Category: Weekly Newsletter

E-Bikes is a sample application that demonstrates how to build applications with Lightning Web Components and integrate with Salesforce Experiences. E-Bikes is a fictitious electric bicycle manufacturer. The application helps E-Bikes manage their products and reseller orders using a rich user experience.

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Slack for Salesforce Developers

Developers can extend their apps and allow users to use Slack as their collaboration hub and take action on data from Salesforce and other business systems. If you are wondering what you can build with Slack and Salesforce together, and how to do it, this post is for you. We’ll explore how to build Slack apps integrated with Salesforce data.

You might think of Slack as a messaging app. However, what excites me as a Salesforce developer is the Slack platform, which lets you extend, expand, and automate your organization’s work.

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In Experience Cloud, you can use a variety of pre-built templates that give you a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. With the Build Your Own (LWR) template, on the other hand, you have to build (mostly) everything from scratch. So why would you want to use it?

First, you get great performance for all your users, no matter whether they work remotely in Australia or in an office in Ohio. This is because with LWR we’re following a Jamstack approach. Jamstack (which stands for JavaScripts, APIs, and Markup) is an architectural pattern to deliver frontends faster and better to end-users. Pages are statically generated during build time, and then these highly optimized pages and assets are delivered to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). As LWR sites are exclusively built with Lightning Web Components, we can bundle them to a Single Page Application (SPA) and deploy that bundle statically to our CDN around the globe. Data from a Salesforce environment, like CRM or CMS data, comes in via APIs (the “A” in Jamstack) and are always delivered live.

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A new way to publish and subscribe to events is coming: the Pub/Sub API pilot is launching in August 2021. These events could be Platform Events, Change Data Capture events, and/or Real-Time Event Monitoring events. The Pub/Sub API arrives hand-in-hand with the new Event Bus Runtime, a modern piece of behind-the-scenes infrastructure that will allow all Salesforce customers to scale to greater heights than ever before. Read more about the new runtime in this Salesforce Architects blog post.

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Deliver Scalable Experiences Without Limits Using Functions

Salesforce Functions is a new service on the Salesforce Platform that enables you to deliver more scalable experiences by extending the data and workflows that you already have, making them more robust with the power of elastic compute and open language flexibility. You can now significantly accelerate developer productivity on trusted, managed Salesforce infrastructure through pre-authenticated and preconfigured access to Salesforce data and integration with low-code tools like Flow.

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud exposes a rich set of APIs that allow you to integrate your Marketing Cloud instance with third-party systems in a variety of scenarios. There is robust documentation on the available APIs, but we wanted to provide a quick and easy way to get started using those APIs as well as understand the details and see example calls.

In this post, I’ll introduce you to Postman and show you how to easily explore and test different Marketing Cloud APIs against multiple instances using an open-source Postman collection. This unofficial collection currently holds over 140 API call templates for both the REST and SOAP Marketing Cloud APIs.

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Everyone at Salesforce is interested in this data! It’s clear that our developer community works hard to help their customers succeed, as these numbers show:

• 48% are looking to help solve a problem for a client
• 44% are developing on Salesforce to reach their target market
• 38% are looking to build their careers with us

Most Salesforce Developers are building web apps or SaaS, but we notice an increase in people working on AppExchange or extensions to third-party systems.

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Bring Your Salesforce Mobile SDK Apps to Macs Powered by M1

Mobile SDK 9.1 enables Catalyst on our SDK frameworks and existing SDK for iOS sample apps. We updated our internal APIs to make them available on Catalyst. They previously would only work on iPad and iPhone. We also updated our dependencies to ones with Catalyst enabled.

The following Mobile SDK frameworks were updated and have been enabled for Catalyst support:

• SalesforceSDKCommon
• SalesforceAnalytics
• SalesforceSDKCore
• SmartStore
• MobileSync

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been over four years since we first announced Salesforce DX, and with it, the Salesforce CLI. As some say: time flies when you’re shipping features! We know that many of you started on your DX journey at that time, and you have helped us continue to evolve those tools to better fit your needs. But as our tooling grew over the years, we noticed an evolution in your own projects: you’re taking on more ambitious development work, building across multiple Salesforce clouds, and, of course, using a number of different tools. However, an overabundance of tools can make the development feel disconnected and inconsistent, especially as you build across different products. Well, guess what — it’s all coming together!

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These security layers are configured through several tools, such as permission sets, organization-wide defaults, or sharing rules. If you’re a solo developer or someone on a small team, you may configure these yourself. But if you’re on a larger team, it’s likely that you won’t. However, in both cases, you’ll probably write code. Therefore, it’s extremely important that you understand how application code runs in regards to data security, and how to enforce the different data security mechanisms when they’re not enforced by default.

Basically, operations in Salesforce can run in two modes: User Mode, where data security is enforced, and System Mode, where it isn’t. Operations through entry points as the standard UI (standard Salesforce record pages), and standard API endpoints run in User Mode. Components and services that are used to build user interfaces also run in User Mode. These can be record-form Lightning Components or LDS (Lightning Data Service) endpoints.

