Dreamforce 2022: A Guide of What to See & Do

September is almost here, and Dreamforce is just around the corner! The Oktana team will be attending this year, so we’ve been keeping ourselves busy preparing for it with much anticipation.

This year marks the event’s 20th anniversary, and the theme they’ve selected reflects the significance of this momentous achievement: “Go Big and Come Home”.

It will be held at its regular venue, the Moscone Center in San Francisco, from September 20th to the 22nd.

Why Attend Dreamforce 2022

Dreamforce brings together thought leaders and industry pioneers for a week of idea sharing. You’ll learn, you’ll network, and you’ll grow. And most importantly, you’ll have a ton of fun.

Here are four reasons why we love attending Dreamforce so much…

1. Learn: Dreamforce will have over 1,000 sessions and workshops this year, learn about new products and releases, have hands-on experiences, and get inspired. This is the ‘World’s Largest Software Conference’ after all.

2. Connect: It is the perfect place to meet new people, build careers, and completely transform your career by networking.

3. Give Back: Salesforce is all about Philanthropy, Dreamforce couldn’t be different. By attending Dreamforce, you’re giving back too. Over the years, over $100M has been raised and donated during Dreamforce to a variety of charities and communities.

4. Have fun: When Trailblazers get together, it’s a party. And Dreamforce is the biggest one of all. Dreamforce is a celebration of the community. And this year, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are performing live!

Who is going to be there this year?

Tens of thousands of like-minded Trailblazers from around the world.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers!
World celebrities, activists, and athletes
- Bono | Lead singer of U2; Co-Founder of ONE and (RED)
- Jennifer Hudson | Emmy, Two-Time Grammy, Oscar & Tony Award-Winning Artist
- Matthew McConaughey | Academy Award-Winning Actor, NY Times Bestselling Author & Salesforce Brand Partner
- Earvin “Magic” Johnson | NBA Legend and Chairman & CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises
- Simu Liu | Actor & Writer
- Dina Asher-Smith | Two-Time Great Britain Olympian
Salesforce Chair & Co-CEO Marc Benioff and Co-CEO Bret Taylor

Recommended sessions

The Dreamforce agenda has been released, and great content will be available for all kinds of roles, products, industries, and more. So, how do you ensure to get the most out of your experience?

Take a look at these curated lists of Dreamforce sessions we recommend attending based on your role…

See you in San Francisco!

This year we will be attending Dreamforce. We booked a meeting room nearby the Moscone Center (see the map below), so you can meet the Oktana team and chat about Salesforce technologies, languages, and frameworks to enable your company’s innovation.

Interested in setting up an appointment to meet with someone from our team during Dreamforce? If yes, then follow this link to select a time that’s convenient for you.

Here’s the Details…

Where: Mindspace | 575 Market Street @2nd

When: September 20-22 | 10 am – 5pm

Amenities & swag:

Lounge spaces with phone booths
Kitchen with coffee, water, tea, fruit, and sweets
Custom knit socks
Webcam covers
We’re ordering dozens of freshly baked alfajores as a way of sharing our company’s South American culture with those visiting our meeting space

Oktana team attending Dreamforce:

Jaime Solari | CEO
Marcos Solari | Co-Founder
Dennis Picht | CRO
Christine Burnham | VP of Sales
Jon Parker | Strategic Account Executive

Integrate all your teams with Salesforce Customer 360 Platform

What is the Customer 360 Platform?

Salesforce Customer 360 is the core Salesforce Platform that connects your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams with a single view of your customer data, helping you grow relationships with your customers and your employees. It includes a full range of Salesforce products that help your company keep everything connected in one system.

Discover what you can do with the Customer 360 Platform

Salesforce Customer 360 Platform is built to work with countless applications to provide a seamless customer experience that allows you to run your organization smoothly.

One of the ways you can integrate the Customer 360 Platform with other programs is by using Salesforce Appexchange, a marketplace for apps that can be installed easily into your Salesforce org. Integration can also be done with MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, you can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the full power of Customer 360.

Customer 360 has a solution for every phase of your customer’s journey. The more teams you unite, the more you know, and the better you grow.

So, what are the teams you can unite under this scalable CRM platform? Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Slack, and Commerce Cloud just to name a few.

Customer 360 gives everyone in your company the ability to access crucial data and make smarter, faster decisions.

We have helped our customers take full advantage of Customer 360 Platform, integrating it with over 30 different technologies. Here are some of the success stories:

External API developer community

Our customer, a large installer of interior finishes for US homebuilders, needed help to grow their external API developer community to promote integrations with builders, suppliers, and vendor partners.

In order to create a new community to support the growth of API for buyers and prepare the way for future APIs, we used MuleSoft Anypoint API Community Manager. Our team worked closely with the customer to create a developer portal that showcases the API with technical and business documentation, and a mocking service to allow developers to try the API on the site.

Through the Experience Cloud, we were able to customize the community theme to ensure it remains consistent with the overall brand. Using Salesforce CMS cards throughout, we could simplify management of the site’s content and provide a space to showcase APIs in development (i.e. “Coming soon”).

Results

Launched the developer portal and gave access to builders which reduced their onboarding time by 80%

Streamlines Data Management with Salesforce

Our customer, a Professional services company specializing in Salesforce digital transformations, identified an opportunity to create an abstraction layer on Salesforce to simplify and streamline data entry and management for their clients.

Our client partnered with us to build a new application using Visualforce, React, ts-force, and TypeScript to give their clients a better interface to manage events, opportunities, leads, and comments. This new Salesforce application provides a simplified user interface, unifying management for all 4 object types on one page (translated in both English and Japanese).

Results

The key partners and customers will start using the product as soon as the MVP of the product launches.
Companies who use Salesforce to create meeting minutes, action items, input their sales activities and customer details, saved more than 50% of their time.

If you are interested in reading more about our success stories, we recommend you check out Oktana’s Success Stories.

Oktana achieved ‘Expert’ status for the Customer 360 Platform specialization

In 2022 Oktana achieved ‘Expert’ status for the Customer 360 Platform specialization in the Salesforce Partner Navigator program, the highest level for the category.

As a software development company that helps customers innovate, 100% of our Salesforce projects use at least one of the Customer 360 specializations. Most of these projects require implementation of other Salesforce clouds that we have vast expertise, such as Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, and MuleSoft.

The Customer 360 Salesforce Specialization requires demonstrated and validated expertise in eight Salesforce Customer 360 areas. Through our customer projects, established demonstrated knowledge and expertise in AppBuilder, Heroku, Integration Services, JavaScript Designer, Mobile, Platform, Process Automation and Security & Privacy.

Did you know we are also Salesforce Summit Partners? Check out how we achieved Summit (previously known as Platinum).

Oktana Salesforce Summit Partner

Oktana was recently recognized for reaching Salesforce Summit Partner status (previously known as Platinum) and for achieving “Expert” status recognition for Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and Experience Cloud in the Salesforce Partner Navigator program.

The Salesforce Navigator program allows partners to differentiate themselves and showcase their expertise. Navigator combines three aspects of a partner’s implementation and services experience into a measure of expertise that is Salesforce-validated and verified. (You can see our current recognition in the Oktana AppExchange listing.)

The evaluation criteria rates the partner’s product and industry expertise based on these measurements:

Knowledge: Salesforce certifications
Experience: Completed projects
Quality: Customer satisfaction score

Navigator has three possible levels of expertise:

Level I demonstrates knowledge and capacity to produce customer success consistently.
Level II showcases that the partner has the project delivery capacity while maintaining high standards of customer success
Expert is the highest level of experience proven leaders in the area of domain.

About Oktana

We have vast experience working with the Salesforce Platform and related technologies. Since 2014, we have partnered with more than 250 companies of all sizes and industries, and we have achieved more than 450 Salesforce Certifications (and numerous non-Salesforce certifications!).

Our team is distributed across Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, West Virginia and across the US, with developers, testers, designers, project managers, business analysts, and architects. From day one, we provide training and certification opportunities that enable our team to build expertise across the Salesforce ecosystem and a range of languages, frameworks, and platforms.

