Nurture Creativity, Passion And Collaboration To Be Innovative

The Salesforce Trailhead online training modules are inspiring a lot of us to learn new features and exercise what we already know to earn points and badges. And to have fun with Salesforce. There are modules, or trails, specifically for admins or for developers and trails for specific activities like learning about Event Logs. There is even a trail for getting ready for Dreamforce.

These are definitely worthwhile exercises for anyone interested in encouragement to practice new skills. Once you get started, they draw you in with virtual rewards that inspire continuing with a just-one-more goal. And the list of trails is growing at great speed to ensure that just-one-more goal offers something new and different.

I wanted to explore how this popular project came to be so that I can encourage that kind of innovative thinking among my teammates. So I interviewed Lauren Grau, Developer Relations at Salesforce and a member of the Trailhead team, and here's what I learned.

According to Lauren, the Developer Marketing group was looking into ways they might improve on the existing training workbooks. While these were popular for learning Salesforce, they didn't always provide a clear path or define a way to progress beyond introductory steps. It was also difficult for the folks at Salesforce to gauge the usefulness of any particular workbook. Were people getting stuck? Were they making mistakes?

Coincidentally, while that group was looking into improving the workbook training experience and exploring new tools like those from Udacity, one of the developers on the Developer Evangelism team, Josh Birk, was working on a side project called "Medals". Josh intended to demonstrate using the Metadata API to verify changes in an org based on steps in training. As a group, Developer Evangelism is all about coming up with cool uses of the platform to inspire people and Medals was another project intended to inspire developers with the power of the Metadata API.

According to Lauren, this kind of creative exploration is not limited to any single team. Salesforce is willing to help "carve a space" for projects that employees are passionate about and the company is filled with people who are passionate about Salesforce products. Salesforce has even encouraged that sort of creativity with project challenges that eventually get released as Salesforce Labs applications on the AppExchange.

While marketing had started creating learning paths based on roles and flow charts of the "known universe" of the Force.com platform, the demo of Medals was catching fire among all who saw it. In some companies, these two efforts would continue on their independent paths, but at Salesforce, collaboration and alignment across departments is a huge part of the culture. They use Chatter to connect people and ideas and have a "great open door policy" according to Lauren.

This combination of technology and policy helps Salesforce overcome barriers to innovation that other companies find insurmountable. As a result, the people who could bring together the two teams, marketing and evangelism, did so, and brought in the documentation team as well.

The people involved in Trailhead are passionate about solving the problem of helping Salesforce admins and developers with the task of keeping up with the cloud. With Trailhead, Salesforce can provide training that offers real-time feedback and does not require switching back and forth between disparate systems like workbook and computer to execute training steps. The gamification elements ensure that training is fun and addictive while well-thought-out projects and paths make the skills taught even more meaningful.

Luckily for all of us who enjoy the training modules, Lauren tells me "there is still a lot we haven't gotten to do with Trailhead that we've got planned". New learning trails and badges are on their way, expanding beyond the platform to other clouds as well. There will also be trails for end-users. Just imagine pointing users to Trailhead for learning and relearning tasks like running reports and using filters to see just the data they need.

If you have ever wished you could create your own learning trails for Trailhead, you will get your chance as Salesforce expects to harness the power of its incredible community for content creation and review. Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see what ideas develop thanks to Salesforce nurturing creativity, passion and collaboration so that fun and innovative projects like Trailhead thrive.

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!

Why Should Every Admin Learn To Use Flow In Salesforce?

Flow, it is one of those under-appreciated features in Salesforce.  Many of us aren't even sure what to call it since it is known as Visual Flow, Visual Workflow, Flow, and sometimes the slight misnomer of Workflow.  I presented a session at Dreamforce '13 on Using Visual Flow for Cleaner Data, but the topic of Flow warrants even more attention than that!  And so, I offer part 1 of a three part series on using Flow in Salesforce.

Like Workflow rules, Flow can help your org conform to defined business processes.  Unlike Workflow, which lets you define rules and outcomes to operate fairly automatically and behind the scenes, Flow can interact with users in addition to conducting automated processes behind the scenes and so it is more flexible in its uses.  Some examples of use cases for Flow include:

• Stepping users through the data entry process with detailed instructions
• Providing a call-script for anyone who interacts with customers or donors
• Enforcing naming conventions by employing formulas in record names
• Ensuring data consistency with formulas for data validation and constants
• Simplifying the process of data entry for multiple objects such as parent and child related data
• Creating presentation and training materials

My Dreamforce presentation was created as a Flow and can be found online here: http://flow.snugsfbay.com

Flow diagram illustrates Lead and child record creation.

I created the Flow with several goals.  Foremost, I wanted to walk Salesforce administrators through the basic steps required to create a Flow.  When you step through the presentation, you will see videos, instructions and help related to designing and creating a Flow to gather data from a user and save that data to Salesforce. In my example, the Flow creates a new Lead record if a matching record is not found; it also allows for any number of Lead Notes to be added to a new or existing Lead.  All of this is illustrated in the presentation videos.

The presentation also includes information about incorporating decision branches into a Flow and using formulas for data consistency, for example the Lead Note child records are named though the use of a formula.  It offers instructions for making a Flow available to users along with the most basic code needed to create a Visualforce page to display the Flow as well.  The related videos demonstrate each of the steps involved in creating this Lead and Lead Note data entry Flow.

In creating this presentation, I also wanted to demonstrate the customizable user interface Flows offer.  Part 2 of my Flow blog posts will describe how to style your Flow and improve the user experience.