My Top Picks London’s Calling 2017
I wanted to share my top pick of things to see and do at London’s Calling 2017. However, as I looked through the agenda I realised that picking 5 or even a top 10 would be impossible. There isn’t a session on the agenda that I don’t want to see. The quality and variety of the sessions is the reason I love being an organiser of this event.
After a few hard choices, I decided to highlight some of the top themes of the day.
In case you are still haven’t hear about London’s Calling it is the largest Community lead conference for Salesforce professionals in Europe. It’s taking place on 10th Feb 2017 at Skills Matter, London.
The Keynotes
This year again we have 2 Keynotes, so even though it is only one day we get to have double the thought leadership. Anyone who has see Peter Coffee speak before will know how thought provoking his observations are. I am super pleased he could join us again this year to share more insights and wisdom. As you may have heard me say before “I could listen to him speak all day”
We are also very lucky to have Belinda Parmar OBE, Founder and CEO of The Empathy Business. Belinda has been published in the Harvard Review and has delivered multiple TED Talks, confirming that she has many “ideas worth sharing”.
The Empathy Business has developed the world’s first empathy index, measuring empathy levels in the biggest companies. In the latest article in the Harvard Review Belinda explains that businesses that rate highly on the index can see up to double the amount of growth compared to those rated the lowest. This is going to be a great session from a pioneer who challenges the norms in one of the trickiest areas of business leadership, that of creating and nurturing a positive culture. It reminds me that businesses are run by people and people thrive where they are looked after.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is a hot topic within Salesforce now, especially with all the announcements at Dreamforce 16. We have 2 great sessions on Salesforce Artificial Intelligence by international members of the Salesforce Developer Relations Team. Dave Carroll will set the scene early in the day by giving everyone an enlightening tour of AI, covering what it is and why it’s relevant to you and your enterprise. Then René Winkelmeyer will follow with a talk on Predictive Vision with Salesforce Einstein, discussing how to create and train models with your own data. There will be lots of point-and-click and some source code. In fact both of these sessions will have practical examples, so If you want to know more about Salesforce Einstein this is the place to be.
Analytics & Marketing — The Emerging Clouds
The Analytics Cloud and Marketing Cloud are relatively new additions to the Salesforce family.
Having implemented and spoken about Analytics Cloud, I have found the Wave platform an great tool for enabling business users to gain insight, especially around unstructured information (ie. insights from outside of the standard reporting).
For those new to WAVE we have Tom Ward giving a session on getting to grips with the foundation of the tool. We also have the Director of Wave Product Management, Skip Sauls providing us with a glimpse of the future by showcasing how you will be able to extend Wave’s capabilities with automation tools like Process Builder and Apex.
We also have a great ‘Getting Started’ session on Marketing Cloud by Chris Zullo. This is currently where I spend my days so I am pleased to see more and more Marketing Cloud sessions & resources appearing. I hope this will open the door for more and more sessions on these emerging Clouds.
Implementation Skills & Methodology
This year we have 9 talks that fall into this category. It is great to have so many Salesforce experts sharing best practises and their experiences. Topics include Agile practices, Technical Debt, engaging with new Stakeholders, challenging resistance to change, navigating the build phase, what Execs are looking for and dealing with failure.
The talk that immediately jumped out at me was ’The Worst Decisions Ever Made — Celebrating Failure’. Not everything goes to plan, and what I’ve learnt is that it is not what happens but how you deal with it that counts. When the recordings go live this talk will be first on my list. It is so good to hear about people’s real life experiences.
If you are looking for a list of experts at a quick glance check out Phil Walton’s Top 25.
Lightning Experience & Lightning Components
There are Lightning talks for Admins & Developers, regardless of if you are already on your Lightning journey or simply wondering where to start.
For those just starting their journey, join the session on Migration to Lightning by Fabrice Cathala to see where this technology could fit in for your business.
If you are transitioning to Lightning Component development don’t miss Barry Hughes sharing his experiences on How to approach Lightning Component to deliver requirements overall reusable solutions.
If you are just starting to get to grips with JavaScript then don’t miss Anup’s session where he will shares 10 best practices for the new world of JavaScript Frameworks and building snazzy Lightning Apps.
This year we also have some workshop session including My First Lightning Component, Lightning Locker Service and Building a Responsive website.
Wrap up
So as you can see there is no way I could have chosen just 10. I hope I have given you a flavour of what’s to come, please check out the agenda in full because the line up really is so good.
If London’s Calling is anything like last year, I won’t get much chance to see the sessions during the day, but I will be going back to this article and working my way through the recordings.
If you see me on the day, please feel free to say hello and let me know what sessions you are attending and enjoying.
See you soon!