We have completed more than 700 projects using Salesforce technologies, allowing Salesforce to recognize our expertise through their Navigator program.

Our current Salesforce expertise

Customer 360 Platform – Expert: Customer 360 connects marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams with a single view of your customer data, helping you grow relationships with your customers and your employees.

Experience Cloud – Expert: Salesforce Experience Cloud, formerly known as Community Cloud, helps companies quickly build connected digital experiences for their customers, partners, and employees at scale.

Einstein – Level II: The first comprehensive AI for CRM. An integrated set of AI technologies makes Salesforce Customer 360 smarter and brings AI to companies everywhere.

Service Cloud – Level II: Service Cloud allows your companies to deliver service to every customer, anytime, anywhere. It is a part of Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform, an ecosystem of connected mobile and social tools powered by the cloud.

PDO/Appexchange – Level II: We have in-depth knowledge in building commercial applications for the AppExchange, we can help you design the product and work in isolated key areas of your application. Currently, we have built one app and 12 components on the AppExchange.

Industry Products – Level I: Salesforce industry clouds provide out-of-the-box industry-relevant innovation to speed up implementation and customer success, and create a unified experience that deepens relationships across lines of business.

Nonprofit Cloud – Level I: Nonprofit Cloud is an end-to-end platform designed for fundraising organizations, educational institutions, and other nonprofit entities to expand their reach digitally, deepen their connections, and streamline their internal management by keeping track of the people they work with.

Sales Cloud – Level I: Sales Cloud is a fully customizable product that brings all your customer information together in an integrated platform that incorporates marketing, lead generation, sales, customer service, and business analytics.

What does this mean for you?

We can confidently say that we are Salesforce experts recognized for guiding our customers towards success.

As a Salesforce Summit Partner and certified experts for Customer 360 Platform and Experience Cloud, we provide digital strategies, technical architects, and Salesforce solutions that will help your company innovate and grow.

We can guide you in finding the right solutions for your business. Check out our latest project updates, where we have built customized solutions for our clients:

More about our Salesforce Integration and Custom Development services.

Manage API Users with MuleSoft Anypoint API Community Manager

Oktana is one of the first Salesforce consulting partners to work on MuleSoft Anypoint API Community Manager (“MuleSoft ACM”) integration projects. We are one of the few with experience on MuleSoft ACM. Our team is currently working on six different implementation projects having completed more than five already. These MuleSoft ACM integration projects have been across a wide range of industries. Such as aviation, financial services, healthcare, interior design, and high tech.

Why MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™?

Many organizations turn to the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. Because it provides the tools to develop, deploy, manage and secure the APIs that help them run and extend their businesses.

Digital transformation in any industry brings challenges. How do you regulate and manage access to APIs while providing clear and open information to your developer community on usage? Security is exceptionally important. For example, when you’re creating a new digital ecosystem, you want third-party developers working with your systems to also be able to develop rapidly and effectively.

Organizations that need to scale their network of partners and customers through expanded communities can now leverage MuleSoft ACM. Which essentially provides MuleSoft customers with the ability to manage their API users in a community. The community is based on the Salesforce Experience Cloud (previously known as Community Cloud). This enables them to improve communication and provide more context to their API users. Managing access and security and also providing detailed information on API usage is essential when exposing core information related to customers, accounts, transactions, payments, and credit cards.

The length of each of these projects has varied based on the complexity of the organization’s requirements but generally takes 4-6 weeks. Obviously, it can take more time based on the number of customizations required. Customizations can include custom signup and approval processes, custom objects, special security and permissions configurations, and enabling custom domains.

Aviation

The work done to integrate MuleSoft ACM for our aviation industry partner was complex. It required creating and integrating external objects. That had to then be shown in permanent categories in the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform ecosystem. Our team was able to integrate these external objects using Apex.

Healthcare

Our partner, a healthcare provider, required a unique process for user approvals. They needed to add an additional step for the usage of specific APIs and the method by which API keys are distributed. MuleSoft provides solutions specifically for healthcare. Designed to streamline manual processes, enable cross-collaboration, and unlock healthcare data in a secure, reliable manner.

