Formula fields are great because they allow you to place business logic in a field that can be quickly referenced. However there are some drawbacks you should be aware of.
January through April is tax season for nonprofits. Between my nonprofit services and my app that allows nonprofits to generate tax receipts, it’s an extremely busy time of year.
Balancing workloads from multiple clients can be overwhelming. Here are some tips I’ve learned that may be able to help you.… Read the rest
In Salesforce, you have two approaches to give user access to certain records.
When deciding which approach to use, consider this: users with the View All Records or View All Data permissions can view all records regardless of restriction rules.… Read the rest
As you may know, Marc Benioff recently made an odd comment at an event. It was supposed to be humorous, but definitely wasn’t received that way.
This is not the first time he’s made a comment that didn’t land the way he expected it to.… Read the rest
Last week, Spain became the first European country to ban social media for kids under 16 years old. Australia banned it last December.
I mention this because it’s interesting to see how badly social media impacts us. It distracts us, it reduces our attention span, and it creates too much noise between the ears,
As humans, we were not evolved to handle such a large amount of information and feedback.… Read the rest
Well, it seems AI is not producing the results we hoped for.
A recent survey has uncovered some interesting facts. For example, although AI helps junior developers produce 35% faster, the results are actually less maintainable.
The main issue is, AI is not good at keeping track of high level architecture and design patterns.… Read the rest
Community-led Salesforce conferences are some of the best ways to connect. Since they are organized by the community (and not Salesforce) they are less sales/marketing oriented.
This means they tend to be more signal, and less noise. For example, in the last one I attended, Agentforce was barely mentioned.… Read the rest
If you’re not a developer, it’s possible you haven’t heard of Heroku before. Heroku is a cloud platform that lets you build apps. It’s basically a competitor to Amazon AWS.
In 2010, Salesforce bought Heroku which made a great place to offload some processing from Salesforce.… Read the rest
When presenting options to a client for a monthly support contract, I’ve noticed a common request.
Rather than you simply do all the work on their behalf, a lot of clients want to be mentored. This presents an interesting dynamic.
On one hand, showing them how to do things will definitely slow things down.… Read the rest
A while back, I wrote an email called you really don’t want to rename standard objects. Recently, a reader asked, “When is it OK to rename an object?”
The short answer is, when
For example, in the nonprofit industry, we deal with organizations and households.… Read the rest
Let’s say you want to start your career as a Salesforce developer. Where do you begin?
If you don’t have a coding background already, this is a challenge.
Here are a few ways to begin:
If you already have coding knowledge, then it’s “just” a matter of learning the syntax and patterns of apex.… Read the rest
Junior Salesforce developers have a tough time these days as AIs have become good enough to replace them.
In the past, it was common for a small development team to have 4 junior devs for each senior dev. Today, a senior dev with an AI can accomplish the same results.… Read the rest
When meeting someone new, I often ask my favorite question. “If you didn’t have to work to live, how would you spend your time?”
Most people answer “travel” or “buy things”, so I go deeper. “OK, and once you’ve traveled the world, once you have the house(s) and car(s) or whatever, then what?”… Read the rest
Once you start protecting your mind from the wealth of information available, consider your client’s mind.
One of the most important roles as a Salesforce consultant is to absorb massive amounts of information and then distill it for your clients.
This means:
1.… Read the rest
Let’s start with the conditions that humans and AI are generating large amounts of information, and not all of this information is true.
Assuming these conditions, it stands to reason that you need to decide which information you should consume, and which you should not consume.… Read the rest
These days, we have instant access to data generated by anyone from anywhere in the world. And until recently, all information was only generated by humans. However now we have a new content creator, AI.
I recently watched a video by Yuval Noah Harari titled, “Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion“.… Read the rest
In Salesforce, formula fields have an unusual limit.
Rather than enforce a maximum number of characters, it enforces a 15,000 character compile limit. This limits the number of characters the underline SQL statement can contain.
Interestingly enough, this number can change dramatically without you really noticing.… Read the rest
In the rare moments I respond to an RFP, I mostly treat it like any other project.
Of course you need to make sure you respond to the requirements set in the RFP. So if they ask for your team’s profiles, be sure to include them.… Read the rest
A fellow reader asked the question, “Even before one gets to the RFP stage, how do you even get to the point of getting a prospect? Especially for 1-2 solopreneurs”.
For open RFPs, these are actually hard to find for for-project companies.… Read the rest
Based on reader’s responses and feedback from my post on LinkedIn, when it comes to RPFs, most people seem to fall into the “necessary evil”.
Fellow reader Nicole wrote a LinkedIn article about this topic, I recommend you check it out as it goes into much further depth than I did.… Read the rest
In Salesforce, it’s common to receive Requests for Proposal (RFPs).
Open RFPs are when a client allows anyone to submit their candidacy for a potential project. Closed RFPs are when the client has a shortlist of vendors and only approaches them.… Read the rest
While not usually a best practice, sometimes you need to rename standard objects.
Depending on whether the object is standard, custom, or part of a package, the exact renaming process takes a few shapes.
However once renamed, you may need to retrieve the new label to display in a screen flow.… Read the rest
I’m willing to bet that most Salesforce projects only use a single language. However there are times when more than language is needed.
When that case arises, the main tools used are Custom Labels and the Translation Workbench (TW).
Labels are easy enough to work with.… Read the rest
Whenever working with data, I always use MS Access. Excel is more commonly used, but Access is an actual relational database.
Importing .csv or Excel files takes a couple of clicks. Once there, you can sort, filter, and manipulate data with ease.… Read the rest
Depending on your data source and data import frequency, you have various options to load data into Salesforce. Taking a closer look at the one-in-a-while use case, here are some popular (and free) tools:
1. Salesforce Dataloader
The tried and true dataloader.… Read the rest
Imagine a client hands you a .csv file that needs to be loaded into Salesforce. So, what’s your process?
Here are the steps I usually follow:
To improve as a Salesforce consultant, it’s important to be self-aware.
There are a few reasons for this.
1. The “Expert Trap”
When I started to learn how to scuba dive, I learned an interesting lesson. Most accidents happen to expert divers.… Read the rest
Most people are familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which starts with Physiological needs (food, shelter, sleep), then Safety (security, health), then Belonging (relationships, love) and so on.
There’s another framework called AQAL (“All Quadrants, All Levels”), developed by Ken Wilber.… Read the rest
When I started these emails, I made a promise to you and to myself to post 5 times a week. And for a long while, I upheld that promise. Breaks excluded, of course.
When I was sick the other week, I really tried to keep my promise.… Read the rest
An excellent way to keep your good clients connected is to invite them to your Slack workspace.
While email is great for formal communication, Slack is great for quick chats and questions. When you invite a client to Slack, they quickly understand they have significantly better access to you.… Read the rest