Category / Salesforce Administration

by Lashonna McBride

3 Tips for Troubleshooting (And Staying Calm While Doing It) as a New Salesforce Admin

The experience of becoming a Salesforce Administrator can be a whirlwind of new information, building relationships with your fellow administrators and most of all, trying to develop a thorough understanding of the Salesforce stratosphere so you can best serve your user base. As someone who has essentially learned Salesforce Administration backwards (I received the title of Salesforce Admin, then scrambled to learn how it works), I can vouch for having encountered some white-knuckled, fist-clenching troubleshooting challenges. At first, I allowed myself to succumb to my frustration. After all, how could I not have all the answers? However, in my short time as a Salesforce Admin, I have discovered that not only am I not alone, but there are a ton of resources at my finger tips to help me as I navigate through my learning. Throughout my experience, I have picked up 3 tips that have been essential to my process:

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by JessieRymph

Was it worth my time to automate that?

UPDATE 6/13: Thank you everyone for your interest in this solution! I am working on adding it to the AppExchange through Salesforce labs!

At TrailheaDX I ran around like a bird for a video with Einstein and Astro. I also facilitated a lively Circle of Success (small group conversation) on Process Automation. Everyone shared their best practices, asked questions and learned from each other. The admins’ orgs ranged from a 10-free-licenses nonprofit to a giant health insurance company, and years of experience from 0 to 10 (not me! I’m at 8, I think).

One guy (and I’m so sorry I don’t have his name) asked:

“Is there any way to track how often your automation fires?”

That got us thinking. What if you could find out:

  • How much time am I saving with this automation?
  • How many times has this process ever fired?
  • Was the time I spent building this thing worth the investment?

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by Maya Peterson

BAM! We did it!

On Tuesday, May 21st we celebrated the completion of our pilot Salesforce training program in partnership with Dress for Success Seattle. Dress for Success Seattle seeks to offer long-lasting solutions that enable women to break the cycle of poverty and become more financially independent.

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management tool, but it’s really so much more than that. Salesforce enables businesses to streamline their processes and customer engagement. Salesforce touches many aspects of a business from Marketing to field service, e-commerce, and the nonprofit sector, it generates many new jobs each year. Salesforce encourages those already familiar with the system to spread their knowledge with an initiative called #BAM – Be a Multiplier.

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by JessieRymph

A Glorious NPSP Day Seattle

npspday

“Next step in our : The meta-peeps create some organized chaos: What’s unknown in @SalesforceOrg‘s NPSP, at .” Photo &Tweet from @BRCTweets (Barbara Christensen)

Both years I’ve attended NPSP we’ve had incredible weather so the idea of a unhandled sunshine error is not applicable to this magical day.

MOOD of the room: Excited, happy, energized, grateful to be part of this amazing supportive community.

KUDOS: Ryan Ozimek and Katie Fadden are delightful facilitators! Megan and everyone at 501 Commons pulled this off flawlessly the day after Give Big! Congrats to Crystal on the birth of her new baby girl! So much !!!

STRAIGHT TALK: In this segment of the programming, we brought the elephant to the center of the room and talked about the .org acquisition. As a .org employee, I just want to make it clear that the opinions below are those of other folks who attended, some of which I might share, but they by no means reflect any official stance of Salesforce:

  • We want .org or .com to say “IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY. YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY.”

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by JessieRymph

Attach Meeting Notes on Events

 

Samantha C. asked in the Power of Us Hub: “Does anyone know if you can track meetings with salesforce? We are looking to track our meetings and add a few bullet points about those meetings so we can look back and see where something left off.” And I was curious how it could be done. Here’s the answer in Lightning. Continue reading →

by JessieRymph

Printable Donor Profile

Sometimes as a Salesforce admin I’ve been asked to do things which just seem ridiculously old school, not very efficient and may involve actual paper. When I cannot convince someone to click through a few screens, instead of printing or having an email sent to them, it gets my admin panties all in a bunch.  (Wouldn’t that be cool, to have actual admin panties?!)

Sexy Sys Admin Women's Boy Brief

Not actually surprised that these exist! Thanks Cafe Press Canada!

But when working with a nonprofit, you gotta just let it go. And that is how this printable donor profile came into being.

My pro bono client: The Cedar River Clinics, which are fantastic, independent reproductive & LGBTQ health clinics in Renton, Seattle, and Tacoma.

My task:  Create a one-page document with important donor information.  The development director will print the doc and hand it to the executive director to review before she calls a major donor.  Continue reading →

by JessieRymph

How to Include an Unsubscribe Link

Follow this tutorial to include an unsubscribe link in promotional emails sent from Salesforce. My last post gives you some reasons for considering this feature.

131206-f-it851-005

So…you did that directly in production. I see…

When the recipient clicks to unsubscribe, a flow will look for ALL CONTACTS (not leads) who have this as their preferred email address (if you’re in NPSP) or in the Email field. All contacts who meet that requirement will be marked “Email Opt Out.”  The email address owner will receive one confirmation email immediately.

For goodness sake, please try this in your sandbox or a Trailhead playground first!  Continue reading →

by JessieRymph

When to Include an Unsubscribe Link

The benefits of sending email directly from Salesforce are that you can automate when they go out, you can send up to 5,000 emails per day, and email templates are really simple to set up.

woman using white smartphone on front of table

Dear Asses and Donkeys Trust, I no longer want to receive your email. XOXO, Belinda

But any time you’re emailing groups of people, you should be mindful of the requirements of the CAN-SPAM law (which I just learned isn’t called the “Canned Spam” law). CAN-SPAM requires that emails, in certain scenarios, provide an option for the recipient to unsubscribe.

I am writing to you on my personal blog as a puzzle-solving Salesforce admin, not a Salesforce employee. Your decisions around unsubscribe options can have legal implications for your organization so please do not take anything from this post as legal guidance or means to make your communications legally compliant.  That decision is between you and your lawyers.

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by Maya Peterson

Use Custom Permissions To Bypass Validation Rules And Pass Unit Tests

Picture this… it’s already 9pm on deployment night (Friday night of course). You’ve pushed to three environments already and spent at least three hours resolving unit test failures. If all your tests pass this time, you can go home and enjoy a well deserved hot cocoa….

THEN THIS HAPPENS:

Unit Tests Fail

FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION

Someone else deployed a Validation Rule that is causing almost half your unit tests to fail, effectively ruining your weekend and destroying all your dreams. Has this ever happened to you? Well you’re not alone…

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by Jon Sayer

Finding Record IDs in Bulk, Without Expensive Apps

As an admin, you sometimes just need to figure out the IDs of a large number of Salesforce records based on some data from some other source. For example, at my last job, I was often given a list of email addresses that needed to be added to a newsletter list. The first step I had to take was figure out which emails were already associated with Contacts in my instance. I had to grab the IDs of those records in order to add them to that list. Doing this by searching for records one-by-one would be prohibitively time consuming.

For what felt like ages, the best tool for me was DemandTools’s Find/Report IDs function. As an admin for nonprofit organizations, this tool was free for me, and it was easy. I just plugged in my input spreadsheet file, configured my search query, and the tool popped out another spreadsheet with the record IDs and any other fields I might need. Continue reading →