October Sneak Peek:

Automation Architectures

Published in

Salesforce Architects

3 min readOct 1, 2020

This is the first in a new series of monthly preview posts, sharing a look at resources and content coming in the weeks ahead. October 2020 is all about what automation means, from an architect’s perspective.

Why automation?

The topic of automation is everywhere right now. As our companies, customers, and teams all adjust to a new world, there is colossal demand for everything to be virtual. Executive stakeholders expect architects to deliver on this imperative, and automation is at the center. Automation is how we evolve the way business is done.

But what exactly is automation — especially in the enterprise?

In a Salesforce context, we most likely think about business process automation, marketing automation, sales automation, service automation. Architects (like myself) who have a background in industrial engineering and manufacturing might also think of robotics. Architects in FinServ, HLS, and insurance might think of automating card replacement requests or balance inquiries. Architects in Higher Ed might think about automating change of Major requests and other parts of the student or faculty experience.

Regardless of the specific use cases that come to mind for you, the resources we’re sharing are all about enabling you to choose the right tools, capabilities and design patterns to orchestrate complex processes across different systems in your landscape.

What’s ahead this month?

Automation in multi-cloud scenarios:

Reopening Campuses with Work.com on Trailhead Live — This session is for architects who want to learn more about how Work.com objects and automations can be used and combined with other Salesforce Clouds to help educational institutions reopen safely.
How to use Marketing Cloud to Build Your Own Page Redirects for Salesforce Survey Links — Leverage Cloud Pages, AMPScript and JavaScript to improve survey experiences.
Heroku Multi-Org Integration Strategy — Build unified business processes and reporting for your enterprise across multiple Salesforce instances.

Design considerations for performance, high scale and availability:

Architecting for Event-Driven Engagement — Learn how to evolve from traditional app designs to event-driven architectures that scale elastically across systems with Salesforce.
Data Model Design Considerations When Building Salesforce Applications — A two part series on how to design a data model that will meet your current requirements and support an evolving future state.

How to build systems that reduce complexity for end users:

The Next Normal Demands a focus on Jobs to be Done — Learn about a powerful methodology that can help you build systems that result in truly great customer and employee experiences.

We’ll be updating this post with links, as each of these resources go live throughout the month.

What can I do now?

Here are some resources that are ready for you to explore now:

Architect Decision Guides: Forms & Record-Triggered Automation — Understand how to combine different tools to automate logic on the Salesforce platform.
Designing for High Volume Reads in Salesforce — Your automations are dependent on data. Learn how to ensure that all requests are responded to in a timely manner.
Adopting Business Units in Marketing Cloud — Organize your data and business functions correctly to set up successful marketing automation.
Fishing for Einstein Chatbots — Get started on initial case triage process automation with Chatbots.
Trailhead: Choose the Right Automation Tool — Salesforce provides multiple tools to automate your organization’s repetitive processes. This Trailhead module can help you choose the right one.

Stay connected with us and this topic all month long:

Drop a comment to let us know what you think about this monthly theme and sneak peek format.