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My impressions from Cactusforce__v 2021 đŸŒ” virtual dreamin’ event ☁

René Görgens
8 min readJan 16, 2021

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In the evening of Friday 15 January (Central European Time), I participated in the community-led Salesforce conference Cactusforce, which was an amazing experience 😍

Fellow attendee Lilith Van Biesen said in her wrap-up post on LinkedIn:

I can’t wait for the recordings to be shared so I can catch up on the many awesome sessions I could not attend.

Exactly my feeling! 💯

PLEASE NOTE that the talks showcase is now available as of 01/02/2021!

Cactusforce__v Banner

Cactusforce đŸŒ” is usually taking place in Phoenix, Arizona, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have made it. Due to Covid, the organisers decided to go virtual. Once I understood that from a European perspective, the event would actually take place in the evening and that I could simply attend it without taking time off, I bought my ticket and posted about it on LinkedIn. This had the nice side effect of the event gaining a new sponsor, PDF Butler.

Cactusforce đŸŒ” is organised by Marisa Hambleton, Steve Simpson, and their team of enthusiastic volunteers. Marisa is a Salesforce MVP, community group leader, architect, and entrepreneur. Steve is a CTA, review board judge, community group leader, and entrepreneur. They co-founded Cactusforce together in 2014, 7 years ago.

Cactusforce đŸŒ” is a community and a conference event by and for Salesforce Developers and Architects. Cactusforce was born from a diverse Arizona community of Trailblazers who are users, learners, admins, developers, architects, nonprofits, employees, and ISV/partners organized to meet online and in-person, where we network and trade tips on how to get the most out of Salesforce. We believe developers and architects need more education and learning in and around advanced topics. We believe technical professionals not yet on the Salesforce platform can benefit from this education.

My impressions from Cactusforce__v đŸŒ”

I can only say WOW — the event exceeded my expectations, for several reasons. Cactusforce__v was my first virtual dreamin’ event, and excelled in this category! Also, I loved the architect focus, having CTAs and very senior architects speaking at the event really did make a big difference in my view. I’m not often getting exposed to that quality of thinking. That said, all of the content was great!

I was a bit surprised by the no-show rate, however. Without around 800 registrations and (if I understood correctly) about 300 attendees, there were many not fulfilling their ambition to participate, which contributed to the feeling of being in a close-knit group.

đŸŒ” Technology

Hopin was successfully used as collaboration platform for the event. It’s quite simple to navigate as end user. On the left hand side you have categories such as ‘Stage’, ‘Sessions’, ‘Networking’ or ‘Expo’. In the middle zone you have the stream, with presentation slides by default being large and presenter’s video being small. On the right hand side you have the feed, which is subdivided into event feed, session feed and personal chats.

Hopin. Image courtesy of Ines Garcia on Twitter.

đŸŒ” Talks

Obviously I could personally only attend a few of the many sessions. Below are some of my impressions.

  • Gaurav Kheterpal spoke about “Salesforce B2C Architect — There’s a New Pyramid In Town!”. I loved the way he explained this fairly new credential. Can’t wait to watch the recording/ go over the slides again.
    One of the most interesting slides was the conceptual positioning of the Solution Architect, occupying the middle ground between Enterprise Architect (oriented towards strategy) and Technical Architect (oriented towards technology). Another one the plans of Salesforce to release more architect credentials, namely “B2B Architect”, “Solution Architect”, and “Enterprise Architect”.
  • Carl Brundage spoke about “The Limits You Don’t Know, Can Hurt Your Project”. I found the presentation utterly fascinating, for me it was the best illustration I have yet seen of CTA thinking, while offered in a very accessible format. (From which you can deduce that I haven’t seen much.) Carl used a multi-step LDV scenario centered around Cases to illustrate the pitfalls and limits even an experienced architect might overlook, in this case the limit of 30 million Content files per Salesforce org.
  • Marc Braga spoke about “Salesforce Architects Build the Future of Business”, elaborating on the future of Salesforce Architects, with more resources coming soon, e.g. data modelling templates and possibly capability map templates. He also highlighted the critical contribution of architects to the success of Salesforce projects.
  • Steve Baines spoke about “No-Code does not mean No-Architecture”. He advised to treat low-code technologies in a similar way as code in terms of planning, testing, and other principles and best practices which appear obvious for code, but maybe less so for low-code/ no-code solutions.
Steve Baines’ session

