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Why you should attend Dreamforce 2021

Dreamforce starts next week, in just 5 days. If you’re new to Salesforce, you may not know about Dreamforce, the annual event that brings together the global Salesforce community for learning, fun, community building, and philanthropy. It’s an experience where Trailblazers from all over the world gather to share their stories, their successes, and learn from each other.

Salesforce is taking a hybrid approach this year, both on-site and online. Dreamforce 2021 takes place September 21-23, 2021, and will host select attendees in San Francisco, while the rest of the world will join virtually.

Dreamforce will broadcast globally, for free on Salesforce+. There will be four live broadcast channels and 100+ hours of on-demand content. Salesforce is known across the industry for its excellent events. We highly recommend attending if you are working with Salesforce or would like to start learning more about it. There are four key reasons why you want to be a part of Dreamforce 2021.

Learn. Transform your career with breakout sessions, training, and certification opportunities. Participate in cutting-edge demos. Meet new partners with solutions to help your organization grow.
Get inspired. The world’s most innovative minds come to Dreamforce to inspire, excite, and motivate attendees every year.
Give back. Attendees help build diversity, inclusion, equality, and sustainability with action and volunteerism. Past organizations Salesforce has supported include Girl Scouts of America, RED, and many more.
Have fun. When Trailblazers get together, it’s a party. And Dreamforce is the biggest one of all. Dreamforce is a celebration of the community.

Recommendations to attend Dreamforce

Are you ready for three full days of non-stop events? There are many sessions and topics, that’s why we have some recommendations for you:

Plan your time: One of the biggest challenges with a virtual Dreamforce will be that everyone is spread across different time zones. Dreamforce has everything you need, from session descriptions to calendar links. Don’t forget to add the sessions to your calendar and keep track of what’s coming. Take a look at the schedule and the episodes, so you can choose the sessions that make the most sense for your interests and responsibilities. During the three-day marathon, we recommend blocking off time to catch up on tasks and stay productive.

To make your life easier, here are some sessions we recommend. Remember that if you cannot attend some sessions, they will be available later in Salesforce+.

Day 1: Tuesday, September 21

Dreamforce Main Show: Trailblazing Together with Marc Benioff and Special Guests (12:45 p.m. ET)
Integrate Everything, Automate Anything with MuleSoft (1:00 p.m. ET)
Innovation from Anywhere with Salesforce Developers (6:30 p.m. ET)
Create User Experiences with Lightning Web Components (7:30 p.m. ET)
Develop Enterprise Applications with Apex (8:00 p.m. ET)

Day 2: Wednesday, September 22

A Special Conversation with Co-Founder & CTO Parker Harris (12:00 p.m. ET)
Build the Future of Business with Salesforce Architects (3:30 p.m. ET)
Architecting at Scale (4:30 p.m. ET)
Unlocking Insights with Tableau (5:30 p.m. ET)

Day 3: Thursday, September 23

Your Roadmap for Connected, Effortless Service (12:00 p.m. ET)
MuleSoft: Create Integrated Customer 360 Experiences (12:30 p.m. ET)
Fast and Easy Integration with MuleSoft Composer (1:00 p.m. ET)
The IT Leader’s Guide to the Salesforce Platform Roadmap (2:00 p.m. ET)
Empower IT to Ship Faster with Functions and DevOps Center (2:30 p.m. ET)

Test your equipment. Make sure you have all the equipment ready and prepared for a perfect virtual experience. Test your internet speed, and have a backup source just in case. Also, prepare your laptop and phone chargers as well as grabbing additional cables in advance. You don’t want to have your devices run out of power in the middle of a great session.

Prepare your space: We’ve all been juggling working from home for months, so we know how easy it is to become distracted. The best approach is to find a space in your home that will let you focus on the event with minimal interruptions. Close that email, for example. We know it’s tempting to multitask; avoid it if at all possible. Give yourself the time to focus on learning and engaging as much as you can. And some of those sessions may be early; make sure you have your favorite brew ready!

