5 Northeast Dreamin’ Sessions Admins You Don’t Want to Miss

Northeast Dreamin’ is the premier Salesforce User conference in the Northeastern United States and happens annually in New Hampshire. If you’re not familiar, Dreamin’ events are small regional Salesforce conferences that take place around the world. So you would expect informative sessions, but I was blown away by their lineup. If you were there, you know what I’m talking about. If you missed it or want a recap, here are my top 5 sessions with key takeaways from the event.

Architect Like a Pro: Using the 5 W’s from Primary School by Roger Mitchel

The 5 W’s, who, what, where, when, and why, are fundamentals commonly forgotten in the business world today. You can understand a lot by getting back to the basics, like do we need to build out these custom objects, or would it make more sense for us to just add a few custom fields to the already existing and well-functioning standard objects?

• The importance of the 5Ws in architecture
• Factors to consider in the ‘Who’ aspect of architecture
• Considerations for constraints and goals in architecture

Escape the McAdmin Trap by Jodi Hrbek

This session was a great lesson in slowing down and changing how you approach customer requests. An important reminder for all admins, but I would say especially for more junior-level admins such as myself. Instead of just doing what the client tells you, dig deeper and develop a better understanding of the root issue they are trying to solve. Then supply them with the best solution for their problem, even if it is not what they asked for.

Key Takeaway/Other Tips: Dig deeper and understand the real reason behind your customer’s request. The best way I have found to do this is to understand the business they are running, and how their request can benefit their business.

Other Tips:

• Provide a realistic timeline for when the request can be satisfied.
• Don’t give them what they want, give them what they need

Resources from the Presentation:

https://www.sfadminbook.com/

Career Planning for a GPT-Enabled SF World by Ian Gotts

AI is the hottest new thing on the block, and whether we like it or not it’s here to stay. As Admins, we can leverage it to bring more value to our customers and make our lives easier. Prompt engineering was a major point of this session, learning how to talk to GPT and manipulate it properly is key to adding it to your arsenal and enabling you to achieve things in more efficient ways. The prompt engineering cycle tracks prompts usage and performance, refines prompts, monitors prompts for drift, and notifies of prompt dependency changes. What does all this mean? Well, say you have a model that you have trained to spit out average monthly temperatures in Boston. You can continuously hit it with the prompt asking for the averages, but if one of the runs tells you that it was 85 in December, that means your prompt has drifted.

• The results are only as good as the prompts you provide them with
• Delegate work to GPT, do not abdicate, for example, I would use GPT to write a validation rule with a few exceptions to speed up my work, and I would check it to be safe.
• Gain BA Certification, by gaining the Salesforce Business Analytics certification you understand the business and technology side deeper, allowing you to better use the new tools

Resources from the Presentation:

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/trails/get-started-with-ai-data

https://elements.cloud/blog/gpt-requires-salesforce-skills/

A SF Admins Guide to Data Modeling for Scalability and Performance by Brian Shea

Understanding the data model is critical to being an effective admin, it would be wise to take some time to sit down and analyze your organization’s data model to become familiar with it. Creating a data dictionary is a great first step in this process. What is a data dictionary? A data dictionary is essentially a giant spreadsheet that has all of your Objects and subsequent fields, detailing what they are and how they relate to each other. Knowing how everything works under the hood will make your life easier on the day-to-day, as well as when you want to add things.

• Create a database dictionary
• Use prebuilt data models when possible
• Have a solid data retention policy

Resources from the Presentation:

https://architect.salesforce.com/diagrams/framework/data-model-notation

https://architect.salesforce.com/diagrams#framework

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSD999TQTzU

Straighten Out Your Flows- How to Unravel Your Loops and Improve Performance by Eric Smith

Flows flow flows! Salesforce’s favorite way to automate things, and with good reason. Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish they’re almost at parity with, if not better than code. But if you’re relying on loops and updating large batches of records, you’ll hit limits– fast. Not only do you hit limits, but there are just better and more efficient ways to go about solving that problem, such as what was suggested in this session: use invocable actions. Invocable actions are elements that you can add to your flow that allow you to add apex code within the flow itself.

• Use invocable actions
• Reactive Screens, a new feature that allows you to pass outputs from one component into another on the same screen
• Understanding how DML limits relate to Flows

Resources from the Presentation:

https://unofficialsf.com/understanding-invocable-actions/#:~:text=The%20Invocable%20Actions%20mechanism%20allows,Action%20Strategy%20Builder%2C%20and%20more.

https://unofficialsf.com/list-actions-for-flow/

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