This year, I did not have the opportunity to go to San Francisco to attend Dreamforce. But as Robert Gustafsson says when he plays Tony Rickardsson: “I’m not bitter!” (I am well aware that this reference doesn’t make any sense what so ever if you have not been watching Swedish television). I’ve been to the conference several times before, but this year I regret that I did not go. I have therefore done my best to follow the conference at a distance. In this article I summarize the highlights experienced at almost 9000km away.

During the last few years, chatbots have become a major topic in the discussion about finding ways to improve our customer interaction. The customers we work with haven’t seen the need to implement bots for any business processes before, but in the last month, multiple clients contacted us to ask about bots and how they could implement and use them.

Bots are becoming more interesting, because businesses are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in business software, consumer software, and appliances. A great example of this is that most of us already walk around with a chatbot in our pocket — Siri, Alexa, or Cortana.

When you frequently work with web-based applications, such as Salesforce, you may run into small things that annoy you. It might be that you work in multiple environments—such as a sandbox for testing and development vs. a production environment—and occasionally get them mixed up. By mistake, you may make changes to a production environment that were intended for the sandbox.

One way of fixing this can be to use extensions in your web browser. These can be small, meant to tweak one specific problem, or toolboxes than can greatly increase the overall functionality of your web browser.

Dreamforce is over. It went quickly this year. I met a lot of people and had tons of fun! I discussed and shared ideas with people from all over the world. My takeaways from the conference is mainly lightning with it’s components, connect and process builder. I will revisit these in future blog posts. The new APEX debugger will be interesting to look at when it’s released. The announcement that the agile tools will be released as an AppExchange package is also really interesting looking forward to investigate this package in more detail.

The Salesforce platform is great when you want to quickly build applications because it will give you a lot of functionality for free. As a developer on the platform, I have often worked on building real-time integrations on other systems. These are usually implemented by writing a web service call out from a trigger. The platform requires you to write test code that should have at least 75% line coverage. This is, of course, a great opportunity for us to write proper test code.