How can we contribute back to the Awesome Salesforce Community

I started working with Salesforce platform for quite sometime now and learnt most of the stuff on the job and the rest with a great help from the awesome salesforce community channels ..

• Success Community (Answers Board & Chatter)
• Salesforce Developer Forum
• Salesforce Stackexchange (SFSE)
• Lots & Lots of Blogs (from MVP members and other great minds)
• User Groups & Developer Group Meetups
• Dreamforce Sessions
• Webinars & Salesforce Youtube Channel videos
• Social #AskForce in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+
• and many more.....

as a Developer when you see so many different options/places to find a solution to what you are working on, over a period of time you will start thinking about contributing back to these channels which helped you.. and thats how i started my work in sharing what i learnt from the community back to the crowd to help people like me who are reaching out to the community everyday.. 

believe me this is more interesting / challenging / engaging / satisfying than just browsing existing answers or repeatedly asking the questions .. the more you share the more you learn.. the amount of research I do to post an answer helps me to understand and gain a deeper knowledge of a topic to which i answer.. i would never read those documents or articles if I am not answering a question..

I initially started with Salesforce Success Community Answers Board and then extended myself into Salesforce Developer Forums and recently into Salesforce Stackexchange as well.. 

each of these forums has a unique way of operating / dealing with questions & answers, how the contributors are rewarded / ranked, etc.. it takes a while for anyone to understand the moderation rules. I would suggest users to go thru existing discussions, use the search to find whats already existing, browse already Solved ones, top answers, FAQ pages to understand more about how the forums work, then get started with simple ones which you are very sure & confident about.. 

If you are answering to a question in any of these forums, I would suggest to follow these simple steps

• Salesforce has Awesome Documentation resources (Salesforce Help, Docs, Youtube videos, blogs, etc..) if the answer exists in any of these please share those links and guide the user to the related section 
• if the question has already been asked and answered before, provide those links instead of copying & sharing the answer again
• if someone already answered to the question, no point in repeating the same.. see if you are adding more details or value with your answer compared whats already there
• do your research and provide as much details as possible in a single answer rather than making it a chat by asking more questions and answering at the same time
• finally share some respect to fellow contributors

here's my profile across the 3 different discussion boards I am currently involved in

Success Community Answers Profile

Developer Forums Profile

Salesforce Stackexchange Profile

Remember the more we share the more we learn.. :-)

Dreamforce 2013 Developer Keynote Highlights

Just finished watching the developer keynote from this years dreamforce..

here are some of the key highlights that i noted down from this hour long video..

Force.com Command Line Interface (CLI)
its an open source tool to help developers access the salesforce instance and all of the objects (standard, custom), run soql queries, import & export of metadata, etc..

Introduction
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/11/announcing-the-command-line-interface-for-force-com.html

Some more details
http://www.wadewegner.com/2013/11/a-command-line-interface-for-forcecom/

source code and setup
https://github.com/heroku/force

API.. API.. API.. API...
one of the buzzword througout this dreamforce is API.. most of the stuff in salesforce platform is now API enabled.. this will be the base for cross platform, device independent, application development.
since most of the integration with API's happens over http, xml & json, there are not client libraries to ease the integration. couple of libraries highlighted are

Ruby Client for REST api
https://github.com/ejholmes/restforce

Node.js REST api wrapper for force.com
https://github.com/kevinohara80/nforce

d3.js - to visualise & chart the data from analytics api
http://d3js.org/
example - https://medium.com/p/c87517ab52b1

Salesforce1
This is probably the biggest anouncement for developers this year... its a complete rebranding and futurisitc strategy to put the force.com platform as mobile first & api driven.. this is an umbreall of force.com, heroku and exact target and other supporting components put together. we now have a new developer site for the salesforce1 platform.. which has a good collection of documentation & other resources around the platform and api's..
http://developer.salesforce.com/

