Tag Archives: salesforce

Thank You for World Tour NYC

Oktana had the opportunity to sponsor the Salesforce World Tour event in New York City last week. We wanted to thank everyone that took the time to stop by and visit our booth. It was great to hear about everyone’s Salesforce goals as we discussed ways we could work together to help make those goals happen.

We love the atmosphere at Salesforce events. Everyone is excited about new products and the possibilities for new partnerships. We’re always looking for new ways to get involved, too. Whether you’re looking for help in implementing Salesforce or building tools to take your organization to the next level the team at Oktana is there for you. Be sure to keep an ear open because we’ll be at more events later this year and Dreamforce season is quickly approaching.

We appreciate you joining us for this event and hope to see you soon. If you want to know more about our work, go check out our latest success stories. 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.

App Development with Salesforce Technologies

Working together with our partners to bring ideas to life is one of the driving forces behind everything we do here at Oktana. That’s why when Huge approached us to help them with app development for Stanley Security; we leaped at the chance.

Stanley is a large security company specializing in commercial security systems. They needed a tool for their field sales team to use on the go that showcased their current product offerings. Also, they preferred to manage the process through the app, on either computers or tablets.

Huge has excellent skills in front-end development and was planning to develop the app and the UI/UX elements internally. But they needed a partner to help complete the backend work and sync everything up with Stanley’s Salesforce instance. That’s where the team at Oktana came in. Huge was able to focus on designing a front-end experience that would satisfy Stanley’s sales team. Meanwhile, Oktana could focus on a seamless experience on the back end.

How do the front and the back of this application work, and what did it take to make them play nicely? The front-end app was built utilizing React and Node.JS, managed with a Postgres database that Huge hosted on Heroku. For our backend development, we needed to make sure everything tied into the Postgres database correctly. To do that we utilized Heroku Connect to transfer between the front-end database and Salesforce. Additionally, we mapped all the data so that everything was stored where it needed to be on both ends of the application process. This application’s design was for interfacing with Stanley’s Salesforce organization, and it required a Salesforce login to access the app and all of its features. The login ensured that anyone using that app is a part of the sales team at Stanley. 

Now, beyond the basic connective functionality, we needed to complete all aspects of the sales cycle through this app. This included allowing the sales team to send emails for clients with sales details and other information. To make that happen, we built an email tool using Apex and Visualforce. Stanley also wanted to close sales within the app, so we built in Adobe Sign functionality. Sales contracts could be signed digitally, and Zuora payment systems facilitated immediate payment. The final step was to synch the new data with the Salesforce organization.

The key technologies used in this project include:

  • Salesforce
  • Heroku
  • Postgres
  • React
  • Node.JS
  • Heroku Connect
  • Apex
  • Visualforce
  • Adobe Sign
  • Zuora

This project allowed us to work collaboratively with another development team to build different parts of an app. We’ve been able to successfully demonstrate our skill and ability to understand other’s work and apply it to our goals.

We’re looking forward to working with both Huge and Stanley again in the future. If you have a project that we can help you with, please be sure to let us know!

Learn more from our team here, or check out our custom development services.

Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner

Everyone at Oktana is thrilled to announce that we are officially a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner. We’ve all be working extremely hard to grow as a team to reach this milestone and are extremely proud of how far we’ve come together. We want to thank all of our incredible partners for working with us as we’ve grown as a company. They’ve been essential to this growth and we look forward to continuing to work with them and new partners as we head towards what’s next.

“Becoming a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner is something we have been working very hard at Oktana and we’re excited about this new achievement. Our new distinction will open new opportunities in new sectors and industries. We’re excited to see how this impacts 2019 and beyond.” – Jaime Solari, President of Oktana

Thank you all again and stay tuned to see what everyone at Oktana has in the works.

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.


Gathering Leads with Royal Caribbean

At Oktana, we’re heavily invested in the world of mobile app development. We believe that building new mobile tools that let our customers interact with their Salesforce instance out in the field is essential to the future of the platform. One of the most recent projects that allowed us to utilize our Mobile development skills is our project with Royal Caribbean for their Celebrity Cruises premium brand.

