Month: May 2014

Don’t start cleansing data yet!

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Data is a fickle beast.

One minute, you have amazing dashboards and reports… your finance nerds are seeing into the future with clarity a weather man can only wish to have…the next minute, you have gremlins everywhere causing chaos in the most basic of processes and you can only give accurate forecasts for five minutes in the past.

Don't feed data analysts after midnight!

All your data are belong to us!

I suspect this has been happening since mankind developed the first CRM, which was on Oracle Clay Tablets.

Oracle V1

You should see the servers needed for this!

Having been on many data cleansing projects in the past, with many more in my future, I decided to sketch out some ideas I have picked up along the way. Don’t worry, I will go back to my techie salesforce nerd stuff next week!

“It is a never ending story”

Cleansing data is not a project with a start and an end, it is a process that needs to be ongoing. If you have data coming in, you will have data that needs to be cleaned. Build it into your budget, chant the mantra, do whatever it takes, but embrace the fact that as long as you are around any CRM you will be doing data clean up.

“Business Involvement”

Even though dirty data and data cleansing will never go away, it will become a smaller task once you get your users sold on the idea of clean data. At the very least, you need your users to care about the system at the best they will become advocates of clean data. Boeing used to have a program called “FOD FREE”. FOD is “Foreign Object Damage” and it prompted their employees to be active in keeping the work environment clean. It was a huge success through marketing and  engagement, AKA, Business Involvement.

“Clean with a Purpose”

There are two methods to getting business involvement in data cleansing, carrot and stick. Personally, I prefer the carrot approach. Know why you are doing it, and be able to explain that to the business. Tell them in “What’s In It For Me” (WIFM) terminology why their data is changing and what outcomes they can expect. Have them involved in any process modifications or validation rule building. If you get them at least interested in clean data the process will be much less contentious.

“Know your Data”

Seriously, run some DANG reports. Know the numbers because someone will ask. Know the up and downstream impacts of dirty data. Know use cases. Have a really nice power point set explaining this things, and gear the presentations to different user levels. If you do not  know your data, how can you clean it???

On a side note, I swear by “You suck at powerpoint” as a great learning aid around presentations!

“Classify your Data”

Classifying data is just chunking up your data into sound bite groupings. The key here is “Sound Bite”. You can say something awesome like “Customers with an account that has at least 3 contacts that all have been sent an email in the past three years”, but after the first couple words, all anyone will hear is “blah blah blah”. Instead, have sound bite ready classifications. Thinking in “Sound Bite” terms will also help with reporting and formula writing, covered next week!

Here are some suggestions for accounts:

Primary = Customer, Non Customer

Secondary = Active (Open Pipeline), Non Active (No Pipeline)

Tertiary = Marketable (Contacts with Email), Non Marketable (Contacts without Email)

It’s looking a lot like Christmas (Sigh)

What really gets me excited about classifications is that it helps you NOT boil the ocean. It is not unrealistic to have hundreds of thousands of account records, and if you were to set about trying to clean them ALL, you would be wasting time and money on records that really are the equivalent to that fruitcake you got last year. It is just taking up space, but you don’t want to throw it out because someday you might have a reason to use (re-gift) it.

fruitcake

Yes, I did just compare your data to an old fruitcake

The above tips are not the end all be all, just things I have picked up along my career. But, if you are rolling into the discussion on data clean up just keeping these in mind you will be at a point where you have the business engaged in the ongoing process of data cleansing on a known set of data that involve a set of agreed upon classifications…or, in other words, you will be setup for success!

Oh, and now that this stuff is out of the way, we can get back to more techie stuff next week!

 

Andrew

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Add followers with Flows

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Chatter (in my opinion) is one of the really neat features of salesforce, allowing users to follow records that might be important to them is just one of the “Killer Apps” of this functionality. Ironically enough, being that this is a social network, is the request for that one can just add followers automagically if  “X” condition is met. There are even a couple apps on the appexchange for that.

Automated Networking, Jumbo Shrimp, Stop / Keep Moving, OxyMoron

Automated Networking, Jumbo Shrimp, Stop / Keep Moving, OxyMoron

To me, this takes a bit of the social out of “social networking”, so I am going to sketch out a solution that is a bit more personable but still makes it easy to add a follower

In a nutshell, it goes a little something like this:

1)      Within a record, the current user feels that another user (or themselves) should be on the follow list

2)      The current user clicks a button. In this case, I have called it “Pied Piper”

3)      A flow is launched that does the following:

1. Looks up a user based information given

2.Attaches that user to the current record as a follower

As usual, I am just sketching going to provide the foundation for this functionality. The magic here is that you can flows to do some neat stuff like attaching multiple users, adding comments, tags, etc. You don’t have to add this stuff in, but I would encourage playing around with it to see what you can / can’t do. Also, a quick Caveat. I found that a user will have to have “Modify All” permissions on the object you are pushing this out to. 

