Adventures in Salesforcing.

So... I continue to have one of the craziest/busiest years of my life, and Dreamforce is no exception! I've kind of spent the year with a "always say yes" type of philosophy, which has taken me literally all over the world.... but that's for a future blog post! For now, I'm going to give an overview of what I'm going to be involved in at Salesforce's most wonderful time of the year,  Dreamforce. I am speaking four times. That's right FOUR times. And you know what? I submitted three sessions, and none of them were selected. I've had a wile ride since last year's Dreamforce as a first time attendee and speaker, and it just goes to show that sometimes the right opportunities have a way of finding you. So with that, here's what I'm up to: AppExchange Street Team The AppExchange Street Team are a group of Salesforce MVPs and AppExchange All Stars who spend the week at Dreamforce having an extra bit of fun helping attendees enter t...

Get ready everyone - it's #AwesomeAdmin challenge time again! It's another " Be an Innovator " challenge, this time harnessing the power of Flow Builder. I love that the Admin team have been rolling out these challenges, as it pushes us to step out of my comfort zone and try something new - something as Admins we need to do all the time, but might not have the means to. For those of you like me that are still total Flow noobs, I couldn't be more excited to give this a try, and the best part is I feel like I'm hanging out with Admin Evangelists Marc Baizman and LeeAnn Rimel in my home office (couldn't help but include the photo of us below!) Got the treasured selfie with @leeanndroid and #AwesomeAdmin and new #lifewithgoldie golden hoodie winner @zazamataz at #SalesforceTour Toronto! pic.twitter.com/2UCWuJXVsQ — Marc Baizman (@mbaizman) April 11, 2019 Modelled after the success of last year's Be a Builder and Be an Innovator (with Einst...

Let's rewind to the end of March 2018, San Francisco, TrailheaDX. I knew nothing and no one, and was greeted by the community with open arms. I had a great time learning at bootcamp, and was excited for the conference. I was all set up with the Events app and was learning about the swag situation (I'd heard that Salesforce events had pretty good swag!), but all I was really hoping for was a Trailblazer Hoodie. Anything else I could possibly obtain would be a bonus. I had seen people wearing them around all through bootcamp, and all over the posters, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever! I wanted people to know that I was a Trailblazer, no matter how brand new I was - I had just had the best few days of my professional career after all. I arrived bright and early for TDX the next day, and pretty much ran to Camp Quick Start. If you earned three Three badges there, you'd get your Trailblazer Hoodie - while supplies lasted. I don't think I've ever been so an...

Life has been crazy lately, so it has meant blog writing has fallen by the wayside a little bit. I've been doing a lot of soul searching and contemplating lately... and then on one particular day I was listening to an episode of the Salesforce Admin podcast , which featured an interview with Emma B-F on owning your role. This had been a particularly rough day, so when Bossed Up Bootcamp was mentioned, and I visited the website, I knew this was what I was looking for: As luck would have it, the next session was only 5 weeks away, and in Washington DC, so within a few days, I had everything booked. It was even more exciting when fellow WIT User Group leader and Salesforce sister, Leandria Streeter was announced as a speaker. DC is only 1 hour and 15 minutes of airtime from Toronto, so I could very easily hop on a plane after work the night before. So off I went - Appygail Bobcat and myself to the United States capital. One of my favourite things to do when I tr...

From Admin to Admin - Administration to Administrator. I'm going to post on this topic a few times going forward, as I'm a big advocate for those in Administration roles moving into the role of Salesforce Administrator - primarily because, that's my story. As some of you may already know, I was recently promoted to the role of "Technology and Project Manager", but to be honest, is it really a promotion if you're already doing the work anyway!? So while I've been thinking about what that title means, and how I've ended up here, I wanted to share part of my journey, and specifically the impact Salesforce has had on my career so far. Even though I am still part of the Administration team, since we started using Salesforce I've moved up in the ranks, beginning at "Executive Assistant & IT Coordinator" to when we implemented in late 2017, to just "IT Coordinator" once we were using it regularly in 2018, and now that I ha...

Lightning is coming. That's right - with the Winter 20 release, Lightning will be turned on by default We all knew this day would come... so with that in mind, there's no better time to become a Lightning Champion! I joined the program in July of 2018 and have had some amazing opportunities and experiences since then. It has been such a success that applications had to be closed, but they are back open until January 31! With the re-opening of applications, I thought I'd check in with program coordinators Chelsea Kaufman and Kelly Walker to find out how the program came time life. Starting only last year, the Lightning Champion program began with several Salesforce team members wanting to help give us Trailblazers a way to share  passion and experience for rolling out the Lightning Experience, or building apps on the Lightning Platform, with the community. So why become a Lightning Champion? I joined as I was looking for more ways to contribute to the community,...

So I'm going to be completely honest... I didn't do a whole lot over the holidays... but it was just what I needed! Even though I feel like I say this every, 2018 was a crazy year... and I was grateful for the week and a half to recharge.  I spent some time studying, and was considering sitting the Platform App Builder exam before the end of the year, but after chatting it through with my perpetually supportive husband, I decided to push it back to 2019. I'm not quite where I'd like to be for some of the topics, and why rush? I've been in the eco system for a but over a year, and I already have one cert.  Sometimes we have to make decide whether to push ourselves, or whether to recharge... and I chose to recharge... and I have absolutely no regrets.  I had my birthday and participated in a range of self care from getting a massage, to getting my nails done, as well as two Superhero movies and Thai food! So now it's officially 2019, a new da...

