Disclaimer: While I am employed by Salesforce.org, this article is written out of my own desire. All words and opinions expressed here are mine.

In July of this year, I flew to Detroit to attend my first Salesforce.org Open Source Community Sprint! Salesforce.org hosts 3 community sprints in the United States and an additional sprint in Europe every year. Nonprofit and education customers, partners, and employees of Salesforce.org all met up for 2 days of collaboration and fun in Long Beach, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam in 2019.

So, who should go to a sprint? I would encourage anybody involved in the Salesforce ecosystem that has a desire to contribute to Salesforce.org’s nonprofit and education open-source products to attend a sprint! Sprints are the perfect opportunity for community members to come together with Salesforce employees and partners to build something great; this includes administrators, developers, project and product managers, architects, and executives.

Sprints especially need developers! There are so many fantastic ideas that come up in every sprint, yet I felt that having more developers in Detroit would have enabled some projects to see even greater progress.

Don’t believe me that a sprint is worth attending? Just check out some of the highlights below — and follow along on Twitter in 2020 with the #SFDOSprint hashtag.

This year marked my second Dreamforce conference – the first being in 2016 when I co-presented with Dan Appleman on The Dark Art of CPU Benchmarking. I’ve attended all 3 TrailheaDX conferences as well, so I felt that I was able to take those experiences and successfully navigate my way without getting too stressed or fretting over the small annoyances (especially since I wasn’t presenting this year). Dreamforce 2018 had over 170,000 registered passes – that’s a lot of people!

Dreamforce 2018

ISV Takeaways

Since I work for an ISV (Independent Software Vendor), I went into this Dreamforce looking to find some answers specifically related to managed package development and connecting with other partners. Here are what I consider the top things I learned from an ISV perspective:

• The second-generation of packaging will likely not be Generally Available until next Dreamforce at the earliest. Salesforce is still working through a lot of issues getting this ready and it’s not quite there. For now, we’ll stick with the current packaging process to which we’re accustomed.
  • Note: ISV partners should also be wary even when this feature is GA. We typically like to give a new feature a release or two to stabilize, as there are usually always some sort of snags hit. Sometimes it’s best to be patient and keep waiting!
• The Circles of Success for Partners sessions are tremendously helpful. I attended a session and sat at a table with some other partners who all wanted to discuss Salesforce DX and project migration strategies. What I’ve learned: Many ISVs are still struggling to fully switch over to Salesforce DX and we are in dire need of a best practices guide.
  • Note: Best practices guide coming soon? https://twitter.com/andyinthecloud/status/1045834682980433920 – I hope so!

The Future Roadmap

As always, there were a number of features and announcements at Dreamforce that aren’t quite ready yet (though many are nearly ready, with the Winter ’19 release). Some of the highlights: Continue reading →

Salesforce DX is the newest buzzword (buzzphrase?) in the Salesforce ecosystem. By launching Salesforce DX, Salesforce now offers tools for individuals and teams to more easily integrate continuous development into their coding regimen. Salesforce is advocating version control as the “source of truth” for Salesforce code and metadata, not a sandbox or development org – or, dare I even say it, the company production org.

Many ISV developers might be scratching their heads and thinking, “But wait a minute, my company already practices continuous development. We have defined processes for syncing code changes and data to development and QA orgs, and we’ve been using source control for years! What benefit does Salesforce DX have for us? Why bother switching over our existing projects?”

While there are many resources on Salesforce DX out there, including a trail on Trailhead, it can still be daunting for an ISV developer to get started. We’re all busy with our own projects, so why fix something that’s not broken? Here are what I consider the top reasons why ISV developers should switch to Salesforce DX: Continue reading →

With the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) enforcement date of May 25th fast approaching, it is important to understand how Salesforce is supporting companies in their GDPR readiness efforts.

I recently wrote and published a blog post with more information about GDPR for Salesforce admins & developers over on the Full Circle Insights web site. I encourage you to check it out here: “GDPR Overview for Salesforce Admins & Developers”

There are many resources that I found to be incredibly helpful in understanding GDPR and how it will impact our work as Salesforce admins & developers, including:
The EU GDPR Portal – https://www.eugdpr.org/
Salesforce GDPR Readiness Overview – https://www.salesforce.com/gdpr/overview/
“GDPR compliance and Salesforce Individual object” by Ian Gotts on Medium

Happy reading!
— Robert

You’re stuck. Your SOQL aggregate query isn’t working (but it should be). Salesforce is running into a query limit exception even though you specified a limit. Where do you turn for help?

The Salesforce Developer community has grown considerably in the past few years – far beyond the early community forums. There are now so many different resources available that it can be overwhelming for someone new to Salesforce to know where to go to have the greatest chance of getting help.

At the Tahoe Dreamin’ 2018 conference, attendees to my session Navigating the Salesforce Developer Community learned about several resources and reasons why they may choose to use each. Best practices and guidelines when soliciting help from others were also discussed.

Didn’t attend the conference or missed my session? No worries – I’ve got you covered! While the session wasn’t recorded, I’ve made the slides available below…

Continue reading →