5 Ways To Get Help With Your Salesforce Problem

Q:  How many different ways can you find help with your Salesforce implementation, administration and development?  A:  Lots!

If something appears to be off, you can easily find help!

Salesforce is so chock-full of features and the thrice-yearly releases offer so many improvements, it can be challenging to keep up.  For administrators who support smaller implementations, they may be the only person trying to keep up with everything that Salesforce can do for your business.  Salesforce has found a way to help with both of these situations by offering multiple avenues for help and support, including making it easy for the community of Salesforce users and administrators to help one another.

When you find yourself in need of help, here are my top five recommendations for finding the answers you need:


1.  Help and Training -- Salesforce offers standard and Premier Support and training for most users.  Help, without training, is offered for users with developer accounts.  Salesforce Help and Training should be your front-line for finding out how to do things in Salesforce.  All of the product documentation is searchable here, including some Best Practice documents.

Premier Support is what you want your support to be like, really.  Open 24 hours a day, they will track down even the craziest problems and solve them for you.  In addition to fantastic support, the online training available with Premier Support includes several of the classes offered in-person by Salesforce University. If you are working on Salesforce certification, you should definitely take a look at these training options!  And developers should note that Premier Support even offers help with code.

2.  The Community -- Let your peers give you a hand.  Online communities, success.salesforce.com and, for nonprofits using the nonprofit starter pack or other nonprofit specific applications, the Power of Us Hub, offer multiple channels for helpful discussions.

• Answers -- Search for questions that others may have posted on topics of interest to you or post your own questions.  Lots of folks are looking for a Salesforce challenge and would love to answer your questions.  Note that the questions are organized by categories listed on the left side of the page.  For nonprofit organizations, you have an additional avenue for answers through the Power of Us Hub Q&A, a resource for applications and concerns specific to nonprofits.
• Chatter Groups -- Sometimes, what you really want is to be kept abreast of what's happening and hear ideas from other Salesforce users and administrators.  Chatter Groups provide just that sort of information.  With groups like the Success -- Getting Started and Success -- Release Readiness, among others, you can keep up with Salesforce features.
• User Groups -- Among the most helpful Chatter Groups, you will find the Salesforce User Groups online as well.  If you find a group in your geographic area, consider signing up for your local group and trying to attend meetings in person to get to know your peers.  Meetings give you an opportunity to ask other administrators, users and developers how easy or difficult a task may be before you try to hire a consultant.  User Groups can also keep you informed about Salesforce features and best practices and third-party application availability as well.
• Developer Groups -- Like User Groups for developers, these provide opportunities for discussing technical issues and topics.

3.  Developer Community -- the developer boards offer a great place for help with all your Apex and Visualforce needs.  If you are trying to go beyond formulas and workflow, you may have questions that have been previously discussed on the developer boards.  You can find code samples to get you started with your projects as well.

4.  Office Hours -- both the Salesforce MVP community and the Salesforce Foundation host office hours as a regular webinar that folks can join to ask questions and get answers. Both provide a forum for conversations about problems and challenges you may be encountering.  The MVPs offer general help with Salesforce and the foundation offers help with issues concerning the Nonprofit Starter Pack and any related topics.

5.  Out in the Wild -- The community is also active outside of the Salesforce environment in places like Twitter (try #askforce when you want to make sure your question gets seen) and StackExchange, which tends to focus on technical challenges and developer concerns.  FindSFinfo is another great resource when you are looking for information to solve your problems, it performs a search of official documentation, discussion boards, blogs, code repositories, AppExchange, and videos for any text you enter.

By cultivating a strong community, Salesforce ensures that you can always find the help you need!

User Interface Improvements With Salesforce Flow

Flow gives administrators the opportunity to offer users a custom interface for interacting with Salesforce providing as much help as you think they may need to get their jobs done, from simplifying data entry to providing insight to help users complete forms, all without the need for code.

Last week, I defined some use cases for Flow and offered a presentation to introduce you to various features of Flows for data input and Salesforce record creation.  This week we look at ways to improve the user experience with Flows.

You can access the demonstration Flow I created at http://flow.snugsfbay.com.

Help

Cascading Stylesheets offer control.

Each Flow Screen has its own Help Text area, which you can use to add an extra bit of information  that may not be needed by all users.  In my example Flow, the lead form Screen includes a link to Help, located with the "Next" and "Previous" buttons, to let users know that their information will not be shared.  Other Screens offer more in-depth information in their Help.  And Screens that don't have Help text do not show a link at all.

Because Help text is defined per Screen, your Flow can provide context-sensitive help to your users.

Branding & Style

Flows offer two ways to format output display text and Help text.  Toggling to the Rich Text Editor while editing text, you can select formatting option buttons for bold, italics, font, etc.  But you can also enter HTML tags directly without toggling to the Rich Text Editor.  For example, "Not Bold and <b>Bold</b>"  will display the following: 
Not Bold and Bold

You can also use HTML tags to add an image directly to your Flow.  For example, adding the following to display text will display the Bay Area Nonprofit User Group logo: "<IMG SRC="https://c.na14.content.force.com/servlet/servlet.ImageServer?id=015d0000001wpuy&oid=00Dd0000000gNhq&lastMod=1381177979000" WIDTH="100" ALT="SNUGSFBay">"

For even more control over the look and feel of your Flow, define a cascading stylesheet (CSS) and incorporate both the Flow and CSS into a Visualforce page.  Among the tags particular to Flow are FlowContainer and FlowPageBlockBtns.

Special Tip

One undocumented CSS tag that you will want to know about if you change the background color of your Flow is interviewFormHeaderCell.  If you see a random underline character at the top of every Flow Screen, it comes from a bit of code automatically inserted by Salesforce, and is a known bug.  To get rid of the stray text use the following code in your Visualforce page or adapt it for your CSS file:

        
    <STYLE type="text/css">
        .interviewFormHeaderCell {border-bottom:0px;}
    </STYLE> 

According to technical support, this is the only way to get rid of the unwanted character as of Dec. 9, 2013.

Next week's blog post will describe some of the more complex data handling options currently available with Salesforce Flow.

How to Find A Salesforce Genius At Dreamforce

Did you know that the Salesforce MVPs will be entertaining questions at their on-going ‘genius bar’ setup at Dreamforce?  Running each day of the show, you can find a selection of MVPs to help you solve your most vexing Salesforce questions.

What is a Salesforce MVP


The MVP program recognizes Salesforce customers and consultants who contribute to the Salesforce Community by sharing what they’ve learned about the product.  Bloggers, user group leaders, developers, folks who actively answer online questions, any of these may be candidates for the MVP program.  The program pools the knowledgeable and enthusiasm of a lot of individuals.

At Dreamforce this year, you can find these folks gathering at the Success Community Zone in the Hilton.  Tables are set aside for you to bring them the issues that have you flummoxed.   Look for the it at the Hilton Grand Ballroom in downtown San Francisco.

Why do so many people choose to make themselves available to answer the questions of strangers?  We enjoy working with Salesforce and want to share that enjoyment.  We believe the Salesforce platform has a lot to offer its users if we all help each other.  We love to learn more about Salesforce by investigating what others are pondering.  We recognize that a lot of administrators and developers may be working alone or in small teams and so can benefit from having other folks to act as resources.  And, as Steve Molis famously put it on the Salesforce answers board: “it's just the right thing to do and the right way to treat someone.”