Category: New Features

Salesforce Spring ’18 and GDPR

Posted on by Jack Bailey-Grundy

As the deadline for GDPR moves ever closer, we’re now starting to see opt-in’s appearing on web forms, and marketers are working harder than ever to ensure all aspects of data compliance are met.

But how do we ensure we’ve recorded the compliance data within Salesforce correctly?

Although subject to change, Spring ’18 will allow you to set up a new “Individual” record, linked to a Contact or a Lead, that allows you to record and encrypt specific information relating to their data preferences.

For instance, you can track preferences for:

  • Collecting, storing, and sharing their personal data
  • Packaging their personal data so they can take ownership of it
  • Deleting records and personal data related to them
  • Solicitation of products and services
  • Tracking their geolocation and web activity

 

Data privacy records, based on the Individual object, let you store certain data privacy preferences for your customers. These records can help you honour and respect your customers’ wishes when they request only specific forms of contact from your company.

New Pardot feature: SSL for Pardot Vanity URLs announced

Posted on by Matt Lincoln

With web security becoming an increasingly important trend, and browsers including Google Chrome clearly flagging mixed content to users, one of the most frequent feature requests for Pardot was enabling SSL for Pardot vanity URLs.

Previously, Pardot only had an SSL certificate for the go.pardot.com URL, meaning that it was unable to support HTTPS in vanity domain URLs. For HTTPS websites, Pardot administrators needed to use the go.pardot.com URLs when embedding forms and other Pardot content to avoid prospects seeing a warning message.

Pardot has recently announced in the success community that SSL for vanity domains will be available from February 1st, and some customers have started to see this functionality appear in their account this week.

With the release just around the corner, we are awaiting the documentation from Pardot in terms of the specific technical information, then we will provide a more detailed overview.

 

I am pleased to announce that this feature finally has a release date! SSL for Vanity Domains will be available to *all* Pardot customers on February 1, 2018. Thank you for your patience through the long wait for this delivery. Keep an eye out for a blog post for more information.

Salesforce’s Time field (Beta) – Why and when to use it

Posted on by Doug Gardner

The new Time field which can be found in the sandbox at the moment enables you to easily add a time to a record. This can be as a manually entered field or as a formula field. People have been finding uses for this in various firms including event control, project management, within cases and for recording appointment dates which can be easily provided to customers.

It is great to see such a long-standing request taking shape in the Salesforce environment but at present it does have a few limitations. These limitations include only being in GMT, not currently being able to be converted to text or number, and not being available in the process builder. However, these limitations can be seen as a good thing at this stage of the beta as it ensures that the base functionality works correctly.

As far as when to use the new field, the rule is to keep it simple at this stage. Personally I have found it very useful for showing client appointment times. This was previously controlled via a complex formula pulling from a time and date field which lead to difficulties for appointments which had more open timeframes such as AM or PM. With the current limitations and possibility that this functionality will not become a production feature it is not worth spending multiple hours configuring, however it is something that you should be aware of as it could easily become a stable of  the Salesforce environment. It is a field type which could be very powerful, especially when you consider that fomula functions such as TIMENOW have been enabled already.

I look forward to this being rolled out to production so that the functionality can be fully utilised for customers. If you have any questions about this though then the Success Community is definitely a good place to look.

 

There are 2 types of Time fields in Winter ’18 beta:

– as a custom field with Data Type = Time, or

– as a Formula field that returns type = Time