New York is less than an hour of airtime from Toronto, so I really should visit more often. New York world tour seemed like the perfect opportunity to scratch my travel itch, see some friends, and do some learning, so away I went! I met up with my roomie, Bhavana, and after lunch and a walk back to our hotel, we decided to go for a visit to the Empire State Building. There were surprisingly no lines, and we were up the top in only 10 minutes! It's quite a view from up there - we found the Salesforce tower of course. hello Salesforce tower! From there we headed downtown to Silverline CRM for the pre-world tour New York Community group meeting. As if this day weren't already so wonderful, I was greeted at the door with the biggest possible hug from Sandi Nuss Zellner - leader of the New York Administrators group. Sandi, Bhavana and I This right here - this is why I love the Salesforce community. Seeing by people from literally all over the world, and coming ...

On this day, 7 years ago, I moved to Canada. My trumpet and I left all our friends and family behind and set out on an adventure. I had been working in the music industry, in seemingly my dream job, but I had become increasingly more unhappy. I felt defined by my job, and was wondering where the hell I was going to be able to go from there? I can't have hit my peak at 24! Fast forward 7 years, and I've grown up a bit. I'm married, and I have a house. I still play the trumpet, but have an upgraded model. I'm still involved in the arts, being a member of the board of directors of two musical groups, but I don't work in the music industry, I'm a proud Salesforce Administrator! I know there are a lot of accidental admins out there, with all sorts of education and employment backgrounds, so I thought I would share mine. I studied Music Business and Public Relations, and worked at a music magazine and then a boutique music booking agency. I also had my ...

After weeks and weeks and months of lead up... it finally happened. Dreamforce 2018. The event I'd been determined to get to the moment I walked into Bootcamp at TrailheaDX six months ago. Of course far too much happened for me to cover in a blog, so I'll just recap my top five favourite experiences, in no particular order of course. Empower Your Admin and Supercharge Your Business Our session couldn't have gone better! We had a packed house, and lots of familiar faces in the room, but the best part - people stopping us during the week to tell us they enjoyed our session and how much they got out of it! Empower your admin & supercharge your business with ⁦ @zazamataz ⁩ and ⁦ @mehansen82 ⁩ pic.twitter.com/q2eslUNDL2 — Bhavana Singh (@singhbhavana8) September 25, 2018 The #AwesomeAdmin Keynote During my journey this year, I've gotten to know and really love my fellow #AwesomeAdmins, and as my first ever Dreamforce Keynote, it did not disappoint. I even got ...

Today is Thanksgiving, so I thought I would share some of what I'm thankful for this year. Don't worry, my post-Dreamforce recap will be coming in the next few weeks. I'll give you some backstory first. So obviously, being an Australian, I did not grow up with Thanksgiving, aside from what I saw on TV and in movies, but that of course was American Thanksgiving. Then I learned Canada had a different Thanksgiving, so it became Canadian Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving. But now that I live here, it's Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. It's kinda like how before I used to refer to Hockey as Ice Hockey and Field Hockey as Hockey... it's part of my Canadianization. I'm sure these will also be questions that come up when I eventually take the Canadian citizenship test too! So I digress... I know the majority of my readers are based in the US, and are wonderful people at that, so I'm sure most of you know that up here it's Thanksgiving today, ...

Earlier in the year when I started my #AwesomeAdmin journey, I set some goals: My year 1 @salesforce goals as a new @salesforceadmns ! - listen to as many podcasts/webinars as possible ( @gilliankbruce @TwoWITpodcast ) 🎧 - get certified 👩🏻‍🏫 - hit @trailhead ranger status 👮🏻‍♀️ - get to @Dreamforce ! ☁️ — Zarina Varley Scott (Zaz) (@zazamataz) April 6, 2018 I certainly have been listening to as many podcasts and webinars as I can, I got certified on May 1, and I hit Ranger status on July 1. I'm happy to say that attending Dreamforce is the last thing off my list, and that it was this tweet that really helped me get there. The wonderful Admin Evangelist, Gillian Bruce, responded asking how she could help me achieve my goals, which lead to meeting other members of the Admin team for world tour in Toronto, which lead to the idea for Empower your Admin and Supercharge your Business. If you'd had told me when I sent out this tweet on April 6 that not onl...

Ever since I discovered the Salesforce Community at Trailheadx earlier in the year, I have wanted to attend Dreamforce. I've heard it described as many things from "Sleepover camp for adults" to a "family reunion", and both sound amazing to me! But here was my conundrum... how to get there by myself, without the help of my employer? Among the many people I spoke to about this, I was lucky enough to chat with the wonderful Mike Gerholdt and Rebecca Saar from the Salesforce Admins team when they were in town for the Toronto World Tour. They offered up some key advice "speakers get to attend for free", but also took that a step further telling me that "everyone has something to share". They made me see that even though I'm only in my first year of my Salesforce journey, I had something to say, and thus " Empower your admin and supercharge your business " was born. Another piece of advice given to me was to partner ...

So I was on the train the other day, and it finally dawned on me that I should start blogging again... especially now that I have something I can wax lyrical on for hours. Who would have thought a former publicist would actually miss writing? I started thinking about what an adventure this is turning out to be... and so my natural progression was to one of my favourite 80s movies (even though I only watched it for the first time this year)... Adventures in Babysitting. I plan on being very active in the community, so I figured it might be good to document my journey along the way. So here's a little bit about me - born and raised in Sydney, Australia, I moved to Toronto, Canada in 2011. In 2017 my company decided to move CRMs over to Salesforce, and just like that I became an accidental admin. I'm the leader of the Toronto Women In Tech user group, a certified admin, a Trailhead Ranger and enjoy playing the trumpet and comic book culture when I'm not Salesforci...