Summary of CzechDreamin 2024

It happened a month ago and I finally found time to go through all those great presentations to learn what I missed during the day. What a long list of learnings.

Selfie time
  • Charly and her recommendation for 1 badge per day to embrace continues learning and growth mindset, specialize and say „yes“ aka embrace challenges;
  • is DevOps about tools or about approach? And your tests tightly coupled to database or just mocking things?
  • backup tools – are they all the same? What a great overview of the tools out there with their short comparison;
  • great screen flow demos;
  • Scale Center – something I want to try and learn more about;
  • how to design knowledgebase;

It could be at least two days with longer sessions 

  • how to lead a great workshop (because it is different to meeting) – whiteboards with sorting and voting, meeting notes, breakout rooms. Definitely something I should still improve;
  • customer journey mapping was a nice seque including the process-driven approach for good architecture – when properly mapped it is so easy to design the solution later on;
  • framework for custom approval process – my head was just spinning from the presentation, pretty heavy (and most likely really useful when you have the right need);
  • how to enhance email campaign delivery process – surprisingly it is also about folder structure, snippets and templates but also about knowing your data;
  • did you have an idea how many use cases AI in Salesforce supports?
What Product Owner does
  • the history of Astro – what a great video we had chance to watch!
  • CTI and comparison of several solutions;
  • CPQ and where is the right fit for it;
  • how to measure and improve adoption of the system and why is it important;
  • traps of integration with flows – coupling, async path, tokens;
  • successful interviews – as I’m just interviewing people it is interesting how small details can make difference (and go/no-go for interview);
  • browser extension for SFMC and how to develop them;
  • Slack and Salesforce flows – too easy to integrate it!

I love the business topics this year, it was not all 100% IT related, I would keep this initiative and add even more from the commercial perspective

  • SOQL and advanced grouping of data – it still amazes me what is even possible with a few extra words in SOQL query;
  • quiz about data sharing – CTA learning paid off;
  • Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics – how to configure it so you can understand what is going on;
  • how to do online presentations better;
  • how to use CRM Analytics to calculate data and push them back to Salesforce;
  • best practices looks like they work;

Can we fit in multiple keynote speeches into one conference? 😀 I absolutely loved this years one

  • flows and guest site – what about hashing the IDs for added security? Plus much more;
  • 7 sins of project management – communicate early and often, don’t be afraid of long risk log, set expectations, don’t flirt with scope creep and a few more;
  • great features of Financial Services Cloud;
  • tips for business growth with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement;
  • and much much more.

420+ people joined us for a day full of learning across 6 paralel tracks, for 50 % of them it was first CzechDreamin (shocking ratio for us!) and 50 % of them were from abroad (awesome that Prague draws them so much). Weekend spent wit a trip to Kutna Hora to enjoy some traditional place in Czechia.

People taking their own pictures

I enjoyed my challenge during the welcome speech to speak just in sentences of 4 words. Great challenge on short notice, surprisingly hard, feedback I’ve got was, that people really tuned in to understand what I want to achieve (and hopefully remember more).

No photo booth this year, which I didn’t miss personally, but we involved FYFT and Škola improvizace to provide some relaxing activities to attendees. Traditional coffee by The Miners and tea provided by Meetea, the whole catering run by Zatisi Catering and for dinner we got some extra from Kuchařky bez domova.

FYFT equipment

Plenty of great photos taken by our photographers, a lot of new connections made, plenty of memories.

Will we be back next year? The team said loud YES! and we will share more details after the summer. Stay tuned till then.

The whole team including volunteers
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Salesforce v Česku s Martinem

Dva roky si povídám s lidmi kolem Salesforce a tohle tady ještě nebylo – Martin (Vágner) se rozhodl, že by bylo fajn se dozvědět víc o mě a tak mě vyzpovídal. Díky za to, hned si nepřipadám tak hloupě, jako kdybych se rozhodl vyzpovídat sám sebe.

A o čem jsme se bavili?

  • tom kdo jsem;
  • jak jsem se dostal k Salesforce;
  • CRM pro neziskovky, které mi pomohly k rozvoji;
  • Trailheadu;
  • CzechDreaminu;
  • úspěšných a neúspěšných projektech – koukám na vás Zdravotní klauniCEELI;
  • tajných zdrojích pro Salesforce CTA a Salesforce MVP;
  • jak proniknout do Salesforce;
  • které certifikace mi nešly a že je to normální;
  • budoucnosti Salesforce;
  • generačních výměnách ve vedení firem;
  • mém LinkedIn postu o náboru lidí (který je mimochodem pořád aktivní a snažím se spojit se všemi, kteří projevili zájem);
  • Slacku, Tableau a dalších produktech včetně nových rolí, které se v ekosystému objevily;
  • networkingu, komunitních skupinách a konferencích.
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Do surveys in a seconds – SurveyVista

During the CzechDreamin conference and after we always want to get some feedback. Historically we used Kahoot for that, but with the pricing they invented a few years back it wasn’t really possible anymore. So for the last a few years we used AhaSlides, which worked really nice, had good pricing and looked good.

