Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Reportedly Hints At No Digital Dreamforce This Year

Benioff also said he’s not sure how much longer he’ll run the company, according to a report.

Few expect large-scale live events to resume anytime soon due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but most major tech companies have shifted their important conferences to virtual formats.

Salesforce, however, might just opt to entirely forego Dreamforce, the industry’s largest and most star-studded affair, in any form in 2020, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff told The Information in a report published Monday.

In April, Salesforce formally canceled the massive event, originally slated for Nov. 9 through 12, that last year drew 170,000 registered attendees to San Francisco, and likely tens of thousands more who didn’t register. At the time, the Software-as-a-Service giant said it would hold an online virtual event instead.

[Related: 5 Key Takeaways From Dreamforce 2019]

Salesforce also canceled Tableau Conference 2020, its business intelligence and data visualization subsidiary’s annual conference that attracted some 20,000 attendees. Tableau’s conference, scheduled for Oct. 5 through 8 in Las Vegas, would also go virtual, the company said.

“Dreamforce is obviously a critical brand for Salesforce, but there’s no Dreamforce this year,” Benioff told The Information.

He went on to say he’s no longer sure the live event will be replaced by a digital format, the tech news site reported.

Silverline, a leading Salesforce channel partner headquartered in New York City, has been working with Salesforce in recent months as its ecosystem marketing system pivoted to focusing on digital conferences, Kai Hsiung, Silverline’s chief growth officer, told CRN.

“From that perspective, we’ve been eager to see how a virtual Dreamforce could take place, with Silverline supporting it with all our digital marketing capabilities,” Hsuing said.

But if that too gets canceled, “it likely won’t have much impact to Silverline overall,” he said.

Silverline instead would focus marketing resources to various Salesforce go-to-market initiatives, and just “look forward to an in-person event in 2021.”

Benioff also told The Information he’s not sure how much longer he will run Salesforce, the company he founded in 1999 after leaving his position as the youngest vice president in Oracle’s history.

“I advise others and I advise myself the same thing, which is I have an open mind to all possibilities, and whatever is the right thing going forward, I will do,” Benioff said, according to the report.

The Information also reported that Mike Micucci, who led the Salesforce e-commerce and community collaboration businesses, has left the company.

Salesforce did not respond to requests for comment on any change in Dreamforce plans.

Now Powered By Lightning UX Framework, Salesforce Community Cloud Upgrades Its Digital Experience

Salesforce is enhancing its Community Cloud to empower partners to design more vibrant, highly customized portals for organizations looking to better engage customers, employees and their own partners.

In its two most-recent releases, and one coming later this year, the CRM leader is "extending the digital experience," making design and branding a core component of the platform used for deploying self-service online communities, Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Community Cloud, told CRN.

Salesforce is focused on giving systems integrators the ability to use pre-built templates, components, and themes to address needs of customers in specific verticals looking to engage diverse audiences, Rosenman said.

[Related: Salesforce's AppExchange Updates Technology Partner Program To Promote Cutting Edge Capabilities]

Salesforce introduced Community Builder in 2015, a product taking a templatized approach to launching community portals. Last year, Lightning Bolt (pictured) provided a framework for building portals and community clouds faster with reusable components.

Those capabilities undergird this year's series of Community Cloud upgrades.

The Summer release of Community Cloud added CMS Connect, a tool for integration with most popular content management systems, Rosenman said.

"Now they can leverage existing investment in a CMS system and create personalized experiences for whoever is viewing this content," she told CRN.

Before that, Salesforce introduced the ability to target specific audiences with unique content. The next release in the winter will go further by enabling dynamic creation of custom themes that display branding geared to customers or partners accessing the Community Cloud portals, all guided by CRM data, Rosenman said.

Those upgrades, for example, could allow a vendor to deploy a channel portal with content and a user experience that discerns between partners in different tiers or geographies, she said.

Partners told CRN the user experience-oriented upgrades are timely as Salesforce integrators increasingly adopt Lightning Bolt as their approach to building reusable templates and components specific to the industries they specialize in serving.

Eric Scheel, CTO of Magnet360, a Minneapolis, Minn.-based partner, said introducing the Lightning platform to Community Cloud prompted a major transformation continuing to take shape with the latest releases.

"Features like audience targeting, those are features that allow us to continue down to that one-to-one journey level, create a much more tailored experience," Scheel told CRN.

But the real transformation underlying all those upgrades is the Lightning UX framework supplanting VisualForce, another user-experience framework, as the preferred means of constructing Communities through Salesforce.

Salesforce in its latest releases has been peeling back restrictions on how much customization is possible with Lightning, he said.

"We're only building Lightning Communities going forward, not building traditional VisualForce communities," Scheel said. "Don't have to anymore. Can do this all through Lightning."

Yoni Barkan, director of global solutions and innovation at Appirio, a partner headquartered in Indianapolis, said "packaging user experience and design components with the underlying workflow and business logic and objects" is an entirely new approach to deploying online communities with Salesforce.

"Lightning Bolt gives us the capability to package this up and quickly deploy it to customers," Barkan told CRN.

The audience targeting and dynamic theming upgrades will further enable partners to offer Community Cloud variations customized for specific users, including brand experiences that adapt to different audiences.

"Generally speaking we are getting a lot of traction and interest in Salesforce Communities and Lightning Bolt solutions right now, especially when we leverage the newer design capabilities," Barkan said.

Enterprises don't want entirely off-the-shelf solutions from their SIs, he said. Community Cloud increasingly allows partners to showcase their industry expertise and leverage pre-built components as accelerators, he said.

BM Education: Rethinking exams: Open-book format

Bangalore Mirror Bureau / Updated: Jan 3, 2024, 06:00 IST

Open-book exams put less demand on memory

A committee of experts has recommended to the state government the consideration of introducing open-book exams in undergraduate courses to alleviate the fear associated with traditional examinations. In response to a student’s tragic suicide following a cheating incident, the government formed a committee comprising vice chancellors and educationists to propose potential measures, with open-book exams being one of the suggested options. A source said, “This could be one of the possibilities for making students ready for exams. Let’s see what the government has to say about this.”

The CBSE also contemplated incorporating open-book exams, intending to provide case studies in advance rather than allowing books inside the exam hall. The open-book section, carrying a 20% weightage, would feature questions based solely on the provided case studies in subjects like biology, economics, geography, and one additional subject. The aim is to move away from rote learning and foster a deeper understanding and application of concepts.