June 25, 2020, marked a new first for Salesforce: the first fully virtual TrailheadDX. For the last four years, TrailheaDX has been Salesforce’s annual developer conference — an in-person San Francisco gathering of developers, admins and architects looking to grow their Salesforce skillset and innovate with the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform.
But, as with most things in 2020, this year’s event took a different shape. Sarah Franklin, EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange, shared before the event, “The most exciting opportunity [of TrailheaDX being virtual] is the removal of barriers to entry for our community. TrailheaDX is for the first time open to everyone, across the world, for free … People can tap into all of this expertise from anywhere, and that’s a key thing for me: bringing the whole community together globally.”
If you missed TrailheaDX 2020, here’s a selection of memorable moments in quotes.
- “We’re here today to use this platform and our products, together, to create pathways that create economic opportunity for all by building a platform that is accessible by all — by removing every barrier from cost, proximity, to approachability and more, to learn our platform. And by empowering everyone to be what they can see, by seeing Trailblazers celebrated from all walks of life and getting power to the voices that need to be heard most. I believe that together we can impact this change, provide economic opportunity for all.” – Sarah Franklin, Salesforce EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange
- “The Salesforce Platform is like this magical set of building blocks — and building blocks are great because you can take the pieces and the parts and put them together and build whatever you imagine, like Legos … and these platform building blocks to all the things that customers need in their apps such as automation flow and bots, user experience, mobile containers, and AI security. And they all work together and are configurable, reusable, and accessible right out of the box. And they empower everyone to unleash your imagination, build incredible things fast.” – Sarah Franklin, Salesforce EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange
- “One of our stated goals at IGI is to serve the community and serve folks that don’t have access to services or healthcare otherwise. That’s absolutely been our priority with our clinical testing lab. We’ve been working with a number of healthcare partners including up and down the bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. Primarily, these are folks that are either unsheltered or uninsured or our first responders that are out in the community, working every day and therefore, potentially getting exposed to coronavirus … One thing I think about a lot is ‘how will this change us, not only as people, as individuals, but as a society. How will it change science? How will it change business going forward?’ I think it’s a great moment for us to all take stock of what our values are, and how we want to be spending our time.” – Dr. Jennifer Doudna, Executive Director of the Innovative Genomic Institute at UC Berkeley Learn more about how IGI transformed into a COVID testing lab in three weeks.
- “It’s never been more important to connect your customers in a whole new way, at every customer touchpoint, across the entire Customer 360. I’m excited to welcome you to this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world; Introducing Salesforce Anywhere. Salesforce Anywhere empowers everyone to sell, service, and market from anywhere, new today with Service Cloud voice. Telephony built right in, with our AWS partnership. For Einstein Call Coaching, it’s never been easier to do that, with Vlocity joining the Salesforce family of apps, for every industry from anywhere … Collaborate from anywhere, new today with consumer-like chat, video, workspaces and our strategic partnerships with Zoom and Amazon.” – Sarah Franklin, Salesforce EVP & GM of Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange
- “It’s important for leaders — from HR to operations — to have the tools and the data they need to manage their workforce and ensure their wellbeing. Now in the Work.com Command Center, we can keep tabs on employee wellness and understand if our colleagues will be working from the office, from a store, factory, school, or anywhere. Shift management tools help provide the data required to manage this safely.” – Wade Wegner, SVP Product for Salesforce Developer Platform
- “Today, more than ever, companies need to engage with their customers. And for that, they need relevant content. Salesforce CMS is easy to use and connected to your CRM data with APIs. You can access this content anywhere.” – Leah McGowen-Hare, Salesforce VP of Trailhead Evangelism
- “With COVID, we saw a higher demand in home-delivery kits, and with that meant, more customers with more questions … We actually noticed that customers were reaching out to us more through text, than with email, so we added the ability to request a text back from the bot.” – Samantha Philip, Developer, CS Systems, Sun Basket. Read on for the full story, and check out how their agents skilled up on Trailhead.
- “When we looked around and saw the financial impact that the coronavirus was having, and the kind of government programs that were being spun up like the Paycheck Protection Program. We knew that we were going to need to do something really quickly. In order to give our customers the tools that they needed to get money into the hands of people in small businesses.” – Dory Weiss, VP of Engineering, nCino
- “Eight years ago some developers got frustrated at Dreamforce and said ‘you’re not listening.’ I agreed to meet with them. Now, we’re here, eight years later, with a forum for you to talk to us about what you care most about and for us to listen. We’re thrilled to be here with you.” – Parker Harris, Co-Founder, Salesforce
- “We’re looking toward the future and considering, when this pandemic is through, what kinds of behavioral changes will remain. And what we see is this all-digital, work-anywhere world. That’s why I think collaboration at Salesforce is more important than it ever has been. We have significantly increased investment in collaboration and digital collaboration across our entire portfolio. We need to also think about what a modern team needs to collaborate, and that’s why today you saw a lot of real-time collaboration features like presence, and video, and chat.” – Bret Taylor, President and Chief Operating Officer, Salesforce
Finally, click below to watch a video demo of Salesforce Anywhere, and see collaboration in action:
