Salesforce: Some Insights

Recently, I was working on a project, wherein the organization was undergoing complete restructuring (merger, re-organization) and added to that re-vamp of CRM to improve Sales operations. As an integral part of data security. There was a need to review and redesign role hierarchy. Long story short, we ended up with a large list of roles (400+). We could have assigned someone to manually create these roles, but due to obvious reasons, I wanted to get this handled via script. I want to share a quick code snippet which can help you generate roles en-masse, without having to put in boring and gruesome hours of manually creating roles. [ Important: This solution will work when you have unique role names] SETUP Create the top level role manually at desired hierarchy level. For e.g. in our sample script, we used "CEO" role to build new hierarchy under CEO role DATA PREPARATION Firstly, as an approach of user onboarding we followed following steps: Created a l...

Salesforce is undoubtedly a leader in cloud CRM and has an immensely rich set of features and capabilities. Yet, I've come across several Salesforce customers who are not quite familiar with all the capabilities of Salesforce. As I see it, it not only shadows the value that an organization can get from its Salesforce investments, but sometimes it also leads to additional costs or delays. Not to forget, you are probably already paying for some or all of these features, but may not be using them. So, here is a quick list of some awesome Salesforce features which are sometimes overlooked, but are worth looking into. Do keep in mind that some of these feature depend on user licenses and Salesforce instance type you are using. For more information refer to Salesforce documentation to get complete information on these features. Force.com Sites Do you know you can host a whole website (yes public facing) from within your Salesforce instance. It's often not marketed a lot curre...

Emails are still a very essential part of our day to day communication. Be it an internal communication within the organization, or across organizations or between customers and organization, emails are one of the key communication mechanism (let's not debate on pros and cons here). Quite obviously, Salesforce provides various options to send emails to internal and external recipients. In this post I'm trying to cover all the essential points (briefly) involved in sending emails from Salesforce. Defining Email Templates First and most important aspect regarding emails is ability to create email templates within Salesforce. This is without doubt one of the most used aspect related to sending emails. Email templates help administrator create pre-defined email templates within Salesforce. This helps in providing business approved and verified templates to system and users. As a result, all outgoing communications are consistent. Also, any correction/ improvement incorporated ...

Frankly, this is a pretty nifty feature I have just observed (never paid attention) and I thought that most of you like me, would have never looked into it. So, hereby sharing it. While implementing Salesforce, one of the key things we showcase to users is the ease with which users can create their own reports with point-and-click features. This is definitely a very important feature for end users as they get the power to create reports in minutes without having to wait for lengthy IT process. Vanilla Salesforce provides lots of report types out of the box as per below screenshot. However, it is quite common that client might not be using certain features of Salesforce and hence those report types are not being used at all. They just clutter the report type list unnecessarily. Salesforce provides a quick way to hide unwanted report types. Just, check the checkbox above "Select Report Types to Hide" and you can hide/ unhide report types. For e.g. we want to hide all...

Hi all, as evident from the topic, I'm hereby sharing a small list of configuration options available within Salesforce using which a non-programmer can also develop functionalities within salesforce. The best part of using these features is that you save time, save development/ testing effort, deploy and manage it easily. Standard/ Custom Objects Objects a.k.a. table (for database junkies) a.k.a. entity are used to store data within Salesforce. We can use out of the box objects for e.g. Account, Contact, opportunity, lead etc. (along with their powerful features) or create our own custom objects to store required information for e.g. invoice, purchase orders etc. Custom fields As with any entity, you need to store its attribute, similarly in salesforce an object can have fields. Out of the box objects have standard fields. Additionally, custom fields can be added to standard and custom fields. Following are few special types of fields that can be added to enrich product...

How often did each one of us get into a situation where we have to create custom security rules? For e.g. Call center agents should not be able to give credits. Only Supervisors or Finance team can give credits Only Finance and Account Manager can generate invoice. And the most trivial way to achieve it is something like if(profileName == 'Supervisor || profileName == 'Finance'){      // business logic to give credits } else{     //throw error message } Now, one of the best ways to handle this is by using "Custom Permissions". It allows you to leverage Salesforce security infrastructure and loosely bind that to your custom logic. This helps in making your code scalable and robust. You'll learn that below. What are Custom Permissions? Custom Permissions was made GA in Summer '15 (ver 34.0). It is a unique way of creating a custom permission which is required/ to be used by your custom logic. For e.g. in above example, if we create ...

Finally, there are few much needed feature additions to Salesforce's data import wizard.  Note: The Data Import Wizard is currently available through a pilot program. On a high level, I found following improvements:- Improved UI (bit glitches though) with wide screens having lesser height Data mapping on the fly Drag and drop file (thanks to HTML5) Specify actions for e.g. insert, update or both Capability to skip trigger execution for data being imported Improved data mapping with ability to map a column from data file to multiple properties Following is step to step procedure to use it (simplistic flow):- Open wizard Select object, action and provide data file View/ modify data mapping Review import information and confirm For more information visit  https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=data_import_wizard.htm&language=en_US

What? Extends chatter's capabilities to enable user to take custom actions for e.g. create a new related record or access a visualforce page. Where? It would be accessible via chatter section on Chatter tab, home page or chatter section in detail page of an object. Why? Publisher actions lets administrator/ developer expose additional functionalities to users via chatter feeds. So, now a user can create a new record from chatter feed as he/she used to create new post/ poll etc. For e.g. a user viewing account detail page can create a contact/ opportunity related to the Account, without navigating to any other page. How? Actions can be created from Object setup page or via "Buttons Links and Actions" link for each standard object in Setup and Administration section. There are two types of actions:- Create action :- allows user to create a new record. Administrator can define the fields to be displayed in the create page layout. Additionally, administrator c...

With permission sets available for some time now, there have been lot of discussions around what is real use of permission sets, what they are capable of, when to use them and when to stay away from them. I am hereby trying to put in some views What? A Permission set is a configuration based mechanism to provide additional capabilities to users, on a temporary basis. It can be viewed as a subset of Profile, wherein it has similar capabilities to define security permissions, but has few lesser options. Where? Permission sets should be used primarily for temporary basis, wherein the access is to be provided for shorter time duration and the access can be removed later.  It can however be used to provide additional access to certain users, as compared to other users using same profile. But, in this case, usage of permission sets is elongated, its suggested to rather create a new profile. Why? It provides a very flexible and easy approach to give additional permis...