3 Things I Love About the 2010 Dreamforce Application
11/17/2010
by
Justin Edelstein
For 2010 Salesforce.com put together an outstanding conference application called the Dreamforce App in order to manage their annual Developer and User Conference both pre-conference and during the conference. These are the top 3 things I love about it.
- There is nothing better then Dreamforce for a cloud computing junkie like me. All the people, the keynotes, the Cloud Expo, and breakout sessions all make for an outstanding few days of fun and professional development. This year Salesforce.com has taken their annual conference to the next level and it's in part thanks to a Cloud App that was built to manage the conference called the Dreamforce App. The App allows conference goers to organize everything they want to do while at the conference but with a few little twists - it's completely social and in my opinion a groundbreaking new way of running an event - see our earlier blog post about how the App is changing the conference experience alltogether.
Here are my 3 favorite things about the Dreamforce App:
The Agenda Builder:
Every breakout session, special event (like the Stevie Wonder concert), individual learning session, networking opportunities, and keynotes are available to add to your agenda using an intuitive agenda builder tool. You can search or use filters to find relevant things that you want to accomplish at the event and add them to your personal calendar. The tool is smart enough this year to recognize when you are double booking yourself and even better the conference is smart enough this year to save you a seat when you book yourself into an event.
Access:
Since the Dreamforce App is meant to be social in nature everyone who is using it seems to have more access to the event this year then ever before. You can converse with the organizers of the event itself (Tom Wong), the Salesforce employees who are running breakout sessions, or even Marc Benioff. Thanks to the Dreamforce App I feel the most prepared I have ever felt going into a Dreamforce.
Chatter:
Of course the number one reason why the Dreamforce App is amazing is the use of Chatter throughout the app. As already mentioned access to the event is amazing this year and Chatter is the glue that is keeping it all together. There are Groups built up that are specific to verticals like the Higher Education Group or just plain communities of people that want to communicate and collaborate before the conference starts like the Awesome People Group. There are even groups built specifically to help other users with issues in their Salesforce instances acting as a quasi help desk called the Challenge Us Group. Personally I am enjoying the groups that are put together for people to have fun in like the Football Fanatics Group. I honestly feel like I've already met a large number of people and the event is still 3 weeks away! The notion of being able to collaborate and communicate with people from all over the world about a conference far in advance of the event actually taking place is stunning and extremely powerful. Chatter is persistent throughout the application - it exists as not only a personal profile and groups but also on sessions themselves so you can have a pre-discussion about a session topic with the leader of the session itself lending an opportunity to mold the session into something that you are really interested in learning about. It also exists on all the Cloud Expo vendors and partners so conversations can occur around them as well. Chatter really makes the application a destination for me - I enjoy logging in every day and conversing with fellow attendees.
I can't wait to see what the next release of the application is going to bring on November 23rd and 24th which is later this week. It should hopefully include Chattalytics and an update to the Campground Hero Theatre.
To sign up for Dreamforce head on over to www.dreamforce.com and make sure to read our previous post about the top 10 reasons to go to Dreamforce. If you want to give me some feedback or lend some thoughts about why you think the Dreamforce App is so #Awesome then shoot me a tweet at twitter.com/justedelstein OR if you are attending Dreamforce login to the portal and post something on my profile by searching for Justin Edelstein.
