Build a Networking App to Track Your New Dreamforce Friends

You guys! Dreamforce is coming! Its happening! And in person! I registered today, did you?! People keep asking about my Dreamforce experiences and if they should also go, and of course the answer is yes you should definitely go, but it also got me thinking about what advice I give to people about Dreamforce. And that got me thinking about networking. And that got me somehow building an app to keep track of my networking? We go down rabbit holes real fast over here.

I know what you’re thinking… umm, that’s what LinkedIn is for. Yeah, but what fun is that? I know what you’re thinking again… umm, Salesforce is literally a tool to track contacts… what do you even need to build? Oh. You’re right. So, maybe this is less about building a new app than it is just thinking of the idea to use Salesforce to track all my new Dreamforce friends. But I don’t want to just connect on LinkedIn or Twitter, I want to engage with you! And what better place to track that than in Salesforce? Its like it was built for that or something!! And its mobile ready, of course, so its perfect for conferences.

Challenge Statement

I’m inspired by the new Business Analyst certification, so let’s start with a challenge statement and outline some requirements.

• How Might We make collecting contact information at Dreamforce more effortless
• By using tools we already have
• In order to ensure that we follow-up, engage, and build relationships with our new Dreamforce friends?

Or something like that? Any suggestions? I’m still working on perfecting challenge statements – its new to me, but I really like it!

Requirements

Okay, so here’s what I need this thing to do:

• Be mobile friendly
• Fast to capture information
• Capture additional information like… did they swap stickers with me? And maybe we even capture a picture of the sticker!
• Ability to add tasks so I can follow-up
• Ability to add notes – like if I want to capture anything from our conversation, or they gave me an awesome restaurant suggestion?
• In fact, maybe I need a place to capture restaurant suggestions too?

That’s basically the gist of it… I’m excited about this now! I hope that I actually use this and then I can put together an amazing dashboard of all the people I met! And in that case… to make my dashboard more interesting, I’ll probably want to capture more information like:

• Country
• State
• Number of Dreamforces attended?
• Favorite Salesforce product?

Let’s keep it at that. Remember, I wanted this to be simple and fast to capture data! BUT I do still want to make sure I’m also capturing contact data like:

• LinkedIn Profile
• Slack?
• Twitter?

OR, at least making sure I get their name right so I can look them up later!

Data Model

So with all this in mind, let’s figure out what we need in terms of Objects here. The simplest solution is to just use the Contact object. I don’t really want to deal with Accounts, so I’m going to just make an Account called “Dreamforce ’22” and add everyone as a Contact there. On the other hand, I kind of REALLY WANT to create a custom object called “Friends” 😂 but I will refrain. What if I forget to use my app and then I only have like 2 Friend records? And then I would be sad. 😭 Plus, its always best to use the Standard Objects when you can!

Okay, so super simple data model: we’re using the Contact object. In addition, we’ll have related Tasks for our follow-ups, Files for related images (like stickers!), and potentially a related Restaurants object for our restaurant suggestions!

The App

This app is going to be super simple! Let’s start in the App Manager and create a new Lightning App.

And remember, I plan to use this primarily on my phone at Dreamforce, but then I’ll want to use my desktop later on. So, I’m setting the supported form factors to desktop and phone. And since I haven’t created my Restaurant object yet, my only navigation items so far are Contacts and Reports.

Easy Peezy and we have our new Dreamforce Friends App!

New Friend Global Action

I want to make this as simple as possible to use, so having a Global Action where I can just click a button to launch my form will be key. So, back in the Setup Menu, search for Global Actions and then click New Action. I’m labelling it “New Friend” for giggles every time I click it. 😄

Once the Action is created, we’ll edit the Layout so that we have the fields we want and nothing else. We’ve got 7 fields to fill in here, 8 if you count State and Country as 2. I think this is okay. And I’ve made sure that none of the fields are actually required, except Name, so that I can move through quickly and don’t end up interviewing people.

Remember, this Global Action won’t be available until we add it to the Publisher Layout. Need help with Global Actions? Check out this Trailhead Module!

On this note – the only reason I’m creating the Global Action really is to default the Account. I could just as easily stay on the Dreamforce ’22 Account in my app and just click New Contact. I’ve got a Friends record type with my custom layout, so it’s basically same-same. Here’s what our final Layout looks like:

And here’s what our layout looks like on my mobile device in the Salesforce App!

Fin

With just a few clicks, I’ve got my new App in ship-shape and ready for Dreamforce! Now I can create records with all my new friends, create follow-up Tasks, and hopefully stay connected!

Probably I will forget about this in the next two months and not actually use it, but its always fun to come up with ways to apply our skills to real world scenarios!

Will I see you at Dreamforce ’22? Let’s be friends!