Celebrity Cruises participates in a number of large conferences and expos every year where their sales team is out in the field talking to potential clients and customers. They needed a way to easily gather data from the people they met for giveaways and potential sales leads. Additionally, this needed to be a tool that would allow them to gather the data while offline and then sync with Salesforce when they reconnected later because while moving around at conferences they can’t count on network connectivity.

Oktana was brought in to build an iPad app that would accomplish these goals. The app was built and designed internally by us. We designed an app that was slick and would be impressive looking so that when potential customers saw it on the floor it would look like something you would expect from a premium brand like Celebrity Cruises. We needed to make sure it met all of the client’s needs from beginning to end which included both the technical aspects and the app’s appearance.

What tools did we use to accomplish this task? We built the app using Salesforce DX along with Forcereact and the Salesforce Mobile SDK. The app also talks directly to the Salesforce Sales and Marketing Clouds. When a member of the sales team at Celebrity Cruises is preparing to go out to the floor of a show or conference they simply need to launch the app and select the Salesforce campaign the leads will be entered into. Then when they disconnect from the network the app will store all their leads locally and when they reconnect to the network at the end of the day it will sync them with the proper campaign. Additionally, when leads are entered the team member has the option to edit them for errors or even delete them before they sync to keep their campaign list clean.

This project was a perfect fit for us because it allowed us to utilize our experience in mobile development and Salesforce to make a unique tool for our client. The key elements to highlight for this project include:

  • Salesforce DX
  • React Native
  • Salesforce Mobile SDK
  • Apex
  • Sales Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud
  • iOS
  • UI/UX Design

While we have been working on this project for Celebrity Cruises we have also been helping Royal Caribbean with ensuring their tools meet GDPR requirements in the EU. We created tools to ensure collected data could be anonymized upon request. Royal Caribbean has been a great partner for us at Oktana and we believe this app was a great showcase of our skills in both Salesforce and Mobile development.

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. 

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. 

Building Demos and Prototypes at Oktana

Everyone at Oktana is the best of the best at what they do and the incredible people that make up the Demos and Proof of Concepts team lead by Gonzalo is the perfect example of that. Whether it’s a Salesforce, mobile, or web project the team works hard to make our client’s dreams and ideas and make them a reality. The needs of our clients always come first and as such the team has developed into an extremely agile machine that is capable of producing and iterating on projects quickly while responding to new and changing requests.

The Demos and Proof of Concepts team’s role are to help our clients work through the entire prototyping process. First, we bring on all stakeholders and map out what the client’s goals and vision for the project are. The team is extremely adaptable and capable of discussing tasks at a very high level regardless of how fleshed out the idea is. Once all these ideas are captured the design team here at Oktana gets to work on designing the prototype. The design process here is highly iterative as we want to make sure our work is aligning with all of our client needs.

Once the design has been completed, the assets are then passed on to the engineering team. The engineering team then takes pre-built templates and reworks them into a working prototype for the project at hand. They continue to iterate on the concept with the client to ensure that it meets their needs. Once this process is completed the client will either decide to move forward on the development of the full product or not. If they opt not to move forward all code is then scrapped and the team moves on to its next project.

The Demos and Proof of Concepts team does incredible work for our clients with very little notice. They’ve built demos and prototypes that have been used for presentations in front of thousands of people at major conferences. If you’re ever in need of a demo or prototype then our team is here for you.

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. 

Showcase – Gonzalo

It’s time once again to shine the spotlight on one of the fantastic members of our Oktana family, Gonzalo Parada! Gonzalo is Oktana’s Demos and Proof of Concepts team lead. In his two years at Oktana, he has grown to be a key member of our team.

 

Gonzalo

Gonzalo has been working in Salesforce development since 2011 and joined the Oktana family in 2017. In that time he’s worked on a wide variety of different projects including some product demos you may have seen at some major conferences. These demos are seen by millions of people and we know Gonzalo is immensely proud of the team’s accomplishments and his contributions to them. We love that our work makes it onto these big stages and Gonzalo is a huge part of how we make that happen.

