Tuesday 4 January 2022

2021 Year in Review - Part 4


Testing. Testing. 1..2..3 (and more) Lateral Flows

The theme of the last few months of the year was testing. Not the fun kind involving mocks and setup/teardown, but the unpleasant kind that required shoving swabs up your nose. The picture everyone wanted to post on social media had changed from a selfie to a negative result!

It was all worth it though.

October

The London Salesforce Developers were back in person! This felt simultaneously wonderful and very weird - seeing three dimensional versions of faces I'd only seen on screens for 18 months took a little bit of getting used to. I also got the opportunity to meet in person a bunch of graduates that I'd been training up for the last few months!

The theme of the meetup was a quick run through some of the interesting features from the Winter 22 release that had gone live earlier in the month. We kept it pretty light though, as most people just wanted to network. 

Bret Taylor was apparently telling everyone he was going to be promoted to Salesforce CEO soon. He wasn't wrong, but as it turned out wasn't right either.

November

Back to back in-person events for the London Salesforce Developers, as Rob Cowell presented a cracker of a session on Integrating AWS with Salesforce. There was also a dog, which made it pretty much perfect for me.


And the biggest news of the month, for me at least, BrightGen was majority acquired by Credera.

December

Just ahead of the Omicron variant, the Xmas Megameet of the London Salesforce Developers, Admins and Women in Tech took place on 6th December.  

After months of rumours it finally happened, although not exactly as some were expecting, Bret Taylor was promoted to co-CEO of Salesforce. He was also took over as Chairman of the Board of Twitter. Not a bad week's work by any measure.

Dreamforce made it outside of San Francisco, although sadly for those of us in Europe it was only to the other side of the US in New York. The safety aspects of this were taken extremely seriously, and held up as an example for everyone else. And launched as a product - Dreampass. What with the reimagined work.com in 2020, the acquisition of Slack and now Dreampass, Salesforce have certainly maximised opportunities during these pandemic times.

What Does 2022 Hold?

More Covid cases for sure - the numbers continue to rise rapidly in a number of locations including the UK. Work from home is again the advice, so I'd expect the first couple of London Salesforce Developer meetings to be virtual again. Hopefully three months of in-person softens that particular blow!

I can't see Salesforce resting on their laurels with regard to remote work, so I'd expect more in the way of acquisitions to establish themselves as a player in this space. Videoconferencing still seems like an obvious addition to the product set, and it will be interesting to see if (and how) Slack is further integrated  into the Salesforce UI, given that it will supposedly replace Chatter.  Half of employees say they may quit if remote work goes away, so there's plenty more opportunity in this space I feel.

Two things are for sure, there will be three further releases of Salesforce in 2022, and if there is a major outage it will be in May!

Whatever happens, I'm sure I'll be banging on about it on here or Substack. Thanks for reading!

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