TrailblazerDX 2022 is back in person at the San Francisco Moscone Center! Salesforce is hosting the yearly convention, which is geared toward developers, admins, architects, partners, or anyone interested in increasing their Salesforce technical skills and learning about new features in the Salesforce ecosystem. The event takes place on Wednesday and Thursday of this week (April 27th and 28th,2022) and can be viewed online.
During the Wednesday keynote, the Salesforce team reiterated its commitment to sustainability (the company plans to grow 100 million trees by 2030) and building an equitable and diverse workforce across the ecosystem. A new study found that the Salesforce economy will create 9.3 million jobs and $1.6 trillion in new business revenue by 2026. The Salesforce product management team also announced key product features that will empower technical teams to continue building complex applications (with an emphasis on clicks and not code).
Some of these tools were only available as a pilot and are now moving toward GA (general availability) or beta versions:
- Flow Orchestrator (Generally Available): Orchestrator allows admins to create multi-step & multi-user processes via configuration. With this tool, admins can combine various flows into multiple stages across different users. Over the past few years, Salesforce has increased the sophistication of its automation suite, such as flows, so that admins can meet complex business requirements without having to write Apex code (Salesforce’s proprietary programming language)
- Flow in Slack (Beta, Summer 2022): Salesforce completed its acquisition of Slack (a workplace communication tool) in 2021. This summer, Salesforce will allow admins to integrate flows with Slack actions. For example, if certain records are created in Salesforce, a flow can automatically post a message in Slack or create a Slack channel.
- Salesforce Platform for Slack – Apex SDK (Pilot, Summer 2022): Developers will have the ability to build native Apex-based applications for Slack using the Block Kit UI framework. By taking this approach, developers can seamlessly integrate Salesforce with Slack without the need for middleware.
- Code Builder (Beta, Summer 2022): Code Builder is a full browser-based version of Visual Studio Code, which allows developers to build and manage code directly on a browser (without the need to install any software on a computer/laptop).
Salesforce has democratized the ability to learn the platform by launching Trailhead back in 2014. Trailhead is a series of online interactive tutorials that use gamification to teach Salesforce concepts and is available for free to anyone who signs up. Trailhead users can earn different “ranks,” which are granted by earning badges through the completion of modules (the most coveted rank is Ranger). Users can continue to climb in rank by completing additional badges (Salesforce has over 1000 badges available in Trailhead). During TrailheadDX 2022, Salesforce announced that Trailhead will support new Ranger ranks, which will allow users to further showcase their Salesforce subject-matter expertise.
