Dreamforce ‘16 Report — What’s coming in Wave

DF’16 is done and dusted. It’s my first time here, it was excellent and exhausting. I found the value in DF wasn’t the keynotes, you can just watch those at 2x speed on youtube anyways. There were amazing smaller sessions.

Wave is maturing, there are some important additions on the way.

What I learnt from the Wave Roadmap session -

Beyondcore/Wave Einstein Predictive in Action.

• BeyondCore as Wave Einstein. This impressed me big time. It’s still a separate product that is branded to look like Wave, it’ll fold in sometime soon. Check out the 14 day free trial on their website www.beyondcore.com. Beyondcore will go through all your data and give you automated insight. You tell it what you’re trying to maximise, ie. Maximise Revenue. It will then farm through the data and tell you insight about what is contributing. It will then tell you what you should do to maximise Revenue — like run a certain promotion that typically contributes 20% extra revenue. You can then create a wave app from the insight. It’s impressive. It looks like it’ll be an extra licence.
• Huge Improvements to data manager — “click augmentation”, and visual dataflow customisation is coming, they demoed this and it looks to be far easier to build the dataflow. It will also tell you which fields are duplicates and value distribution, warnings etc. This should make it one step closer to not having to edit dataflow in JSON.
• External Connectors to AWS, Workday, Marketo etc.
• Compare Table improvements continue to close out gap with Excel, including giving more recipes for windowing functions.
• With the 202 Release (Winter ‘16/DF Release), Flex is Generally Available. You can annotate/comment on dashboard components. For instance if an end user notices something wrong with the data, they can make a comment on the dashboard and it will clip an image of the data with usual Chatter functionality of being able to @mention your BI team.
• Alerts are also available now — you can set a threshold on a widget to get alerted. eg, when this widget goes above $100 please send me an email.
• Wave What If Analysis is coming sometime
• Wave Commentary — this I assume is powered by Beyondcore but Wave will tell you in a sidebar in natural language what is happening, with predictive insight. Eg. “Your sales are down 21%, mostly due to low performance of the X100 product sales that typically account for 40% of your revenue. If you continue with this trend you will not reach your target for FY16, falling about 12% short.”
• Wave Encryption At Rest is in pilot. Shared key management with Shield.
• Advanced Analytics — linear regression and other stuff I didn’t understand.
• Wave Chat Bot for mobile, predictive for mobile — This is natural language processing through a wave chat bot. You can ask “what was my sales for QLD this month?”, and it’ll come back. You can also ask predictive questions “Will I reach my target this year”.

• Beautiful new charts — My favourite chart in the world, the Bullet Chart, is coming, along with a few others. I assume we’ll see new charts each release. Bullet Chart, Box Plot, 3d Chart, Radar were all demoed.

Some new Charts. Not sure why the Matrix chart is there though…

• Wave Everywhere — Lightning Events will interact with Wave. As well as Wave Apex SDK, execute Wave Queries from Process Builder. Lightning and Wave will have cross capability.
• Full Sharing Interface inherited from Salesforce — no longer will the role hierarchy be flattened and Manual Sharing be a pain in the ass to configure. Wave will sync the sharing interface from Salesforce, and not transfer through dataflow, it will be a realtime sync.