Had a client recently that wanted to lock down a field based on role, but also depending on what the account type field was. For instance, reps could edit a prospects address but not a customer. Normally you would use field level security based on role, but because of that added item of account type, it’s a bit more than that. Read More
The Salesforce.com workbench is an amazingly useful tool when you want to deal with directly with the data on the backend. This is like having SQL access to the backend database, something that many developers, data managers (importers), and administrators need to better understand the way the Salesforce.com database is setup on the backend. Read More
Another function of the workbench is to do imports much like you would with Data Loader. It’s a bit more “programmer friendly” than data loader (which is more “standard user” friendly) in my opinion, but nevertheless a keeper.
Go ahead and login to the workbench like before. This time, go to the data menu though…. Here you can insert, update, upsert, or delete. If not familiar with these, you may want to stop as you can do some serious damage to your database. Read More
Just a final tip here, wanted to let you know about the different settings that you can manage from the workbench that are very helpful for administrators when importing data through the workbench.
Under the workbench main menu item, choose “settings”. Read More
Optimizer is a feature in Salesforce.com used to evaluate below scenarios in your implementation and fine tune them. For instance:
- You can evaluate profiles and permission sets — Optimizer helps find profiles and permission sets that are unused or unassigned to any user. It also provides a recommendation on how to fix it.
- You can identify hard coded URLs in the implementation — Optimizer helps find the list of hard coded URLs in the implementation. This will help fix any changes to URLs if needed easily. Here’s a sample shot of the report for this one….
This one’s a bit of another oldie (blast from the past), but it’s a good one. We all know that Reports and Dashboard tabs are great one-stop shopping spots for data. But users don’t have to go there every time they need to know something. You can set it up so people can see a report chart right on the page where they’re working. For example, when updating an opportunity, they can see a chart that’s filtered to show the latest data about the account that opportunity is associated with, without leaving the Opportunity detail page. Read More
This is kind of an oldie but a goodie, bring back to life a post from long ago just because I think validation rules are so helpful. A lot of my clients tend to go down the rules of “required” fields but that doesn’t always work. In that case, use a formula to validate fields, popping up a warning when something isn’t correct — thereby prompting the user to add in data.
In our case here, we’re going to do a rule that creates a warning if the user chooses a type of value, and we want something to clarify that value. Here, I want to create a validation so that when someone tells me that they have Goldmine as a product, I put in their version as well (other products in this picklist don’t have a version, hence the need for GM only).
Something I just kind of stumbled on to for another client, a useful tool that can put tabular reports in a dashboard item. You don’t want to whole tabular report, but maybe the “top 10 opportunities by dollars” or “customers not touched in a LONG time”. Now, a couple of caveats — you cannot use date fields as a displayed field inside of the dashboard. I find this very annoying, but I’ve gotten around it by doing an aging field based on that date. That works well, but takes a bit so this will be more like 2 tips.
A common question is how do I get the data out of Salesforce? Views are nice, but sometimes you need to have a good report to export or schedule to email to team members weekly. We’ll do a simple custom report here.
This is an oldie but a goodie, so kind of rehashing a two-year-old tip here for your pleasure. This is how we can add a list view to your Home Page, so you can see things like leads, opportunities, etc., right from the home page. We’ll use the Leads object in this example:
