For anyone who attended the myTrailhead keynote speech during Dreamforce, Chris Duarte, Leah McGowen-Hare and the rest of the team just seemed to drop blockbuster after blockbuster announcement of what’s coming. We are going to have a look at some of the highlights:
As the dust has well and truly settled on everything Dreamforce-related and we continue our planning for the New Year, you sit and hope that it’s not another blog from someone still banging on about Dreamforce or laying out cheesy resolutions…well, good news and bad news. This is not a blog about Dreamforce or my soon-to-be-
broken promises but it will be covering the great announcements that Salesforce made at Dreamforce for Trailhead and myTrailhead and there are some great steps forward being taken that you can take advantage of in 2020.
Trailhead Go
Let’s start with one of the big ones – Trailhead Go is the mobile app that has been a long-time coming. You can now take your training with you on your iPhone or iPad and make the most of those train journeys by continuing your Trailhead experience. It has now been optimised for mobile devices and includes nearly all the features you are used to on your desktop. Just be aware that for the mobile device, all the challenges are quizzes and Playgrounds haven’t yet made it to the mobile app – this also means that Superbadges and Projects are not yet available in the mobile version.
There is a further sting in the tail on this one though – it is currently only available on the iOS platform so if you are an Android user, you have a while longer to wait until it comes to your device.
Trailhead Live
We all know that as great as Trailhead is, some learners will learn best by listening to someone explaining a concept – enter Trailhead Live. The Trailhead team will be putting together a programme of training sessions that will be delivered as live content. You will be able to log in at the designated time and listen as a real instructor delivers a training session. This is designed to support your Trailhead journey and will align to some existing content. It is also designed to be re-consumed as the session will be recorded and you will have access to it to go back and view it as many times as you need.
Trailhead Help Bot & other help
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will also know that Salesforce have been active in the world of AI now for quite a while and our next feature makes best use of this. Think of the Trailhead bot as the angel on your shoulder looking out for you as you journey through Trailhead. But rather than give you advice on the decisions you need to take, it is actually there to help you when you get stuck. We don’t know full details on how this will work yet but you will be able to call on the bot who will analyse where you and give you useful guidance to take the next step in your challenge. Watch this space for more details!
There will also be a new Community panel embedded in Trailhead which will allow you to connect with other users who are working on the same content and share tips and comments.
Get qualified, not just certified!
This one is just for the US market at the moment but it does show the direction that Salesforce may be thinking of going: Salesforce have partnered with New Hampshire University and it is now possible to use your Trailhead learning to earn credits towards a Trailhead degree. So, whilst anyone in the Salesforce know will understand what it means to hold a Salesforce certification, this is the first step towards benchmarking Salesforce knowledge against an actual qualification which gives more meaning to the learning you have taken outside of the Salesforce ecosystem. We wait with anticipation to see if this goes beyond the US borders…
myTrailhead for Communities
And let’s finish with another biggie for myTrailhead – myTrailhead is now available for Salesforce customers with Communities. This has been a much sought after feature and for good reason. One of the great things that Trailhead offers is the ability to reach out and deliver training to people wherever they are – they do not need to be geographically located in the same place as they do with classroom training. Now, imagine you are a company with a widespread user base accessing Salesforce through a Community. It’s possibly not feasible to get all of your users together but you need to get a consistent message out to them all and validate that they have understood the key points from any learning you deliver to them. Enter myTrailhead – up until now, myTrailhead was not available for Community Users so you were restricted to using videos or elearning whilst your internal users got the myTrailhead experience. That all changes now as myTrailhead becomes available for Community Users too so all that goodly learning can be delivered consistently across all users across the organisation. Great news ??
And if that wasn’t enough, watch out for exciting news from Stimulus in the first quarter of this year with regards to myTrailhead!
For anyone who wants to see the Trailhead keynote from Dreamforce, you can find the link here: