Ranger Raj is Here !!!!!

On this ongoing learning journey to be a Salesforce Professional, Trailhead has been a great partner. I am not sure if without Trailhead it would have been possible to continue the momentum on this learning journey. Trailhead, not only provides quality content to learn about Salesforce but also about various other topics like culture, values, equality and some great lessons on Management, which I feel are essential towards being a Professional.

There are many e-learning platforms however the way Trailhead serves the content and gamifies it makes you learn and indulge much more than what you would initially thought of doing on the platform. Trailhead Ranking system brings in a sense of accomplishment each time you complete a badge and gradually you climb the ranking ladder from being a Scout (Starting rank) to Ranger (Highest Rank) while learning the cool stuff about Salesforce and other topics.

This week has brought that sense of accomplishment as I unlocked the Ranger rank while learning about Salesforce and attained 100 badges/50000+ points on the Trailhead platform. Hurray !!! Ranger Raj is Here !!!

Thank You Trailhead Team at Salesforce for building such an engaging learning platform. At Trailhead learning never stops and so will be my learning Journey on the platform. So, get set go and write down your goals and targets to unlock Trailhead ranks on the journey to be a Salesforce Professional. Happy Trailblazing :-)

Capabilities Enhancements through Community Groups.

Apart from Trailhead, a great source of learning and networking happens during in-person Salesforce Community Group Events. Recently, I started attending these local community events as part of my learning odyssey and I am amazed to interact with some passionate fellow Trailblazers who are eager to learn from each other and share their knowledge and experience about Salesforce. Recent two Salesforce community events that I attended were as follows:

Learn Salesforce with Bangalore Community (LSFBC) organized by Bengaluru, IN Administrators Group on June 1^st 2019

The event was aimed primarily for beginners in the Salesforce Eco-System as part of the Journey to Salesforce initiative and attended by around 65+ participants coming from diverse backgrounds looking to explore career options within Salesforce. Presenter for the Event was Kishore B T, Group Leader of the Bengaluru, IN Developers Group along with organizer Vedashri who is currently leading the Bengaluru, IN Administrators Group. In this first session in the series of sessions being planned, Kishore gave a 35000 feet view of the Salesforce along with various career options and learning resources available to anyone looking to build career in Salesforce Eco-System. With great simplicity and Products Lifecycle example of a printer company he took participants across to the entire Customer Journey of evaluating, buying and getting the product/services and on the way explained some important Salesforce concepts like Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Cases objects with live demonstration.

Audience too showcased great enthusiasm by asking questions and adding more to the example scenarios. One thing that stranded out from the event was that there is no dearth of passionate individuals to learn about new technologies and it was evident from the fact that couple of participants came from other cities by covering a distance of around 600 kms (355 miles). Overall, event was good for someone looking to start on the Salesforce Eco-System and I see that there is a follow-up activitiy by the group in terms of sharing a LSFBC - Trailmix 1 with the attendees which is a great way to help everyone blaze a trail.

Circles of Success with Salesforce Success Team & Session on Decoding Social Studio! Organized by Bengaluru, IN B2B Marketers Group on June 08^th 2019

Event was to share knowledge on the Marketing Cloud and was attended by group of around 15-20 participants. Pankaj Namdeo gave an overview on the basic terminologies used in the Marketing world with live demonstration of the Social Studio where event tweets were being live tracked/responded. Pankaj also showcased how analysis can be done easily out of these tweets within social studio to extract some vital information that is useful for marketing efforts. SK Samal and Maitri Arya from the Salesforce Customer Success Group also engaged participants with questions on user adoption challenges and shared some great insights on how to encourage user adoption of the Salesforce platform in the organization. Event was ended with a small and sweet online quiz by organizers Jagan NS and Reddi Prasad with swags for the winners. Also, it was great to see in person some influential trailblazers Shyam Nair & Ritika Bhargava at the event. Overall, the event was much appreciated by the trailblazers who got orientation to the Social Studio and understanding the basics of Marketing.

Trailblazer Community Groups is another great way to learn and build your network and there is always someone blazing trail through these groups. So, find the group nearest to you and start blazing the trails on the journey to be a Salesforce Professional.

Happy Trailblazing 😊

Week full of learning on Journey to Salesforce - #Journey2Salesforce

Previous week was full of learning and expanding my knowledge of the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Certification Days organized by Salesforce had a series of Webinars on Admin, Advanced Admin, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud Certifications.  Each webinar was approximately 6 hours long session with luckily some breaks in between:--) . Trainers on these webinars were certified Salesforce Instructors and left no stone upturned to ensure that important concepts & curriculum for the relevant certification is thoroughly covered and well explained.

