How we craft robust solutions on an growing platform

Today, hundreds of thousands of excited Salesforce consultants, customers, and App Developers take over the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Dreamforce 2019. During the week-long conference, Salesforce will share significant updates to the platform roadmap, and expert consultants will share their approaches, best practices, and solutions. The large scale nature of the event alone is indicative of the size of the Salesforce Platform.

When you buy Salesforce, you're not just buying a CRM; you're buying a business process automation and development platform that grows more extensive and advanced every year. Salesforce releases three major updates a year - every Winter, Spring, and Summer.

The speed at which the platform grows presents significant value and opportunities, but it also can present challenges. With an ever-growing platform comes shifting solutions target. It is not uncommon for features that require custom development today to become a native feature in only a couple of releases. Likewise, solutions that use poorly constructed workarounds today may find their approach unreliable in future releases. Even though Salesforce is known for its focus on backward compatibility, a poorly designed solution rarely stands the trailblazing speed at which the platform evolves.

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Guiding Principles for Crafting Solutions That Last

Follow best practices, and it won’t break on the next release.

We strictly follow Salesforce best practices. They are the product of our team's efforts to combine guidance issued by Salesforce, experts in the community, and through our research and experience. They ensure that the solutions we implement today still work in the future and that we deliver consistently across our projects. With major releases a year, this is one of the best ways to ensure your solutions will last.

Native first, then custom.

Our expertise lies in designing solutions for complex business problems using the Salesforce Platform. We're always eager to create new, custom, and innovative solutions on the platform. We prioritize native solutions because we know that they will carry the highest degree of stability in the future. When native features don't meet the need, we use Salesforce's advanced development framework to create highly customized applications using Apex, Lightning Web Components, and APIs.

Learn and train often.

We meticulously review release notes every year to remain up-to-date on new features and changes to existing functionality. We often gain meaningful insights into future releases, helping us anticipate future changes in the platform. You can find all the release notes here. Our team also dedicates significant time to the Salesforce learning ecosystem, using Trailhead and hands-on exercises to train and increase our knowledge of the platform.

Our team members have delivered Salesforce solutions for complex business problem across many years, and we've seen the benefits of following these principles. As we listen to all the announcements, sessions, and speakers at Dreamforce this year, we'll focus on extracting learnings that will help us craft innovative solutions that grow with the ever-evolving Salesforce Platform.

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