Trailhead

According to Wikipedia, "a trailhead is the point at which a trail begins, where the trail is often intended for hiking, biking, horseback riding, or off-road vehicles". Or learning Salesforce skills. In a structured way. For free. Yippee - how cool is that!

I recently had a scenario where we needed to simplify the way that we achieved a business process in Salesforce in order to improve user adoption. The way I had in mind would require custom screen layouts. Having written BASIC code (go look it up!) as a teenager and COBOL in my first job (a long time ago!) I thought I would dust off the coding corner in my brain and learn Visualforce, Salesforce's programming language for creating custom pages.

I had heard of Salesforce's Trailhead online learning resources so went to check out it out. Turns out there's a whole host of training material available there, for free, covering everything from the basics to advanced topics.

There's 'Reports and Dashboards', 'Chatter Basics', how to customise pages using clicks not code, 'Data Security' and a whole lot more. If you want to know how to write Apex Triggers or Visualforce, that's there too. As well as technical topics, there are business topics like 'Application Lifecycle Management' and 'Change Management'.

If you're just starting out, don't be put off by the fact that it's in the developer's area - head over to developer.salesforce.com/trailhead and start learning. I would recommend signing up for a free Developer Edition org (find out what this is and sign up for one here ) and then you can complete the exercises on Trailhead in your own org and collect points and badges for completing challenges.

Happy Learning!

(Update - Setptember 2015 - There are now 65 modules to work through, including how to do Dreamforce.)