DreamForce 2011 - Day 1

Well DreamForce 2011 kicked off today. There were 44,000+ persons signed up for the event. It was something like I have never seen before. There are so many things going on that it is impossible for one person to relate how it is going and to describe the total experience. I can only relate my limited view of the event so far.

Being a developer and also having a specific business purpose for this event my view was limited to two aspects so far. My focus was to enhance my grasp of APEX and to learn more about how Visual Process Manager (or Visual Flow) works in Salesforce.

Today started out at the community conference. I was not expecting too much out of this. I attended it last year as well and for the most part it talked about the development plan of their MVP program and how great they were. Today it had that a little though one of the speakers also spoke quite a bit about the Radian6 aqcuisition and how that has impacted their view of how they evaluate social perception of their company. It was very interesting and opened my eyes as to some of the possibilities out there in social media aggregation.

My second session was a user experience design session. This was one of the coolest sessions I have attended at a conference. This was led by one of the systems analysts and the director of user experience. It was interesting to hear their new approach to development. They grouped us by tables and gave us some scenarios and had us work together to come up with potential solutions to the problem. One of their focus for this was to take technology out of the mix all together. Remove the "roles" that we put on ourselves (I'm a designer, a developer, a PM) and instead grab the paper and pin and just start collaborating ideas as a whole. Come up with something that can meet the needs of the issue and once that is done then move back into our roles to implement the solution. Of course this session only focused on the brain storming part of the process. It was very fun.

Next came lunch. Since I do not like mayo the lunch was pretty much worthless to me. So I nibbled on a few things.

Third session was about Visual Process Manager. This a primarily for business users. It was good. The focus was to show business persons how easy it is to use the tool and that with this we are able to put the builing of the process into the hands of the business where it should be. They are not trying to take IT out of the picture. There are elements where IT is needed, like when it comes to connecting to sources outside of the environment, but that the business should own the process and only pull in IT when they are needed. The presenter did a great job.

Session four was a hands on exersize in AJAX code development. We played around with creating a class that consumed emails coming into a custom email connector and parse the body to use to insert infomation into a Salesforce object. It was a short session but it opened my eyes into some of the possibilities and showed me the solution to a couple of solutions we were looking for.

Session five was called a hands on to Visual Process Manager though was more a visual demonstration. When I hear "hands on" I think that we will get to do some playing around. Instead the instructor was the one doing the playing around. Even though this was not what I expected it was a pretty good session. Earlier the focus of the meeting I was in was to the business. This session was focused towards the IT side of things. He showed a mock up of a business process that someone in the business had put together as well as the sections that were incomplete due to need for IT assistance. We have been using the old version of Visual Process Manager called FireFly (by the former Informavores) which includes an installed designer. For the demos today they showed off the new web-based designer that is planned for release in the Winter release (safe harbor statmenet goes here). This session was also very informative and enjoyable.

After the fifth session I headed over to the expo floor where there were vendors all over the place and some food. The amount of people in one place was astounding. People were everywhere. The most frustrating part of this is that the majority of the drinks available were alcoholic. I do not drink and it was not easy trying to find a drink that I wanted. When I asked for a mountain dew the server looked at me kind of funny and had to ask someone else to find the sodas. Even then he came back with a "Mist".

We only spent a little time there because there were too many people and we wanted to go to a party at the Museum of Modern Arts. There were a lot of people there as well but not as bad as the expo. The food there was really good though the drink situation was a little worse. The only non-alcoholic drink they had was soda-water. Interestingly enough they had a "candy bar". This was cool. We also spent time touring the art upstairs. Some of the things that they consider art is absolutely crap in my opinion. There was some are that I really enjoyed. After a while though I was tired and had to go back. I went back to the hotel, checked my email, did some work and then a couple of blogs. Now I am going to bed to get ready for another day tomorrow.