Salesforce Denver User Group Q1 2014 - Live Blog

12:00pm MT - The Denver User Group is back at the Conga Ranch today. We’re honored to host, but we’re quickly running out of space.  If anyone in the downtown Denver area has space for our 190 and growing members to meet, please let Brent and Peter know. 

12:05pm MT - Forthcoming Mentoring and Mentorship Opportunities - New to Salesforce or trying to get into the space? Brent has posted in the success community to get this going. For potential mentors, Brent stresses that it’s a great way to go back to the basics and maybe catch stuff you glossed over when you were first starting out. 

12:15pm MT -The results of the Salary Survey are in! Peter goes over some highlights:

• Denver user group members are huge Chrome users.

• The response was weighted heavily towards system administrators and an average of 1-3 years of experience with Salesforce.

• The predominant response of those surveyed were in the IT function, but sales operations was a close second, signaling the broad adoption of Salesforce within the organization. Peter expects the Marketing function to grow as Marketing Cloud adoption grows.

• 43 of respondents held at least one Salesforce certification

• Average salary correlates to the number of certifications you hold. There was a $20K jump between no certifications and one certification

12:30pm MT - Local Denver company, ReadyTalk sponsored the meeting (thanks for lunch) and two Account Executives are joining us to talk about their web conferencing tools and specifically, ReadyTalk for Salesforce. 

• Key Use Cases: Sales training, small meetings, customer trainings, webinars
• Key Differentiators:
  • Download free
  • 24X7 support with direct dial to a person
  • Industry leading recording tool with built in editing in the application
  • Integrated to several marketing automation tools, Outlook, Gmail and Salesforce
  • Ability to share desktop or PPT, prerecorded videos, polls

Comic Relief: Who's been on a call like this?

12:47 - Live demo time - ReadyTalk for Salesforce

• Meeting history right in Salesforce with attendance status
• Within an individual meeting, all of the responses to polling questions and post meeting survey questions are captured in Salesforce
• ReadyTalk can automatically create new leads/update existing contacts
• Send meeting invites from within Salesforce
• Chatter integration shows sales reps what webinars their prospects are registering for/attending
• NOTE: Most marketing users are also using a marketing automation tool and syncing campaigns (webinars) with Salesforce via the automation program

1:13pm MT - Spring '14 Release - Greg Francis, Sales Engineer at Salesforce is going to go over the top 10 of the over 150 new capabilities in Spring '14. #safeharbor

But first two enhancements to Salesforce1

• Today - Pulls in calendar from phone and Salesforce instance and you can now let people know you're running late
• Embedded Analytics - Add charts in Salesforce1 to and Visual Force page

1:20pm MT - And now, the Top 10

1. Enhancements to Topics - Within Chatter posts will suggest topics to categorize your post.  New enhancements make it more global and searchable. Can now tag objects. (Topics are replacing concept of public/private tags.) Knowledgable People widget

2. Salesforce Files Sync (pilot) - Synced files will appear everywhere across all devices and can be shared and collaborated on

3. Salesforce Orders - New objects (Orders & Orders Products) coming, similar to the Quote object. Entered for closed deals using product details from Oppourtunity/Quote.  Concept of a reduction order to process returns de-provision services, reduce services, etc. 

4. Enhancements to Salesforce for Outlook - Create from a new case from an email in the side panel, relies on publisher actions on the case object. Great for customers who are not using email to case capabilities

5. Salesforce A - New tool for admin, freeze/lock out users, reset passwords, assign permission sets, direct access to release notes

6. Multi Monitor Components for Sales & Service - Pop out the workspace in the console into their own windows for easy viewing. Footer components like Notes can be popped out. 

7. Enhancements to Salesforce Knowledge - Knowledge One is now available as a widget you can plug into the Salesforce Console for Service as a responsive component that will automatically resize for given size. Can link in other knowledge resources, i.e. Sharepoint articles and accommodates federated search. Can also attach topics to articles and can automatically suggest articles based on similar cases. 

8. Analytics Enhancements - Now flexible sorting of groups in a report  without having to create a tabular dashboard component. You can now freeze row and column headers! Also you can now export a report without the footer. Hide unused report types. Dashboard enhancement - units can be displayed in decimals and percentages.

9. Community Moderation - Community memebers can now flag posts, comments, files and you can set up triggers to automatically flag content. Private messaging and badging, Salesforce1 access and Knowledgeable People coming to Communities. 

10. Salesforce Console - Making it easier to work in a feed-based concept, i.e. see all updates to a particular account in the feed. Create related records or tasks from publisher actions. Multi Components allows several components live side-by-side in the sidebar (accordian, tab or stacked styles)

1:48pm - Bonus Enhancements

• Storage Increases - Increases per user license for most editions.
• Enhancements to Sandbox - Partial Data sandbox (5 day cycle) pulls in a random 10K records so you can go through development cycles faster
• Announcements to Chatter Groups - Highlight persistent, important messages

1:52pm MT - Q&A with Greg

What are best practice for companies who have leveraged the tags? Tags are not going away. Unsure if a migration tool exists for this.

Is there an ability to lock files so two users can't work on file at same time? Not right now. 

What will Order object look like? Same as other standard objects, with related product data at bottom. Peter chimes in that for subscription style business, he sees Orders as a way to replace doing renewals in Opportunities. 

Does the Order then update the Contract? It's a child object so you could write triggers to update, and there are APIs to help make this connection. 

1:58 - And that's a wrap!