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Tip of the Week – Use Named Credentials in Salesforce to simplify integration maintenance

Tip of the Week – Use Named Credentials in Salesforce to simplify integration maintenance

Integrations are integral when you want to take your Salesforce org to the next level. The integrations you use may be as simple as generating short links for SMS messages, or as complex as feeding live data between Salesforce and your accounting software or back-office data warehouse. If you’re a Salesforce developer, you’ve probably had to hard-code integrations over the years, leading to challenges in testing, deployment, and maintenance. If you’re a system administrator, you’ve probably had to deal with the annoyance of needing a developer to update code every time a simple endpoint changes. Many developers have learned these lessons the hard way and created custom settings to maintain integration settings, but this approach has its limitations. But have you heard of Named Credentials?

My team had favored the Custom Settings approach for quite a while, and when an incredible power user on Twitter built a bit.ly integration based on a question I posed to the #askforce community, I was introduced to the new Named Credentials tool released in Winter ‘16. Readymade out of the box, this cool tool is built with integrations in mind. They’re easier to set up and reference in Apex than Custom Settings, and maintenance is a breeze, allowing you to change endpoints without ever touching the code. Create a Named Credential by going to Setup -> Security Controls -> Named Credential. If you want to see how easy it is to incorporate into your code, check out the bit.ly integration above and Salesforce’s user guide. Admins and Developers alike, I know you’ll love this!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
Cover image by Joelle Diane

Tip of the Week – A bit.ly integration for Salesforce all from one tweet

Tip of the Week – A bit.ly integration for Salesforce all from one tweet

I know I rave about the Salesforce community. A lot. And for very good reason. A few weeks ago, I was asked if you could send shortened URLs from Salesforce. Sending them wasn’t the problem – there’s dozens of approaches there. But I didn’t quite have a solution for generating those links. I knew my team could figure it out quickly, but it was after-hours when the question came in and I wanted an answer fast. I turned to Twitter, and within a few minutes, I had several approaches lined up and could definitively say it was possible. The next morning, I awoke to an incredible blog post by Doug Ayers, who took my question as a challenge and stayed up late writing the code.

In short, his solution is brilliantly simple. First, you sign up for a free bit.ly account. In Salesforce, create a “Named Credential” (a tool designed for storing login credentials and endpoint URLs for integrations; Setup -> Security Controls -> Named Credential), then a Custom Field to hold your shortened URL. Next, copy and paste his Apex code – yeah, it’s ready to fly and very well-commented. Finally, use the Process Builder to create a Process, activate it, and test it out. Due to some known limitations with the Process Builder (if you need to do this in bulk, you could hit some problems), my team needed to swap that out for a Trigger, and a few other modifications were needed to make it fit into the process flow, but the hardest part was solved with just one tweet and the incredible #askforce community! Check out Doug’s post here, and enjoy this awesome solution!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys
Cover image by Joelle Diane

Dreamforce Sock Update:

Dreamforce Socks

The socks are done! They look awesome, and feel even more incredible! I think I’ll be knitting another pair of Dreamforce socks next year, and I definitely plan on strolling around the convention in these!

Tip of the Week – Mass delete records in a snap with truncation in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Mass delete records in a snap with truncation in Salesforce

Take a break

There are a number of circumstances where deleting all records under an object can be crucial to your business’s success. Have you been finalizing Production testing on a custom integration? Have you completed the test phase for a new process and are ready to roll it out? Have you decided to migrate records from a legacy Object before repurposing it? You don’t want to delete the object, just the hundreds, thousands, or millions of records associated. If you’re already in tears thinking about the time it will take to use the data loader to remove these records, then dry your eyes and keep reading!

Salesforce allows you to truncate any custom object. Truncation in Salesforce deletes all records associated to a custom object while preserving all associated metadata – fields, lookups, formulas, workflows, validations, sharing settings, list views, etc. In just a few minutes, you can clear out all junk or legacy data and get your team up and running in a shiny new object! Truncating isn’t the solution for every situation, and I recommend you check out Salesforce Help to decide if it’s the right solution for you. Good luck on all your exciting summer builds!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Celebrate independence from IT with Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Celebrate independence from IT with Salesforce

Fireworks

Fire up the grill, pop the cork, and get your (legal) fireworks ready! It’s almost Independence Day here in the good ol’ USA. If you’re a Salesforce user, you know that every day is a day to celebrate your independence from IT and developers. Need a new Report? How about a new field? Updates to your automation? Salesforce’s “clicks-not-code” interface gives anyone with basic computer skills and an internet connection the power to become a Salesforce superhero in just a couple days! In celebration of the holiday, here are 4 great tricks for the aspiring admin.

4. Reporting on Reports:       

Did you know you can run Reports on Reports in Salesforce? If you’re trying to clean up your Reports folder or help your team identify what’s already available for them, this can be a fantastic feature. You can even see when a Report was last run. Check out this cool use case for supercharging your Report Reports!

3. Use List Views to drive prioritization:

What Lead should you call next? What Case needs your attention? Which Opportunities should you try to close today? Create a couple list views using fields like Stage, Rating, Last Activity Date, and Last Modified Date to create targeted call lists. Once they’re set, you can get a bit fancy with this intermediate level code!

2. Create a custom Follow-up Date field:

Did a client ask you to call back in a week? Do you need to give a customer time to think about your latest proposal? Create a custom Follow-up Date field on any object and use it as part of your list view criteria to weed out the people who don’t need to hear from you just yet.

1. Leverage the community for free help on anything:

Stuck on your latest customization? Can’t figure out why the cool thing you’re trying to do won’t work? Tweet #askforce or log on to the Salesforce Community forums to get free help with anything. As your skills grow, the community will go from being your source for basic how-to guides on stuff you feel too embarrassed to ask to a crew of knowledgeable developers the world over ready to help you figure out why you’re getting an error in your latest integration!

Happy 4th of July everyone!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Collaborating and taking the next step with Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Collaborating and taking the next step with Salesforce

Thumbs Up!

Chatter is an awesome collaboration tool that lets you connect with your internal users, partners, and customers to ask questions, share ideas, and work together towards success. Salesforce has its own vibrant Chatter community, and we like to share our tips there to help other users and developers improve their systems. In turn, we frequently get fantastic feedback that helps us hone our own ideas and bring you better tips each week. Last week’s post on giving your users a guided workflow utilizing the Next Step field received such a response from community member Tyler Swinyard. It was so good, we wanted to share it with you! Check out his response below, and read the full thread here.

Thanks for the post @Henry Abenaim (CloudMyBiz). Your post’s workflow is great. I adopted a method like this while at my previous organization and loved it.

We’d use a “next step” text field paired up with a “next step due date” date field. We’d then use [list views] and found it to be an elegant way to remove the “thinking” from our daily activities. It also [eliminated] the need to create tasks. I’d go the extra step launch the list view results (next step due date less/equal to today) into PowerDialer by InsideSales.com. Basically, knowing what I should be doing and when were fully automated. I loved it.

Additionally, enabling field tracking for your “Next Step” field is an easy way to automate visibility for the “previous step.”

Hoping to see you at Dreamforce and share more great ideas with all of you next week!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys