Dreamforce: Salesforce App Cloud Roadmap

Today at Dreamforce 2015, James Ferguson and Jim Rivera, product managers for the Salesforce App Cloud (Platform), gave a tour of what’s new for the app cloud platform and a peak at where they are placing their biggest bets for the coming year.

From security to performance to mobile services, Salesforce App Cloud continues to power businesses with new and advanced features for all your customer and employee apps, they said.

Five areas of focus:

1. Lightning UI Mobile
2. Security and compliance
3. Integration and Data management
4. Configuration and Admin
5. ALM and App development

UI

They are rolling out a huge new revamp of the UI. It changes how things work. It’s a much more modern interface that takes advantage of the browser. The lightning app builder initially focused on mobile, but it will support tablet and desktop.

New stuff

• Drag and drop when building a page
• Still supports the same metadata
• Still have the old page layout editor
• Components are at the heart of Salesforce1 but will now be out on the app exchange
• Biggest change is what they call Lightning out
  • Allows the components to be a part of someone else’s page
  • Had been tied to the browser but Lightning was built from the beginning to embed anywhere
  • Showed a Chatter feed on SharePoint, PHP page, and Heroku
• Key components
  • Trustworthy / secure
  • Platform agnostic
  • Living
  • In other words, it’s not just a style sheet. It’s a whole design system about how the apps behave.
  • Available in Winter 2016
• Mobile app has some enhancements
  • Will support offline. Will be able to cache data / content
    • in Winter 2016
    • Want to support the spotty network problem vs the completely offline

Security and Compliance

A lot of customers are using Salesforce in new ways. They are starting to store more business-critical or sensitive data.

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Themes include:

1. Trust Service
2. Heroku Enterprise
3. Salesforce Shield

Trust Service

The dashboard gives you easy-to-understand insights into your security posture. It also gives you a security health check to start. You can customize your own level of security.

• They have had an audit trail for a while. Now have a setup audit trail API to build your own reporting, etc.

Heroku Enterprise

You can control your own trusted network in the cloud. It includes:

• Private spaces: your own private network in your Heroku applicaiton
  • Lots of controls for you
• Selectable regions: You can control where to deploy it globally
• Integrated Identity: can share the identity across a variety of vendors

Salesforce Shield

There are three main components:

1. Platform encryption. It encrypts your data.
   1. Original product for encryption was not very robust and limited platform capability. Search didn’t work for example.
   2. This is meant to seamlessly protect data at rest. When it’s used elsewhere, it’s pulled and decrypted.
   3. It’s natively integrated with key Salesforce features.
   4. Easy to setup via admin console
   5. Can use customer managed keys
      1. It’s a derived key with seeding info from tenant and HSM
      2. Key only exists in memory and is never stored on disk
   6. Available Summer 15
2. Event Monitoring
   1. In Pilot now
   2. This is about exploring event data with admin analytics Wave app.
   3. Allows you to understand how people are using encrypted data
      1. What was downloaded and stored
   4. Has pre-configured dashboards but is customizable
   5. Starting to change the architecture
      1. First gen was opportunistic
      2. Now going beyond logs and streaming it
   6. It’s near real-time and queryable
   7. First events
      1. Log-in forensics
      2. Data leakage detection
      3. Apex transaction limits
3. Real-time security actions
   1. For a subset of events, can define a condition
   2. When condition is met, can define some actions
   3. Just beginning but will expand
4. Field Audit Trail
   1. It’s about data integrity
   2. Can now raise limits on the field event tracking
   3. Can track 60 fields per object
   4. data retention going from 16 months to 10 years

Integration and Data Management

This will include:

• Lightning connect allowing you to model external objects in Salesforce
  • Now can bulid screens and list views as if it were in Salesforce
• APIs focused on mobile apps
• Big Data: want to manage large amounts of data on Salesforce
  • cuts down on having to pull it off and processing elsewhere

Lightning Connect

• Now have full read write capability on external objects
• Winter 2016
• Building a connector for Salesforce orgs
  • can tie two orgs together without having to copy it over
• Support for customer report types
  • can report on it
  • Pilot in Spring 2016

API

• Reducing round trips via batching and tree saves
• all about speeding up the transactions
• Tree saves. Let’s say you want to update a new account
  • to do the update is a gyration of create account, create case, etc.
  • Now just a nested call
• eTag support to avoid update collisions
  • Concurrent updates are now better supported

Big Data

• Salesforce has had a challenge in dealing with billions of records
• Running batch Apex across your org can cause things to slow down
• Introducing a new object type called BigObject
  • read only data
  • similar to SObjects
  • backed by HBase but looks,smells, and behaves like an object
  • scales to billions of records
• SOQL lets you query the data
  • doesn’t work so well with very large data
• But now have Async SOQL
  • Lots more capabilities
  • will tell you when the data set is available
• Data Pipelines lets you define your own map reduce jobs
  • integrate and join data ses
    • point of sale data, metrics, and join with contact records
    • Use pipeline for this
    • Can also use to pull off data into wave data sets
  • In pilot now

Configuration and Administration

• Lightning Process builder and visual workflow continues to be enhanced
  • Made progress with cross-object workflow.
  • now called super COW
  • can manipulate child records within process
  • schedule processes
  • visual workflow gets more investment with modern interface and richer support
  • supports parallel paths in workflow
  • Getting workflow and process builder closer together
• Platform actions
  • Used to be easy to do platform actions
    • then added mobile, chatter, etc.
    • Bringing all actions together
    • Can define an action and use it anywhere
    • We will all learn to love the actions bar
• Custom Schema
  • Picklist enhancements, no longer takes an insane amount of time to come up with a list
    • Now it’s a picklist infrastructure
    • Create one picklist and use on 1-n different objects
    • supports more than 150 values
    • can restrict the picklist
      • cannot add a new value
    • available Winter 2015
• Custom Metadata type
  • pulls data with description
• Admin and sharing
  • Winter and spring
  • spent a lot of time trying to make locks more granular
• Sandbox
  • rolled out sandstorm infrastructure
  • faster to create sandbox copies
  • easier to kickoff tools and monitor the data
  • long term want to take infrastructure and let you do sandbox to sandbox copy
    • lots of claps there
• Deployment tools
  • provide SOQL access to all metadata
• Version Control and packages
  • Looking to support their own version control system instead of Github
  • Looking to get rid of unmanaged packages
• Platform debugger
  • and caching. Lots of caching behind the scenes. Developers can control the cache.
  • big thing for developers
  • Just keeps getting better

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