Dreamforce ’23 Architect Track Recap
It’s been just over a week since Dreamforce ’23, and we’re happy to have already received a lot of great feedback about the sessions in this year’s architect track as it shows that our content has really been resonating with our audience. The Architect Relations team worked closely with subject matter experts both within Salesforce and throughout our ecosystem during the weeks and months leading up to Dreamforce to ensure that we were putting together the highest quality architecture content possible. Let’s take a deeper look into the types of content and sessions that we offered:
Architect Keynote: The Future is Well-Architected
The keynote focused on how to apply Well-Architected principals to AI + Data + CRM Parker Harris, Co-Founder and CTO and Zayne Turner, Senior Director of Architect Relations kicked things off by recognizing the architects who make up the vibrant Trailblazer community, including the 4500 Well-Architected workshop participants and users who access content on the Salesforce Architects website from 138 different countries. To further support our global audience, we made an announcement that Well-Architected is now available in Japanese. We also announced a variety of new website features, including the ability to search and filter items in the Template Gallery and our Generative AI Starter Kit.
The keynote focused on the three pillars of Salesforce Well-Architected:
- Nicole Holmes, Certified Principal Enterprise Architect, talked about how Trusted solutions protect data and stakeholders and demonstrated how architects can use tools like the Einstein Trust Layer and Scale Testing Service to make their trusted.
- Marc Braga, Senior Director, Well-Architected, talked about how Easy solutions deliver value fast and showed how architects can use Data Cloud Smart Mapping, Prompt Builder and more to make their solutions easy.
- Zayne Turner talked about how Adaptable solutions evolve with the business and discussed ways that tools like our new Generative AI Lifecycle Templates and Einstein Copilot can make solutions adaptable.
In addition to our lineup of amazing speakers and demos, our newest addition to the Architect Keynote was a segment called Architecture Corner. Susannah Plaisted, Lead Evangelist, Architect Relations interviewed the architects who build our products during live white-boarding sessions to show an in-depth at a three different products and concepts:
- Scale Center Architecture under the hood with Karishma Lalwani, Senior Director, Technology
- Differences between Data Cloud and CRM (core) Architecture with Jeanine Walters, Principal Architect, Software Engineering
- The AI Feedback Loop with Atul Kshirsagar, Principal Architect, Software Engineering
The Architect Keynote concluded by celebrating Nadina Lisbon, CRM Enterprise Architect at Netapp. Nadina is an amazing architect who is an amazing architect, CTA, co-leader of the Salesforce Architects Community Group in Frederick, MD, Dreamin’ In Color Conference Conference Organizer and Speaker. Nadina was awarded the coveted Golden Hoodie.
The feedback we got about the keynote included comments such as: “This was the best Keynote I’ve ever attended. Real information. Real demos. Best practices. No fluff. All real. I was so happy. More like this!“ If you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, you’ll definitely want to check it out on Salesforce+.
Architect Theater Sessions
While there wasn’t a dedicated Architect Theater this year, there were 29 theater sessions for architects that ranged in topics from Business Value Alignment to Hyperforce Security. The majority of our theater sessions had standing room only crowds and many attendees stayed to have further discussions with the speakers after the sessions ended.
If you missed our Well-Architected Quick Start Theater Session, make sure to check it out on Salesforce+.
Well-Architected Workshops
Community members who are part of the Well-Architected Ambassador program hosted workshops in the Architect Vista. Architects who were already familiar with Well-Architected workshops from previous events still got to experience something new as we introduced new workshop content that dived even deeper into the framework and included new patterns and anti-patterns related to AI and data architecture. These workshops gave attendees the opportunity to get hands-on with these and other Well-Architected concepts like governance and maintainability.
There were 40 available seats in the Architect Vista and not only was every workshop completely full, but attendees were lining up for them 30 minutes ahead of time. Most of the people who weren’t able to get in still stood behind the ropes to watch and stayed in line to make sure they’d be able to get into the next workshop.
If you didn’t attend Dreamforce in person or weren’t able to get into one of the workshops, no worries! We plan to continue hosting them at future events and we’ll also be making the workshop content available to our Architect Community Group leads later this year so that they’ll be able to host workshops during community group meetings as well.
Conclusion
Dreamforce provided a great opportunity for our community members who serve as some of the most trusted advisors in the ecosystem to share their knowledge with others. The crowd sizes and engagement were strong indicators of the quality and demand for the topics we covered. Some of the initial feedback that We’ve heard from our sessions is that attendees walked away with information that they’ll be able to put to use right away, which is exactly what we were hoping for.
If you weren’t able to join us at Dreamforce, or if you want to relive the fun, check out this video highlighting some of the memorable moments:
