Videos can be a strategic ally when it comes to communicating complex and important messages. Think about training the team on that new app you just purchased to increase sales productivity or that anniversary message from the CEO that cheers everyone up. Both are messages that need to be understood clearly and that have a greater impact when they feel more personal. Oktana YouTube makes your life easier by creating a place in your Salesforce org to embed and share YouTube videos to communicate with your team.
No code needed: Oktana YouTube is all about simplicity
Oktana Youtube is based on the Lightning Web Component technology. It is easy for Salesforce admins to install it from the AppExchange and to enable it on any Salesforce page. Drag and drop the component and you will be all set.
Alexis M. – Developer @Oktana Peru
Simplicity is at the core of Lightning Web Components and Oktana YouTube is no exception. Installing it from the AppExchange takes three (3!) clicks. Once the component is installed, you just enable it on the Salesforce page of your preference. The Lightning App Builder makes this easy for you. Drag the component and drop it wherever you prefer. As you can see, no coding skills are required to add Oktana YouTube to your org.
Admins have full control
As an admin, you get to decide whether to embed a corporate video for all of your users or let them decide what to watch according to their needs. That’s up to you. If you need them to watch a specific video (let’s say a tutorial, a demo, or a message from the team lead), paste the YouTube ID in and you are all set. If you prefer them to be able to search, just leave the YouTube ID blank.
Oktana YouTube means flexible layout
As you create a new page in Salesforce, you also decide where to place your components. We recommend the upper right corner as the best spot, but you can move it according to your needs. Oktana YouTube also allows you to adjust the title and the height to fit your expectations. Good enough? You get the same flexibility on desktop and mobile. It doesn’t matter where you are, you can always watch your embedded videos.
Search videos
As a Salesforce admin, you can allow your users to search YouTube videos from within your org. How does this work? Exactly as YouTube does. Enter keywords and the Lightning Web Component will retrieve related videos. Every user has their own viewing history stored, making it easier to locate previously watched videos. And you can always clear your search history with a simple click.
Oktana YouTube is useful for everyone because it provides YouTube functionality in an intuitive way. If the admin allows it, users can visualize, share, and search any video they need. Anyone can use Oktana YouTube with other components in the same panel/screen. This way, users can access important videos without leaving Salesforce.
Juan C. – QA Analyst @ Oktana Peru
All of this functionality makes Oktana YouTube a useful component you should definitely try. We leverage the YouTube API to embed and share tutorials, demos, or any other important message to your team right in your org.
Thinking about a tech career? There are a lot of different directions, but the Salesforce developer path is one that will enable you to quickly get started and expose you to numerous technologies as you work with companies to integrate and customize Salesforce. While a coding background is definitely helpful, Salesforce is a really good place to start your tech career.
You can explore this career path from the perspective of two of our Salesforce developers, Erwin and Sergio. They’re both new to Salesforce development, having joined Oktana Bolivia in 2020. They deserve an extra round of applause since their team started remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic!
In Bolivia, very few people know about Salesforce which surprises most of our team because they can see it’s a platform with a lot of potential. Because of its size and complexity, with so many different products, learning Salesforce on your own can be intimidating, but Erwin and Sergio have found that the learning materials and coaching provided by their trainer made everything much easier.
Since childhood, both Erwin and Sergio showed a strong interest in technology, especially video game creation. This passion eventually led them both to software development. Before they joined Oktana, they had never worked with Salesforce, but had gained experience with different languages like Angular, C++, and Java.
Similarities with common programming languages
Now that they have been working with the platform for several months, they have found some similarities with common programming languages:
Salesforce uses Apex, a proprietary language very similar to Java. The syntax is Java, but simpler.
The same happens with Lightning Web Components. They have a Java base, making their creation easier for Java developers.
The way Salesforce manages data is by storing everything in metadata. You can manipulate it using SOQL, which is similar to SQL.
Benefits of Salesforce
As a Salesforce developer, you help businesses by helping them integrate with a secure and scalable platform that’s easy to customize and upgrade without anything breaking. From the point of view of our Oktana Bolivia, here are some additional benefits of Salesforce:
Efficient: With just clicks, you can create a structure very quickly. Comparing it with other programming languages where you have to create the database from scratch, using Salesforce is much easier because the database structure is already created for you. Also, the way Salesforce organizes your information is great. If you have to make a change in Salesforce, and if you setup your metadata correctly, it is simpler to reorganize it, saving a lot of time.
Drag & drop page layouts: Salesforce lets you move fast by dragging elements and following defined steps which allows you to focus on other development.
Mobile: Salesforce offers a mobile application that lets you work like you would in the browser. When you build functionality for Salesforce, it can be made immediately available on the Salesforce app, so you don’t need to build a separate mobile app.
Platform: The Salesforce platform is very intuitive. Salesforce teaches you to think about the easiest way to solve a problem, so it’s quite easy to follow this trend. For example, if you start working with Lightning Web Components, when you get some practice, you learn to create components one on top of the other and that interact within the same page, understanding how the components communicate with each other.
Environments: Salesforce already has everything hosted for you. It’s easier to develop in a sandbox environment, then upload it later to production. You don’t have to deploy, just take it to a sandbox to upload it later to a host and then production.
Salesforce best practices
On the other hand, working with Salesforce forces you to learn good programming practices like:
When you develop with Salesforce, it forces you to be more orderly and develop in the most optimal way possible, so your code is not chaotic. It’s really how you should program on any platform in any language.
Likewise, all the out-of-the-box tools are very well made and give you ideas of how you should develop if you aren’t working in Salesforce.
“I consider that the creators of Salesforce are THE BEST, they thought it through very well, and you learn from this.”
Erwin M – Developer
Challenges while learning Salesforce
Maybe the toughest thing is the declarative part of the flows. Salesforce has tools to automate data management. One is the Process Builder where you can develop with clicks, also with the Flow Builder, which allows you to create complex solutions all with clicks, too. In the beginning, it can be a bit complicated to select the right tool for each type of request, but with practice, you get to know everything that Salesforce offers and can do.
Plus, at Oktana, with the onboarding training and experience on different practice projects, you have an excellent base to get to know Salesforce much better.
“There is a lot of information about Salesforce, so it is difficult to know everything, but with practice, you gradually get used to using this platform”
Sergio Z – Developer
Why should you become a Salesforce Developer?
Erwin and Sergio highly recommend taking this career path, because it allows you to create different types of solutions, learn good practices and it’s a great way to start learning a different form of programming. Also, there is a lot of demand related to this career.
It’s not necessary to have previous knowledge of Salesforce before starting this career path. If you know the basics of programming, that is enough. But, it does facilitate learning to have prior knowledge of web development, JavaScript, or basic Java (or C#).
What it’s like working with other cultures
Erwin and Sergio think it’s great, and fascinating, to work with people across several countries – every day they learn about the customs, food, culture, and places they would love to visit in Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States. They also learn many of the similarities between countries.
Something funny Erwin found when he started working at Oktana was that he had thought Salesforce was a simple and straightforward CRM tool, but after training and working with it, he was completely surprised by the size and potential of the platform. For Sergio, when he started working at Oktana, it was the first time he had worked with a Mac as a working tool. He thinks it isn’t as bad as some comments he’s heard from those who don’t use Macs, it has quite interesting and useful things.
It has been interesting getting started at a new job, learning new technologies, during COVID. For example, for Erwin, it was interesting several paid events around the world that used to take place in person, are now broadcast over the internet for free, allowing people to know and learn much more about Salesforce and new technologies for developing software. In the case of Sergio, working completely from home has great advantages. The fact of literally getting out of bed and taking a couple of steps to be in your work area, instead of taking a bus to go to the office, is really motivating. It’s also really relaxing too, at the end of the day, simply log your hours and close your Mac to be at home and rest.
If you’re like me, you have about a billion photos in your photo album that you peruse after you’ve had a drink or are feeling sentimental.
These photos could be of a dinner full of unvoiced farewells at a well-known restaurant with a childhood friend that is getting married or a photo of the first car that you bought. But, behind all these life events, there’s usually a brand or business associated with the experience.
Salesforce launched Einstein (AI) built into its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform in 2016 and Einstein is now delivering more than a billion AI-powered predictions each day. Einstein can deliver advanced AI capabilities to Salesforce Service Cloud, App Cloud, Platform Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and enables nearly anyone to build artificial intelligence powered apps through clicks or code.
Within these clouds, App Cloud uses Einstein to integrate AI into its apps for enterprises and consumers. External developers utilize APIs to bring deep learning to their apps with Prediction Vision Services. Prediction Vision Services classifies unstructured images by comparing them to a vast library of pre-trained classifiers.
What this means, essentially, is that a massive range of images is categorized and fed into a neural network in order to “learn” how to classify them in an autonomous way.
What are the implications of such image learning software?
The implications are actually widespread and exciting. Using such software would allow images that are not specifically tagged with names of brands, but are still online, to be found. The data is then used to deliver solutions and offers to people. For instance, the photos that you have online of your new car can be found by the people who manufactured it to offer personalized advertisements or messages.
KIA and SEEDPOST Collaboration
SEEDPOST, a digital communication agency in South Korea, partnered with KIA Motors to use an API developed by Immaga, a Bulgarian-based company that focuses on image analysis, recognition, and understanding to do just that. KIA Motors wanted to advertise its new KIA K5 Optima model so SEEDPOST used Immaga’s own Auto-Tagging API to match thirty-six different types of the KIA K5 Optima model. People testing the process could log into a website using their social media accounts, pick three images that they thought best represented their lifestyle, the API would sort through keywords that best represent the image contents and then generate a page with custom offerings from a profile pool of thirty-six different customizations (colors, engines, seats etc.) of the KIA K5 Optima.
We built a demo that can demonstrate the potential of the newly developed AI from Salesforce that can demonstrate the potential of their newly developed AI just like KIA did with its new model. We developed a puzzle-solving application to demonstrate the API’s capabilities and to offer a glimpse of the services to come.
In our demo with Einstein Puzzle at TrailheaDX (Salesforce Developer Conference), we decided to engage TrailheadDX attendees with the Einstein platform by providing the attendees with iPad Pro’s that can be used to piece together a puzzle. People took their iPad’s camera, showed it a piece of the puzzle and the Salesforce Prediction Vision Services API matched the piece with its place in the puzzle.
The success of brands in the future would potentially be by leveraging data like those within untagged photos of brands, products, and experiences in social media posts to build digital solutions for client’s audiences that improve their lives in an organic way.
At Oktana, we help clients leverage data and build such solutions. We approach all our projects with a focus on the quality of the design and development that we do. We also provide dedicated support long after we implement solutions for our clients. These commitments to our craft have always been a driving force behind the business decisions we make, the culture we cultivate and how we move.
So, we’ve decided to take our products to the next level in this age of emerging automation and deep technology. We’re ready to continue to keep on top of digital trends and use machine learning, like Einstein’s APIs. And we’re committed to building and delivering the future of Salesforce technology and cutting-edge digital products– today.
