Now the dust has settled from Dreamforce 2023, James Melville, Chief Architect at Unaric, took some time to share his reflections on this year's conference, including how some of the latest announcements may impact Salesforce ISVs.
AI Innovations
You couldn’t miss AI’s presence at Dreamforce, it was referenced in almost every presentation. Salesforce appears to be ahead of the game here, and are doing a great job of trying to explain a very complicated subject and building customer confidence around the trustworthiness of the product. It feels like they've taken time to actually think about where AI can add the most value, and have separated themselves from the broader "look what I did with ChatGPT" movement that I'm seeing on social media. In addition to the focus on how AI will help development teams, it feels like Salesforce have really thought about how Einstein Copilot can support Revenue and Customer Success teams and how that ultimately impacts the customer experience.
I’m looking forward to hearing more on how ISVs can leverage the capabilities.
Packaging Enhancement
As ISV partners we’ve been awaiting the move towards 2nd Generation Packaging which has been coming for the last few years. Salesforce guidance is now that all publishers of 1GP packages should be at least using 2GP for their testing process, even if it’s not yet used for the final product. The roadmap claims that the migration path will be finalised and available in 2024. I’m excited to see how using 2GP with our 1GP products can accelerate testing cycles, prove its readiness (or provide feedback to Salesforce), and get us ready to reap the benefits of the functionality, including complex versioning and many major performance improvements.
Apex Announcements
The Apex Roadmap presentation also had lots of content for ISV publishers. The ability to trim vast amounts of security-related code from your app and rely instead on built in capabilities will simplify security review for so many apps. Additionally new features like zip file handling, DataWeave becoming generally available, and formula evaluation all solve gaps which I’ve seen repeatedly requested from products built on the platform.
ThrillFest by Salesforce Ben
There’s nothing like a bit of retro gaming to wind down after a busy day at Dreamforce (or prepare yourself for the FooFighters!) It was great to chat to a load of old and new faces at the party, play some arcade games, and spot our Unaric logo in 8-bit form on the TV screens! Shout out to Salesforce Ben for putting it all together!
Check out the Dreamforce '23 keynote if you didn't manage to catch it on the day.
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