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How to Build LWR Sites with Experience Cloud

In Experience Cloud, you can use a variety of pre-built templates that give you a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. With the Build Your Own (LWR) template, on the other hand, you have to build (mostly) everything from scratch. So why would you want to use it?

First, you get great performance for all your users, no matter whether they work remotely in Australia or in an office in Ohio. This is because with LWR we’re following a Jamstack approach. Jamstack (which stands for JavaScripts, APIs, and Markup) is an architectural pattern to deliver frontends faster and better to end users. Pages are statically generated during build time, and then these highly optimized pages and assets are delivered to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). As LWR sites are exclusively built with Lightning Web Components, we can bundle them to a Single Page Application (SPA) and deploy that bundle statically to our CDN around the globe. Data from a Salesforce environment, like CRM or CMS data, comes in via APIs (the “A” in Jamstack) and are always delivered live.

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One of the first things that our stakeholders noticed about Tableau was how easy it is to go from a dataset to a beautiful and compelling data visualization. It’s quite intuitive — we found that new users could jump in and spin up a useful chart in a matter of minutes using built-in helpers like the “show me” feature. It’s even easy for a novice user to perform actions like data blending or creating custom calculations.

We also have data-savvy users in our organization that want more advanced options. The special thing about Tableau is that an advanced user can use the same basic concepts to perform more complex functions. For example, a table calculation, which can be as simple as adding two columns together, can be used for something more complex like filtering out accounts with aggregated billings greater than $100. In the same way, a simple visualization can be endlessly customized to fit the specific use case. For example, we frequently use parameters in our visualizations to toggle between different timeframes or metrics. We also like to build supplemental information into charts by using action filters and adding details to data points.

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Welcome, Salesforce Developers! This group is a great place to collaborate with your peers, share ideas, and get inspired by our Salesforce Developer Advocates on how to build apps smarter and faster, together.

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Understanding Call Center Analytics

Call center analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data to unearth valuable insights about your service organization’s performance. This includes customer satisfaction (CSAT), revenue, customer retention, customer effort score, and service-level agreement (SLA) performance.

However, a common challenge for many service executives is having a real-time, holistic view of call center performance across all channels. With multiple agents dealing with scores of customers every day, only highly escalated situations – such as a system outage, a significant customer complaint, or an employee in need of coaching – come to their attention. That means there are many opportunities for improvement.

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The key thing we’ve learned, alongside our customers, is that COVID-19 is an accelerant — an accelerant for change that had already begun. It supercharged a pivot to customer-centricity, to rethinking how you serve your employees and customers, the importance of employee experience, and how to reinvent yourself for the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.

Yet conventional attitudes, silos, and legacy systems often stand between leaders and customer-centricity. And while technology can help, it alone is not the answer. Simply applying new technology to old ways of doing things won’t magically change the way your teams deliver a great customer experience at scale.

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alesforce Platform includes low-code tools for interactive app development and automation, as well as new elastic computing, AI-driven data protection, identity management and DevOps capabilities to help teams drive business outcomes fast. This gives anyone — including business users, admins, designers and developers — the ability to build apps and processes using low code, all while enabling the highest levels of IT governance, scale and trust. 

“The future of app development is low-code, where anyone can participate to solve any business problem,” said Patrick Stokes, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Platform, Salesforce. “The trusted, powerful Salesforce Platform makes it easier and faster for everyone to build apps and get back to growth.”

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AWS and Salesforce Announce Expansive Partnership to Unify Developer Experiences

Organizations from around the world rely on Salesforce to manage their customer relationships and build new applications leveraging the Salesforce platform while using AWS for their compute, storage, and database needs along with AWS technologies like Amazon Connect (an omnichannel cloud contact center), Amazon Redshift (a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud), and AWS Lambda (a serverless compute service that enables customers to run code without provisioning or managing servers). Previously, significant custom integration code was often required for customers that wanted to combine AWS and Salesforce capabilities for their applications. These new offerings will enable customers to use AWS and Salesforce services together seamlessly through new, unified platforms. The companies have also collaborated on new low-code tools to help customers innovate and build applications that connect data in real-time between Salesforce applications and AWS services. 

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Dynamic Interactions starts with developers who build the interactive components — basically, anything on a web page users can interact with, such as a list, a data entry form, a chart, or a map. Once created, IT users can dictate when components will react to different actions, such as when someone visiting the page clicks their mouse or presses specific buttons, and how the components interact with each other on a given page, all in the App Builder interface.

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Players who complete BINGO will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win. Four lucky winners will receive their choice of one of these amazing prize packs.

Below, you’ll see a list of activities with opportunities to Tune In, Get Social, and Make a Connection. Once you complete a task, a spot will be filled in on your BINGO card. Your progress will be saved so you can either stay and play, or come back at any time to finish up.

More than one BINGO means more chances to win our prize drawing. The more you play, the better your chances!

