Over recent months Salesforce.com have experienced a number of outages, with the most recent one being just days before the start of Dreamforce. But, it appears this did not dampen the enthusiasm for what was the biggest event yet.
Ahead of this years Dreamforce, Salesforce.com kick-started the event, with the announcement of their mobile app platform, Salesforce1. So it came as no surprise that Dreamforce 2013 would have a mobility theme. If we think back to last year, we were introduced to Salesforce Touch, a HTML5 backed platform for mobile devices, but this year they took a step further into enterprise mobility innovation.
So what is Salesforce1? Salesforce.com themselves are citing it as a CRM platform aimed at developers and ISV’s to create mobile apps. And ‘apps’ is certainly the key message for 2014, and beyond. Designed to be developer friendly, they are offering more APIs for developers to build apps for their customer base, with the added benefit of an Administrator App, so changes and updates can be made on the move.
Watch out though, as Heroku also jumped on the bandwagon with their announcement about Heroku1.
As we head back to Dreamforce for a moment, is it any wonder that so many attendees from around the globe are left starry eyed, as they were tempted and delighted with the choice of a thousand breakout sessions. Plus, a ‘who’s who’ list of keynote speakers which included; Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Holistic Health Guru Deepak Chopra and Salesforce.com’s very own CEO, Marc Benioff.
Administrators were also give special treatment this year, with clinics covering all levels of administration and included topics such as; configuration, reports, dashboards, data management and collaboration, sales support, implementation success, best practices and technical advice. Plus there were 40 unique sessions, that were repeated throughout the four day event, to cover all roles and cloud content.
The DevZone also proved a big hit this year, with a never ending queue at the Developer Library for attendees to pick up their free workbooks and textbooks. The breakout sessions covered everything from technical architecture to brushing up on your Visualforce and Apex code.
And let’s not forget the light relief, which this year saw ‘dream-goers’ rocking along to music from Green Day and 70s legend, Blondie. And, when you thought that you were finally beat, the bean-bags in the park came as a welcome relief for tired feet!
If you were unfortunate enough not to attend Dreamforce first-hand, then click below to watch the keynote speeches:
Opening Keynote with Marc Benioff
Lean in with Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
Salesforce Platform: Next Generation Apps