Zip Files, Life Sciences Cloud, OmniScript, ISV DevOps, TrailblazerDX and more

Zip Files in Apex

Ever since I started Salesforce development over 13 years ago, there has been one consistent thing you can rely on. No, not regular product naming changes, I mean great content from the one and only Keir Bowden a.k.a. Bob Buzzard. He has just written a great blog about "Zip Handling in Apex, Spring '24 Developer Preview" which covers what he could and couldn't get working and his first impressions.

I think it's good to see Salesforce improving the ability of the platform to handle different types of data, and uploading a zip file to process the contents has long been a bug bear for developers. I'm interested to see how far this gets pushed with heap size limitations still being a big factor in how much data you can process, but this is a good step in the right direction. I personally wonder if we won't end up seeing Salesforce provide some sort of new file store system utilising AWS S3 as part of the HyperForce updates. It would be great to push a file to a large storage area and it have an Id I can reference. The existing content and documents setup is too cumbersome for many use cases and often I just want to store an image somewhere and reference it. What do you think?

Life Sciences Cloud

I had the pleasure of working with Joe Ferraro whilst at Mavens, and whilst Joe is probably best known for the MavensMate IDE, he has recently moved to the Salesforce mothership to take up a role as a VP of Product for the Life Sciences Cloud.

Joe recently posted an update on what you can expect from this brand new offering from Salesforce in a short video you can see here. I'm excited to see what Salesforce come up with for this new cloud and how it will help bring together the various technologies Salesforce have on offer alongside the vast requirements for compliance and security in the life sciences space. I also love the openness and public engagement here from a VP of Product and how we are seeing more Salesforce PMs and VPs engage on their products and roadmaps.

TrailblazerDX

TrailblazerDX is just around the corner and the sessions look incredible. I sadly cannot make it but like others will be able to dial in and watch live on Salesforce+.

OmniStudio vs Flow

One of those areas I have never touched on Salesforce is the OmniStudio and OmniScript portion of the platform that was integrated from Vlocity when Salesforce Industries was launched. Nick Phillips. 🇦🇺 posted a great short comparison of OmniStudio vs Screen Flows you can read here.

After reading this comparison my interest has definitely been piqued and I have added looking into OmniStudio to my learning backlog. If you are an OmniStudio expert and have any resources to share please let me know!

ISV DevOps

As I mentioned last week, DevOps is one of those items that is top of mind for me at the moment and running my ISV Groundwork Apps and advising Aedon.Accounting I was intrigued when I saw this interesting conversation on DevOps for product development on Salesforce by Carl V. cross my LinkedIn feed.

The thread includes lots of great information and links to resources which I highly recommend you check out if you are interested in building a product on Salesforce.

Einstein Copilot Custom Actions Admin Blog

Salesforce Einstein Copilot is now out in beta and the team at the Salesforce Admins blog have a great new article to help you understand how to work with Copilot to create custom actions for copilot.

As more of these tools become available out of the box it will be interesting to see bot only what we can build to generate insights but also how we can use AI to help inform users around what they are seeing. A common problem I see in organisations is only understanding the "what" of a report or insight and not being able to see the "why", or even know how to find that out. If we can not only use Einstein to find out what is happening but also guide users to asking the right questions then we will truly see value.

I gave a talk at London's Calling on machine learning and AI a few years ago where I shared the following image:

This image shows bullet holes on planes that survived skirmishes and posed the question "where should be reinforced?" The answer is the areas with no bullet holes, as those places are where a bullet has hit a plane and it not made it home. This phenomenon, survivorship bias, is something I see a lot in users reviewing reports - they look at how successful deals closed for example rather than why lost deals were lost, and so they cannot improve win rate but just simply need more leads of a set type to improve their number of closed deals. Hopefully tools like Einstein can help us remove some of that bias when undertaking our analysis.

DocumentScanner Mobile Capabilities

Salesforce have also added the DocumentScanner API to LWC so you scan a document (such as a business card) on your mobile phone and extract information from it to then populate records.

There is a great blog breaking down how to do something like this which you can find here.

Thank You! 🙏 And weekly call to action!

Finally, thank you to everyone who read, liked, shared and subscribed to the newsletter and the first edition. There are already over 1000 subscribers in a week 🤯 Lots of people have messaged with support and offered collaborations which I am excited to be working on in the background to bring you some amazing new content.

I had been planning on doing this newsletter for a while, and so this week's call to action is to start the thing. Been meaning to try writing a blog post? Get started! Are you planning on reviewing all the old open Leads in Salesforce that need cleaning up? Start cleaning! Aiming to book that Salesforce certification test after a few more weeks? Book it now and set a deadline! Been meaning to reach out to a friend or family member you've not spoken to for a while? Make that call. Getting started for 5 minutes will help you get far more done than you thought possible.