Monthly Archives: May 2018

Hurry! Offer Expires at 11:59 PM Central Time, July 31, 2018!

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Want to Attend Dreamforce 2018, and Help Homeless Children at the Same Time?

If you had the chance to do something (that you do every year) and help a great cause at the same time, would you do it?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question, but do me a favor, answer it anyway.

My answer would be a resounding ‘Yes!’ I try to give back to the Salesforce community every chance I get. So I reached out into my network of connections in search of a pass to Dreamforce that I could auction off with the proceeds going to Project Night Night. I was very fortunate in that the first person I emailed replied back with a resounding “Happy to provide that for you.”

Today I’m thrilled to launch the 2018 edition of the “Attend Dreamforce, Help a Homeless Child” auction. The rules are pretty simple:

  1. Place you bid here.
  2. All entries must be received by 11:59 PM Central Time on July 31, 2018.
  3. The highest bid wins.
  4. Free pass covers conference registration fees only. All travel and other accomodations are the responsibility of the winner.

When registration for Dreamforce 2018 opens, the rate for a full Dreamforce pass will be $1,899.

One lucky winner will get a free pass to attend Dreamforce and many homeless children will get a NightNight pack from Project Night Night.

Please answer these two questions:

  1. Do you, or someone you know, still need a pass to Dreamforce, or want to save money on the pass you already have?
  2. Do you want to help children have sweeter dreams at the same time?

If you answered yes to both questions, please place your bids here. To see the current high bid, follow me on Twitter and search for #DF18PNN_HIGHBID.

The bidding will close at 11:59 PM on Tuesday, July 31, 2018.

If you happened to answer the first question with a no, please visit Project Night Night and consider making a donation.

Either way, please follow Project Night Night on Twitter and support their cause with prayers!

Thanks!

Come Celebrate a year of Salesforce Saturday in Chicago

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Special Guest Post by Mary Tagler.

Mary Tagler

For Chicago, it all started with a Tweet.

The lovely Jen Nelson asked who ran our local Salesforce Saturday group and the answer was no one. At the time, I didn’t know a lot about Salesforce Saturday, but the idea intrigued me and I batted the idea of starting one around. Then I went to TrailheaDX in 2016 and met Stephanie Herrera. Her enthusiasm is infectious; the doubts and hesitations I had about kicking off a Salesforce Saturday group in my hometown transformed into ideas and excitement. I came back ready to make it happen.

So what is Salesforce Saturday? Started in 2015 in Austin, it has become a global movement to motivate and inspire our current and future Ohana while strengthening our community spirit. Spending your Saturday Salesforce-ing might sound strange as many of us spend our weekdays immersed in the system and weekends are our time, but I honestly look forward to every single one. It excites me to laugh, collaborate, network, and learn with some great people. I am so pleased to see new faces, satisfied when they find the help they seek, and elated when they come back for another one.

Our Midwest Dreamin’ 2018 Salesforce Saturday will be our one-year anniversary. In that year, I’ve meet some wonderful people and deepened relationships with others. We also grew from one Saturday a month to two and excitedly participated in the first Global Trailhead challenge.

Summer is one of the best times to explore Chicago. If you’re considering extending your Midwest Dreamin’ experience into the weekend, we would love to have you spend some of it with us at Salesforce Saturday.

Register for Chicago Salesforce Saturday, July 14, 2018 here.

Join the Chicago Salesforce Saturday group on the Trailblazer Community.

5 things you might not know about Skyvia – Salesforce data integration & backup platform

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Special guest post from Alex Hirniy, Head of Skyvia Platform.

alex hirniy

Never heard of Skyvia? Here’s 5 things you should know to about them.

One: Skyvia is a product of Devart, a well-known vendor of a data connectivity solutions.

Devart is software development company with 20+ years of experience in creating the database tools for developers and administrators. The company has more than a dozen product lines and is trusted by over 40k of grateful customers, including companies from Fortune 100 and Fortune 500.

4 years ago Devart entered the cloud data integration market with Skyvia – at that time a simple Salesforce data loader tool. From that time the product has evolved greatly. Now Skyvia is a full-featured cloud data platform suitable for solving a wide range of business data-related tasks. Skyvia supports over 30 major cloud applications & databases and has over 20,000 of devoted users from companies of different sizes and industries.

(EFD – Are you one of the over 20,000 already using Skyvia?)

Two: All-in-one platform for a wide range of data-related tasks

Skyvia is an all-in-one cloud data platform with support for all major cloud and on-premise data sources. It solves a wide range of data related tasks, including no coding data integration for automating data workflows, managing data via SQL from web, exposing data as an OData endpoint, and protecting it via a secure cloud-to-cloud backup. Skyvia is an intuitive and easy-to-use web product that provides a convenient GUI to configure and automate your data-related tasks.

(EFD – Check out the supported data sources…it’s quite a list!)

Three: Easy Salesforce integration and backup

Skyvia’s goal is to automate routine tasks and data flows and save your time. It is a completely no coding solution both for IT professionals and people without any technical skills. You can use Skyvia to integrate Salesforce data with multiple cloud and on-premise data sources, ETL your business data to a database for archiving or analysis, expose database and cloud data via OData to access it directly from the Salesforce interface via Salesforce Connect, etc. All the integrations are configured in an intuitive UI and can be flexibly scheduled for automatic execution.

In addition to data integration, Skyvia platform offers a daily automatic backup for Salesforce. Skyvia stores your backups in a secure Azure GRS storage, and at any time you can restore your data directly from web browser in just a few clicks.

(EFD – Backups stored in Azure – wait a sec, that’s Microsoft!)

Four: We value our clients by delivering the best support

Skyvia team adheres to customer-oriented approach. We use best customer success practices in order to help our customers with on-boarding and assist should they have questions later on. Our customers address us the way they like: at our Support portal, via an online chat in the application, or just schedule a demo/on-boarding call with a technical specialist and management.

As a result, we help our customers to set up their accounts and solve even the most difficult scenarios quickly and seamlessly.

(EFD – The support portal looks similar to the Salesforce Trailblazer Community Answers forum.)

Five: Skyvia future plans

Skyvia’s mission is to provide a universal product for solving all the data related tasks in one platform suitable for companies of any size. We constantly improve Skyvia’s usability, performance, add support for more connectors, and we plan to significantly increase the number of supported cloud applications in near future. Customer satisfaction is our number one priority.

Currently, our team is developing a new product – a visual designer for automating workflows in a company and providing a true trigger-based integration. Find us in Facebook or Twitter and keep updated about our future releases and improvements, or try Skyvia right now.

(EFD – Check you their story, and be sure to check out the app.)

EFD – Thanks, Alex, for bringing the value of Skyvia to my attention and allowing me to share it with others.