Whether it is your first time attending Dreamforce, the second time, or more, we are sure you will have a great experience!

Oktana Paraguay is Certified as a Great Place to Work®

We are privileged to announce that Oktana Paraguay has been certified as a Great Place to Work® with a score of 93/100.

Congratulations, team, for all the effort you’ve put into creating a happy and inspiring work environment!

Founded in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2018 we opened a second office in Asunción, Paraguay. We have since expanded into other countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and the U.S. – many of the lessons that enable us to successfully grow have been learned as we continue to mature in Paraguay. We are so proud!

Great Place to Work® certification is the most definitive ‘Employer-of-Choice’ recognition organizations aspireto achieve, considered the‘Gold Standard’ in identifying and recognizing great workplace culture. More than 12 million surveys are completed each year across 10,000+ organizations in 60+ countries.

The survey investigates three employee relationships with:

The leaders of the organization
Their work
Their colleagues

These relationships translate into five dimensions: Credibility, justice, respect, pride, and camaraderie.

Next steps: We’ll review all survey feedback to identify action items to continue to improve the Oktana experience across all offices. We will also adjust our internal survey, sent twice annually, to include aspects of this survey.

Be part of the team! See our latest Oktana Paraguay job openings for developers, testers, business analysts, and designers in Asunción, Paraguay.

Top Salesforce Developer Certifications for 2021

Salesforce is one of the most powerful business technologies on the market, which makes Salesforce certifications a great way to gain expertise and enhance your career as a developer. At Oktana we are committed to the professional growth of everyone on our team. That’s why we have a specialized training team that guides and prepares our entire squad to tackle new challenges and to help them build expertise across the Salesforce ecosystem and across a range of languages, frameworks, and platforms.

During recent months we have published many articles about Salesforce certifications. They are compiled here to help you figure out which option is the best to boost your career:

1. Salesforce Certified Administrator

Overview:

Exam Duration: 105 minutes
Questions: 60 multiple-choice questions + 5 non-scored

The Salesforce administrator certification helps you better understand Salesforce CRM fundamentals and demonstrates your expertise and abilities in the platform. You should be able to maintain a Salesforce org, support common business requirements and inquiries, and last but not least, execute Salesforce administrative tasks.
Not sure what Salesforce admins do? Start with this Trailhead module: Salesforce Admin: Quick Look. (10 min)

2. Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I

Overview:

Exam Duration: 110 minutes
Questions: Content: 60 multiple-choice questions + 5 non-scored

Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I is probably one of the most important and complete certifications that Salesforce offers. Additionally, it is a prerequisite for many other certifications such as the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II and it is the first step to becoming a system architect. It is an excellent way to demonstrate to your peers and customers that you have the required skills to complete a successful development project.

3. Salesforce Certified Platform Developer II

Overview:

Exam Duration: 120 minutes
Questions: Content: 60 multiple-choice questions

The Salesforce Platform Developer II certification exam may seem daunting at first, but with some studying and determination, you’ll have that certification under your belt in no time.

It’s important to mention that to achieve this certification you must have already obtained the Salesforce Platform Developer I certification. During your preparation for this certification, you will learn how to leverage the advanced programmatic capabilities of the Salesforce platform and data modeling to include more complex business logic and UIs in applications.

4. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Consultant

Overview:

Exam Duration: 90 minutes
Questions: Content: 60 multiple-choice questions

This certification enables you to design and implement solutions that are maintainable, scalable, and meet nonprofit business requirements. During your preparation for this certification, you will build a solid understanding of data management and database concepts, understanding of internet technologies and cloud computing, and more. If you are interested in earning this certification, you must first become a Salesforce Certified Administrator.

