Dreamforce 2010 is right around the corner and the exitement is building. But — why? What is all this excitement about? Is it Bill Clinton? Is it Stevie Wonder? Will it be the plentiful and no doubt excellent hors d'oeuvres?
All that will be great, but it's not why people will trek half way around the country or the world to spend 4 days with 20,000 of their soon-to-be-closest friends.
People come for the content — lots and lots of content. Don't believe me? Search YouTube for Dreamforce 2009. There's the keynote, sure, but there are also sessions. Lots and lots of sessions.
I'm very excited about the sessions I'm helping out with this year. They represent a portion of the Developer track. Click here and here for more info about the developer experience at DF10 and then click here to see all 75 developer track sessions.
Note: this post will cover just the intro track — I'll post about intermediate and advanced sessions (including Chatter and JQuery related) in another entry.
Have you heard about Cloud Stock yet? No??? You know what to do.
Intro track sessions are designed to be broad but not deep — we'll show you what the technology can do, common use cases, sample code and where to get more information. If you already have a basic understanding of the technology and want to go deep into a small part of it, try one of our excellent Hands On clinics. Dreamforce Links assume you are registered. Use the public agenda builder to see them all.
Intro to the Data Model — I'm leading this discussion of how to get the most out of the Force.com data model. You'll learn about what makes the Force.com database special and how you can take maximum advantage of it. Dreamforce Link
Intro to Force.com Code (Apex) — Mark Sivill and Doug Merret, two rock star SE's, are leading this session. Mark is the force (get it? force?) behind Force.com Labs' Salesforce International Mapping with Google as well as Chatter Weather with Yahoo Weather. He's a rockstar coder. Dreamforce Link
Intro to Force.com Pages (Visualforce) — I'm leading this session about how to get started using Visualforce as well as a discussion of common use cases. We'll build some great examples, talk about some opportunities for quick wins, and some concrete things to watch out for. Dreamforce Link
Intro to Force.com Sites — Our excellent product team will be leading this session, and showing you how you can run your website on the Force.com platform. It will cover initial setup, basic security, and data integration. Dreamforce Link
Intro to Workflow and Approvals — Sidd Singh from product management will be leading this survey of one of the platform's most powerful features. Sidd will cover common use cases, setup and best practices. Dreamforce Link
Intro to the Web Services API — Technically Quinton is running this session, but I'm excited about it so I'm adopting it for this post. There's a lot of great stuff in the Web Services API and this session will cover most of it. Speakers include the excellent Alex Toussaint who as far as I can tell knows more about API based interaction than any one person should. Dreamforce Link
These are just a few of the sessions. As I said, I'll post links to more over the next few weeks. Two that I'm really looking forward to is Developing Apps with Salesforce Chatter featuring Jonathan Hersh, the brain behind Chatter Combo Pack (and a lot of other apps) and evangelist Aish Shukla, and Developing Apps with JQuery featuring the inimitable Jason Venable and Javascript rockstar Josh Birk.
Oh — and Force.com Labs will have a couple of great slots at the Force.com Lightening Forum. 3p on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Stop by to hear what's new.