Building My Dev Cred

…And building a trigger that creates a new task when an email was sent! 

In 2018, I’m focusing on building my “dev cred,” as Leah McGowen-Hare put it at Forcelandia a few years ago.

Next week is the final week of my RAD Women coding course and I am thrilled with how far I have come.

I am also building more connections in the Salesforce digital communities of Trailblazer, Power of Us Hub and Twitter.

So I was checking out the unanswered questions on the Trailblazer Community to see if I could help out and I ran into this one:

Is it possible to use Process Builder or Workflow in auto creating a task after an email is sent related to a record? The email (with a specific Subject filter) will be sent from (A) within Salesforce or (B) Gmail/Outlook but will be recorded in the Activity History. I tried to create a WR but it didn’t run after I sent an email.

The answer to that is ‘No.’ The end. Continue reading Building My Dev Cred

Sending Mass E-mail in Salesforce

Why use a 3rd party tool for sending mass e-mail when you can just use the built in Mass-Email?

I discuss the pros and cons, and give a demo on how to send Mass E-mail in this presentation from April 2017.

Caroline Renard kindly asked me to participate in HUB Office Hours, following up on a longer presentation I gave at the Seattle Non-Profit User Group around that time.

Also included in the conversation are Chris McCullough and Gorav Seth, moderated by Caroline Renard.

See the full video on youtube here.

Reports 101 – Study Guide & Slide Deck

In the Spring of 2015, I had the privilege to participate in a Girlforce (now Amplify) study group. The study groups are made up of women in the non-profit sector and two volunteer coaches.

Each week a different group presented all the info thought needed on a specific topic to pass the Salesforce Administrator Certification (CRT-101).

Yes, these are very dense slides, but I didn’t want anyone to fail their exam because I forgot a critical detail!  You can download the slides here.

 

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Bailey Bones perched on the edge of his seat – he can’t wait to learn about reports!

 

Keystone Habits

I highly recommend The Power of Habit Why we do what we do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg to humans, particularly Salesforce administrators and architects.

As mentioned before, at Optimum Energy we have a self improvement book club and we just finished The Power of Habit. The first section of the book is about individual habit formation. The second part is building habits in an organization. Third part is how habits develop and are morally evaluated in society.

While I particularly enjoyed thinking about how to break my own personal bad habits, (Hang on. There are Top Pot Donuts in the kitchen)…. I found myself contemplating how to help users develop the habit of using Salesforce.

Is there one essential task in Salesforce that can serve as a “keystone habit”?  Continue reading Keystone Habits

A Salesforce Love Story

[ Zach and I are honored to be on Salesforce.com’s blog today!]

FEB 06, 2018 BY LAURA WOODS.

On our Trailblazer Voices blog series, we’re sharing stories of real people facing real challenges, and finding innovative ways to succeed. These stories are as diverse as our world, ranging from one Trailblazer’s career transition to an ongoing mission to tackle the tech gender gap.

Yet across these stories one common theme stands out: community, or as we like to call it “Ohana.” It’s the family-feel of the Trailblazer Community that many Trailblazers cite as the biggest game-changer in their journey. And in no story is that more obvious than the story of Jessie Rymph and Zach Nostdal, two Salesforce Admins who chose to put a ring on it center stage at Dreamforce last November.

It’s not every day that we’re asked to help pull off unforgettable marriage proposals, so with Valentine’s Day around the corner, it seemed like the right time to check in with these lovebirds and ask them to share their story. Continue reading A Salesforce Love Story

Salesforce Admin: The Leanest Job Ever

You’ve probably heard of “lean management” or “lean manufacturing.” It feels like “lean” is ubiquitous in many industries, but I haven’t encountered the buzz word up here in the cloud. We have a self-improvement book club at my employer, Optimum Energy, and last week we discussed 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers.

“Lean” is the involvement of the entire company in continuous small improvements to remove waste and improve efficiency, as practiced by fanatic Paul Akers.

71cpzizlgfl.jpgGood Salesforce administration is one of the most “lean” things you could do for your company.

Every day each of Paul Akers’ employees comes up with one process improvement that cuts out two seconds. 2 Second Lean claims you can revolutionize your company in these tiny increments. And I believe it, because that’s exactly what I do all day in SFDC.

At Optimum Energy, for every energy optimization project, a series of emails used to go back and forth between members of three teams until pricing was agreed upon. Now a user clicks a button, launching a flow which asks them a series of questions and starts an approval process. No information is misplaced in an email folder. All the right people are looped in. That’s efficiency!
Continue reading Salesforce Admin: The Leanest Job Ever

Simple Parent/Child Flow with Decision

Here’s an example of a “simple” flow that uses a Decision element. You don’t need to use flow to achieve the results – you could entirely stick to Process Builder. This flow is for educational purposes only.

Here’s the sitch: I want an automatic email to my customer when we quote a specific product.  For example, “Dear Darnell McCustomer, for a limited time only, you can purchase the EDGE widget for $150!”

Caveat: I want this to be in an HTML template, not a Visualforce email, based on the Quote object. I can’t reach the price on the Quote Line Item from Quote in this format.

Continue reading Simple Parent/Child Flow with Decision

How Flow Saved My Job

Flow took me from a “hmm…let me Google that” Salesforce admin to a confident “no record is too far out of reach” admin-eloper (admin/developer). Leadership changed at my company and I had to quickly differentiate myself from my new boss, a Salesforce administrator with way more experience than me. In our initial conversations, he made it clear he would prefer to have a developer working for him. Okay…. one developer, coming up!

i can be a developer Continue reading How Flow Saved My Job