23 December 2018 - London Admins Community Group, let’s look back on the year

Couple of weeks ago we held the Salesforce Community Xmas Mega Meet at IBM. It’s good to get the main London groups together as in reality we are members of more than one group and so we often inter-mingle on a regular basis.

In addition to general joviality, plenty of food and drink, a quiz hosted by his Royal Highness, Peter Chittum, and a magician, each Group Leader managed to drag themselves away from yet another magnificent cake and took a moment to reflect on their year.

Here I shall share what the London Admins got up to in 2018. Let’s start with the main stats that I shared at the mega meet Christmas party:

We had 13 sponsors supporting our events across the year, in various locations in central London. We are very lucky that London has a large Salesforce Community with suppliers to the industry wanting to support us. We’re genuinely thankful for your enthusiasm and delighted to work with you. We are a blended community.

We covered a whole range of subjects, including some of the historically unloved (but critical to success) areas of implementation including training, automation testing and release management. We dived into some traditional developer related topics such as the Command Line, Lightning App, Builder and how our Developers can support the Admin more.

We tackled some data subjects that were coming to hit our Orgs, ready or not, like the joys of GDPR, exception reporting, and how to manage our data with Form Assembly, Own Backup, Pexlify and Elements Cloud.

We also took time to think about our own work environments and careers with talks on certifications, Equality/BAM and how to find our dream job.

We had some fun along the way too; with swag fest nights for TrailheaDX, World tour Week and Dreamforce Global Gathering. We may have learnt how to play Blackjack too!

We couldn’t have delivered such a diverse range of talks without the help of our speakers. All volunteers who, for many, were first time speakers at London Admins. They decided to take the plunge and give it a go standing up at the front and sharing something. Everyone has a story to tell and we are truly grateful for their input. And afterwards, they are beaming with pride that they achieved a personal goal and it’s like a switch has been flicked inside, they want to do it again. We’d love to have you all back to share new ideas. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Oh, and did I mention cake? It’s becoming a tradition now that London Admins do like to celebrate some key dates in the calendar with a cake. We had 4 this year and they were all amazing. My co-cake cutter Claire and I relish each cake challenge that faces us.

But I think the biggest part of what London Admins is about is that we have brought an amazing group of people together. We have regulars who will make all kinds of efforts to attend each month.  It’s not just about the content that we share, that’s just an added bonus to the night. That was the initial reason why people joined. They decide to come back each month because of an invisible glue. In this last year I’ve really felt it. It’s the warmth, the caring, the real friendships that have grown and the willingness to support each other, whatever someone might be facing. We are in this together. So, to every member of London Admins, thanks for showing up. We’ve listened, we’ve laughed, we’ve celebrated and we’ve supported. To my co-leaders; you’re awesome, much love and big hugs.

I look forward to 2019, let’s do some more.