Sweepstakes runs from 06/23/21 8:45am PT to 6/23/21 6:00pm PT. Open to legal residents of the U.S. (incl. D.C.), Canada (excluding Quebec), Cyprus, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Ukraine, and UK. Must be 18+ (20+ in Japan). Country of residence and other restrictions apply. See Official Rules.

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Learn MOAR in Summer ’21 with 5 Release Highlights for Admins

There are a ton of great enhancements in the Summer ’21 Release, such as Flow, record sharing, Your Account, and Einstein, which our product teams have already shared. But there are even MOAR that I want to make sure you know about since I think they belong in your admin goodie bag.

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Say hello to the biggest expansion in flow screens since Lightning components! Now that Multicolumn Flow Screens is generally available (GA) in Summer ’21, you can construct layouts in your flow screens that are not only more visually appealing but also make your users more efficient – all without touching a single line of code.

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A few weeks ago we walked the last mile setting up the CI/CD pipeline at my current project, including the ability to deploy Vlocity components. And it is an experience that someone mentioned could be useful to other Salesforce folks, particularly if you are not using one of the specialized Salesforce CI/CD tools available in the market.

SFI (Salesforce Industries, aka. Vlocity ) components are different from traditional Metadata components. SFI components are represented as records and JSON files inside the platform. I am not sure if Salesforce plans to change that in the future, but right now in order to deploy these components, you require either the Vlocity Build tool (CLI) or Vlocity IDX tool (UI).

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TrailheaDX ’21 Adventure Guide: AppExchange Edition

TrailheaDX 21 is the event to discover where technology can take you. Developers, admins, architects, partners, entrepreneurs, and IT leaders will gather globally (and virtually) on June 23 to expand Salesforce skills, learn about the latest product innovations, discover apps to extend Salesforce, hear exciting announcements, see new demos, and be part of live Q&As with experts. Pack that in with winning exciting prizes from AppExchange (that’s right, keep reading!), and it’s going to be an event to remember.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to connect with AppExchange during your TrailheaDX adventure.

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Everything Salesforce does starts with the customer in mind. When creating your AppExchange app’s go-to-market strategy, you should follow suit by creating a target customer profile. Clearly defining who your target customer is will help you craft tailored messaging for your pilot customers and focus your conversations with the Salesforce ISV & direct sales teams.

An ideal target customer profile for a Salesforce AppExchange app consists of the common facts, pain points, and benefits your customers share.

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TrailheaDX brings Trailblazers everywhere together to expand their Salesforce skills, go deep with product experts and get sneak peeks at what’s ahead. This year, you can experience our out-of-this-world learning event for free, from anywhere.

We’ll be broadcasting live, interactive, expert-led content across 5 channels on June 23 (Pacific Time). Whether you’re planning to tune in from home, host a virtual watch party with your community, or join whenever and wherever works best, you’ll find a lot in store for Salesforce Developers at TrailheaDX ’21.

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TrailheaDX ’21 for Architects

On the Architect Channel, you’ll learn about the latest product innovations and tools to help you deliver value at the speed of business, align your teams and stakeholders, move fast and scale with resilience.

Here’s the channel lineup:

Meet the Teams: DevOps — We’ll be kicking off the Architect Channel with a special live episode. I’ll be joined by Salesforce Product Managers Rohit Mehta, Karen Fidelak and Shuji Ui for this deep dive into DevOps with Salesforce. This stellar lineup of product leaders will demo the latest innovations and answer your questions live on June 23rd.

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When building applications with Lightning Web Components (LWC), developers need to pass information across components to share state and re-render components. In this post, I’ll share an overview of the different communication patterns along with their perks and use-cases. We’ll look at the three types of exchanges:

1. Passing data down the component hierarchy.
2. Passing data up the component hierarchy.
3. Passing data to components that share no common ancestry.

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Chuck Liddell is the CEO of Valence App Incorporated. In that role, he has the opportunity to leverage his skills in both business and technology. These are skills he has developed throughout his life and the multiple roles he has filled.

In this episode, I’m talking with Chuck about the work he has done in fostering, curating and teaching others about advanced topics on Salesforce architecture. We highlight his many community engagements and get into some detail about Valence the company and the app. Tune in to learn all about the many projects Chuck has done and how they might be able to help you.

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Salesforce Summer ‘21 Release: Top Developer Features

There are quite a few new features available to developers within this release. Below you will find some of our favorites that we think should be on your radar. Of course, this isn’t the full list and many more features were included. Head over to Salesforce Help & Training to read the Salesforce Summer ‘21 release notes. The release dates are scheduled for May 15th, June 4th, and June 11-12th, but be sure to check Trust to find out when your Salesforce org will get access to the new features.

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As admins, we love automation because it helps us deliver beautiful, efficient solutions to our users. And, in case you can’t tell already, Flow is the place to go for all things automation, from record-triggered flows to AI. Flow combines the capabilities of Workflow and Process Builder, such as time-based triggers, global variables, and “Is Changed,” with the power of Flow, which includes debugging, invocable actions, and before save, for single no-code automation home! With that said, there are a ton of great new Flow enhancements coming with Summer ’21 for those new to Flow as well as for our seasoned Flownatics.

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