Hey folks, by the time you read this, I’ll be at the Twin Cities super-uber Use group presenting on the Lightning Process Builder.
There’s a lot going on so instead of a normal blog on how to do some magic in salesforce, I thought I’ll give you some quick updates. Continue Reading
It eventually happens, your Salesforce administrator leaves. Perhaps you’re the manager, or one of the other admins on the team. Maybe you’re the new administrator who is taking over. You Admin was the center of your Salesforce org for such a long time. Where do you begin? Who do you need to call (besides Ghostbusters)?
What should you do?
Hey Wizard News fans! I’m on vacation with my family right now. As you read this, I may be watching the kids go crazy on the TeaCups at DisneyWorld or maybe I’m riding a orca whale while wearing my hat.
Occasionally, I’m asked about “the hat.” Instead of answering these questions one by one, here… is the truth. Please note that the following story may be inappropriate for some audiences. Small children and sheep may not want to read the following. It is strongly recommended that readers with heart conditions or may be pregnant are not exposed to the following story.
This story may contain harmful or sensitive language, symbolism, and the images. Readers who may find offense at these things should not read further.
I’m serious. This is some heavy stuff.
This isn’t a normal blog post for Wizard News. In a few days, it will be 1 year since I stopped drinking caffeine. Why am I sharing this? In the course of talking to other Admins and Devs, going to user groups and Dreamforce, one thing became very clear. The grand majority of drink a ton of caffeine.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking some caffeine. It can be very helpful during a stressful day when the kids kept you up late or you simply had to play “one more turn” of your favorite game.
In my situation, I was drinking a LOT of caffeine. I discovered that I was drinking it for a variety of reasons, but one of them was to address stress. I had a job I was very frustrated at. It also had free coffee. I was drinking six to eight 16 ounces of coffee a day, by noon.
Needless to say that this had some major impacts on my health. I was getting jittery at work. I became less patient. I also was having more and more trouble with sleep. This all started to snowball. The less sleep I got, the more irritable I became. The more irritable I was, the more stressed I began to feel. The more stress I feel, the more coffee I started to drink.
Ultimately, I hit a point where I contracted a heck of a illness that prevented me from drinking anything other than water for about a week. I was caffeine free for a week.
When I got healthier, I decided I might as well continue. I decided I might as well purge caffeine from my body for a month. A month became a quarter, and then I decided I might as well make it a full year.
It hasn’t been easy. It’s amazing how many drinks of caffeine in it. Going out to eat really limited yourself. There’s only a few soda/pops that are commonly served in restaurants that are caffeine free. I caught myself drinking a lot of water and lemonade.
The up-side to all this is I feel pretty darn good. I’m sleeping better overall and I even managed to lose a little weight from nearly removing soda from my diet completely.
Will I stay caffeine free forever? Probably not. I love a good cup of coffee. For me, this year has been an exercise in will power and life style change. It’s something I hope to carry over to other things I want to change. Reduce my weight, get more certifications, learn a new skill. These all take will power.
My recommendation for you my readers is to consider doing a purge of caffeine. Pick a length of time and try it. I would suggest starting with a week. That’s the shortest period of time to not have caffeine and have your body start to adjust. See how you feel. We may all be better without caffeine in the long run, but I still plan on having that good cup of a coffee occasionally.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for a more “normal” Wizard News post next week.
Emails make the world go round. Well at least they make my inbox round (digital fat joke). Experienced users and admins know you can send emails from Salesforce completely ad hoc or by using email templates.
Email templates support merge fields which lets you place data from your Salesforce records directly into the email you’re sending. This is a great way for sending reminders to users, updates to managers, or notifications to clients. I’ve seen email templates used to send links to customer satisfaction surveys and even quotes & proposals.
With merge fields, Email templates in Salesforce can be very useful. With a little extra work they can also be amazingly flexible.
Salesforce is a fantastic tool. You can quickly create new Objects, fields, validation rules and workflow rules. There are always a few nifty tricks that admins can use to help speed things up even more.
This will likely be a recurring theme on Wizard News and I invite everyone to participate. Got a nifty trick that makes using Salesforce a breeze? Post it in the comments or send me a “Letter to the Developer.”
Tell me your name, your trick, and if you want to be included in an upcoming Productivity Magic Tricks posts.
For now, here’s a trick for updating page layouts
Hey there Wizard News fans! I love writing blog posts and trying to pass on the little tricks, tips, and cool things that I’ve learned how to do with salesforce. I started blogging for the first time a year ago. Over last year, I started many posts that have never been published. There were two primary reasons for this. The first reason was time. Most of those posts covered more complicated ideas which is difficult to convey with just words. This meant needing to create lots of screenshots and building up the post. The second reason is the blog post seemed to be just too confusing to convey what I wanted to.
Some of the posts I did last year had some little video snippets that I included. Those snippets had no audio and were very short. I think they worked better than a whole bunch of screenshots you had to click. Video was simply a better medium for these ideas.
Thus Wizard’s Apprentice was born. This will be a video series that will cover various topics starting with an introduction leading to more complex details. The first series will be focusing on Visual Workflow (Flow).
I’m going to still aim to do a blog post a week, released on Thursday at 10:00 AM Central. Considering the time it takes to record, edit, and publish the videos I will likely also release those with a blog post like today.
This is the first video that I’ve created with audio. I also had to multiple different sessions recording the audio. So you will hear some audio weirdness with the video. I’ve also learned that the device I recorded with did not record in the right resolution. So the YouTube video will look a little odd unless you have it in full screen.
The first two episodes will be a little “funky” this way. Future episodes will hopefully be a better quality for both audio and video.
Right now, I’m planning on a video series for Visual Workflow and the new Lightning Process Builder. I’ll love to hear what other topics you would be interested in.
Before you can start to use a tool, you need to be familiar with it first. This is what prevents people from trying to hammer a nail with the handle, grabbing the wrong end of a circular saw, and peering through the wrong side of a telescope.
This first episode of Wizard’s Apprentice on Visual Workflow goes through the various tools. We explain the palette and discuss what is a variable. All this leads up to episode two where we start to build a basic Flow.
You’ll find Wizard’s Apprentice videos on my YouTube channel, specifically on this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlwUYE-6OLbWSIg25D2QP7eCVmRg5jT6x
