Finding Your Way at Dreamforce 2015

If you’re heading to Dreamforce 2015, proper planning, figuring out what you want to do and where you want to go are essential to avoid wasting time.

Last year, San Francisco saw its population increase by 16% for one week in October as 135,000 people decended on the city to network, learn, and geek out during Dreamforce 2014.This year promises to be even bigger.

If you’re heading to Dreamforce 2015, There’s no doubt you’re going to be in crowds of people, so proper planning, figuring out what you want to do, and where you want to go are essential to avoid wasting time in the rush-hour-like pedestrian “traffic."

While there are myriad things you can do—including sessions, keynotes, training and after-hours parties—you’ll definitely want to make time to check out both the Cloud Expo and the DevZone, and visit Progress while you’re there!

Cloud Expo

The Cloud Expo is the “main floor” of the show, divided over two whole convention halls. In the Cloud Expo, there will be over 400 cloud-computing companies showcasing thousands of products. You’ll see companies you’ve worked with for years and others you have never heard of. These Salesforce partners are there to answer your questions, demonstrate their solutions, explain how customers are succeeding and of course, hand out swag.

Despite being open for 7 hours on 3 of the 4 days (and 5 hours on Friday) it always seems to be crowded, but don’t let that scare you away! Instead, consider the fact that all those people are there for a reason, and you don’t want to miss out.

Progress® DataDirect® will be hanging out at Booths W837 and W839, handing out some awesome t-shirts and showing off our awesome solution for Salesforce Lightning Connect that lets you expose any data source as an OData endpoint to be viewed as an External Object right from the Salesforce interface. Make sure you come by to get your swag and to say “Hi!” And if you want to learn more about our Lightning Connect solution, make sure to attend Sumit Sarkar’s session while you’re there.

DevZone

The Developer Zone, or DevZone as it is affectionately known, is for the real techies among us. Here, you’ll have an opportunity to join over 20,000 fellow cloud developers getting hands-on with the latest cloud technologies! It’s a bit more low-key than the massive Cloud Expo, focusing on technical solutions, deep discussions and workshops.

There will be all sorts of sessions going on here, too, about both technical topics and how to “level up” your career as a developer. We’ll even be there, teaming up with Intuit how we helped them get more than 6,000 of their Salesforce users visibility into legacy and back-office data through our OData service. To get the whole story, make sure to sign up for our session presented by Idaliz Baez.

By the way, new this year is the AdminZone, conveniently located next to the DevZone. Due to increasing ease of developing with point-and-click, more and more people are acting both as administrators and developers. I envision a lot of people will be moving back and forth between it and the DevZone, learning new skills to enhance their overall Salesforce expertise.

See you there!

You owe it to yourself to spend time in both the Cloud Expo and the DevZone. You’ll get fired up, you'll learn things you didn’t know you needed to learn, and you’ll meet people that will become life-long contacts. Maybe not everything is for you, but until you check it out you really won’t know.

See you soon at Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco!