Tag: salesforce

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 Printable Donor Profile

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…

Continue reading Use Custom Permissions To Bypass Validation Rules And Pass Unit Tests

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

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

Manage Campaign Members in Lightning

Campaigns are a flexible, native object that allow you to track your engagement efforts and performance in Salesforce. You can customize the Campaign Member Status values to suit your specific business needs. You can also add, update, and remove Campaign Members to track specific engagements.

This post is the third in a series of three blog posts about Salesforce Campaigns in Lightning. The second post, Customize Campaigns in Lightning, covered how to customize Campaigns in Salesforce for the Lightning admin. This post will provide detailed instructions for how to configure Campaigns Member Status values and Manage Campaign Members in Salesforce Lightning. If you’re interested in an overview of Campaigns in general, I suggest you start with the first post in this series, Salesforce Campaigns in Lightning. Continue reading if you’re ready to get hands on.

Continue reading Manage Campaign Members in Lightning

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 Flow: What is going on in there!?

Salesforce’s Visual Workflow and Process Builder are incredibly powerful tools but can be very difficult to troubleshoot. I struggled to make these tools effective until I was able to get a glimpse of what was happening inside. Salesforce has some suggestions for how to troubleshoot failing flows but often these tools provide incomplete answers. Particularly for auto launched flows, these techniques are often insufficient.

Flow error
Answering why this failed doesn’t have to be a rabbit hole.

Debug log to the rescue!

Continue reading Salesforce Flow: What is going on in there!?

Custom Settings For Clicks Not Code

If you work on the clicks side of the force and you haven’t heard of Custom Settings and the cool things you can do with them using declarative functionality then this is the blog post for you! There are also many other great blog posts for you out there and a few Dreamforce sessions as well. Why should you keep reading this particular blog post and not crawl off down the internet rabbit hole I just dug for you? Because I’m going to explain what Custom Settings are and then document three examples of how you can use them with clicks not code, but more importantly, my examples are kind of funny… I hope.

What are Custom Settings?

Custom Settings, like Custom Objects., have custom fields that allow you to create records that contain data. However, unlike Custom Objects, Custom Settings can be accessed in any formula, workflow rule, and process builder organization-wide. Custom Settings are indeed settings for your org or application!

Continue reading Custom Settings For Clicks Not Code

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

Custom Report Types: Why do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

love

Have you ever wanted to report on something only to realize you’ll likely have to write three processes and a few formulas to get there? Have you already written those processes and formulas? Is your org in danger of maxing out all its cross-object relationship reference limits? Are you about to write some more right now? STOP! Custom Report Types can solve many of your cross-object reporting problems with just a few clicks! Continue reading Custom Report Types: Why do I love thee? Let me count the ways…