Dreamforce 2017

18 days ago
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What is Dreamforce?

Dreamforce is an annual user conference hosted by Salesforce.com in downtown San Francisco, bringing together thought leaders, industry pioneers and thousands of IT professionals. This is Salesforce’s big annual event, in 2016 over 170,000 people descended on San Francisco for the event.

I have spoken at Dreamforce for the past 5 years.

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My reflection on India Dreamin

18 days ago
10 min read
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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!!!

 

India Dreamin

19 days ago
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Very excited to say that I will be heading over to India to present at India Dreamin 2017! Looking forward to seeing all the people who I’ve worked with who live in India!!

Automation Hour with Francis Pindar

July 16, 2017
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After the success of my last Automation Hour talk webinar I’m doing it again in Jan 2018! Come learn some advanced features around Process Automation within Salesforce.

Registration Link: http://bit.ly/FPindarJan1918

 

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The Power of One: The best reporting trick of all time!

June 15, 2017
8 min read
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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:

How to supercharge Pardot with Text Messages

May 23, 2017
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Join me and the rest of the Pardot geeks at Guinness World Records where I demo how to supercharge your Pardot and get near 100% read-rates on your marketing using SMSs!

 

London’s Salesforce World Tour

May 18, 2017
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The ‘Salesforce World Tour London’ is Salesforce’s largest Sales event in London. This yearly event has sponsors, talks and workshops throughout the day. Last year I was invited to do a couple of talks at the event its always a great event with simply loads of people there. They had a trailhead zone which is a great place to pick the brains of Salesforce gurus and get free advice!

 

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General, Videos

Time for a tech implant?

April 19, 2017
2 min read
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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…

General, Videos

The Future of Salesforce Lightning

April 7, 2017
5 min read
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In General, Videos

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)

https://twitter.com/Salesforce_Tom/status/848952112574758912

 

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.

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