5. Salesforce JavaScript Developer I

Overview:

Exam Duration: 105 minutes
Questions: Content: 60 multiple-choice questions

The Salesforce JavaScript Developer I certification, introduced in 2020, is an excellent way to demonstrate experience developing with one of the most popular web programming languages. JavaScript developers work with front-end and back-end development and even related technologies like Salesforce’s Lightning web components. This credential is a great way to further your development career.

6. MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1 (Mule 4)

Overview:

Exam Duration: 120 minutes
Questions: Content: 60 multiple-choice questions

MuleSoft streamlines the process of integrating various systems, like new APIs, Salesforce, ERP, or legacy applications. It is a unique technology that makes it easier to integrate systems and manage the entire lifecycle of your APIs, including building, testing, deploying, and managing.

Even though there are no prerequisites for this certification, our team recommends having background knowledge of REST API services, the basics of web concepts, HTTP requests, and knowing how these work from a server perspective.

7. Tableau Desktop Specialist Certification

Overview:

Exam Duration: 1 hour
Questions: 30 multiple-choice questions

Tableau is a visual platform that transforms the way we use data to solve problems. It empowers people and organizations to make the most out of their data. In 2019, Tableau was acquired by Salesforce, but its mission remains the same: to help people see and understand their data.

Our team highly recommends this certification. Companies like Amazon, Experian, and Unilever trust Tableau business intelligence (BI) and analytics software to explore, visualize and securely share data in the form of workbooks and dashboards. Tableau is very user-friendly with drag-and-drop functionality. Tableau Desktop Specialist allows you to quickly clean, analyze, and visualize your data.

8. Informatica Specialist

Overview:

Duration: 90 minutes
Questions: 70 multiple-choice questions

Okay, it’s not an official Salesforce certification, it’s more like a complementary certification. Informatica enables you to migrate data from different data sources and transform the data according to business requirements.

Informatica certification is in heavy demand by enterprise companies that have large databases they would like to connect to Salesforce. If you work with Salesforce, this certification will expand on the methods you know to integrate Salesforce plus enable you to provide additional value to your internal teams or clients.

Interested in working on Salesforce projects? We are now hiring! Check out our open positions on our careers page.

Oktana is Growing: 200 Developers

The first half of 2019 has been a period defined by growth and expansion for Oktana.

200 Developers

We are thrilled to report we’ve officially reached a headcount of over 200 developers, testers and designers worldwide. As our family grows, our available skills grow which is exciting for all of our partners.

Introducing, Paraguay

Our company was founded in Montevideo, Uruguay. Like any technology company, we’re always on the hunt for great talent, encouraging our team to learn new skills to provide additional value to our partners. With that in mind, we expanded into neighboring Paraguay in late 2018, opening an office in the capital, Asunción. Over the past six months, we’ve been able to bring on new team members in Paraguay in a wide variety of roles. The team has become an essential part of the Oktana family.

Why Paraguay? The population is young and entrepreneurial. There has been increased investment by the government in science and technology and several accelerators and other programs have launched to help fuel entrepreneurship. For us, this is the right environment to find developers eager to work on big projects and expand their knowledge.

Fun Facts about Paraguay

Population: 7,000,000+
Slightly smaller than the state of California
Literacy rate is 94% (vs. 86% in the United States)
World’s fourth-largest exporter of electricity
Host of Guinness Book of World Records world’s largest barbecue, attended by approximately 30,000 people

Next Stop: Peru

With offices in New York, San Francisco, Montevideo, and now Asunción, where are we headed next? After the successful expansion into Asunción, we looked for other cities to grow into and found Lima. So, we’re excited to announce our office in Lima, Peru is open and ready for business.

Why Peru? The capital, Lima, has a population of over nine million people, making it one of the largest cities in South America. Because the majority of our customers are based in the United States, it’s important for us to ensure our team schedules align with US timezones and work hours to enable collaboration. Like Paraguay, Peru’s workday naturally overlaps with the US workday. Peru is a growing and stable country, so we’re confident it’s a place we will be able to continue to grow.