Financial

For this specific project, our team started with the implementation of MuleSoft ACM. Installation and configuration were followed by significant work managing additional security requirements. To allow efficient management of access to the APIs, we created a new self-service registration service for developer partners. The team use Apex, Aura Components, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to create the registration service. Ensuring developer partners have managed registrations allows our customers to personalize partner pages and create a fully branded experience. MuleSoft ACM is able to leverage the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS). It publishes materials for each API, like documentation and marketing information. Also, MuleSoft allows them to manage access and provides developers the ability to test APIs without code.

Certainly, companies looking to improve how they manage their APIs will find MuleSoft has solutions specifically targeted to eight different industries. Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, Manufacturing, Media & Telecom, and Retail. But, companies from other industries, like our Aviation partner, can also successfully leverage the platform to accelerate development. If you have an API strategy firmly established on the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. It will be easier to enable developers (internally and externally) to use your APIs responsibly.

Resourcing with Oktana

When you outsource development, nearshore or onshore, you probably wonder about resources and whether they’re going to work well with your internal team. At Oktana, we consider our team to be your development team. We take pride in working to get the right help for each project, whether it’s a designer, developer or a whole team. Many of our clients even choose to continue with the same team on multiple projects.

Let’s take a look at how resourcing works at Oktana.

Step 1. Gather data

First, we need a clear picture of your company and project. Your account manager will work with you to understand skill requirements, project scope and anything else you feel is essential. For example:

Will we work alongside your internal team?
Will we need to integrate with existing systems?
Are there preferred development platforms, frameworks or languages?
Is business analysis, design or test automation part of the scope?

We work with you to define “done” for the project. We are an Agile company, so this often means defining a minimum viable product, or MVP. These conversations help us determine a reasonable start and end date for the project.

Step 2. Select resources

Now that we have an idea of your needs, our resourcing team will build your development team. We want to ensure your team brings the skills to meet all of the technical requirements for your project. We also want to ensure they’re a good fit in terms of personality and experience.

Everyone should feel confident in their ability to work together.

Step 3. Review resources

As our resourcing team builds your development team, you have a few options depending on how involved you want to be in the process. You can let us handle the entire process, or you can be far more hands-on.

If you want to be more hands-on, we’ll work with you to review a set of developer profiles. You can also conduct developer interviews to meet each team member before you sign-off on your development team.

What’s a developer profile?

Our resourcing team compiles a developer profile for each of our developers, which provides you with a good overview of their skillset, certifications and experience.

Step 4. Meet your development team

Our teams receive English tutoring and overlap with most of the US workday. Because of this, you are always able to chat or run planning sessions, review specs and do demos face-to-face by video. This is your development team.

As your project grows, or requirements shift, your account manager will work with you and our resourcing team to adjust the team to meet those needs.

We hope all of this information helps you understand the resourcing process better and by extension how our teams work. Our team has worked with different organizations and their projects. We are Salesforce platform experts and offer custom development to help you build your platform and solve the right problems. If you want to know more about our work, go check out our latest success stories.

Connecting Salesforce and Slack

We’re always looking for new challenges here at Oktana. One recent challenge that presented itself to us came from our partners, a leading investment firm. This investment firm out of California works with growth-stage companies in a wide variety of industries. They approached Oktana to help them find a solution to an efficiency problem within their organization. The primary tool that they used within the organization for work was Slack, and several different apps designed to interface with it. Their employees had to switch between Salesforce and Slack to manage updates and new tasks that would populate through Salesforce.

That’s where Oktana came in; the firm wanted a way to integrate Salesforce into their Slack experience to help save everyone at their company time and energy while they’re working. What could we do to bring these two platforms together? We started by exploring what tools might already exist within Slack that would make this integration quick and easy and found Incoming Webhooks. With Incoming Webhooks, we were about to take any new notifications from the Salesforce org about new task assignments and send them to users within the Slack instance.

