All About...Salesforce: September 2021
Fall is officially here in the North East. We’ve broken out the rakes for fallen leaves, switched off our air conditioners, and started breaking out our warmer sweaters. Fall is my favorite season, especially after spending years in the DC area, where summers are, for me, unbearably hot.
Below I’ll outline several new developments in the Salesforce ecosystem that are worth diving into this autumn. See you in October!
DREAMFORCE Catch these speakers at Dreamforce ’21
This year’s Dreamforce, September 21st to 23rd, is being made available to all virtually, so all you need to do is register and tune in from your desk. I suggest blocking time in your calendar so you can be present and focused. The speaker lineup includes Marc Benioff (of course), who will outline his future vision for Salesforce and Jane Fonda, Will Smith, and other notable advocates and esteemed businesspersons.
Dreamforce is always a rewarding experience, with educational programming, new feature demonstrations, and I find them to be an excellent way to preview the following year through a Salesforce lens. And, if the in-person Dreamforce is just too much of an experience for you, virtual Dreamforce is an opportunity to learn and engage without wearing a hole in your shoes!
EVENT Salesforce.org Week of Learning
Week of Learning is a new offering from Salesforce.org designed for you, the nonprofit and association customer. From October 4th through 8th, join Salesforce.org for a week of virtual roundtables, hands-on training, and webinars that focus on adoption, change management, and configuration and deployment best practices. I’m particularly excited about the Roundtable – Strengthening Your Salesforce Architecture and the Webinar – Implementation and Managing Change for Small but Mighty Orgs. And mark your calendar for Friday, October 8th at 9:45am PT / 12:45pm ET for the Ask a Partner Expert – Artificial Intelligence event featuring two of my colleagues.
RELEASE Release notes and readiness group
In addition to these exciting events coming this fall, the Salesforce Winter ‘22 release is officially here, with release weekends falling last weekend on September 10, October 1, and October 8. Hopefully, you’ve been able to get into your pre-release Sandbox and test your configuration against the new release before it hits your production org. If you haven’t, it’s not too late to do so. Review the Release Notes here. I also strongly recommend that you join and participate in the Release Readiness Trailblazers group in Trailhead. This dedicated Trailblazer group provides crowdsourced information on new releases, helps identify bugs or gotchas, and escalates them to the community and Salesforce for resolution.
NOTICE MyDomain
Admins of Salesforce.org instances that do not have MyDomain enabled should have received an email from Salesforce alerting you that MyDomain enablement will be enforced in the Winter ’22 release. If you have questions about why you should enable MyDomain and how to do so, reach out, and we’ll set up a time to talk.
BLOG Hot URL summer
From the same team that wrote the Project Runway-inspired blog about user acceptance testing earlier this year comes a new article about My Domain, which replaces the standard Salesforce URL with your own custom branded URL.
Enabling My Domain unlocks some major features in Salesforce, but most importantly, it increases your Org’s security — and we stan a secure Org.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of implementing My Domain in your Salesforce Org.
ARTICLE Salesforce order of execution
Finally, I want to plug our friends at SalesforceBen, specifically Amit Chaudry, for his article on the Salesforce Order of Execution. What’s this, you ask? As the name implies, there is an order for how automations and Salesforce features interact. Understanding this execution will help you diagnose problems and develop scalable and, more importantly, consistent solutions. As Salesforce develops more features and heavily invests in the Flow declarative automation tool, we will see more actions taking place on the platform. Understanding what actions take place and when is an essential step to understanding the fundamentals of the Salesforce platform and is an invaluable resource for system administrators and power users.
