London Calling - Salesforce1 Developer Week

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Salesforce1 Developer Week is series of events taking place around the world between 27th April and 3rd May 2014. The London Salesforce Developer Group are hosting an event on 30th April from 5:30pm:

Right Side of the Tracks

In a groundbreaking move, we’ll be running two tracks for this event, both with a hands-on focus:

• Beginner Track
  If you’ve never developed against the Salesforce1 platform before, attend beginner track. This covers the basics of creating an application via drag and drop; adding process automation, all without writing a single line of code.
  Having run a few “Introduction to Force.com” workshops, the most common feedback from attendees is they are amazed how quickly you can build applications when most of the heavy lifting is done by the platform.
  
  
• Intermediate Track
  The intermediate track will introduce use of Visualforce in Salesforce1, among other items. This is the track for the “clicks not code” developer who is interested in taking the next step, as well as experienced developers from outside the Salesforce ecosystem who have covered the basics through attending an introductory workshop or completed the Force.com Workbook. Experienced developers should prepare themselves to write much less code than they are used to when creating custom applications – in Salesforce1 code is written to extend the existing platform functionality rather than building from the ground up.

Salesforce1 Team, Assemble

We’ve put a crack team of presenters and helpers for this event, including MVPs and a couple of Salesforce Certified Technical Architects, so regardless of your level of experience with Force.com (if any) there will be someone on hand who can help if you get stuck. This also gives rise to some excellent networking opportunities during and after the event.

There’s no Such Thing as a Free Lunch

But there is such a thing as a free event - all you need to bring is yourself and your laptop. There are also exclusive event T-shirts (while stocks last) and Salesforce1 books (again while stocks last). 

Its Five O’Clock Somewhere

Its actually 5:30 at Tquila HQ - its an early start to allow as much development time as possible.  Register for this event here. I look forward to seeing you.

Update 25/04/2013: the time has been moved to 6pm.

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London SFDG - UX Meetup

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in a departure from our usual 3rd/4th Wednesday of the month, the London Salesforce Developer Group meetup for April took place on 16th April at Make Positive’s offices just south of the Thames.  The reason for the date movement was a special guest speaker - Richard Boardman (@uxrick), Lead UX Researcher from Salesforce was in town and stopped by to give us a talk.

This was a departure from our usual code-centric talks, focusing more on the tools and processes that Salesforce utilise to conduct research into the user experience, ranging from monitoring users while they work in dedicated labs to ride-alongs with salespeople. Also, in a move that if repeated I’m sure will hit our attendee numbers, we were given some coursework to do - draw our perfect Salesforce1 experience on a blank phone image.  I look forward to seeing Marc Benioff demonstrating my design at the Dreamforce ’14 Keynote.

A Q&A session then took place, with one or two grievances about the Salesforce1 and main UI being aired, before we repaired to a local hostelry to continue the discussions/arguments.

Having to host this meetup earlier than usual has actually turned out rather well, as Salesforce1 Developer Week takes place worldwide from April 27th - May 3rd, and we’ll be running the London event on April 30th at Tquila’s offices in London - watch out for another blog post with some more detail in a day or two.

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Subtab Applications

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 An often overlooked feature of the Winter 14 release of Salesforce is the introduction of Subtab Applications.  Most of us by now are familiar with the new tabbed layout on our chatter profile page:

but did you know that you can add your own tabs to this page, via the Subtab applications. I tend to use this for functionality that I want to provide to a user but that isn’t really part of the Salesforce applications.  A good example is The Freezer - a Visualforce pages that I’ve created for administration purposes. I’ve created a Visualforce tab for this (and I’ve also turned off the header and sidebar, as otherwise I’ll get those embedded in the subtab too!), but I don’t want to add it to any of my standard/custom applications as it is more about setup, but I also don’t want to burn an application just for a single tab that will be used very infrequently. 

Subtab applications are configured via the Create -> Apps setup menu. They appear in a fixed set of places so you can’t create new apps, but you can customise the existing apps by clicking the edit link

I’m customising the Profile (Self) application so I click the edit link for that and on the resulting page, add my custom tab ‘The Freezer’ to the Selected Tabs:

If I now navigate back to my chatter profile, I have an additional tab that allows me to access the freezer functionality:

Access to the tabs is controlled via the usual profile/permission set configuration, so if users don’t have access to the tab it won’t appear in their subtab application.

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