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Dreamforce 2019
Updated 01/12/2019 to add that Evergreen is in closed developer preview in Spring 20.
It’s now over a week since Dreamforce 2019 officially finished, the jet lag is starting to fade and those afflicted by show fever are coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what they saw isn’t going to be available for a while.
Keynote
Marc Benioff’s keynote was somewhat different from previous years, reflecting the sheer breadth of the Salesforce product set. Instead of lengthy demonstrations of specific clouds, we got quick snippets and pointed at the keynote for the cloud in question. How long before it’s just a page of short links that we read through together?
There was an additional demonstration, when a protestor stood up and started reading a speech that only those around him could hear.
This was clearly expected, as Benioff didn’t miss a beat and told him he had 30 seconds and a timer appeared on screen. This would have been the time to grab the mike and make a few killer points, but the plucky protestor simply continued reading from his script without amplification in a room that holds around 15,000 people. Definitely a missed opportunity in my opinion.
Developers
There are some cool features on their way, especially for developers, and below are three that really caught my attention.
1. Evergreen
The coolest announcement was Evergreen. (As is traditional for Salesforce, this term has already been in use for a while, originally denoting a CPQ subscription with no end date).From a developer perspective, it now means serverless functions, written in open programming languages, invoked from Apex, /Flows or triggered by Events. This kind of thing has always been possible (and Mick Wheeler's talk on Microservices inside Salesforce with Platform Events and Change Data Capture demonstrated exactly this) but the secret sauce for Evergreen is (per the Salesforce blog post) :
Evergreen is a seamless part of the Salesforce platform and no extra authentication or networking setup is required.
The demo that I was given in the Trailhead zone made it look very simple (no surprise there), with Node microservice code in a subdirectory of the force-app/main/default directory, everything configured through Salesforce setup, and the deployment handled by Salesforce tooling. A fair few questions were met with the response “we haven’t decided exactly how that will be done yet”, but as an early preview it was quite impressive. Evergreen goes into closed developer preview in Spring 20. Pre-release orgs should be available in a couple of weeks, but often these don’t have all features enabled from the word go, so we might end up having to wait until the release lands around February. UPDATE 01/12/2019 - I’ve been informed by product management that Evergreen will be in closed developer preview in Spring 20, which means you’d have to be nominated to take part - contact Salesforce if you think you have a good use case, and if you don’t, get used to waiting!
Evergreen feels to me like an admission that the Salesforce platform has been taken about as far as it can be. Those of us working with large and complex implementations have found ourselves spending more of our time battling governor limits (particularly CPU time) and while going asynchronous can certainly help, that usually requires a degree of orchestration and also brings limits of it’s own. By making Evergreen a seamless part of Salesforce, where developers really don’t have to care that much about exactly where their code runs, it sounds like the product team have given us a good mechanism to scale. Of course we haven’t seen the pricing yet, and there’s probably an element of smoke and mirrors about the demo, but so far it looks very good.
Andy Fawcett’s influence was clearly making itself felt here, as these functions will also be packageable by ISVs!
2. Data Mask
As part of the ongoing privacy wars, Salesforce will soon have native protection of data copied from production when a sandbox is refreshed, via Data Mask. This provides three options for data protection:
- Anonymization (which we used to call scrambling), where the data is converted to meaningless values.
- Pseudonymization, where the field is left with a readable, indicative value, but unrelated to the original value. For example, if the field is a phone number, the real data will be replaced with something that looks very much like a valid phone number, but isn’t.
- Deletion, where the contents of the field are removed.
This is another area where we’ve been able to do this kind of thing for a while, but never completely. For example, we could easily run an apex class after refresh to protect the data, but if field history tracking is enabled then we’d still end up being able to view the original values. We can turn off field history tracking via the metadata API, but then the original data is unprotected for a short while, which means we have to stop everyone logging in until we’ve taken care of all this, which is another brick in the wall. Something that takes care of all this under the hood is a great improvement.
According to the Salesforce Developers blog post, Data Mask will be generally available “next month” which at the time of writing means December 2019.
3. Open Source Lightning Base Components
50 odd of the Lightning Base Components have been open sourced, with more to come. Initially this will be interesting to understand the implementation details and see if we are anywhere near the standard approach. The Github repo makes it clear that contributions are not welcome right now, but I’m sure in the fullness of time they’ll open up the firehose and have to deal with a torrent of pull requests.
If you don’t see your favourite component in the repo, that means it isn’t open sourced yet. Don’t panic, it’s a work in progress.
There’s a Trailhead for that
In the continuing story of Trailhead eating the world, the developer and admin keynotes had a call to action in the form of a trailmix:
One More Thing
The theatre sessions weren’t recorded this year, just the breakout sessions in Moscone West, so if you presented a theatre session, you can replay it for your local developer group without too many people having a sense of deja vu.
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