Connected Force

This month I would like to write a blog about Salesforce, also because I just became a certified salesforce administrator.

Salesforce is a very easy-going enterprise application for mainly CRM system. 80% of the system is configurable, and with AppExchange, lots of templates and solutions are ready for download and use.

I highly recommend the salesforce training, which is free and very well structured. You can follow trailmix and learn step by step for a specialization. During the trailmix, you will complete badges, super badges, and projects. Each unit is not too big and learner can build up the confidence to go along the journey. I enjoyed earning super badges very much, due to it is assignment based challenge typically takes 6-8 hours to complete. It can be stressful if you are stuck in the middle of somewhere, but heyy do not forget we have google, there are many of others has been through this and shared their experience! With the completion of a super badge, you will receive 5000-6000 points, that will be a real happy moment!

For example, below is my overview after 3 weeks 🙂

Salesforce user is called Trailblazer, there are many cartoon characteristics makes the company feel easy-going and young, if you are interested in the cartoon’s meaning, here you go: Astro, Codey, and Friends. Never forget that Salesforce engages in organising many community events for users or certain group users, like admin users, it’s also amazing to observe such an enterprise company can engage with its users in such an easy and relaxed way.

Based on my observation this month, there are two areas in Salesforce where I found not perfect yet.

Firstly, the structure of the functionalities in the application is not very easy to follow anymore. Due to the fast growth over the past 20 years, Salesforce started with CRM system and grew to a platform basically can do everything. During this journey, 2 versions of salesforce are running in parallel – Classic and Lightning. I think Salesforce planned to transit from classic to lightning, but due to any reason it is not yet fully managed, some functionalities still require to switch to Classic to use. On a micro level, a functionality, for instance -workflow- Salesforce has 3 tools to do the same, each new tool has a bit more functionality compared with the earlier tool, not sure why Salesforce did not choose to release a new version of the same tool instead.

Secondly, Salesforce Einstein claims to have AI capability, however, the reality seems that it is restricted in the area of analytics. It is powerful in connecting data sources internally and externally, as well as reporting and building dashboards. However, there is no sign indicating the system is learning from users’ feedback (so-called feedback loop), which is the key element in machine learning, thus I do not count it is intelligent. Looking forward to the future Einstein!