Category: Weekly Newsletter

We live in an era where the customer is in control. Amazon can predict what products we will buy next, Netflix recommends the shows we like with great accuracy, and Uber lets us customize trips right down to the type of vehicle we want to travel in. Customers expect companies to have an intimate understanding of their preferences, want personalized experiences, and demand fast service. It’s no longer a marketing advantage to deliver on this — it’s table stakes.

When it comes to marketing, customers expect the interactions they have on a company’s website to translate to their mobile app experiences and even in-store visits. The problem is that, for most companies, those environments operate off different datasets — even though the customer is the same. Customers also expect their experiences to be consistent, and “in the moment” as they move from channel to channel. Most customer journeys involve over three different channels (for example, e-mail, web, and mobile app), and customers tend to move seamlessly and quickly between these channels. Most companies, however, don’t have these data environments connected in real-time.

---

Moving from Scrappy to Scale: Digital Transformation Amidst Retail’s New Normal

In an incredible response to the health crisis, most retailers condensed their roadmap for digital transformation from years to weeks, uniting around the customer. They were scrappy — making quick decisions to provide the products and services customers needed — from supplying PPE to curbside pickup. As our industry continues this massive acceleration, retailers must [re]think the necessary path from scrappy to scale. Given that digital transformation is led by humans and not machines, Salesforce surveyed 500 executives globally and interviewed dozens more for a candid look inside their minds. This session will provide insights into how leaders responded and what the future of the industry looks like in the New Normal.

---

Trailhead, the free online learning platform from Salesforce, is a fun way to learn in-demand skills. While learning is its own reward, there’s always room for a little extra motivation. Trailhead Quests combine the challenge of learning new skills with the chance of winning sweet prizes

---

When basics like shelter and food are uncertain, as is the case for the more than 500,000 Americans experiencing homelessness on any given night, technology is often an afterthought. While experts agree that more affordable housing and policy change are the most critical solutions to the homelessness crisis, technology advancements can support those goals by equipping governments and service providers in the sector with the right tools and data to help them serve their constituents.

In a research report released today, the Salesforce.org Impact Labs cohort, in collaboration with case managers, service providers, people who’ve experienced homelessness, and industry experts, identified three high-impact areas where technology can play an integral role in addressing this pervasive issue.

---

How Salesforce Is Continuing To Deliver A World-Class Employee Experience

Salesforce was just named one of the World’s Best Workplaces for the fourth year in a row. It’s an honor to have received this award over the years, and in 2020 it means more than ever before.

The last eight months have presented us with challenges we never thought we’d have to face. The global pandemic and its effects have dramatically changed everyday life and the way we work. Lucky for us about 20% of our employees were already working from home when the pandemic hit, so we had some of the infrastructure and best practices in place. But, when we all went remote, we knew we had to step up our game to ensure our employees remained productive, happy, and well. Here are a few ways we’ve supported our employees to help them thrive during this unprecedented time.

---

In a matter of minutes and without a single line of code, Zapier allows you to automatically send info between Salesforce Essentials and Shopify.

Get started with workflows like Add contacts in Salesforce Essentials when new customers are created in Shopify. Or check out the rest of our guided workflows.

---

Bringing the Dreamforce experience to you with DreamTX was a blast: 4 days of learning, with some special guests and lots of trailblazer fun. Were you able to catch our debut “Wheel of AppExchange” game? This APP-tastic episode included some of our favorite AppExchange experts talking about 20 free apps that are available on AppExchange!

No worries if you missed the episode, you can learn all about them below and go directly to each listing to learn more and instantly install each solution into your Salesforce org.

---

Salesforce Spring ‘21 Release Date + Preview Information

The Release Date for Spring ’21 will depend on your instance of Salesforce, but the main dates are on Jan 16th, Feb 6th, 12th & 13th. If you already know the instance your production Org is located on, you can head over to Salesforce Trust and click on your instance name and hit “Maintenances”, this will show you the date of the Salesforce Spring ’21 release hitting your Org.

---

Now more than ever, companies around the world are challenged to innovate quickly, all while providing seamless experiences for customers. At Dreamforce 2019, the chatter from our customers and partners about the need for skilled Salesforce Architects blazed to the forefront. Architects are critical to the success of digital transformation projects, with a unique skill set to tackle the most complex challenges and produce the best solutions. 

To help architects build multi-cloud expertise and supercharge ecosystem capabilities, we created the Solution Architect Program—made for architects, by architects— delivering a brand new Salesforce Solution Architect career path and curricula in Partner Learning Camp and on Trailhead. Today, we’re excited to expand the architect community with our newest architect certification: B2C Solution Architect.