At his core, Gonzalo is a Salesforce developer. He’s an expert in the field and it shows in all his work. A self-styled Hardcore Salesforce Developer, Gonzalo has worked on it all, from apex, visualforce, lightning components, service cloud, sales cloud, and communities, whether it’s for the classic Salesforce experience or Lightning he’s got it covered. Additionally, Gonzalo is one of the only members of our team to have three Salesforce certifications under his belt, Platform App Builder, Platform Developer I, and Platform Developer II.

Dreamforce 2018 (Continuous Integration using Salesforce DX)

Gonzalo is very comfortable getting up in front of a crowd as well. He’s lead training sessions internally at Oktana on topics such as developing for the new Lightning Web Components framework. And just like a number of our fantastic team members Gonzalo has had the opportunity to travel and share his skills with the wider Salesforce developer community. In 2018 he was fortunate enough to be able to lead a presentation at Dreamforce with fellow Oktana Showcase developer Carlos titled “Continuous Integration using Salesforce DX”. Both of them were thrilled by the opportunity and have nothing but great things to say about the experience.

Though you might assume Gonzalo thinks about nothing but Salesforce that’s not actually the case. A lover of technology, Gonzalo is always on top of what’s new and cool in the tech world. He’s also a bit of a gamer and is currently working his way through Resident Evil 2 on his PS4. But the thing he enjoys more than anything is when it’s time to travel with his family and visit new places. Next month they’re actually heading to the western United States for a road trip! They’ll be hitting San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles before heading all the back to SF to wrap things up.

Post-Dreamforce 2018

In closing Gonzalo’s message about his experience here at Oktana is a simple one, “Oktana is a great place to work… But the most important thing is that you are always learning new things and improving your career.” And on some level that’s what we’re always striving for. We want the best people to be here working together not just for the sake of the company or our clients but also for the sake of themselves. We’re always learning and growing and we’re thrilled to have someone like Gonzalo here to grow with us.

 

Salesforce World Tour New York City

Salesforce World Tour New York City was December 13th and it was a fantastic experience for our team. It was a truly inspiring show and we’ll definitely be reflecting back on everything we learned for quite some time.

The keynote this year by Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi was fascinating. She presented a vision of what Salesforce can do to help change the world that left us proud of the small part we’ve played in this process. Undoubtedly, Salesforce has a very strong vision for the future and the positive impact we can all have on the world but the keynote also gave us some great insights about the new tools coming to Salesforce that will make our clients happy too.

Salesforce Customer 360 was one of the star attractions of the keynote and Stephanie offered a number of different examples of what we’ll be able to do with it in the near future. They highlighted a number of different use cases for how Customer 360 allows Salesforce users to gather all essential data about customers in one place to make sure they’re taken care of at all times. What made us the most excited though was the awesome Einstein Voice demo by Sarah Aerni. As we’ve discussed in the past, we’ve had a hand in some work on Einstein Voice and it’s really exciting to see all that work coming together into something really powerful. The demo was a great example of Einstein Voice’s potential for Salesforce users and being able to ask Salesforce for important data and easily update client notes in the field all with your voice could be a real game-changer for a lot of users.

Cloudy’s Spot in the Office

As mentioned earlier Salesforce Customer 360 was one of the star attractions of the show and nowhere was that more evident than on the expo floor. Customer 360 was the centerpiece booth that everything else revolved around. The expo hall had a magnetic energy that made us all the more eager to see what everyone else was working on. Our team had a great time meeting people and even managed to find a new friend to bring home, Cloudy the Goat.

Our Friends at Copado

We were also fortunate enough to make it to a few sessions during the show. It was great to hear our friends and partners at Copado discuss their product and how it can help developers with release management. We’ll be working much more with Copado next year so stay tuned to find out more here on our blog soon. We also got to see an extended session discussing the strengths of Einstein Voice and what it can do for Salesforce users.

Einstein Voice Demo

Our day at Salesforce World Tour New York was fantastic and left the whole team feeling energized and excited about everything we’re working on heading into 2019. In a lot of ways, it was the perfect way to cap off the year. We got to see tons of friends and colleagues one last time before the end of the year, learned about some new products that we can look forward to, and reflected on everything that we accomplished over the past year. We were thrilled to be there and already planning for a number of events next year.

See You Next Year!


At Oktana, our team is growing fast check our current open positions.