Being a Salesforce evangelist, I can’t stop trying new stuff about Salesforce. So I have started experimenting trailhead very early and thought of sharing my experiences in this post.
When someone asks me 'What is the best way to start learning about salesforce ?' my responses would range from talking about workbooks, blogs, and official salesforce training. But now I have a better answer
'Start using Trailhead'
With trailhead, Salesforce is experimenting gamification to make salesforce learning fun for the user base and also to create a bit of buzz around the Salesforce platform. Trailhead is poised to become the de facto primary source of training across the entire Salesforce platform. Currently, you have a series of Trails that are comprised of “Modules”, which are collections of “Challenges”. Each challenge has specific goals and exercises with live verification that will let you win some points and cool badges.
Getting Started
A small tip before starting is to use your Salesforce Developer profile to login to the trailhead and then sign up for a Developer Edition Org to do your exercises.
Salesforce uses cool live validation developed using Tooling API to validate if the trainee has really completed assignment or not. Trailhead contains modules for
- Developers
- Administrators
- Architects
- Integration Specialists
- Testing teams
- Run team responsible for deploying patches in Prod
So find some modules interesting for your role, collect some flashy cool badges and share them with your colleagues and in the developer community.
Unexpected Outcome
Though Trailhead is an awesome way to learn salesforce, there is another important thing we have learned. It gave us the idea to have functional testing in the sandboxes using the same tooling API behind the scenes
Business defines the use case and the developer team build a functional test case which can be triggered with a button, for example, check user story 11
Let the team finish the development cycle
And then Business will click on this button to verify the status of user story (This won't bypass any existing tests though)
If you think of any cool module which isn't there in Trailhead, you can Suggest a Trail. New modules come out frequently, Salesforce wants you to guide the direction of this phenomenal feature.
Drop your queries in the comments. Thank you.