---

In order to view sessions happening in your time zone, select your region from the Themes below. Regions include DreamTX Americas, DreamTX Asia Pacific, or DreamTX Europe.

---

Salesforce’s Wade Wegner on the Growth of Modern App Development in 2021

Companies across industries and regions are looking to accelerate their digital transformations in the face of the pandemic. This makes the software developer’s role all the more crucial to the success of the business, as developers will largely be responsible for building the apps and processes that help their organizations bridge the divide, remain connected to their customers, and stay relevant in this digital-first world.

---

The new MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce is the fastest and easiest way to connect disparate apps and data to Salesforce and develop a 360-degree view of the customer without developing any new code. Unlocking and connecting data across apps and systems is one of the biggest challenges businesses face. MuleSoft’s new The State of Business and IT Innovation report shows more than 80 percent of line of business employees want easy access to data and IT capabilities in order to be productive as digital projects increase. MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce allows administrators and other business users to move faster with a library of pre-built connectors and templates to easily automate integrations. For example, Salesforce admins can quickly and easily connect their organization’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and payments processing systems to Sales Cloud to automate the quote-to-cash process, streamlining sales operations and improving seller productivity.

---

Being an #AwesomeAdmin is all about delivering business value with technology that makes our end-users’ lives easier and helps our organizations run more efficiently. Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) can help you, as an admin, deliver these results in more impactful ways than ever before. Einstein Prediction Builder makes it easy to create a custom prediction for your business. You don’t have to worry about ETL-ing your data, data wrangling, or picking which algorithm to use or tuning its parameters. Even better, you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure to run these models in production, model retraining over time, or how to integrate the predictions back into your business processes in Salesforce. Once set up, training and scoring happen automatically behind the scenes. And, the predictions are available on a custom field on the object where your data is stored.

---

Customer 360 Privacy Center: Manage User Privacy and Archiving, and Build Your Single Source of Truth

To build a single source of truth your business needs to ensure it has these four things: Customers have a single way to log in to apps, there is a single identity internally to connect and manage customer data, companies have a B2C scale data lake for all data, and there is a way to manage customer privacy and compliance. As of October 2020, Salesforce offers capabilities in all four components in an admin-friendly declarative way to manage a single source of truth: Customer 360 Truth. Let’s dive into one of the newest products of Customer 360 Truth — Customer 360 Privacy Center

---

It’s that time of year when the Trailblazer Community comes together to nominate community heroes to be Salesforce MVPs. We invite the entire Trailblazer Community to join as we celebrate the renewal of our current Salesforce MVPs and welcome nominations for our 2021 class.

Our community leaders have risen to all the challenges 2020 brought our way. They adapted quickly, and continued to go above and beyond to help the entire community blaze trails. That’s why now is such an important time to show gratitude and welcome a new class of Salesforce MVPs.

Want to be part of this special community experience? Then get ready, because the process starts with you! Nominations are open now through December 1, 2020.

---

Leveraging existing code is often the fastest way to bring your experience online for your end-users. At Salesforce, we strive to ensure that interoperability makes this achievable. This blog is going to show you how to leverage an existing investment you may have made in another framework, and integrate more seamlessly into the Salesforce Experience.

---

Introducing the SOQL Query Builder, Now in Beta!

We’re thrilled to introduce you to a new, faster way to write SOQL queries! The SOQL Query Builder is a VS Code extension that delivers a rich, intuitive UI for designing and executing queries against your Salesforce data. With the SOQL Query Builder, writing, running, and exploring the results of your queries is easier than ever. Today, we’re releasing this new experience in Beta for VS Code, with future plans to bring it to Code Builder so that you can declaratively build queries from your desktop or browser.

---

It’s that time of year when the Trailblazer Community comes together to nominate community heroes to be Salesforce MVPs. We invite the entire Trailblazer Community to join as we celebrate the renewal of our current Salesforce MVPs and welcome nominations for our 2021 class.

Our community leaders have risen to all the challenges 2020 brought our way. They adapted quickly, and continued to go above and beyond to help the entire community blaze trails. That’s why now is such an important time to show gratitude and welcome a new class of Salesforce MVPs.

Want to be part of this special community experience? Then get ready, because the process starts with you! Nominations are open now through December 1, 2020.

---

With decades of experience leading, advising, and investing in successful entrepreneurs, Mark Cuban has been a key supporter of the small business community. Mark joined us early in the pandemic to offer advice to small businesses. Hear what he has to say 8 months in about how the events of 2020 are shaping the future of business, AI, and employee loyalty.

Join us virtually on 12/9 to get your most pressing questions answered by the original Shark and learn how Salesforce technology can help small business owners take control of their future.

---

Ecosystem Innovation with Lightning Web Components

We are happy to share that WebComponents.dev now fully supports LWC for both on-platform and off-platform development. We see beautiful harmony when projects like this solve common problems for the greater good. This also allows us to put more time, energy, and resources into creating a better developer experience with our productivity tools such as the Salesforce CLI, VSCode Extensions, Code Builder, and LWC Local Development. With all the innovation WebComponents.dev brings to the LWC ecosystem this does mean that we will be phasing out our LWC Playground on February 1, 2021.

---

It’s that time of year when the Trailblazer Community comes together to nominate community heroes to be Salesforce MVPs. We invite the entire Trailblazer Community to join as we celebrate the renewal of our current Salesforce MVPs and welcome nominations for our 2021 class.

Our community leaders have risen to all the challenges 2020 brought our way. They adapted quickly, and continued to go above and beyond to help the entire community blaze trails. That’s why now is such an important time to show gratitude and welcome a new class of Salesforce MVPs.

Want to be part of this special community experience? Then get ready, because the process starts with you! Nominations are open now through December 1, 2020. 

---

In the Summer ’20 Release, Pardot added a more modern, consistent, and secure method for authenticating to the Pardot API. The newly supported authentication method allows customers to leverage the familiar Salesforce OAuth flows using your Salesforce users, no longer requiring a one-off Pardot only user. Yay, less context switching!

---

What’s the #Appy Twitter Chat and How Do I Join?

The #Appy Twitter Chat is a monthly, 1-hour, high-energy chat on Twitter under #Appy focused on different aspects of AppExchange each month. Here’s how to join:

1. Go to Twitter and search for #appy (or click here)

2. @appexchange will tweet a question using #appy and Q1. Every few minutes, we’ll tweet more questions, using Q2., Q3., Q4., and so on. 3. When you want to answer a question, simply use A1. with your answer (or A2., A3., etc. based on the question you’re answering) along with #appy.

---

Who is winning 2020? Our pets because they see us more. Slippers over dress shoes. Online shopping. No travel expenses. Not commuting. But another opportunity in the current and beyond-COVID world is the ability to do more with technology. Salesforce customers are going through a digital transformation, and we’re learning more about these accomplishments with AppExchange.

---

Salesforce CMS opens up multiple ways and channels for you to surface all the varieties of your authored content — be it marketing materials, news articles, or blog posts. One such quick and easy way is to use our Delivery APIs in a Spring Boot web application deployed on Heroku. Read more to find out how this can be done in a few simple steps.

---

Step Up Your LWC Skills – Part 1

Lightning Web Components (LWC) is a framework for creating user interfaces using JavaScript and Web Components.

LWC relies heavily on language features that were introduced in ECMAScript 6 (aka ES6, aka ES2015). Aura offers support for ECMAScript 5 (aka ES5) features. With ES6, plenty of great features have been added to JavaScript. So if you’re coming from a Visualforce page or Lightning component (Aura) development background.

---

Every October 31st, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and horror movies remind us all to appreciate the spooky side of life. Countries around the world have their own traditions to celebrate the holiday — Mexico celebrates Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) while many other countries celebrate All Saints Eve — but here at the AppExchange, we’ve decided to celebrate Halloween by highlighting some AppExchange solutions that are so good it’s scary

---

Create innovative, cool, and fun MuleSoft projects for an opportunity to win awesome prizes! This is the perfect opportunity to showcase your MuleSoft expertise and build your reputation in one of the largest integration practitioner ecosystems.

Who will hold the title of first MuleSoft Hackathon champion? Submit your MuleSoft Hackathon project before Nov. 29, 2020 11:59pm PT.

---

Dreamforce to 𝙮𝙤𝙪 2020

The world has changed, and so has Dreamforce. Instead of everyone coming to Dreamforce, Dreamforce is coming to you — to your kitchen, to your living room, even to your own backyard. We’ll bring inspirational customer success, timely, relevant, insightful conversations, and Customer 360 innovations geared for our new work-from-anywhere world. Plus amazing speakers and, of course, our inspiring community of Trailblazers. Dreamforce to You 2020 — because we don’t need to be together, to be together.

---

Winter may be bad for Westeros, but for us in the Salesforce world, it brings great updates across the entire Customer 360 platform. The Developer Evangelism team has been busy the past few days bringing some of these updates to the Sample Gallery. In this blog post, we’ll go over the Winter ’21 updates we’ve added to the sample apps and some general enhancements that make it easier for you to navigate and understand these apps.

---