Day two of DreamForce 2011 is done. It was a good and fully packed day. We started off the day with the keynote speach. Marc Benioff is a very good speaker and is very engaging to the crowd. As always they enveiled a few new things particularly in regards to their new social media strategy, data.com, a new visual interface for database.com, the official release of database.com....It was very informative but in my opinion it went a little too long. The end seemed to drag on so we left a little early.
My first session after lunch was on how to use SEO and SEM effectively. It was an interesting session. It was not particularly targeted towards my job responsibilities but there was nothing at that time that was and I think that SEO and SEM is interesting. I learned a lot of interesting things in regards to effectively setting things up for good indexing and such. If I have time I will post some of what I gleaned from that session. The presenters were excellent.
My second session was a hands on intro to the web services api. This session walked through some tutorials on how to create a java application that can consume Salesforce web services to present Salesforce content and update records in Salesforce but outside of Salesforce. It was a VERY brief tutorial. I would have liked a session though it was a bood breif introduction.
My third session was about developing web applications using jQuery. This is another one of those sessions that would have been more effective if it was hands on instead of an instructor walkthrough. It was good to see some of the possibilities of combining jQuery with our VisualForce pages though many in the room will most likely forget most of what was presented since there was no hands on. With that being said the walk though was actually a very good case and it was good to see the approach that they took to solve the casel.
I skipped my fourth session since I have already had two other Visual Process Manager sessions and I think that I am good with what it can do for us. Instead I went to the campground area and talked to some of the vendors that were there and got a few free things.
The day up to this point was really good but the highlight for me was going to the Gala. Metallica was the performer this year and they did an incredible job. They energy that they brought to the place was amazing. Last year was cool, Stevie Wonder is a classic and class act though to me this was absolutely incredible.
All in all it was a great day.
Showing posts with label DreamForce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DreamForce. Show all posts
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
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.
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.
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