It’s the End of the World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

So, I sit here in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis, killing time before my red eye flight takes off from SFO. Another Dreamforce has come and gone, and once again salesforce.com put on an amazing show. From the Monday night pre-dreamforce meet ups and greet ups right to this morning’s final sessions, Dreamforce was a business conference masked as a rock concert festival for 45,000 people…

So, what were my personal highlights for the conference this year? Here are my top five, while I sit and await my flight home.

1) The Community Conference, a keynote and a set of sessions for the salesforce community and/or ‘new to’ attendee was an amazing success on Tuesday morning. The keynote was standing room only, as the present and future of the salesforce community was laid out, and eight community members were honoured by being named as the Summer ’11 MVP’s. Along with the keynote, two hours of breakout sessions centred around how the community works, how to get the most out of dreamforce and even some ‘Answers Live’, where people could come with their questions they’d typically post on the community site and have them answered right then and there. If you use salesforce, and are asking ‘What community???’, I’d recommend you visit the salesforce community and see what it’s all about.

2) The layout for the keynotes this year was new and worked very well. Marc Benioff has a penchant of wandering while he speaks, and the new setup up, fanning out almost like orchestral seating made the session much more intimate than last year’s setup, allowing more people to be closer, and possibly have Mr. Benioff wander by. And I’d be remiss to say I was excited to have a received seat, an honour given to me as an MVP (I even got to shake Marc’s hand during the show). But much more important than the layout or my plush seat placement was the new features announced. Salesforce’s main focus was ‘Social Enterprise’, and it’s main goals to tie salesforce into the social data of external applications such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as new social features of Salesforce Chatter. Many new features extending the social enterprise were announced, as well as mention of many other features that were quietly announced via the slide deck being shown. I will post a blog about this one point early next week, after all of the dust settles and my brain (and body) are not exhausted.

3) The keynote closing speech with Google chairman Eric Schmidt was absolutely wonderful. This now ranks second in my Dreamforce keynotes with industry or world leaders (the talk given by Cisco CEO John Chalmers still resonates with me- one of the few life changing moments I have had via speech). The setup was similar as to previous keynote in the same vein, with two chairs for Benioff’s and his guest in a fireside chat format. However, Mr. Schmidt’s candor, openness, analysis and guidance for the future and his clarity and intelligence were breathtaking. Don’t take my word for it? The salesforce channel on YouTube now has it up – you can watch (or repeat) the discussion by searching ‘Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote’ on YouTube – I will post a link when not running on simple wifi, as I work off…

4) My new iPad. I did not own an iPad prior to my departure to Dreamforce, and I am heading home with one. What company had the contest? I do believe it was Merced Systems, but that is not the important part. The part that is important is that I won. an. iPad. Very, very happy about that!

5) Finally, the new layout for the Birds of a Feather luncheons was a great step in the right direction. Birds of a Feather (BoaF) have been run for some years now, but in previous years, you chose a role on registration, and you sat with people in similar roles. This year, a chatter group was created where people could post their desired topics, and based off of votes and repeats, the BoaF table topics were chosen. When you got to the BoaF session, a resource from either salesforce.com or community would moderate the discussion. Moderating when I could, I found the new setup with topics instead of roles to be an excellent improvement as well as a hit with the crowd.

So there are my five highlights of Dreamforce from my eyes, as blurry and tired as they are. And while I had an absolute blast this year, as the song (and blog title says), “it’s time I had some time alone”. Taking the redeye back to my lovely wife and children, going to enjoy a few days recharging the batteries and see my hooligans off to school before work beckons on Tuesday. Next week, I will be doing blog posts on the new, upcoming features of the Winter ’12 edition of Salesforce, as well as one on ideas I have on how to make the already awesome Dreamforce even more awesome. Until then, safe travels and rest to all Dreamforce attendees, and enjoy the Labour Day long weekend.