Recap of Dreamforce ’21 for Salesforce Admins

Last week, Dreamforce 2021 returned as a 3-day hybrid event with both in-person and online experiences for Salesforce Admins, Developers, Architects, and Trailblazers.

To say we dropped a plethora of knowledge at this year’s event would be, in my opinion, an understatement. So, I’m here to help break down the big news and key highlights — and give you some fun details about all things Dreamforce for Salesforce Admins!

And don’t worry if you missed our Admin Main Show and two episodes (and want more than just a recap). It’s all available for you to view anytime, anywhere on Salesforce+. It’s free, and all you need is a Trailblazer ID to sign up. Find links to the segments below!

Skills, skills, skills!

For Salesforce Admins, Dreamforce online kicked off with the Admin Main Show, The Future of Admin Success, led by Rebecca Saar. Rebecca began the 45-minute show by featuring skills that the Admin Relations team has gathered as the most important for admins to have, from the perspective of other admins, employers, and job seekers. What a great way to kick off the Main Show in this work-from-anywhere world!

The show itself was divided into three separate chapters, each with a specific goal. Our first goal was to help our audience both at home and in the crowd to define admin success. To do so, Marketing Manager Ella Marks presented an amazing, new video featuring admins around the world defining what it means to be an #AwesomeAdmin. We then jumped into a demo that showcased how Salesforce Admin job seekers can build an app for tracking their employment efforts while highlighting their skills. We rounded out the definition of admin success by chatting with Admin Trailblazer Gordon Lee on best practices to grow your technical skills and your people skills — both of which are important.

From there, we dove into our second goal: amplify admin success. To help us do that, Sam Reynard, Product Manager on the Flow team, chatted with us about the future of Flow.

Sam shared how admins around the world are amplifying their success in a few different ways:

• With change management, by transforming the way their organizations communicate with Slack
• With process automation, by automating complex business processes with Flow
• With project management, by building sophisticated business processes with Flow Orchestrator

We also heard from Awesome Admin Mary Tagler and Admin Evangelist Jennifer Lee in a special Main Show version of “How I Solved This,” a regular YouTube series hosted by Jennifer that highlights solutions admins create. Mary showed us how to connect Flow and Slack in just a few easy steps. Get excited, the full version of the “How I Solved This” video is coming later this month! ?

Next up, David Louie (Senior Director, Product Management, MuleSoft) discussed our third and final goal: empower admin success. David focused on showcasing how we can empower admin success by creating innovative solutions such as:

• Using MuleSoft Composer to automate integration across all your teams
• Creating intuitive page layouts that display the right information at the right time with Dynamic Forms
• Showcasing your business analysis skills with Optimizer to get instant recommendations to improve your Salesforce org

In our final demo, Admin Evangelist LeeAnne Rimel invited Senior Product Manager Brinkal Janani to give us a sneak peek of the future of App Builder. ICYMI, admins will now be able to create permission sets to grant access to certain parts of the application. We’re excited, to say the least!

We ended the show with arguably one of our favorite Dreamforce 2021 moments: awarding a Golden Hoodie. If you’re new here, during Salesforce events, we invite inspiring Trailblazers to share how they’re pushing boundaries and doing amazing things in their careers, companies, and communities. We then give them a special Golden Hoodie as thanks for sharing their stories and as a way to help spotlight their achievements and inspire others to follow in their footsteps.

At the Admin Main Show, we had the honor of awarding Tony Nguyen, Salesforce Admin at Calabrio, the Trailblazer Golden Hoodie. So well-deserved! ?

If you missed the Main Show, or want to relive it all over again, you can watch it on Salesforce+ here.

Be a boss builder

During Design and Build Apps Fast for #AwesomeAdmins, Lead Admin Evangelist J. Steadman, Product Marketing Manager Claudia Robinson, and Senior Director of Product Management Vin Addala introduced us to admin Addison Maisley and demonstrated how apps can be constructed quickly, without code!

This episode featured a smorgasbord of App Builder features. Addison was able to extend a page via free AppExchange components, embed screen flows directly in her app, customize record pages to fit her needs with Dynamic Forms, and flexibly display components to users with Dynamic Visibility. But the real icing on the cake was DYNAMIC INTERACTIONS. Finally, admins can connect components on a page and watch them interact in real time! The best part is no code is required. Dynamic Interactions are generally available in Winter ’22.

Admins should tune into this episode to see an app that combines the most powerful features of App Builder. The episode features three in-depth demos that show how you can get started with these features today to design and build apps fast!

Go with the flow

We wrapped up our Dreamforce content with our Automate Apps Fast for #AwesomeAdmins episode which featured our Admin Evangelist, Jennifer Lee, and Diana Jaffe, Director of Product Management, talking about all things automation. This episode focuses on how #AwesomeAdmins like you can automate and scale any business workflow using our low-code Einstein Automate tools. Building upon the Design and Build Apps Fast for #AwesomeAdmins episode, we continue to follow Addison Maisley as she now uses automation to reduce manual data entry, streamline complex multi-user, multi-step processes, sync data across systems, recommend next steps to users and help employees get the answers they need.

This episode was jam-packed with product demos!

Jennifer showcased the power of Flow as your admin automation tool for record-triggered actions and screen flows. She highlighted some key Winter ’22 features, including the sub-flows in record-triggered flows (Flownatics rejoice!) and the ability to customize the labels for your screen footer buttons. Diana reinforced the message to “go with the flow,” encouraging admins to build automation using Flow Builder first. #FlowFirst

Admins should keep their eye on Flow Orchestrator as it goes beta in Winter ’22 as the tool for more complex business processes that require multiple users and steps. MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce is a great tool for any admin needing to integrate systems using clicks, not code — in this case, we showed an integration from Google Sheets with Salesforce and Slack. Einstein Recommendation Builder and Einstein Next Best Action are tools admins should consider to take automation to the next level, using built-in intelligence that helps users make better decisions by learning from existing data and then dynamically adjusting recommendations and actions based on that learning. Diana concluded the product demos with a quick sneak peek showing how Salesforce is combining the power of AI and Einstein Bots with Slack.

The ladies wrapped up the episode with a short Q&A about Flow. You won’t want to miss that!

The learning never stops

Whether you tuned into our segments live, or are just now catching up on them on Salesforce+, we want you to know that the learning doesn’t end here!

We created a special Dreamforce ’21 Admin Main Show Trailmix that covers many of the topics and features mentioned above. Dive in, complete the Trailmix by October 31, and earn a special community badge.

If you enjoyed our three segments, be sure to check out the admin role page on Salesforce+, which includes this year’s True to the Core and other admin-specific content from Dreamforce and TrailheaDX created to empower #AwesomeAdmins like you, worldwide.

Is it too soon to start counting down the days to Dreamforce 2022?! ⏰

Resources

• Dreamforce on Salesforce+