I attended all the five Webinars (around 30 hours of learning) to ensure at least I get a high-level overview of each of the Salesforce Product or feature set being discussed in the webinar. While the focus was towards certifications however in between demos of the features were helpful to understand and get a real time experience on the functionalities and their potential implementations in real world.  After reviewing these products through webinars and some online exploration I have solidified my pursuit on the path for being a Salesforce Consultant (out of various job roles) as this relates to my current day to day job of being in Salesforce advisory and consultancy role as a Business Analyst. By virtue of these webinars, this week I am also meeting by organization Director to discuss about various Salesforce features that can be adopted and implemented in our business context. I hope he will be impressed by the suggestions and thought process around it. 😊.

Apart from these live webinars there is one another great learning initiative currently running in Salesforce Ohana and that is the Journey to Salesforce Program (#Journey2Salesforce). This program is meant for people looking to build career or transitioning their career to Salesforce Eco-system. Program seems to be well-designed and utilizes various trailhead modules with guided and well thought after six trailmixes along with mentorship opportunities and Ask Me Anything (AMA) webinars with community experts. I have completed my first trailmix on this program which was towards orientation of the platform basics, data model & basic customization on the platform and it was great to brush up few concepts which I have been reviewing from last few months along with an opportunity to build a Lemonade Stand App (my first app) 😊

Also, not to forget there are some great trailblazer community events lined up in my city in coming months and I have registered myself as a participant on these community events related to TrailheadDx Global Gathering, Journey to Salesforce (J2S) and Pardot. I look forward to learn and meet few new trailblazers during these events to continue on my journey towards being a Salesforce Professional. 

Happy Trailblazing 😊

My Inclination towards training & preparation for Salesforce certifications.

I read various posts and articles where people usually indicated their first encounter with Salesforce was either as an end user or being an accidental admin, wherein a Salesforce admin in the company left the job and some other employee was asked to fill that role and thus became Salesforce admin by accident. 😊 But, that is not how I landed up into the Salesforce world. My first encounter with Salesforce was as a Software Tester wherein having tested many business/web applications in my area, I was brought to a project that involved testing of Salesforce.

At that time, I would have never imagined that its such a vast application and a lot we can do with it to automate the business processes and that too with so much ease and without much coding 😊. Traditionally, I have been testing applications where there was extensive coding and each change had to go through the deployment and review processes and there were hardly any configuration-based tweaks that could have changed the application functionality at greater scale. However, Salesforce is totally different and there was greater power in configuration settings too and that way I started exploring more about Salesforce features and options (fiddling with Setup menu and object manager).  My Testing efforts also shifted towards verifying configurations & settings rather than doing bug hunting around boundary values and field level checks.

As days & months passed, multiple Salesforce stories and functionalities started coming under my to-do items primarily for testing sign-off to ensure the functionality works as it is intended and defects are fixed before releasing the same to end users.  These stories also started giving me exposure to various Salesforce terminologies and features like Workflows, Process Builder, E-mail to Case, Case Assignment rules etc. Gradually, I started liking this Salesforce exploration and this exploration journey expanded my role towards business analysis. I started providing inputs to developers & business and steadily started working to bridge the gap between business stakeholders and technology professionals with Salesforce platform being at the center of the conversations.

As a Business Analyst it is vital that you manage the stakeholder’s expectations as sometimes it might be overwhelming to over commit on deliverable within specified timelines. It is important to involve and take inputs from the development team who can help to assess the capabilities and limitations of the Salesforce Platform. Increasing your knowledge on the Salesforce Platform and keeping up to the latest developments/releases/features is essential to do justice to the job and offer value to the stakeholders. Thus, I started looking for some formal certifications & training around Salesforce to ensure I have the latest and relevant conceptual knowledge on the Salesforce Platform.

Luckily, I came across the post on Salesforce website about Salesforce Certification Days wherein Salesforce has been offering Free certification preparation webinars along with $70 discount coupon towards any $200 Certification exam.  As soon as I saw the post, I was game for it and immediately registered for the “Preparing for your Salesforce Administrator Certification” Exam Webinar as my first choice followed by others. Also, I enrolled for Journey to Salesforce program offered by Salesforce to gain knowledge and further upgrade my skills on the platform.

Learning is a lifelong process and with advent of Internet you are never far away from awesome learning resources/mentors, then be it anything you want to learn and get mastery/certified on. Salesforce provides immense free resources and opportunities and with these free resources in hand started my formal Salesforce Certifications Journey on path to be a Salesforce Professional.

Happy Learning. Let’s keep blazing the trails!

Salesforce - Certifications

By now we know Trailhead is a great place to learn about Salesforce however one may get overwhelmed with so much learning content available on trailhead and you may (or may not) face the “Problem of Plenty”. Looking at so much content that is available on the platform, one might wonder where to start and which all modules or trails to complete in the beginning.

