Ausure IT Team at Dreamforce 2022 - Well-Architected Workshop
After a hiatus during covid, Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, was once again back on in San Francisco in September. This year was a cut-down version with approximately 50,000 attendees, down from the normal 180,000. Dreamforce is one of the world’s largest tech conferences, attracting people from all over the world who get together to talk about all things Salesforce and the latest tech trends.
People often don’t realise the enormity of Salesforce and how widespread and hugely popular this platform actually is. Over 150,000 businesses around the world rely on them to run their businesses, including some of the world’s biggest brands such as Spotify, Amazon Web Services, Toyota, and even the US Bank! When you realise how massive and successful Salesforce actually is, it’s no longer a surprise that they’re known for hosting out-of-this-world conferences that feature some of the world’s best bands including Metallica, U2, Fleetwood Mac, and the Foo Fighters, speakers, and high-profile celebrities like Bill & Hillary Clinton, Sir Richard Branson, Barack & Michelle Obama, Jessica Alba
Vickie Jeffery, Ausure’s Head of Technology attended again this year, and was asked to facilitate two ‘Architect Workshops’ as part of Salesforce’s ‘Well Architected framework’ and the Well Architected Ambassador program. Which is a group of architects and budding architects who are helping to spread the word about the “Well-Architected framework”, as well as assisting Salesforce in preparing the framework, providing feedback and running in person and virtual workshops. The Well Architected Framework includes pillars for good Salesforce and systems architecture, tools, and resources such as a template gallery, decision guides, and planning tools. The pillars break down systems architecture into easy to understand topics, provide information on what good architecture looks like for each pillar, and detail available development functionality, that can be used when building solutions in Salesforce.
You may be asking, what’s the relationship between architecture and Salesforce? Architecture is important to any systems solution that is being built. Good architecture when designing solutions means that we can build systems easily and quickly with good security and allow for growth.
Salesforce’s Well-Architected 3 pillars are Trust, Easy, and Adaptable.
Trusted solutions protect stakeholders
Easy solutions deliver value fast
Adaptable solutions evolve with the business
The two sessions Vickie facilitated were for Architecting an Engaging Solution. Making a solution engaging fits into the ‘Easy’ pillar and is all about making our software solutions simple, automated, and engaging. Engaging includes making navigating a system easy, making sure the correct information can be seen or accessed easily on each screen, developing systems that work well on any device, ensuring notifications and error messages are understandable by users, and thinking about providing guidance for users as they navigate a system. Architecting is how we go about using the best tools in our software development and design arsenal to facilitate this.
The workshop included providing an overview of what Architecting an Engaging solution means, an intro to the Well-Architected Framework, and a solution design exercise. Attendees then split into groups, were given a scenario, and embarked on putting together a solution design based on best practices and the tools available to them. While they were designing their solution, I would help with understanding the tools and framework.
These workshops were really fun and popular amongst Dreamforce attendees with full attendance and people around the perimeter watching the action. I really enjoyed hearing everyone’s different thoughts on how the solution could be architected and assisting the groups with possible solutions to think about as they worked through the scenario.
Dreamforce is always a whirlwind of learning and networking and Dreamforce 2022 was no exception.