That aside, now we get to the Nuts & Bolts of the matter. I have got a couple of components that I am going to be using:

  1. A visual flow
  2. A custom button driven by a URL
  3. A nice cup of Coffee (Optional, or not)

This flow function sounds exciting and awesome (Follower Updates, Magic!), but is really basic. There are four components to this flow, Entry screen, Record lookup, Record Create and the confirmation screen (optional). There is however a critical variable, varAccountID. This is the variable that houses the ID that is passed over via URL. Just be aware when you are building this out!

The Components

Salesforce Flows, How awesome

On the entry screen, there is a text box for entry of a person’s name. The text box value is passed to the Record Lookup. One of the easiest improvements would be making this multi search (name, ID, email), just something to keep in mind.

Search Box

The flow does a look up on name, and returns the userID.

2014-05-13 13_15_27-Flow Designer_ public_FlowFromFlow

 

 

Next up is the Record Create on the object Entity Subscription. In this case, the parentID is the accountID, but it can be anything. SubscriberID is just the UserId pulled above.

2014-05-13 12_49_55-Flow Designer_ public_FlowFromFlow

Once the record is created, there is a confirmation screen. This is an optional step, but something I like to do.

Confirmation

Now that I have a flow in place, I create a button (Pied Piper) on the account layout.

Pied Piper Button

1 story point was spent on the clever name

This button is nothing fancy, just running a hyperlink that will open up the flow AND push over the accountID of the record the user is currently in. I did add the retURL on the end so that instead of a loop, the user is returned to the accounts page.

Behind the Curtain

Just to reiterate, this is the foundational work. You could implement this into production and have something that works but it isn’t going to be awesome. Here are the required proof shots!

 

As always, questions or comments, hit me up!

 

andrew

What (approximately) 48 hours with Apex has taught me

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Friday afternoon, around 2:00 I got a message telling me to check out SFDC99.com. At first, I was skeptical, here is yet another blog that is going to teach me Apex / java/ html etc…I had read it all before and have failed just about every time. Part of it was how the knowledge was presented, part of it was me saying “It is 20XX, why am I still having to write lines of code” and part of it was that I can do a BUNCH of cool stuff already with the goodies in Salesforce, what will learning Apex do for me.

Apparently, not my future.

Where we are going, we don’t need code

This blog was different though, the tutorials were written in a conversational and logical manner that made sense and also didn’t come across as a developer talking to a kindergarten class.It also dawned on me…I was doing this stuff already. Sure, it might be through flows or crazy clever formulas and workflows, but the logic was there. My bias was pretty much erased completely once I saw this question:

1. If you can solve a business need using either a workflow or a trigger, which should you use?

Always use a point-and-click solution (workflow) when possible!

  • It’s easier for your team to create and maintain workflows
  • Workflows are easier to find when debugging unexpected behavior in your org
  • Workflows never break!
  • You don’t have to write test classes
Pretty much every developer I have ever worked with

In internet time, this meme is so old it farts dust

The reason this question really hit me was because I have ran into MANY developers that are code first, ask questions (and write documentation, test, get feedback on, deploy correctly) later.

Having seen and supported the aftermath of this type of developement, I really took a to the whole #ClicksNotCode and #ButtonClickAdmin philosophy to heart. Seeing a developer actually answer this question like I would was like a golden ticket.

Golden Ticket of Apex

First time your class runs with 100% coverage (even though trigger is 5 lines)

It told me I could still believe in all the good stuff that makes a system like Salesforce.com great WHILE learning the dark side.

So, it has been approximately 48 hours since I started doing this thing, and here is what I have learned:

1)      Just because you know code doesn’t mean you know salesforce.

2)      APEX is way more intuitive than whatever code you might have tried to stumble through last time.

3)      I am really thankful for my time supporting traditional CRM systems (Cough, Siebel, Cough) and having to muddle through gnarly SQL statements.

4)      Having to have 75% code coverage is tough, but if you think about what you are trying to do with your trigger and then build out from there, you will do good.

5)      Try and think how you would write a trigger to handle every transactions like getting coffee.

Next steps? Well, I just got my Head First Java book and have been working through that. Honestly, so far installing the JAVA SDK seems to be the hardest part (and I have installed Linux!), but that really isn’t a surprise since it is an Oracle Product.

Clicks not Code Larry, Clicks not Code

The new westcoast beef

I am also going to keep plugging away on the SFDC99.com tutorials. I have went through Chapter4 and am going to spend some time here getting a better grip on the basics before I move along. I am also going to keep “doing what I do” in terms of new functionality in SFDC. I love all the fun stuff like flows and workflows, but much like a padawan with a new lightsaber, I am going to try and use it as much as I can.

Nuts! My lightsaber test class only ran 45% of the lines!

I missed class picture day

 

Andrew