Fun Facts about Peru

Population: 30,000,000+
Nearly twice the size of Texas
Founded in 1551, National University of San Marcos is the oldest in the Americas
Incan Empire was larger than imperial Rome at its peak
Home to both the world’s highest sand dune and deepest canyon

Company Culture

As we continue to expand, it’s important to ensure our Oktana family feels connected regardless of location so we’re increasingly focused on building our company culture and communication between offices. As the year progresses, we may reach out to you, as our partners, to share your story so each developer is able to better understand the projects keeping their colleagues up at night.

MuleSoft & Informatica Certification

With a growing team, we’ve also expanded on our certification game. We believe in continuous learning, so our developers are always training and working on new certifications. We recently stepped outside of core Salesforce certifications to explore other options that fit our team, including MuleSoft and Informatica certifications.

Hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about us. 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. If you want to know more about our work, go check out our latest success stories.

Connecting Salesforce IoT

Salesforce is very excited and passionate about the potential that IoT connectivity could have for both Salesforce users and their clients/customers.

During one of the keynote speeches, we learned about how the data collected through the use of internet-connected devices can be paired with Salesforce data to create a powerful tool for customer interaction that is not only reactive to customer needs but also pro-active based on the data that is being sent to Salesforce constantly from IoT devices and the use of Salesforce IoT orchestrations.

Now you might be wondering what it actually takes to get your data from your IoT device management platform and into Salesforce and that’s a fair question. As you may know, most IoT devices currently on the market aren’t capable of connecting to Salesforce out of the box. That’s why we at Oktana partnered with Salesforce to develop the Salesforce IoT Connector app. With the Salesforce IoT Connector app, we can establish a link between your IoT device management platform, including AWS and GCP, and your Salesforce dashboard to bring in all your IoT data and use it to make smart decisions for your business, your clients, and your customers.

We recognized that to help accelerate IoT adoption within Salesforce, admins need to be able to connect all the devices they already have out in the field.

We’ve built an application that makes linking your management service to Salesforce simple and intuitive. The app acts as a data replicator that connects to your management platform, collects the data that has been gathered, and then sends it to Salesforce for you to use within your Salesforce IoT orchestrations.

As a Salesforce Administrator, you’re probably concerned with how we handle the data that comes into Salesforce from your IoT management service. The IoT Connector gives you all the power you need to easily manage what data is coming in and where it goes once it gets there. First, you will provide an example of the data that is coming from your management service in JSON format. Then, you can map all the data to the Salesforce event fields of your choosing.

Salesforce’s goal with Salesforce IoT is to help empower every business in that space to be able to harness the data from their network-connected products and use it to reimagine the ways they do everything. With the Salesforce IoT Connector, we have further lowered the barrier of entry for Salesforce customers to truly take advantage of all the data being collected by their connected devices. We’re always imagining new ways to use IoT technology to change customer experiences truly and we believe this tool is one of the essential first steps on that road.

Read more about Oktana services and request a quote.

Looking back at Dreamforce 2018

With Dreamforce 2018 in the books, we wanted to pause and take a look back at everything we did at the show. From hosting sessions to manning our own booth and getting to see a pretty cool concert, it was a great show for everyone at Oktana.

The expo hall at Dreamforce was full of energy and I know our team was thrilled to be there. We loved seeing what everyone in the Salesforce community has been working on. Speaking of the expo hall, we had our own booth and meeting space. It was great to meet and talk to so many people over the course of the conference.

Developers from Oktana hosted three sessions this year at Dreamforce and they’re all archived and ready for you to watch online.

First, developer Carlos walked attendees through his experiences in developing front-end apps for Salesforce using Angular, React, or Vue. Carlos offered a number of live demos of his work as he demonstrated his expertise and approach to front-end app development.

Next, three of our developers Lorenzo, Carlos, and Gonzalo presented a session on how to use Salesforce DX to easily adopt Continuous Integration into your projects. Our team not only discussed the advantages that Continuous Integration offers to developers but also shared some of their own success stories which helped illuminate and better highlight those advantages.

