerful diagram.

Level 0: Salesforce Functional Capability Map

Level 0: Salesforce Functional Capability Map

The first level is the highest level of abstraction on the Salesforce Capability Map. This is how I see Salesforce at the highest level. This is very similar to how Salesforce sees themselves with the 360-degree customer circle that you may have seen at Dreamforce. The only real difference is that I have AppExchange or the “App Ecosystem” rather than part of the platform. For me, this is one of the key areas to accelerate your usage and adoption of Salesforce.

Level 1: Salesforce Functional Capability Map

Level 1 is the second level of arbitration. For each of the sections in Level 0 we essentially look at the functionality within each of the areas. I’ve tried to include all functionality across all the clouds in each section, although I may have missed some functions, the hardest was grouping like functions together. In Marketing, you have Pardot, Marketing Cloud and areas of the core platform with Salesforce campaigns.

This is the level I use the most for answering the questions above. By colouring or shading each of the cells I can answer a raft of questions in a single slide in a deck. In this example, I’ve coloured everything green that has been purchased from Salesforce and orange the functionality that is yet to be utilised and could be of value. This is a great way of maximising your investment in Salesforce without spending additional money. As you can see here single sign-on isn’t currently being used.

Level 2: Salesforce Functional Capability Map

I have to say, level 2 can be huge. It is the most complex, so I generally use level 2 for defining the scope or rationalising why functions in the same group were not used for some reason. It’s also at this point I may start to call out where they are located in Salesforce (Pardot vs Marketing Cloud etc) and what the maturity of the features are (eg email templates in the core platform vs Pardot or Marketing Cloud).

Learn more about Salesforce functionality:

The Salesforce platform is large and having a concise picture of what the functionality is can be hard. In my Salesforce 101 course, I go through each section of the Salesforce Capability Map as well as the history of Salesforce. I also dive into the roles and salaries you can achieve in different parts of the world.

Download the Capability map: Lucid Chart | PDF | Visio

Latest Lucid Chart Version:

This is my active lucid chart capability map, it may be more up to date than the above article but has some of my notes etc in it as I’m continually updating it, use at your own risk