I started this blog sitting in the sun in the middle of Howard Street San Francisco, which for the occasion was closed for all traffic and turned into Dreamforce Park, and live band is playing in the background. Now I am back in Norway and preparing for winter. Got it?
Dreamforce this year has been amazing. Actually I am writing this using Salesforce’s newest acquisition, the productivity app Quip (check it out), which makes collaboration in teams easier and more efficient.
What sums up my impressions from Dreamforce 2016 so far
Obviously, Einstein has been the main topic and making everything smart with AI. However, before I get too carried away, I would really like to see the license model for Einstein. Will it be a good solution for smaller companies? Will they be able to defend an Einstein business model and see positive ROI?
But there is a lot of other things to pick up.
I really like that Lightning framework finally seems to make more sense both for developers and admins. App Builder looks very promising with lots of improvements. Building apps and release them to your users is much easier and after Spring 17, it finally looks like it is possible to migrate most orgs to Lightning.
As a newly established ISV partner, or should I say, App Innovation Partner, I am very excited to see how well Appexchange now will work with Salesforce. Finally you can download and install apps directly within the builder inside Salesforce. Additionally, I am really happy to see that Salesforce also introduces a tool set that will make it easier and less time consuming to get you app on AppExchange.
Last point in this update is SalesforceDX, which finally is a real effort from Salesforce to make platform developers happy. Really great to see that Lighting component framework is much better and integrated into the platform with a new lightning taglib, and you don’t need to create apex controllers anymore to access data in your component!! Awesome. I also really like the new CLI and all productivity tools in the CI-space with Heroku pipeline and scratch orgs for testing. Finally it is possible to have a source control driven app development to ensure higher quality on your apps.
This was a short summary of my first impressions. I am really happy with Dreamforce 2016, and hope to be back next year.