And finally, project lead Antony brought us something special as he walked everyone through his team’s project of bringing a robotic Einstein to life through the power of Einstein.ai and Einstein Bots. With the emphasis on Einstein at Dreamforce this year we were thrilled to see Antony sharing this project with the world. It’s definitely one of our favorite projects in from recent memory but it’s also a great visual representation of just what makes Einstein.ai special. We’ll be going into more detail on this project on our blog soon so stay tuned.

Overall, Dreamforce 2018 was a great experience and we look forward to seeing everyone there again next year!

Interested in working on Salesforce projects? We are now hiring! Check out our open positions.

So Long Chatter Messenger, Hello Tok

Earlier this year, Salesforce officially retired its enterprise collaboration platform, Chatter Messenger, which since its incarnation has helped to enhance collaboration and productivity amongst Salesforce users. The most attractive feature of Chatter Messenger was the ability to communicate within Salesforce which made it simpler to interact with colleagues without leaving the Salesforce platform. If you’re an active Salesforce user, you know that Salesforce’s Chatter Messenger definitely streamlined initiatives throughout the daily workflow. This enabled users to follow groups, objects, tasks, and other criteria as well as directly message colleagues to keep current with business initiatives.

Chatter Messenger

Consequentially, the retirement of Chatter Messenger has broadened the landscape for enterprise collaboration and productivity. After Salesforce announced that they’d be retiring the chat applications, we imagined many users might be wondering; are there any products on the market that could continue the legacy? The answer is yes! Our product, Tok, has elevated Chatter Messenger capabilities to provide rapid real-time communication between users so they can stay productive and keep current with all of their tasks on Salesforce.

Tok

Tok is the ultimate collaboration tool to bridge the communication gap between colleagues and on the Salesforce platform. It provides users with an easy-to-use messenger interface for desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. In addition, users don’t even need to log into their Org to communicate with their colleagues. Users can simply download the Tok desktop version, sign in directly from their desktop to chat with their coworkers, and share pertinent documents and information with each other. Team members can also send cool and customized messages by adding attachments or files like images, GIFs, videos, and much more.

Tok is also super intuitive where users can drag and drop items from their desktop directly into the platform for simple sharing amongst colleagues and perhaps the best feature about Tok is its ability to store conversations onto Salesforce as well as create leads, opportunities, tasks etc. The TokBot also automates commands to create polls and surveys and share them in Groups on the Tok interface.

If you’re on the search for a collaboration product to continue where Chatter Messenger left off, look no further! Tok is blazing a new trail for team members who want to stay connected and integrated with all of their tasks on the Salesforce platform.

3 Advantages of Artificial Intelligence

Until recent decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was regarded as a utopic, unrealistic tale that only science fiction writers dared to dream upon. However, AI is part of our daily routine as any other technology. AI is increasingly becoming a dominating force, from intelligent cars and smart houses to even voice assistants on our mobile devices.

In 2017, we saw steady growth in AI at a global level. Every day, more organizations implement machine learning technology to innovate and improve customer service and other business functionalities. We already see this happening at a high level with Salesforce’s Service Cloud, which is automating processes so that the customer experience feels more engaging and human-like.

Since Artificial Intelligence is in such high demand, we figured we’d divvy up three ways it comes to advantage in providing a better customer experience:

Anywhere/Anytime Access

Chatbots are in popular demand across industries, especially in e-commerce, where companies are looking to provide customers with service around the clock. Chatbots have evolved so that they can now respond rapidly and in a personalized way to customers from any device at any time. Ultimately, this enhances user experience and decreases the traffic to your call centers which provides a better, faster and more complete service.

