9 Announcements from Dreamforce 2017 You Don’t Want to Miss

Another year and another wild week in San Francisco as over 160,000 people made their way to Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference. In between all of the breakout sessions, client meetings, and parties, there were a number of exciting keynotes to break the news on all the latest innovations from Salesforce.

While it seemed that there weren’t any one blockbuster announcement that we have come to expect from Dreamforce, there were 10 announcements that really grabbed our attention.

I’ll give you a brief overview of each of them here along with a link to more information so you can dig deeper into whatever excites your interest.

1. myTrailhead: your Trailhead, brand, trails, and Trailmixes

If you’re not familiar with trailhead, it’s Salesforce’s learning platform where you can get instructions on how to do anything from writing an Apex script to creating your first record. With this latest update Salesforce is personalizing the experience by adding things such as:

Trailhead Profile– One simple place to track your progress with trailhead and enable employers to easily qualify your skill set.

Trail Tracker – Assign and track learning modules to employees while motivating them with leaderboards and badges.

Trail Mixer – Create custom tutorials and track progress for things like new-employee onboarding.

And more. For a full summary of the announcement you can head here.

2. Live Apps for Quip

If you haven’t heard of Quip until now, there has never been a better time to explore the platform. Quip is a collaboration tool that allows you and your team to create, share, and work on documents in real time. It was acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $750M and this is their first major update.

With the latest release of live apps for quip, they have added a TON of incredible new features to create the most powerful digital document ever. With Live apps you can integrate all of your current workplace tools(slack, atlassian, workplace, etc..), add a calendar, a kanban board, start a chat with your teammates, import data from Salesforce and so much more.

Find out more about quip and live apps here.

3. myEinstein: every Trailblazer can build AI-powered apps

Salesforce has been pushing to offer AI across their platform with predictive analytics, lead scoring, and other machine learning solutions. MyEinstein could possibly be their most powerful and important AI initiative yet.

What MyEinstein intends to do is make the creation of AI-powered apps so easy that an admin can do it without touching a line of code. We are yet to see the full extent of what you can actually create without a background in Machine Learning, but we are sure this will become a critical component of Salesforce’s platform.

You can learn more about myEinstein here.

4. Salesforce essentials – New Plans for Small Businesses

The depth of the Salesforce platform has made it a sort of playground for enterprise companies and left small businesses to deal with a barebones Salesforce org. Not anymore though.

Salesforce essentials is a pre-packaged CRM for small businesses and is priced at just $25 / month / user for a maximum of 5 users. The out of the box solution comes with an Einstein AI-infused Sales cloud, support for Salesforce1 mobile usage, and the ability to integrate your other small-business apps through a SMB Appexchange list. They’ve also made sure to include trailhead modules within your org to guide you through things like building a sales process, creating role hierarchy, and any other customizations you want to add.

This new offering from Salesforce looks like a great alternative to rival SMB CRM’s like Zoho and PipeDrive. To Learn more about Salesforce Lightning essentials, check it out here.

5. myLightning: Your Apps, Themes, Flow, and Components Declaratively

Need another reason to make the switch from Salesforce classic to lightning? Well here it is. myLightning from Salesforce is their latest enhancement of the lightning platform that is packed with some amazing features.

Want to customize the look of your Salesforce org? You can do that now with myLightning.

Want to create a Salesforce app with dynamic pages based on specific criteria? You can now customize salesforce at scale with myLightning.

Want to create a guided visual process for people to handle support cases within Salesforce(similar to an traditional app’s flow)? Yep, you can do that too.

If you’re thinking about making the switch to lightning, there has never been a better time. Not to brag, but we’re pretty great at migrating companies to lightning, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing you can contact us.

But if you want to learn more about mylightning, check it out here.

6. Salesforce and Google’s New Partnership

Since we already mentioned this announcement in a post here, I won’t spend too much time on it. But this could easily be the most important announcement coming out of dreamforce this year.

Essentially, Salesforce has named Google their preferred cloud provider and has created a seamless integration between the Google Suite (think gmail, drive, calendar, etc..) and your Salesforce org.

While we are excited by what’s to come with this partnership, all we can think about is how much it must hurt to be Microsoft right now.

7. mySalesforce: Your Branded App in Google Play or The App Store

It was cool back when Salesforce created the Salesforce1 mobile app that essentially allowed you to bring your CRM on the go. But the app was never actually yours, and it was nearly impossible to let your partners or customers interact with your Salesforce data without shelling out a ton of money in licensing fees.

But now with mySalesforce, you can have your admin create an app with clicks, not code, that can be published onto the Google Play or App Store. Now, the extent of what you can really do with these apps is going to be nothing like something you could build on Heroku, but nonetheless this is an exciting new innovation from Salesforce.

Just think, within a few short days your admin could build, publish, and easily manage a branded app that can be downloaded by visitors to your museum, park, or other attraction, and allow you to capture their data when they log in.

To learn more you can check out Salesforce’s demo video here.

8. New Marketing Cloud Products and Features

There was a massive announcement of new features and product updates during the Marketing Cloud keynote at dreamforce this year. Salesforce did a great job of distilling the updates here (and there were a lot of them) so I won’t mention the product updates here.

New Marketing Cloud partnerships announced include SiteCore, Thunderhead, and the integration of Google analytics as a part of their partnership with Google.

Learn more here.

9. myIoT: IoT in The Salesforce Platform

The last but certainly not least of the my___ announcements is the new myIoT. Salesforce cited a study done by Cisco in which they found “60 percent of IoT (Internet of Things) initiatives stall at the Proof of Concept (PoC) stage” and resolved that the core issue was the divide between developers and business users when it comes to IoT.

Basically, although the engineers were able to harvest high quality data from IoT connected devices, it’s too difficult for service, sales, and marketing users to put it to use. MyIoT is Salseforce’s initiative to change that by implementing new features to the IoT cloud that allow for low-code orchestration, Customer Context, and the ability to proactively engage customers directly from Salesforce.

This is yet another reason to build your IoT connected app on top of the Salesforce platform.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I hope that these new innovations from Salesforce get you excited to explore everything that’s possible on the platform. If there’s anything that you may be interested in implementing with your business, or you have some questions on how these innovations can impact your business, we are always available to talk.

If you would like a 15 minute consultation, just fill out the form here.