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At the Salesforce TrailheaDX event

I was excited to have the privilege to attend the 1st Salesforce TrailheaDX Developers Conference held this June in downtown San Francisco. For those of you who’ve attended previous DreamForce events, the TrailheaDX Conference was similar. It featured product leaders giving demos, small workshops on various Salesforce-related topics, as well as hands-on events for more learning. It also gave attendees the chance to meet other Salesforce pros and newbies to exchange tips, ideas and talk about (what else?) Salesforce.

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, gave a welcoming speech, telling attendees how excited he was for everyone present. Also, Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder of Apple, talked about the latest advancing technologies and did a Q&A with the audience. Plus, I got to see Lenny Kravitz in concert (yea!).

What is Salesforce TrailheaDX?

In case you’re wondering, Salesforce Trailhead is a guided learning path utilizing modules, projects and gamification (earning badges and points to learn and show off.)

Trailhead is used to:

  1. Help those new to Salesforce cover the most ground in the shortest amount of time or;
  2. For current Salesforce Users to gain more experience through free, hands-on, online training.

For Trailhead, there are trails for users of every level: for Salesforce Admins, those just starting out with the platform, for existing users who want to gain more knowledge on managing their users, data security and process automation – a point and click tool for Admins who do not know much about coding.

Also, there are Trails for Developers. They’re the ones who do a lot of the work behind the scenes – using codes and formulas, creating advanced processes and workflows, and making life easier in general for Admins to perform tasks in the Salesforce platform.

They also had computers set up for attendees to get on Trailhead and earn a few badges, all for a good cause. For each badge earned during the conference, the company donated $5 to MissionBit, a group helping youths eliminate the tech divide here in the Bay Area.

More Conference Details

Now, back to the conference. The Salesforce TrailheaDX Developers Conference had Salesforce engineers and product leaders promoting new and exciting features Salesforce has to offer and introducing the new “Summer 16” release of Salesforce Lightning Experience.

The Lightning Experience is built on the Salesforce App Cloud, which combines the new Lightning Design System, Lightning App Builder and Lightning Components to enable anyone to quickly and easily create modern enterprise apps. For Admins, this means that it’s a drag and drop component, making platform design much easier — and for Developers, writing codes and saving them in the system to reuse.

During the demos, I got to ask questions on some of the issues I am currently having problems with. Reps from the company answered to the best of their ability without going in-depth and not giving away secrets they don’t

SCSF Program Asst. George at TrailheaDX

SCSF Program Asst. George at TrailheaDX

want to reveal until the release of Summer 16.

One of the workshops I attended talked about the Process Lightning Builder. It’s a workflow tool that helps automate business processes without coding. This is very useful for Salesforce Admins who have little to no experience in writing codes. The set-up of the Process Builder is all point and click. You just need to know the fields and objects of the company’s Salesforce Org (set-up). Another workshop I attended talked about becoming an entrepreneur. A couple of presenters talked about how they got started with their own businesses and their own success using Salesforce. There were a few more workshops that I wanted to attend, but couldn’t because it was that crowded.

Steve Wozniak was asked what his thoughts are about the new technologies coming out, his thoughts on artificial intelligence, space exploration, and what the future would look like in the next 20 years or so. He had some interesting views and concepts of what technology is now and what they would look like by the year 2030. He also talked about the pranks he pulled off in his college years.

I’m an Intermediate/Advanced Salesforce Admin Trailhead user. I’m working towards becoming a Certified Salesforce Administrator, and by using Trailhead, I feel like I’m ready to take that next step. For anyone who is

interested in Salesforce, either as an Admin or a Developer, or just want to gain more useful experience with Salesforce, here’s the link to sign up and get started: https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/

Thanks to Salesforce, and to the Success Center for giving me the opportunity to attend the TrailheaDX Developers Conference; it was a fun learning experience. I recommend anyone who uses Salesforce to check out the Salesforce Trailhead modules and projects online to gain more experience. I’m very interested in attending the DreamForce in October, and if they have another Trailhead Developers Conference next year, I would definitely go again.