Last week I had the privilege to attend a conference as a sole attendee for the first time. I didn't have to worry about logistics for a trade show booth this go around. My main responsibility was to spend all week being a wet sponge, soaking up information. And learn I did.

Recently being named the admin for our company's new Salesforce initiative, I got to travel out to Dreamforce 2010 to learn more about Salesforce.com's business "on the cloud." Our company is still new to using the cloud platform for our core business processes and I myself was extremely wet behind the ears as to how the Salesforce platform worked. The week provided a lot of new knowledge for me.

Admin Training

I went out to San Francisco a few days early for Admin 201 training. The class was essentially four days worth of material crammed into two. Needless to say, it was intense but it completely opened up my eyes on what my role was as an admin. My initial thought to an Salesforce Admin's role was trivial matters like resetting passwords, helping people find accounts, deleting old records etc. Turns out there's a bit more to it than that.

My main job is to make the jobs of our sales and program managers as efficient as possible. In just a couple of short days I not only learned how to do the mundane tasks but also learned how to re-arrange page layouts, build widgets, dashboards and even entire applications. My main takeaway from the class was that Salesforce is designed to do...anything you want to do with it. As an admin, there really isn't much limitation to the customization I am able to pull of for my company.

The platform out of the box is pretty cool. Salesforce.com empowers companies to make their processes as efficient as possible by any means necessary. You could even place web applications inside the system along with anything from the App Exchange that could enhance your system even further.

For you social media geeks out there, Salesforce even has plugins that aids community engagement on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all within the system. If someone felt inclined (and had a few extra bucks lying around) you could run an entire company without even leaving the Salesforce platform.

There were a few other new product launches and applications that were announced throughout the week. Later on in future blog posts, I'll show off how my job may get a little cooler.

Related articles

• Dreamforce 2010 (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• 3 Services That Leverage the new Salesforce REST API (readwriteweb.com)
• "Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff to Speak at GigaOm Net:Work 2010" and related posts (indianweb2.com)