Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Dreamforce 2011 - Were You There?

VRP has been doing salesforce Apex development, integration and support for large App xChange providers for the past four years. VRP also implements multiple data migrations for large App xChange providers and have it down to a science. One of our primary business goals is attending dreamforce and taking advantage of the opportunities to build strong working relationships.

If your company is involved in systems integration, data migration or salesforce Apex development, then attending dreamforce next year will be critical to the success and growth of your organization.

This year dreamforce attracted well over 40,000 users, IT professionals, trainers and executives who took advantage of 425+ expert-led sessions with everything needed to maximize your investment in the cloud: best practices, how-to's, expert panels, case studies by industry, and more.

If your organization includes a Certified Administrator, dreamforce provided plenty of training sessions to develop those toolsets. Ever wonder what it takes to be a top salesforce admin? 7 Habits of Highly Successful Admins would have been the perfect session for your company. Or how about taking the power of LinkedIn one step further as a sales tool for your company? LinkedIn for Salesforce: Close Deals Faster with Insights for Your Pipeline would have been the session to learn how to integrate both of these sales tools.

Chatter was the huge technical announcement of the week. Chatter is a real-time collaboration platform for users. The service sends information proactively via a real-time news stream. Users can follow coworkers and data to receive broadcast updates about project and customer status. Users can also form groups and post messages on each other's profiles to collaborate on projects. Now Chatter lets you collaborate across departments, geographies, and hierarchies. Salesforce Chatter stands alone as an awesome enterprise-wide social collaboration tool.

VRP attended as many training sessions as we could fit into our schedules. We found what made these training sessions so powerful was that they were presented by industry leaders who had used the technology, software and apps on a regular basis. Their goal as presenters was to provide information and real life examples of how company’s can grow and prosper using these tools.

Finally, VRP learned that dreamforce is more than training sessions and networking. Keynote Sessions included Neil Young talking about integrating salesforce and his interest in digitized music. Also, Marc Benioff of salesforce and Eric Schmidt from Google shared a frank discussion about the future of technology in our lives. Both of these Keynote Sessions were fascinating opportunities to take a break from running around and listen to insightful and entertaining discussions about the future of technology.

And if all of this were not enough, the band Metallica played to a standing room only crowd on the final night.

Consider making an investment in the growth and success of your company. Plan to attend Dreamforce 2012.