Machine Support

By experiencing repetitive issues and resolving these issues, machine learning has the capability to enable user support agents to be prepared for all kinds of issues that chatbots sometimes fail to address. Any call center with artificial Intelligence machine learning capabilities is able to provide accurate solutions to specific problems. Artificial Intelligence’s learning potential to sense human behavior can contribute to a better and faster support experience.

Predictions and Insights

Tech giants like Google, Apple, Netflix & Hulu all have AI capabilities that predict and recommend user preferences. Similarly, in other industries, machine learning can enhance business functionalities by forecasting future issues and providing alternative solutions beforehand. This is the essence of the machine learning algorithm! Such insights can translate into future actions to be taken by customers based on their choices, interests and shared content.

We here at Oktana share a passion for innovation and improved customer experience, which is why we’re avid supporters of artificial intelligence technology. We’ve even developed a chatbot feature for our enterprise collaboration product, Tok, which is available on AppExchange. We definitely encourage other organizations to embrace this innovative technology to produce top-notch business functionalities.

Lightning Experience vs. Salesforce Classic: Is the Lightning Experience Revolutionizing Salesforce?

User experience is a huge factor in how a particular platform is perceived by end users and ultimately defines whether or not they will adopt to utilizing the platform. User interfaces that are choppy and lack visually appealing features tend to fall by the wayside because they are not engaging and they’re more than likely not as functional as they should be. For example, Salesforce updated their platform by implementing the Lightning Experience; a new and exciting way to view and access your Salesforce profile, as opposed to the duller, less visually satisfying Classic mode.

Well, perhaps, we can lay out the pros and cons of each Salesforce feature and establish how each comes with its own set of benefits. Lightning or Classic, you ask?

As the predecessor of the Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic provides users with plenty of resources to complete their daily work tasks. It comes fully stocked with all of the typical CRM capabilities that ISVs/admins will utilize daily such as, accounts, leads, opportunities, campaigns, etc. Additionally, developers can use JavaScript source codes to build out tools like Process Builder, Visual Workflow, or code-driven approaches.

Salesforce Classic

Salesforce Classic has proven to be an optimal solution over the years, however, there’s a sleeker and more intuitive Salesforce UI that’s on the horizon; the Lightning experience! It has an entirely different user interface for Salesforce.com (SFDC) and it possesses some of the core Salesforce classic features as well. Additionally, it has many new cloud-based features and Salesforce objects are given a cleaner, fresher and overall more visually appealing look. The major goal of the Lightning experience was to enhance the usage of data and tools by minimizing the clickthrough rate so that Sales Reps could perform their job functions quickly and easily. AND – it’s completely mobile responsive.

Lightning Experience

The weigh-in?

While the Lightning experience looks awesome, it still has some catching up to do in terms of not having the most utilized Salesforce classic features embedded into its interface. Also, developers are not able to continue to use JavaScript/Visualforce coding libraries and some AppExchange apps might not be supported in the Lightning experience. If you’re a Salesforce party that has not yet fully acclimated to Salesforce classic and have no users/developers or system admins in your Org, it’s definitely best to go straight to the Lightning experience and build out your Org on this platform.

However, if you’ve heavily delegated all of your work tasks within Salesforce Classic, it may better serve to you to wait it out until Lightning experience gets up to speed and fully incorporates features like territory management for sharing and assigning accounts, Public Knowledge Base, Live Agent, Macros, among other features that streamline and simplify workplace functionalities.

As you can see, user experience plays a large role in both viewing formats. With Salesforce Classic, usability depends more on functionality and streamlining work whereas Lightning experience tends to focus more on the “look and feel.” The Lightning experience is definitely the way of the future and we suggest a slow transition whereby switching back and forth between each mode may be the ideal approach until Lightning incorporates more features for functionality. With that being said, we think both Salesforce Classic and the Lightning experience both have much to offer, however, Lightning is the new frontier in the Salesforce arena and eventually, we’ll all want to entirely jump on the bandwagon!

Check out our new article about Salesforce Classic vs Lightning: More than a pretty interface.