đŸŒ” Fireside Chat

Fireside experts Zayne Turner, Peter Coffee, Melissa Hansen, Chuck Liddell, and organisers, made for a lively, insightful and authentic chat đŸ™ŒđŸŒ on change, disruption and “never waste a good crisis”. Did you know that Peter has been working remotely for over 35 years?

Cactusforce__v 2021 fireside chat

One of the points was the surge of asynchronous communication in home working scenarios, which in my view stresses the ability to write well, not everyone’s into that. Some people will actually never write to you what they tell you directly, that’s a big challenge. It forces me to be more selective in my communication, knowing when to make a quick call vs. when to require written notes and artefacts.

đŸŒ” Sponsors

Dear sponsors, if you want to have a better description, don’t hesitate to send it to me (keep it short and sweet).

  • Provar Testing: Test automation for Salesforce. “Helps you transform your testing experience: save time and cost, accelerate your delivery and catch bugs before they disrupt your users.” I liked the 25-minutes video they offered as part of the expo.
  • Salesforce Architects: Architect resources for Salesforce, e.g. Migrating Changes, currently in beta. Stay tuned for many enhancements and additions. Feedback is welcome.
  • FormAssembly: “Easy-to-use form builder, robust integration to Salesforce, and high security and compliance standards.”
  • PDF Butler: “Salesforce document generation made easy.”
  • Odaseva: “Enterprise-class data governance for Salesforce.”
  • OwnBackup: “Proactively prevents you from losing access to mission critical data.”
  • Mobiform: “Create customized forms, create and assign tasks, get customer feedback.”

đŸŒ” Social media coverage

Please send me the posts you want to be included in this article. I’ll be further amending this section.

What can you do?

If you want to help spread the word and make dreamin’ events better known within the Ohana, there are quite a few things you can do.

Participate in community-led conferences

What’s up next on the community-led conference calendar?! The next dreamin’ events of 2021 will (apparently/ likely) be:

  • YeurLeadin’: “Sharing best practice and inspiration for Salesforce Community Leaders” on 21 Jan 2021
  • Nonprofit Dreamin’: “is a new Salesforce Trailblazer Community led event scheduled for 28–29 January 2021.”
  • SoFlo Dreamin’: “CURRENT STATUS: Event re-scheduled to Feb 18–19, 2021” (to be confirmed)
  • London’s Calling: “will be back on Friday 19th March 2021. Virtual again unfortunately, but at least we know in advance this time!”

Please check out the Trailhead Events Calendar for Community Conferences.

Dreamin’ events are always looking for speakers, so watch out for the Call for Speakers announcements!

Help increase dreamin’ event awareness

  • Share dreamin’ event announcements on LinkedIn and Twitter, there can never be too much awareness of community-led conferences. Think for a moment about how much the organisers invested to make these events happen, and how relatively low the ticket fees are.
  • Post about community-led conferences while they’re starting, ongoing, or after they’ve ended. Believe it or not, the organisers are very interested in what you liked or didn’t!
  • Tell your colleagues about dreamin’ events and what participating in a community-led conference brought you personally.

Follow community conferences’ social media handles and check their websites for news

I counted 38 (hopefully) active dreamin’ events, I hope I didn’t forget any! If you have any news on the status of these events, I’ll be happy to hear.

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René Görgens

Written by René Görgens

19 Followers

Senior Architect at @UpCRM | Trier, Germany Admin UG Leader | Marketing @yeurdreamin | Dreamin’ event addict | 15-year Salesforce enthusiast | 6x certified

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