This implementation was a success, and users were receiving notifications, but it was apparent that it wasn’t going to be the right solution for the long term. There were severe limitations to what we could do with Incoming Webhooks. While it could bring in notifications from Salesforce, it wasn’t able to limit those notifications to those directly involved with the task and instead sent them indiscriminately to the entire team. Additionally, there was no way to talk back to Salesforce after you received a notification in Slack, Incoming Webhooks is a one-way street. As such, we decided that we would need to take a different approach to solve this problem.

Thankfully, our partners at the firm were receptive to these concerns and were open to our recommendation for another option that might better suit their long-term needs. Since Incoming Webhooks did not fit our needs, there was only one course of action to take at this point. We needed to build a bespoke app to do the job. We created a small application in Node.js hosted on Heroku that would handle everything the investment firm required and more.

First, the app would replicate the functionality of the old implementation and take any task notifications from Salesforce and send them to Slack. Next, the app acts as a chatbot on Slack that can receive messages from Slack and send them back to Salesforce to update and create new tasks. Additionally, we built this app to be as lightweight and efficient as possible. At its core, the app is always listening to both sides, and when it detects something relevant, it translates the message and sends it from one application to the other. Oktana development process is about creating the most value possible for our clients. The lightweight nature of the app means it has space to grow and take on other functions so that the link between Salesforce and Slack can be expanded later on if needed. The app also can interface with applications beyond Salesforce if the need were ever to present itself.

The Critical technologies from this project:

Salesforce
Slack
Node.js
Heroku
Apex
Incoming Webhooks

This project was about seeing disfunction in how employees at the investment firm were working and finding a way to make it more streamlined. We saw that our client needed a solution for fixing their workflow, and we were able to accurately identify the problems as well as the best way to solve them. Now, they don’t have to move between Salesforce and Slack every time they want to update tasks, and we were able to face a new challenge head-on and solve it creatively.

Okta and Oktana: Working Together

At Oktana, we’re proud of the work we’ve done and the companies we’ve had the opportunity to work with. Our goal with this blog is to share some of the work we’ve been doing and in turn highlight the things that make us good partners for those that may need help in the Salesforce space. One of our most recent partners -Okta- is one we’d like to highlight. Okta fast-growing technology company with a strong emphasis on enterprise security. Its focus is on the development of single sign-on systems for enterprise clients that allow users to log in to a number of services, including Gmail, Salesforce, and Slack all with one username and password. The success Okta has been experiencing has led to our partners so that we can assist them in their growth and capture key processes needed for such growth to be as smooth as possible.

Okta needed a partner to supplement its internal development team to achieve greater bandwidth, higher quality, and faster development cycles. In the process, we’ve become a part of Okta’s team and integrated ourselves into their workflow acting almost as an extension of the existing engineering team. Working together on projects with a goal of acting like one team even in an environment where everyone is collocated is something we’ve been doing for a long time. We can do it and we can do it really well. One of the key factors in the decision-making process that gravitated Okta to Oktana was the appreciation for transparency, honesty, and integrity when critically examining the work to be done and recognizing as a team the challenges we may face along the way as well as their solutions.

With that goal in mind, we have been working closely on a number of different projects. The biggest being an important refactoring exercise of their entire codebase. As mentioned earlier, growth is occurring so fast that they need to improve logic and code across the board is imperative to their ability scale. Oktana has become the face of this effort by spearheading improvements and encouraging the adoption of best practice principles that will lower maintenance costs and leverage Salesforce release improvements better.

This type of customer engagement is one that fits perfectly into our wheelhouse. The key elements of this project that we want to highlight are:

Apex/Visualforce
Salesforce Lightning and Lightning Components
Salesforce CPQ
Agile
Velocity
Quality
Transparency
Integrity
Honesty

Beyond our specific project described in this blog post, we’re also supporting Okta by helping improve its internal development processes. With the refactoring exercise, we’ve been slowly and subtly making the development process smoother and more streamlined for their team and helping them improve their scrum process as well. We are honored to get the chance to help an amazing organization such as Okta and hope we continue helping others in this same capacity.

If you are a Salesforce partner looking to partner with experts to help you provide the best custom app development solutions to your clients Contact us. Our team will give you more information about these services.

Category Archives: Partners