Earlier in the month, I was one of around 30 who flew in from around the world, to Amsterdam, to contribute to the future of Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Success Pack. It needs a blog post all of its own, so in the meantime we have some April insights on the following themes:

• What’s the most exciting Salesforce news I’ve recently heard
• What’s going on in the Dutch Salesforce Community
• What’s the projects that I, and my colleagues, are working on at Cloud Integrate, which we can share with the world

This article was original published on LinkedIn.

Salesforce News

Summer 19 is already around the corner, as can be seen by the fine weather here in the Netherlands! SalesforceBen‘s latest article clearly explains the dates that will impact you (clue: 3rd May onwards for previews and 8th and 15th June for EU production environments). Release notes detailing the new features are expected to be out in the week of 22nd April.

The Education Cloud Consultantbeta exam closed earlier this week. I was one of the guinea pigs, and I could appreciate the thought that had gone into putting it together. Not sure whether I passed or not, and to be honest I don’t mind, as it was a useful learning curve and the beta was free. There are real-world questions in the exam, about priorities for both organisations and consultants – reinforcing the message that planning and setting aims are key, in order to have meaningful, tangible results and a successful project. Results are out at the end of May and, presumably, the exam will go mainstream too around then. ?

Community News

Congratulations to Sergey Erlikh on his MVP renewal. MVPs are Salesforce’s way of recognising the best of the best, and subject matter experts. There are fewer than 300 worldwide. If you want to tap his knowledge, two of the best ways are either to come along to the Amsterdam User Group (next meeting 22nd May), or to participate in the Amsterdam Salesforce Saturdays, which happen every other week and seem to involve a copious amount of tea, coffee and cake.

Yet more results are in. The full schedule for YeurDreamin has been announced! I’ve managed to not mention it so far in my Diary, so I’ll let on that YeurDreamin is an all-day conference where you can learn how to use Salesforce to the max, aimed at business users, administrators and developers. I’m proud to be part of the organising team. Anyway, the point is that a few tickets are still available, and when you see the quality of our international line up, you’ll realise why the YeurDreamin team expect to sell out very shortly.

Company News

We’re pleased to announce a significant upgrade in our application integration capacity. We are now official Dell Boomi partners. Dell Boomi is a highly scalable real-time integration solution, offering companies the opportunity to connect different systems (such as Salesforce, SAP and 50+ other resources) and accelerate cloud transformation journeys; by speeding up time to deployment and connecting siloed systems you can unlock the potential stored in your business and super charge your growth. If you want more information about what we can offer please contact Hugo Obertop.

Often when a new system gets delivered, the initial phase is “like for like”; management sees the benefits, but not always the end-users. We encourage clients to be brave but there’s a lot of learning to do, for all sides.

As part of our work to renovate Novagraaf’s quote process, we successfully delivered a Minimum Viable Product. Following user feedback, it was decided to postpone the launch to deliver time-saving functionality that will really drive adoption rates and increase the enthusiasm of end-users, so they can see what’s in it for them straight away. We’ve now added the ability to add multiple quotes in one click, as well as change the order they are presented in. The downside, the users are so impressed they want more new requirements before the go live!

More next month – tot ziens!

Paul