Learning Vlocity

Vlocity is a new industry accelerator on top of Salesforce, and it provides a great deal of functionality that will significantly reduce your customization effort within Salesforce. You can design agent workflows, user interfaces and interactions with configurable scripts with more simplicity than coding up in Salesforce APEX or using flows. Additionally they provide processes for each industry to download, so you can just browse the library to get processes that allow you to (for example):

• apply for Child Care benefit (Government)
• change a SIM Card (Telecom)
• get a travel policy quote (Insurance)

In addition there is a CPQ (Configure Price Quote) engine that ties in nicely with the processes above.

Salesforce is an awesomely open platform in terms of learning. Almost all the functionality you need to develop enterprise scale applications is available in a development environment that anyone can provision within a minute, and most of the learning material to use that is available in the trailhead.salesforce.com learning site (Although just to be clear: although learning is free, using it in production does cost licensing! ).

Vlocity is for the moment behind walls, and you will need either a partner agreement or partake in a training course to get experience. There is a steep learning curve, since you need to understand how the different components work together (dataraptors, omniscripts and cards) before you can do something useful.

I found that the in-person training course is good and gets through a lot of material in 4 days, but you should straight afterwards go back and go through it all again building your own ideas before you truely ‘get’ it. You can follow the steps in the exercise book and not have a good feel for what is actually happening. For example, I wrote a ‘hello world’ card to understand the user interface better, a simple dataraptor that extracted Contact fields to understand the data model better, and finally my own Omniscript that solicited customer feedback to see how it all tied together.

And do bear in mind that after a steep learning curve, it will be a much easier way to implement complex process functionality into Salesforce!

Advertisement

• Uncategorized