The answer to this lies in what Job role you are planning to take up in the Salesforce world. There are plenty of trails and certifications recommended by Salesforce to support each Job role. This is where I believe Certifications can really help to follow a structured and guided learning path while you aim to pursue a job role.

It doesn’t matter if you are starting as a Salesforce Admin or aspire to be a Salesforce Architect, there is a  related certification/s and suggested learning path around it. Table below has the list of various Certifications offered by Salesforce.

Now the next self-assigned task for me is to pick my first certification and follow the learning path for the same towards the making of a Salesforce Professional. Hauʻoli (Happy Learning) 😊 

Administrators	Consultants	Developers	Specialists	Architects
Salesforce Certified Administrator	Marketing Cloud Consultant	Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder *	CPQ Specialist	Data Architecture and Management Designer *
Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator	Sales Cloud Consultant	Platform Developer I * $	Marketing Cloud Email Specialist	Sharing & Visibility Designer*
	Service Cloud Consultant	Platform Developer II	Pardot Specialist	Integration Architecture Designer $
	Community Cloud Consultant	B2C Commerce Developer		Identity and Access Management Designer $
	Einstein Analytics and Discovery Consultant			Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer $
	Field Service Lightning Consultant			Mobile Solutions Architecture Designer
	Nonprofit Cloud Consultant			B2C Commerce Technical Solution Designer
	Pardot Consultant			Application Architect (Credential is attained on completing * marked certifications)
				System Architect (Credential is attained on completing $ marked certifications)
				Technical Architect (Credential is attained upon completing Application Architect and System Architect levels and a Review Board)

Blaze the Trails on journey to be a Salesforce Professional.

I emphasized in my previous post about various Learning resources available on path to be a salesforce professional. Out of all these learning resources my primary choice has been Trailhead which was introduced to me in my first local Trailblazer Community Groups event by way of few goodies that included Trailhead and Trailblazer Community stickers.

I have been on Trailhead since November 04, 2017 and during this tenure I have slowly and steadily climbed to various trailhead ranks and currently ranked as a Mountaineer (working towards Ranger rank – the highest rank available as on date of this post). I like this gamification to Salesforce learning. It really keeps you motivated to continue further and take on hands-on activities/challenges that fetches higher points leading towards higher ranks. Behind this gamification you are ultimately learning lot of important salesforce concepts and also getting hands on exposure.

So, keep blazing the trails on Trailhead and move up the ranks and soon you will realize that you have climbed a mountain…. not really 😊…. but definitely you would learn a lot about salesforce.  

Here are those Trailhead and TrailBlazer Community stickers from my first community event that connected me to the world of Salesforce learning. These are pasted on my personal laptop and always remind me to keep blazing the trails and continue on the journey to be a Salesforce Professional. 

Time to blaze the next trail :-)

Salesforce - Learning Resources

In my previous blog post, I have indicated that there are plenty of products and services offered by Salesforce to serve diverse needs of the customers. Learning about each of these products indeed requires lot of time, effort and learning resources. So, the big question in mind is where to start as there are plethora of learning resources and also how does one gets access to the salesforce application for learning & experimenting. Well, for learners Salesforce has sorted this out by providing few great options as follows:

• Free lifetime Developer Edition (don’t worry it’s not only for developers/coders) It's a fully featured copy of the salesforce platform and can be created by signing up at: https://developer.salesforce.com/signup

• Free Online Learning platform known as Trailhead which has various courses (called trails) and combination of courses (called trailmixes). An interesting aspect of this platform is gamification of the learning wherein you earn badges and points to achieve higher ranks on the platform.

• Salesforce Certifications (Paid - unless you are lucky to win a free certification voucher by completing trails or participating in various salesforce/company events). Certifications helps you to add value to your resume and let the world know that you have mastered to an extent the concepts around a particular salesforce product or expertise area.  More details about salesforce certifications for various roles available at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/credentials/

• Trailblazer Community It’s a great way to learn and connect with other salesforce users who come here to share their problems and solutions while using the salesforce platform. It’s a very active and vibrant social networking engine which can connect you to plenty of people, resources, events and happenings in Salesforce Ohana (Ohana means Family in Hawaiian language, get used to some Hawaiian keywords like Ohana, Aloha etc.. as Salesforce uses lots of them may be due to its CEO’s deep connection with Hawaiian Culture…that’s how I read it somewhere 😊)

• Trailblazer Community Groups  There are many local groups formed in all the prominent cities/countries and Salesforce encourages and supports local connections to further nurture the Salesforce Eco-System by building local community groups. I got a chance to attend one of the local events in my city and was amused to see the talent and passion of individuals coming together to solve problems and share their knowledge. Free Goodies and an opportunity to interact directly with Salesforce leaders was indeed an icing on the cake. 😊

Looking at the available options, one thing is for sure that Salesforce is investing considerably to build and provide an eco-system towards democratizing the learning of Salesforce. I feel this is also one of the vital reasons for its success as one of the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System. It’s not that difficult to embark upon the journey to learn Salesforce when you know there are plenty of learning resources and a vibrant community available to help you solve problems and become a Salesforce professional.

