When Not To Use Triggers

For administrators who don't code, hiring a developer to create a trigger can be a frustrating proposition, but what else can you do when you need to automate a business process with Salesforce?

Movie props may need triggers,
but administrators can get by without them.

In my experience, many of the processes I need to automate are triggered by a user action on a single record, or are required in order to update a list of records because of a specific change to the database model.  I may change the data model from using a multiselect picklist to check boxes, for example, and need to update all existing records to set the new check box fields based on existing picklist selections for each record.

Salesforce offers Custom Buttons, Links and Actions for updating a single record from the record detail page.  Perhaps converting a Lead to a Contact, for example.  And Global Actions can act on lists of records, such as when I want to create a new field and populate it in all existing records based on existing data.

To define, within Salesforce, the process that needs to be automated, administrators can use Flow rather than Apex.  Flow lets you retrieve records and manipulate them before saving those records, or new records, to Salesforce.  By embedding a Flow on a Visualforce page, it can handle the automated processing and logic associated with the Action or button.  Here is an example of a Visualforce page to initiate a Flow, named "FlowName":

   <apex:page sidebar="false" showheader="false">
    <flow:interview name="FlowName"/>
   </apex:page>

While Flows are easy to use and don't require programming experience, administrators should still learn to think like developers when creating Flows. Beware of using Flows in your production org without thorough testing first!  You can't develop Apex in your production org, which keeps you from damaging your data while you are developing the logic to automate data manipulation.  You should test your Flows in a Sandbox first to protect your data as well.

In the future, Flows will also be able to work with Triggers, but for now, you can have much of the same functionality at the click of a button.