Mobile packs and Mobile SDK
these are already released in phases over the period and got a special mention in the keynote to hightlight how it fits in the Salesforce1 platform. the mobile packs covers the development with existing client side web technologies like HTML5 with javascript libraries like Angular, Knockout, jQuery, etc.. and the Mobile SDK covers the iOS and Android based development

Heroku Connect
if you have any of your apps running in heroku and interfaces with salesforce, then this will be a handy app to sync the data between your postgres database and salesforce data. you can create mapping between these 2 databases and enable syncing (uni directional or bi directional)

you can try heroku connect by logging in here
https://app.cloudconnect.com/

you can find more details on this here
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/11/19/tools-for-integrating-heroku-apps-with-salesforce

Demo Time
some of the cool stuff shown in the demo in keynote are

• Mobile Cards in page layouts
• creating a simple chart with analytics api, add it to object page layout, show it in mobile devices
• Enhanced Lookups in page layouts
• Flexi pages
• creating Quick actions (publisher actions) and using it in Salesforce1 mobile app

Finaly you can watch the developer keynote video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KELBWQIVcfk

will try to cover more on the Salesforce1 platform in future blog posts.. lets learn this together :-)

Salesforce1 and SalesforceA apps (iPhone,iPad,Android) initial look and review

Salesforce1

I recently updated Salesforce1 app in my iPad,iPhone and HTCOne Andriod phone and played around with the apps for a while... Here's my initial feedback on it..

For beginners, note

• Salesforce1 is not a new app.. Its an upgrade of an existing app "Salesforce Chatter Mobile" which was there close to 3 years and got matured over the period..
• Salesforce1 is not just a new glossy mobile app... its part of a platform/framework 
• Its a collection of a set of development tools including our existing force.com tools, emerging mobile sdk, heroku tools, newly aquired ExactTarget stuff,
• it has lots of focus on API based development, ability to integrate/communicate with any app/platform/device
• setting up new direction in salesforce app development 

Its too early to write anything on the entire platform.. so i m just focusing on the mobile/tablet app here

So whats new or different from previous apps/versions ..

here's the list of new features listed in the app 

• Improvised search - ability to search across the feeds including records, people, groups & conversations
• Make use of publisher actions that you created in your org from any device with this app
• Custom list views - now you will be able to see your custom list views not just the recently viewed records
• Access all your objects (standard, custom, apps)
• notifications pane on the right
• ability to mobile optimized access appexchange apps 
• ability to create new records from the list view 

after going thru the listed features, few things that I expected but couldn't find..

• We cannot edit our own user details (name, photo, etc.. ) - need to use the SalesforceA app for this 
• Not possible to edit groups even if we own it
• thou it says we can access apps and objects, I found only objects. - to get additional stuff we need the customize the navigation menu by logging into the desktop site and changing the settings under Setup ->  Administration -> Mobile Administration -> Mobile Navigation.
• List views are restricted. As usual by default it shows the recently viewed records with option to select custom list views. and just below recently viewed, you will see the custom list view names.
• The custom list views shows the records in "Google Now" style mini post cards - but we cant change the number of records showing up, what fields to display on the cards, the sort order, etc..
• When the navigation pane is opened, you cannot scroll thru the main pane.. It jus freezes..

SalesforceA

This app is an admin friendly app that goes along with Salesforce1 app - 

• primarily to manage users 
• edit, unlock, freeze, deactivate user accounts
• reset passwords
• manage permission sets

We have a Rocket Launcher at the bottom of this app.. that takes us to the community page of ideas, answers, events, user groups .. not sure what the actual intent is but its adds a fun/game element to the app..

Rest of the Apps
So what happens to Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Touch, old version of Chatter Mobile... not sure.. need to wait and watch

Bottom Line

I can see the direction of getting into a unified app experience with the vision of customer engagement and better experience which is good... but the current set of multiple apps from salesforce to do different things is a killer..