O Trailhead! myTrailhead!

Introduction

After a fairly lengthy wait (announced at DF 17 and 18) myTrailhead officially launched on March 6th 2019. Simply put, this allows you to provide much of the Trailhead features that you know and love (minus some, plus some others) within your organisation to create your own continuous learning system. Trails, modules, badges and points are all there.

The main addition is you can add items such as corporate presentations and documents to a trail, so you can re-use existing collateral without having to migrate it to Trailhead quiz format. You can also combine standard Salesforce Trailhead modules into your own trails, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

The big minus is that (I think) the automated checking of code/configuration assignments isn’t (currently) available. While I’ve seen references to Trail Checker, as far as I can tell this is more of a manual check than the kind of automation we are familiar with from Superbadges. I can’t say I’m surprised by this - turning a verification system of this nature into a product is no small undertaking, but it would be a very powerful addition for those of us regularly on boarding admins and developers to maintain our existing Salesforce applications.

Familiarity Goes a Long Way

The familiar styling should help adoption. Trailhead is extremely widely used by Salesforce admins, devs, and users (and many of their children, for some reason) and a UI/UX that they are already intimately familiar with will immediately remove some barriers. I’m also pretty sure that the chance to earn more badges and points will be jumped on with alacrity.

Content is King

myTrailhead also includes content management - modules and trails are combined into releases that can be published (accessible to your users) or unpublished (the next iteration, currently being created or reviewed), giving fine grained control on when users can access content and ensuring that it is fit for purpose. As mentioned earlier, you can link to existing Trailhead content so you have a head start in terms of material that isn’t specific to your business.

This is the mechanism of managing content that is provided by myTrailhead. However, creating the content is a task that is all yours and should absolutely not be underestimated. Managing a library of engaging training content and ensuring this is kept up to date when underlying processes or applications change can be a huge task. I can’t imagine how long the Trailhead content team spend on this for a new Salesforce release, but one thing I can tell you is that they don’t ask the developers to do it in their spare time, so if you want a system that will be used, be prepared to invest in a content team of your own. By the same token, if you library consist of half a dozen badges from a couple of years ago, don’t be surprised if nobody is interested in earning them.

Licensing

Up until now I’ve been broadly positive about this, which might come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog, and here comes the negativity. I think Salesforce have made a bit of a mistake with the licensing.

myTrailhead is a $25/user/month add-on. While this isn’t cheap, that isn’t where my beef lies. Instead it’s the fact that it’s an add-on to an Enterprise Sales/Service/Platform license. So if I’m part of a large company (I’m not) and I want to use myTrailhead for staff that aren’t Salesforce users, I have to buy them a Salesforce license they will never use and then add myTrailhead on top of it. And of course I won’t do that, as it makes the cost prohibitive. Instead I’ll do it all on another platform or run two training systems, one for Salesforce users and one for everyone else, which will cause confusion. Or I’ll buy 10 licenses and continually cycle them around users when new training content becomes available.

A standalone license including myTrailhead and chatter, for example, would make much more sense from a purchasing perspective and allow me to train all my users through a single system. Hopefully this is being used to throttle uptake in the short term and we’ll see more licensing options in the future, otherwise I fear that it will only achieve a fraction of its potential.

Related Posts

• New Year, New Trailhead Badges
• Trailhead in the Wild
• Ride the Lightning with Trailhead
• Trailhead - Bigger, Better, Badgier
• Head for the New Trails
• Musings of a Trailheader
• Trailhead - Interactive Force.com Developer Training

 

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