Michael Welburn

Michael Welburn

Salesforce Architect & Web Developer.

A Belated Dreamforce 2015

Don’t check your calendars – Dreamforce 2015 is over, and has been for a few weeks. Unfortunately what didn’t happen was a blog post highlighting the sessions that I was presenting (presented?) at Dreamforce, but better late than never.

This was my second Dreamforce (I missed last year, but went in 2013) and my first time presenting at this type of level, so it was a great experience to present two topics that I’ve worked on quite a bit the last year.

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Quickly Build a Native Mobile App for Your Community Using Salesforce Mobile SDK

This session, which was Tuesday morning in the DevZone Mobile Theater, highlighted how to use the Salesforce Mobile SDK to create an iOS or Android wrapper of your responsive Visualforce based Salesforce Community. Since it was early on the first day, the audience was quite a bit larger than the projections that I had about the number of signups; the fact that it was the first thing you saw as you came up the escalator to enter the DevZone probably didn’t hurt either.

While I don’t think the Mobile Theater sessions were recorded, what I did was walk through how to do a basic setup of an iOS based hybrid_remote app with the SDK, point it at a Salesforce Community, and then explore the world of Cordova plugins (in particular, installing and configuring the statusbar plugin for iOS).

As I have no shame in self promotion, I’ll also point out that I made a cameo in Salesforce’s Developer blog in a highlight of Dreamforce shot: Dreamforce 2015 DevZone to You.

Creating a Salesforce Community: Code vs Configuration

This session, which was Tuesday evening in a separate breakout room in the DevZone, highlighted the three different options that exist today for building Salesforce Communities: Tabs, Tabs + Visualforce, and Community Templates (which will include support for Lightning components on the Napili template as part of the Winter 16 release). I walked through the slides and did some quick demos of what the setup looked like and what a site might look like built in each way.

This session was sold out, so I knew it would be pretty crowded as Communities are becoming a hot topic on the platform and many people are trying to understand what the level of effort and functionality available is for building their out their own Community. I had a large number of insightful questions afterwards, which is always a plus when presenting.

I’m not quite sure when the online recording will be available for this session, but I’ll be sure to highlight it when it comes out.

Not to be outdone by my other session’s online fame, this presentation got picked up in SlideShare’s The Best of Dreamforce 2015 recap blog.

2015 Community Cloud Partner Innovation Award

Not to be buried too deeply in this post was the news that my employer, 7Summits, won Salesforce’s Partner Innovation Award for Community Cloud. Salesforce has a handful of categories that they create awards for innovation use of the platform, and award implies that project was the cream of the crop for that year, which is very exciting (and great marketing collateral).

If you take a look at the other companies who won, you’ll notice a recurring theme; pretty much all of them are enormous powerhouse consulting firms. That makes our company’s win (roughly 75 employees) even more impressive based on the competition we were up against.

And since I was staffed on the project, it is particularly cool to work on something that gets recognized at such a lofty level.

Overall

While I had quite a hectic schedule leading up to Dreamforce (including a huge deployment the weekend before), I was pleased with how my presentations went and how quickly I settled into it conversing with the audience based on my lack of prior experience.

I ended up spending most of Tuesday going over the sessions on my own so I didn’t get a chance to catch anything else, but I did have a great time catching up with a variety of coworkers and clients from previous jobs and projects that happened to see my name on a session and show up.

I spent most of my time afterwards trying to take in content around ISV and Lightning component architecture considerations, which I learned quite a bit about. Unfortunately I also missed a bunch due to conflicts, so I’m excited to see the breakout session videos start to get published.

Not to be overlooked was the Dreamforce swag. This year I lucked into winning a Surface 3 and picked up Joe Montana’s autograph at the Microsoft booth. Not a bad haul. Looking forward to next year!

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