This year we got as a sponsor Ardira, the company behind the SurveyVista application for Salesforce. As part of the sponsorship we could use the app to collect all the feedback.

At first I’ve been scared, becaused they offered a few hours long workshop to help with the setup and I was like – cannot I just install in and use in 5 minutes?

Luckily that’s exactly how it works – you install the package, create a new survey with all its question in easy to use interface, which allows you to specify all those different types of questions, make them mandatory or allow to put comments. And if you fancy you can go deeper, style their appearance, link them in between and conditional show, make some scoring of the whole results based on answers and much much more. Automatic progression to next question if you can select just one answer and many many more small tricks included.

What’s important is all those things which „just works.“ One of them is the anonymous collection of answers, where you just spin up a new community/experience site, some simple and well documented configuration of permissions and you are good to go.

I didn’t find a way how to guide users throught the questions – as you can do in Kahoot/AhaSlides but obviously I didn’t look well enough as the quiz functionality is available as well.

Of course you can link it to Salesforce records, do automation and all those things we take for granted.

There was one task I didn’t look forward to – make sense of the data, meaning creating a dashboard which would show me the answers. Luckily that’s again something available out of the box, which you can open directly from the survey and you see all the answers in appropriate charts to understand the answers.

Final statements? What a great product, even though it was totally new to me, I had to install it in our org and do all the configuration from scratch – it was as easy as with AhaSlides and allowed me to achieve more.

Small downside I realized when sending the final feedback form? It looks like you cannot create one screen with multiple questions, such as collecting name and email on one screen. But that’s really just a minor thing and I didn’t spend much time trying to figure it out.

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37 Improvements in Summer ’24 Release Notes which catched my attention

Summer '24 Release Notes Logo

The Summer ’24 release is here, I’m in a train to Berlin = great time to read the release notes and see what useful is there and what mandatory changes we need to implement. I’m offline so cannot test things out, but let’s see what I need to test and what is just good to know about.

