While TrailheaDX’17 would pale in comparison with Dreamforce in terms of size and the number of sessions. There were still major product announcements, demos and 1-on-1 consultation sessions that we were able to benefit from due to the intimate nature of the conference. In this document, I not only cover the product announcements but also perform a deep-dive listing the pros-cons, business use-cases and hands-on exercises. Apart from functional knowledge, I have also peppered this document with Tips & Tricks for you to consider when you plan your next trip to Dreamforce or any other Salesforce conference. Major Announcements Across the entire TrailheaDX’17 from the keynote to the various product demos; there were four key themes that were central 1) Launching Salesforce DX (sforce.co/get-dx) 2) Connecting multiple customer Apps with Platform Events 3) Enable 360 view of data from other systems integrated with Salesforce Connect 4) Intent & Sentiment analysis of Einstein (with image detection and classification)

1. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
TrailheaDX ’17: Recap, highlights and way forward
While TrailheaDX’17 would pale in comparison with Dreamforce in terms of size and the number of
sessions. There were still major product announcements, demos and 1-on-1 consultation sessions that
we were able to benefit from due to the intimate nature of the conference.
In this document, I not only cover the product announcements but also perform a deep-dive listing the
pros-cons, business use-cases and hands-on exercises. Apart from functional knowledge, I have also
peppered this document with Tips & Tricks for you to consider when you plan your next trip to
Dreamforce or any other Salesforce conference.
Event Prep
The 2-day session was packed with overlapping sessions, resulting in missing quite a few due to timing
constraints. But each session was worthwhile, in terms of enabling hands-on workshop, overview on
fundamentals and open discussions.
The major challenge, was to prioritize which of the sessions to attend. In my case, I personalized my
experiences on specific project needs:-
a) Salesforce Development best practices – ORG deployment/testing/Release Management
b) Overview on Platform Events (full or partial ESB?)
c) App exchange product demos relating to Contract management/ Reporting/ Security
Management
PRO TIP: Download the Salesforce Events App to make your own agenda

2. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Major Announcements
Across the entire TrailheaDX’17 from the keynote to the various product demos; there were four key
themes that were central
1) Launching Salesforce DX (sforce.co/get-dx)
2) Connecting multiple customer Apps with Platform Events
3) Enable 360 view of data from other systems integrated with Salesforce Connect
4) Intent & Sentiment analysis of Einstein (with image detection and classification)
Salesforce DX
In it’s effort to become the declarative programmatic platform, salesforce has often been derided to not
be a “Developer-driven” platform. The launching of the Salesforce DX platform has been able to equip
the developer community with the right set of tools to enable BUILD and DELIVER continuously
 Integrated, end-to-end lifecycle designed for high-performance agile development
 Source-driven development : By integrating with source control tools such as GIT/Travis
 Rapid Testing and development through scratch ORGs and DX CLI commands
I was able to get my hands-dirty on the capabilities of the Salesforce DX platform (currently in BETA) and
also spoke with a few early adopters who emphasized on how we could use the platform for both
programmatic and declarative deployments for small-agile projects to large-enterprise engagements
Next Steps : Review these hands-on projects on the Trailhead
 App Development with Salesforce DX – LINK
 Plan Your Move to Salesforce DX - LINK

3. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Platform Events
Although still in Beta mode, the platform events are already found multiple organizations piloting
projects around their functionality - LINK
I had a chance to interact with the salesforce architects
A Few key features about the platform events:-
 New in Summer’17
 Similar to Streaming API
o Publish/Subscribe model
o Declarative and/or code approaches
o Typed messages
 Not persistent
o Cannot be queried
o 24 hour replay capability
While there are limitations on the number of messages that can be captured for each ORG, we can place
a request to increase the limits.
The two early adopters of Platform Events; include BlackDiamond (where they are connecting their
customer interactions to their CRM platform) and OpenTable (where they are showcasing at a GEO level
the incidents/issues reported).
As to the Question; if Platform events is meant to replace your typical ESB – the guidance from
Salesforce Architect – Navi Viswanath and Chris De Gour was
Platform events are meant for a pub-sub model, consider it if we do not have an ESB; but not to recode
existing orchestrations due to the limitations of Platform events – namely
 It is a lite-ESB; does not have error handling, message persistence and other features
 Data limitations in terms of # of messages, 24-hr replay only, etc.

4. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Salesforce Connect
The platform events features complemented well with the capabilities of salesforce connect; which
enabled access to 3-party data through the salesforce interfaces
One of the product demos performed was exposing SAP payment and sales order data using ODATA 4.0
(Note : Salesforce connect can enable a 2-way communication with read and write of the data) with
Federated search (continuous search with other data providers through salesforce connectors) where
the 3rd
-party information displayed on the Lightning interface dynamically modified without any manual
refresh.
Although a few pointers (potential enhancements/limitations)
 No audit trail (because they don’t store the data)
 Complex long-running process need to be routed via the Batch APEX support
 Remote event detection can be done using polling and odata4 callback
 Custom fields are not currently available for external objects
Einstein’s Intent and Sentiment Analyzer
While not relevant to our project, Salesforce has been building multiple use-cases around their AI engine
Einstein. While during the last NY salesforce event the focus was on integrating IBM watson’s
intelligence to enable deliver the right contextual messages to the field sales reps; during the keynote
for the TrailheaDX’17 the focus was on 2 key business use-cases on Einstein’s Intent and Sentiment
analyzer.
Use case 1 : Social Media analysis. Einsten’s inbuilt sentiment analyzer can predict the positive and
negative emotions associated with language used around any brand across Twitter and other social
media sites
Use case 2 : We can train Einstein’s Intent analyzer to predict based upon customer’s chat what sort of
expertise/ products can be up-sold

5. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Goody Bag
One of my favorite reasons for attending a salesforce event is networking and the goody bag. This year
at TrailheaDX, my haul included a mini-drone, a really cool hiking bag, tons of great knowledge material
and soft-toys which my 4-yr old adored (Not to mention 2 Certification credits)

6. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Details of Sessions attended: -
Day 1 :-
Hands On: Getting Started with Lightning Components
The engine of the Lightning Platform is the Lightning Component Framework. This
workshop will take you through all the basics of using Lightning Components, including,
creating the markup, styling with SLDS, use of controllers and helpers, and
communication with Lightning events. The workshop will include hands on with the “Build
an Account Geolocation” project on Trailhead, as well as discussion and instruction from
a Lightning expert. Come attend and blaze your trail to Lightning Components success.
Please bring your own laptop for hands on workshops.
TrailheaDX '17 Opening Keynote
Learn how you can be a trailblazer and build customer apps people love in this visionary
keynote with Salesforce Co-Founder and CTO Parker Harris, Salesforce President and
Chief Product Officer Alex Dayon, SVP Dev Relations & GM Trailhead Sarah Franklin,
and Director of Employee Trailhead Content Strategy Leah McGowen-Hare.
Hands On: Summer 17 Platform Events
Imagine you could write a trigger before knowing the actions you wanted to execute. The
new Platform Events service creates a publish/subscribe architecture on Salesforce. In
this hands-on workshop you will learn the basic features of Platform Events by building
an event notification app. In this app you will create create a new event object, create a
Lightning Component to listen for platform events, and create the functionality to launch
platform events from an external application. Please bring your own laptop for hands on
workshops.
Three Transformations to Developing on the Salesforce Platform
The Salesforce Developer experience is rapidly changing - how you build, decompose
and integrate your applications will all be fundamentally different in the future. Come to
learn more about the changes coming in Source Driven Development with DX, App
Decomposition with Lightning, and Event Driven Architecture with Platform Events. In this
session you will learn how you can take advantage of these three critical shifts coming
your way.
Event Driven Architectures with Platform Events
With the growing number of enterprise solutions in a business ecosystem, traditional
record-centric design patterns become difficult to manage. Platform Events enables a
new event-driven architecture for the Salesforce App Cloud focused on events and record
changes, rather than full record processing. Join us to learn about Platform Events and
what this will mean to the future of integration with the App Cloud.

7. Contact author Deepak Bhaskaran (Cognizant Business Consulting)
Sandbox Strategies for Developer Operations
Join us for an intimate and interactive discussion with other customers to learn why a
Sandbox is essential to every successful Salesforce project, and how it can be used to
build and test your Salesforce changes. During this session, we will discuss sandbox
types, use cases, and best practices for DevOps.
Day 2
1:1 Technical Consultations: Thursday
Stop by the Welcome Desk and book a 30 minute 1:1 Technical Consultation with an
expert on Agile, Force.com, Lightning, Mobile, User Experience, or Salesforce
Architectures!
Technical Governance for Developers
Coding and developing in Salesforce is fun, and by following a few best practices, you
can quickly build solutions that your users will love for years. Join us for a collaborative
discussion on the right way to configure, develop and code apps that last, without
introducing technical debt.
If You're Not Getting Certified, You're Certifiably Nuts!
Salesforce Admins, Developers, and Architects, are in high demand. Certification is one
of the best ways for these professionals to prove their knowledge, stand out from the
pack, and grow their careers. Join Vivek M. Chawla, certified Platform Dev II, Advanced
Admin, App Builder, and Sales+Service Cloud Consultant for an open discussion about
the real-world benefits of certification, tips for getting started on your first certification, and
how to map out your own personal certification journey.
Introduction to Salesforce DX
Salesforce is delivering significant improvements to developers! Salesforce DX is focused
on bringing industry standard tools and processes to App Cloud. In this session, we’ll
cover all the updates coming for Developers, ISVs, and IT, including tools and command-
line, packaging, version control systems, and application lifecycle management (ALM). If
you care about building apps with the App Cloud, you don’t want to miss this session!
Org Security Fundamentals
If you've seen the news lately, you know you need strong security protections for your
online systems. Join us as we teach you that access control features like IP range
restrictions, identity confirmation, and two-factor authentication are absolutely critical to
the protection of your Salesforce instance. Hear from Salesforce security engineers about
how these protections work, threats they mitigate, and possible drawbacks. We'll also
teach you how the Security Health Check tool can give you quick insights into security
best practices to your own Salesforce org.