I don’t know if anyone would believe me, but once upon a time I didn’t care for travelling. Now you can’t stop me. The start of this week finds me in Bulgaria at the Developers Group (via a local narrow-gauge railway, above, courtesy of wonderful host and Community Group Leader, Borislav Borisov); it’s a great way to see and understand the world. Of course, as I get older, I realise how little I know, but every little helps!

Whilst I step on another plane (I’m taking a rather indirect route back to Amsterdam), you can read more on:

• 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 originally published on LinkedIn.

Salesforce News

Salesforce continues shopping

Acquisitions typically take around 2 years before the first results start to be shown, so we’ll have to be patient to see the results of this investment, but I’m definitely excited about Salesforce’s acquisition of MapAnything. It’s a great product and does everything from route-mapping for deliveries or even sales visits to an IoT device location tracking. What feature might make it to the Core? More details on the announcement here.

Changes ahead for nonprofits

For many years I have been a little bit confused about the relationship between Salesforce.com, Salesforce.org and the Salesforce Foundation but, as of 15th April, that list will be shorter and a lot clearer, with Salesforce.org being bought by Salesforce.comfor $300m.

One of the important things to note is that the 10 free licenses that most nonprofits get will not be affected; after those 10 licenses, no one yet knows. There will definitely be changes within Salesforce because of this, and Megan Himan MVP has a great article about the likely impact, including many potential positives.

Community News

The next Amsterdam User Group is on 22nd May and this time we’re focusing on the Sales Cloud. I think it will be a first for us(!) Despite that, there’s going to be no sales people presenting; it’s all about how Salesforce Administrators can help the Sales team. We’ve also got the lowdown on territory management and forecasting, with real-world examples.

Wondering who usually comes to these events? Well, lots of Amsterdamers (50/50 split between life-long people & newer arrivals). Around 20% will be popping their heads in for the first time. From experience I can promise they’ll be a wide selection of administrators, product owners, marketing cloud peeps and developers. It’s a wonderfully mixed bag, with everyone there to learn, network and have a bit of fun.

n.b. There’s plenty more that’s happening for Developers, Marketeers, Nonprofit and Women in Technology (WIT). Check out DutchSFCommunity.org for the schedule!

Company News

Campaign Cloud

Sorry for the large graphic, but it does accurately represent what Campaign Cloud is about. It’s our newest offering, which streamlines all the admin tasks regarding media campaigns management. What has particularly struck me – beyond the time saved by freeing up people from admin work, and the awesome ability of our developers – is the cost savings already achieved in reducing billing errors by having a fully automated process. No more copying of financial numbers, with the inevitable human errors, clunky hacking of Excel documents or looking for the right version of a document! As an aside, sometimes these sorts of errors aren’t identified for months until billing occurs, and then trying to fix the resultant issues is significantly harder.

The Next Web

Last week my colleagues were at The Next Web, which is an annual technology conference; taking place in Amsterdam. This year it was at NDSM and 15,000 came(!) As well as talks, workshops and demos, it was a great place to learn, get inspired and network. Some stand-out ideas include how the police use speech recognition technology, a startup focused on tracking your cat and a Dutch-developed and designed unmanned aircraft used for delivering aid, and “everything in between”. To be honest I feel I’ve missed out, and have reserved TNW into my diary for 11th and 12th June 2020.

Sign up for Cloud Integrate’s mailing list to read about more in our full report on the event, which we’re now in the process of typing up, but in the meantime I leave with this, from the welcoming speech: “There is a free WiFi but if you can’t figure out how to access it, the ferry is in that direction”(!)

More next month – tot ziens!

Paul