  1. Verify default no-reply address – I hate these no-reply addresses but you have one in SF and from Winter it has to be verified, otherwise SF will not send any emails from the instance;
  2. the „Create a new record“ functionality in lookup fields now use dynamic forms (if set up) instead of page layouts;
  3. new domain for setup – if you have some restrictions on which sites you can access on the internet, add salesforce-setup.com into the list;
  4. with the cookies blocking on the horizont there is a new setting in My Domain to use first-party cookies;
  5. in-app reminders for SF admins if MFA is switched off – well, why not;
  6. the SLDS (Salesforce Lightning Design System) has been updated for bigger contrast in focus state (when button is selected) and you cannot turn it off;
  7. Search Manager, which is finally generally available, looks like a great thing – you can set which objects should be always searched (not just those which the user is typically using), looks like you can limit in which fields in will search (that would be interesting if the user can access it but it won’t search there) and much more. Surprisingly you can set it up on a per profile basis, where is the move to permission sets?
  8. looks like the new Analytics app, which has been introduce a while back, will allow you to create a collection of reports and dashboards and then insert them as a group to Lightning page;
  9. better reporting on Data Cloud records;
  10. if you have the edition with Generative AI you can create a summary and row-level formulas with simple language and it’ll generate the formula for you;
  11. User Access Summary looks like a great page, where you see what specific user can do in  a glance. Ditto for where public group is used. Or what is enabled in Permission Set or Permission Set Group without clicking through all those screens;
User Access Summary
  1. User Access Policies will simplify the creation of new users (or change of their position) as you can specify the rules (up to 200) based on which they will get assigned permission sets, package licenses or public groups. One task less for the admin (I hope);
  2. blank spaces on Dynamic Forms plus conditional visibility of tabs (finally!);
  3. looks like everyone will get Einstein to explain and fix syntax errors when creating formulas (in fields and validation rules);
  4. Apex Cursors (in beta) looks like something which can make developers excited when working with large data volumes;
  5. REST API, external Id and ability to only update records (previously it was always upsert);
  6. users are automatically freezed in a sandbox, if they didn’t logged in within 60 days of its creation – I mean they still have .invalid email anyway, so cannot get in unless you update it, right?
  7. flow and checking for existing record before creating a new one – I would expect that I can just trust the duplication and matching rules but it looks like you need to specify it in the flow;
  8. keep important appointments scheduled in Field Service – previously you could manually pin them, now you can specify criteria (beta);
  9. add buffer for time travel estimates (beta), surprisingly it is a single number only, not percentage;
  10. link assets to multiple accounts and contacts – one of the popular scenario during CTA, curious to see it in real life;
  11. NFC support in Field Service mobile app, ability to create an LWC which will capture the layout of space (on iOS only using the lidar) or measuring things;
  12. check-in/check-out times via the geolocation;
  13. create quotes directly from the Field Service mobile app, no need for the standard Salesforce app for that;
  14. Buyer Relationship Map which will visualize the org structure, just enable it. And it can help you find detractor on your opportunities, which are blocking them;
  15. Autocreation of contacts via Einstein Activity Capture with their contact details prefilled from their email signature. And you can specify when it should be create – immediately or after specific number of interactions;
  16. personal labels – not sure I get the extra benefits compared to Topics plus they look completely different and takes more screen space. But hey, users can specify them only for them and not to mix with others;
  17. Conversation Insights looks super interesting to monitor when is in the communication on higher level and aggregate it;
Conversation Insights
  1. Sales Planning looks like a feature which will allow you to easily integrate data from additional sources (paid);
  2. disabled fields in screen flows, when you just need to show the value;
  3. less „Next“ in flows as you can have actions on screen which will update the screen with additional details;
  4. when debugging scheduled flows you can set on which record it will run!
  5. only active subflows will be run, not the latest version (that was a big surprise time to time);
  6. Automation Lightning App – something I need to try as it should show flows in a better way. Plus it will allow you to organize them based on category and subcategory, naming was probably not enough;
  7. limit who receives notification about certificate expiration – it isn’t connected to other permissions but has a separated permission. Yes, I do have one client, where it spams the whole company once a year and sadly they had to have this permission;
  8. Einstein Studio Insights (paid) which will help service agents predict how quickly they will be able to save case;
  9. Threading tokens were always used only for cases but now you can use them in Apex Email Services for any object that supports activity tracking;

Not bad. Not as many as I hoped, but still some interesting things (in a bold) which I will communicate to my customers.

What is your top new feature? And did you check what others found?

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Securing Salesforce Digital Experiences, Matt Meyers

Securing Salesforce Digital Experiences, Matt Meyers

Surprising how a book can scare me. As a Salesforce CTA I obviously know everything about the platform and its security, still Matt was able to scare me in a few first pages.

… presenting at local Salesforce Dreamin’ events, informing people about my story and showing them how a hacker performed this attack. During each session, I polled the audience to better understand their awareness of Salesforce security in general. To my surprise, I found most people were overconfident about the security of their Salesforce implementations, and only a select few even knew about this type of attack.


When a few releases back Salesforce started to limit the guest user capabilities I wasn’t happy, as probably a lot of people. We probably overused it on a few projects as a way to give unauthenticated users an extra set of functionality, starting it with ability to add and later update records in SF or just query some extra records, where the full authentication wasn’t really considered as a must and worth the money.

Blocking API access, closely monitoring which objects we giving the access to and we felt save. Untill I read this book.

Additionally, there is an option on the user profile called “API Enabled” that, when disabled, blocks all external access to these APIs. This is what we did in our case. We had “API Enabled” turned off, so as far as we knew, no one could access the data via any APIs.

Salesforce Lightning Experience, which is the user interface that powered our Salesforce Digital Experience portal, used a significant number of microservice application programming interfaces, or APIs,  to display the data and user interface layouts. Salesforce did not document these APIs, as they were not designed for use directly by Salesforce’s customers.

Undocumented API, which works even when the API access is disabled? AuraEnabled classes, which means that anyone can freely call them? Grouping methods in a classes in a functional way instead of which persona should be able to use them – maybe that’s another reason why Salesforce restricted guest user to access classes unless specifically given permission.

The book is short but intense, the intro chapter lying out the story of data leak is scary, the solution looks surprisingly short and easy even though I understand it had to be a long and intense week to fix things up. And a tons of bonuses including video how you can test your site or description of all relevant settings you might want to consider when setting up the Experience Cloud.

Overall recommended reading which you can buy from Matt directly. And the related article at the Cactusforce is great read as well.

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