It feels as if a new acquisition was announced every week a while back but that it has been a while. However it is always really good to see where the focusses are. This year it looks as if Quip will be one of those focuses.
Continue reading “Quip grows following Attic Labs acquisition”
Trigger recursion in Apex can be a bit hard to get your head around. Often it is indirect, so hard to diagnose. What can happen is that Continue reading “Please don’t use static flags to control Apex Trigger recursion!”
Spring ’18 looks set to deliver big functionality changes to the way Leads are handled in Salesforce and in the process are fixing a number of issues that have been around for years. Here are 3 new things to looks out for:
Continue reading “Salesforce is upgrading Leads in Spring ’18”
When it comes to writing custom user-interface code in Salesforce, Lightning is where it’s at. You could write it in Visualforce, but sooner or later you’ll have to convert it to Lightning. Lightning provides a far richer experience. It allows you to view related data more easily, and see that data change in real-time.
One headache for developers has been that doing something like writing a component to update values on a Contact would require page markup, Javascript, and Apex. And Salesforce itself did not check whether the current user had the correct permissions to be viewing/editing this data. Security was an extra requirement that could easily be forgotten.
In Visualforce, the same requirements could all be achieved with a small amount of markup, leveraging built-in Visualforce tags.
Well, as of Spring ’18, Lightning can now achieve the same thing. The combination of two new components, lightning:recordEditForm and lightning:inputField handle all the complexity for us, and we can get on with only writing custom code where it really adds value to the business!
Editing a Contact in Lightning is now as simple as:
| <lightning:recordEditForm recordId=”0030Y0000080eMuQAI” objectApiName=”Contact”> |
| <div class=”slds-box slds-theme_default”> |
| <lightning:messages /> |
| <lightning:inputField fieldName=”Name” /> |
| <lightning:inputField fieldName=”Phone”/> |
| <lightning:inputField fieldName=”Email” /> |
| <lightning:button class=”slds-m-top_small” variant=”brand” type=”submit” name=”update” label=”Update” /> |
| </div> |
| </lightning:recordEditForm> |
Build Secure and Interactive Forms Faster…No custom JavaScript and no Apex needed!
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:
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.
As a business user you often access the same reports. Data is a key driver in decision-making, so you should care about seeing the latest report data.
It’s been a while in coming by Salesforce is finally banging the last nail into the attachment coffin in the upcoming Spring ’18 release. Continue reading “Goodbye Salesforce Attachments”
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
With the Salesforce mania of Dreamforce behind us, we are now looking forward to what the next year of Salesforce will bring us. The latest earnings report was released this week and tells us a bit about what we can expect from the tech giant this year. Continue reading “5 Key Takeaways from Salesforce’s Q3 2018 Earnings Report”
One topic that repeatedly causes confusion and frustration when using Account Engagement (Pardot) with Salesforce is the topic of Campaigns. In this post, I’ll attempt to untangle the differences between the two and explain what each one is useful for. Continue reading “The Differences Between Account Engagement (Pardot) and Salesforce Campaigns”
Mid-November saw 170,000 Salesforce fans descend on San Francisco for the world’s largest tech conference, Dreamforce 2017: All eager to get a first look into the new features being planned for Salesforce over the coming months. Continue reading “MyTopTakeaways from Dreamforce 2017”
Two years ago Salesforce.com released Trailhead to the public, a guided interactive learning tool used to improve every aspect of a users Salesforce knowledge. Since it’s conception, literally millions of badges have been earned.
Continue reading “Reinvent Corporate Learning with myTrailhead”