Another Dreamforce has come and gone, at least this time there were some in-person attendees lucky enough to meet some real people in the flesh. For those of us that were remote attendees, the Dreamforce+ experience was far better than previous online events and will certainly continue to improve as more events are held this way.
While by far the biggest star of the show was Slack, there were many other highlights and announcements to look forward to.
Salesforce mascots Ruth and Einstein take the stage with the Foo Fighters
IDC Study says Salesforce $1.6 trillion Ecosystem by 2026
In it’s fifth major study for Salesforce, IDC highlights the following:
IDC forecasts that the use of cloud services of Salesforce and its ecosystem will create new revenues for customers that will add up to $1.56 trillion worldwide by 2026. This revenue will lead to the creation of 9.3 million new jobs, including 3.8 million direct jobs and 5.5 million indirect/induced jobs.
Slack is your Digital HQ
Not only were there plenty of announcements about new features for the Slack product itself, there were lots of announcements about Slack integration across many Salesforce products. Slack is being touted as “Your Digital HQ” with an ever-expanding list of new features and Salesforce integrations with the platform.
New Slack Features
Slack Clips allows users to create video and audio content in slack channels. The playback experience with recorded clips gives users the ability to speed up or slow down the content, read through the transcript, access archived recordings with searchable transcriptions, or watch on the go from a phone. Note: This is for recorded content – not live content.
Zoom Integration makes it easy to instantly start or join a meeting or call directly from Slack or Salesforce. Salesforce’s app with Einstein Conversation Insights surfaces personalized, coachable moments based on Zoom meeting recordings. In the future, customers will be able to use Slack as a Zoom App directly within Zoom meetings and share information about the meeting in Slack channels after the meeting has finished.
Slack Connect enables teams to work quickly and collaboratively with outside organizations. New functionality makes it even easier to use Slack Connect with partners who aren’t existing Slack users, giving customers the ability to sponsor channels with external partners.
GovSlack is a version of Slack that runs in a government-certified cloud environment and provides the same boost to agency productivity, while enabling secure cross-collaboration
Slack Integration
Slack-First Sales collaborate in real-time to close more deals. Sales reps now have the ability to access, update, and share records directly with the Salesforce and Slack integration, and new alert capabilities help teams stay up-to-date and aligned on important account updates.
Slack–First Service allows service teams to automatically identify and bring the right experts into a case. New swarming and expert finder capabilities allow cross-functional teams to collaborate on priority incidents to resolve customer cases more efficiently and effectively.
Slack-First Marketing enables marketing teams and agency partners to collaborate in a shared digital workspace. Marketers can now accelerate journey planning with Einstein Recommendations in Slack, and Pardot automation empowers all departments to collaborate on a single, shared view of the customer.
Slack-First Commerce helps teams gain a deeper understanding of their business, adapt to changing trends, and connect with their customers and colleagues. New alert capabilities enable teams to stay ahead of business trends and resolve order issues fast.
Slack-First Digital Experiences helps companies deliver personalized digital experiences fast. New CMS integrations alert internal and external teams when new content is published to streamline communication and quickly engage more customers.
Slack-First Platform empowers admins and developers to easily build apps with low-code tools that integrate data from any business system. New capabilities allow teams to create end-to-end workflows that surface actions and approvals across employees, partners, and customers directly in Slack.
The new Trailhead for Slack app allows employees to work and learn in a single environment in Slack, and AI-powered recommendations help employees reach their development goals, and organizations build workforce expertise for the future.
Slack-First Trailhead powers personalized learning directly in Slack. With the new Trailhead for Slack app, employees can work and learn in a single environment in Slack.
Slack-First Analytics gives teams the insights they need right where they work to make smarter, faster decisions. New Einstein capabilities enable teams to make AI-powered predictions, and notifications help teams stay up-to-date on relevant data and trends.
Slack-First Integration with MuleSoft integrates multiple business apps directly into Slack, eliminating the need for context-switching between different software and systems. New capabilities allow users to connect apps and data to Slack with clicks, not code, and include automated alerts in their workflows.
Slack-First Quip allows sales teams to work together in one digital workspace around a single view of the customer. Now sales teams can embed Quip documents directly into Slack, enabling easier collaboration and faster deal execution.
Salesforce Backup & Restore
Salesforce has a number of backup solutions but after announcing the retirement of their data recovery solution, Salesforce felt that the demand for a native, on-platform solution, was very much there.
Backup & Restore is currently being piloted by a select few customers, but is due to be generally available in October 2021.
Built with ease of use in mind, Backup and Restore automatically creates backup copies of business data, empowering any organization to restore data and recover, in just a few clicks, from even worst-case scenarios.
Workflow Rules and Process Builder retirement
Salesforce has been hinting for about the last 12 months that the end is near for both Process Builder and Workflows. There have been announcements at DreamTX, the Admins Release Readiness webinar for Winter ’22 and more recently at Dreamforce ’21.
Flow Builder is now the preferred choice for low-code automation on the Salesforce platform.
Commencing with the Winter ’23 release (Sept/Oct 2022), the ability to create new Process Builders or Workflows will be blocked. You will still be able to edit existing processes and workflows, just not create new ones.
Note: This date is forward-looking and subject to change, depending on community input and the ability to deliver the required tools and support services.
This is just a selection of just some of the announcements made at Dreamforce 2021. The Salesforce consulting experts at KeyNode Solutions are busy finding more treasures in the release notes document. Need to find out more or configure some of these features? Drop us a line at hello@keynodesolutions.com or call us at 1-858-215-5371.