Hauʻoli hele ana (‘Happy Journey’ in Hawaiian language. Courtesy google translator)

Salesforce - A Brief History and its Product Offerings

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce (also known as SFDC, salesforce.com) is world’s leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application hosted on the cloud platform. Salesforce is easily accessible from a web browser through Internet. Salesforce also has mobile application versions for both iOS and Android Operating Systems allowing users to access salesforce features on mobile devices.

History of Salesforce

Salesforce was founded in year 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. It has grown to become the world’s largest CRM company and in year 2018 reported earnings of US$127 million, with an annual revenue of US$10.480 billion. Salesforce ranked 285 on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States (US) companies by revenue with 29000+ employees worldwide.

Salesforce Products & Services

Salesforce has divided its products and service into various categories to support each stage of the Customer Journey as follows:

Category	Salesforce Product	Product Description
Marketing (Pre-Sales)	Marketing Cloud	Marketing Cloud helps build and manage marketing campaigns e.g. e-mail marketing, mobile messaging, social media marketing etc.
Sales	Sales Cloud	Sales Cloud helps in Sales processes e.g. Lead Management, Accounts and Contact Management etc.
Service	Service Cloud	Service Cloud helps in servicing the customers by customising support and help desk functions like Case Management, E-mail Support, customer self-service portals etc.
Community	Community Cloud	Community Cloud allows to build portals that connects employees, customer, partners and business processes to enable seamless collaboration.
Commerce	Commerce Cloud	Commerce Cloud allows to build great shopping experiences and channels for the customers.
Analytics	Analytics Cloud	Analytics Cloud helps provides business analytics through comprehensive data analysis & in-built artificial intelligence.
Others	Financial Services Cloud	Financial Services Cloud is a CRM offering targeted specifically for Banking, Financial Services and Insurance Industry.
Marketing (Pre-Sales)	Pardot	Pardot helps in customising and automating business to business (B2B) Marketing activities.
Community	Chatter	Chatter allows to create a social networking experience at an enterprise level.
Others	Salesforce IoT	Salesforce IoT helps to connect the internet of things (smart devices etc.) with CRM system.
Others	Salesforce Integration (Mulesoft AnyPoint Platform)	Salesforce Integration product was included in Salesforce products portfolio through an acquisition of a company called Mulesoft. Mulesoft AnyPoint Platform allows to integrate other systems likes Oracle, SAP, Workday etc. with Salesforce.

Source of Information & link to various Salesforce Products & Offerings: 

https://www.salesforce.com/in/products/

Jai Shree Ganesh from an emerging Salesforce Professional !!!!!

Learning can transform a person and a world. We can easily observe the progress made through learning by looking at developments in Science, Culture, and engineering. One of the many marvellous creations of engineering is software.

Software Systems are omnipresent then be it a personal cell phone or a commercial airplane. It is not infrequent that the life of people today depends on the friction less and reliable functioning of the software. Testing and Analysis of software systems therefore becomes an increasingly important task which requires well-founded education, continual learning and professionalism.

This is what excited me to opt for Testing and Analysis of Software as my career choice and all my education and work has revolved around the field of Software Systems. Over the course of past 14 years I have worked with many business and technology professionals to help build and test software systems that are fit for the purpose. While working on various software projects over these years, one of the greatest learning was that understanding actual business usage and meticulously capturing the business requirements for software systems is critical to the success. Thus, slowly I developed an inclination towards Business Analysis profession and started working towards being a Business Analyst while keeping my passion for testing software.

Recently, one of my Project Delivery Managers spotted the spark and allocated me as a Business Analyst for one of the Salesforce projects. I have been working on Salesforce application for almost a year now and my love and passion for this Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System has been growing day by day because of ease of doing business, availability of learning resources and above all plenty of Salesforce Career opportunities from Administrator to Architect level.

This is where I thought to start sharing my Salesforce experience with others through this blog/website.  My goal is to make SalesforceProfessional.com an instantly accessible source and connection to the knowledge and learning about Salesforce and market myself as an emerging Salesforce Professional.

Please remember learning is an ongoing progress that happens inside our heads so is the development of this website. Over the coming months, I will add various posts/sections on the website and pretty sure you will be convinced with the efforts. If not - I'd be happy if you took time to give feedback.

I believe sharing is caring and knowledge sharing is above all forms of sharing thus let’s do Shree Ganesh (religious/auspicious way of starting something good) of SalesforceProfessional.com.

Jai Shree Ganesh!!!!!