Salesforce Introduces Developer Tools for Slack, Tableau, and other Apps

Today at its TrailblazerDX event, Salesforce announced a slew of developers tools to make its Customer 360, Tableau, and Slack platforms more capable and automated.

Among the platforms that were upgraded was Salesforce Flow, a suite of automation technologies to help companies automate complex business processes on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform.

With Flow, service agents can now automatically route work across global teams and digital channels

"Our customers save 109 billion hours every month using Salesforce Flow to automate manual processes in their businesses. This frees up time for employees to focus on higher value work," said Patrick Stokes, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Platform, in a statement. "This is automation on one unified CRM platform. New features for Flow provide users the ability to trigger flows from analytics dashboards, use low code to easily integrate with any system, and interact with flows directly within Slack, where people spend most of their time. It's more than just automation; it's automagic."

In another move affecting Slack, the collaboration platform that Salesforce acquired in December 2020, Salesforce today introduced Salesforce Platform for Slack, a toolkit that empowers developers to build custom Slack apps that pull functionalities like actions, automations, and business insights directly from Salesforce into Slack.

Salesforce Platform for Slack helps developers build Slack apps natively on Salesforce Platform across the Customer 360 portfolio.

"Salesforce Platform for Slack is a toolkit that empowers developers to quickly contribute to their digital HQs using the coding languages and tools they already know and love," said Rob Seaman, senior vice president of product at Slack, in a statement. "By making it easier than ever for Salesforce developers to bring their unique apps, data, and automations built on Customer 360 to Slack, where collaboration is already happening, Salesforce Platform for Slack helps make every conversation more insightful, customer-centric, and action-oriented."

The Tableau innovations unveiled at TrailblazerDX enable developers to unlock, embed, and act on data analytics.

Tableau Embedded Analytics now allows data developers to embed Tableau’s analytical experiences into their products and applications.

The new Tableau capabilities include the following:

• Web Data Connector 3.0, a single, streamlined toolkit to build a connector to web application data;
• Embedding API v3, to embed and integrate Tableau analytics into any application using web components.
• Embeddable Web Authoring, allowing users to edit visualizations directly from any application or web portal, ask questions, and make data-driven decisions in their flow of work.
• Connected Apps for Seamless Authentication, a framework that allows developers to integrate Tableau into their own applications with simple and secure authentication (single sign-on.
• Tableau Actions with Salesforce Flow, to trigger workflows in Salesforce Flow directly from Tableau dashboards.

Tableau is also making it easier for developers to upload offerings like Dashboard Extensions, Connectors, and Tableau Accelerators into the Tableau Exchange, the central hub to jumpstart analytics. Developers within the Tableau Partner Network can now submit, publish, and manage offerings on the Exchange, including a streamlined submission portal and increased visibility into how offerings are performing.

"We're letting our data developer community unleash its creativity with a flexible platform to help even more people see and understand data," said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer for Tableau at Salesforce, in a statement. "Our goal is to bring analytics in the flow of work by enabling developers to discover the data they need, leverage visualization and trusted exploration capabilities, and integrate analytics into their own applications."