Meet Founder & CEO, Naveen Gabrani, on April 12 - April 14, 2023, to gain insights into Salesforce CRM implementations for Nonprofits.
Astrea IT, a Salesforce.org partner and one of the premier organizations providing Salesforce CRM technological solutions and support to Nonprofits across the globe will join NTEN’s annual gathering of people who want to optimize their business with modern technology support.
TrailblazerDX 23 is an annual conference that brings together developers, business leaders, and technology enthusiasts to explore the latest trends and innovations in software development. The conference is hosted by Salesforce, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software provider, and is held in various locations across the globe.
Automation Studio is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud application used to execute multi-step marketing and data management activities on an immediate, triggered or scheduled basis.
It has ETL(Extract, Transform, Load) capabilities for advanced segmentation and filtering.
Import, export, decrypt and perform all sorts of data, from any external source. Automate data management and process for advanced messaging.
AMPscript is Salesforce Marketing Cloud 'sproprietary scripting language that helps marketers enhance their messages. From adding personalized content to retrieving relational data from data extensions, AMPscript is a powerful friend to have, especially as a technical marketer.
Let's have a look into AMPscript functions.
APIs are the building blocks you use to connect your system to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We want you to have everything you need to design and implement your code, so to achieve this Marketing Cloud offers two robust APIs.
1) Rest API: Rest APIs are used in the below mentioned apps/tools within Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps an Organization/Marketer to store data in a secured way and then send messages as per the requirement.
SFMC uses Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) which is a network protocol for securely accessing, transferring and managing large files and sensitive data.
SFTP is used for secure file transfers over Transport Layer Security and the transfer of data for virtual private network (VPN) applications.
Marketers come across some important terms/options while using Marketing Cloud platform which help them in achieving the desired result.
Let's have a look into some of the important terms which come under
1) Subscriber Key
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides the ability to send, track messages sent to the customers on their mobile devices.
By using Mobile Studio a user can reach customers on any mobile device with personalized mobile messaging.
Mobile Studio Features
Content Builder is the most commonly used tool/studio within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud which comes under Email Studio and provides the ability to create, send and track emails.
Why use Tracking?
Tracking allows a user to track performance of an email sent. It is used to keep an eye on the response for an email at the receiver's end.
In our previous article we have discussed Marketing Cloud and its best possible use, an Organization or any Marketer can make.
Now, to achieve this, initially when a Salesforce Marketing Cloud account is bought, Sender Authentication Package(SAP) setup needs to be done for better Email Deliverability results and performance.
Let's have a look into Sender Authentication Package(SAP) and it's features.
The Marketing Cloud has one of the most important tool/studio (Contact Builder) within the platform which define, manage, consolidate, organize and link data to build data relationships.
Contact Builder can be accessed by following the below mentioned path:
Login into SFMC Audience Builder > Contact Builder
The Outbound Funds (OFM) Module is a free, open-source product that customizes Salesforce for grant management that helps organizations in tracking, managing, and delivering funds. It’s available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Custom Objects which are used to manage and track funds are:
Marketing Cloud allows marketers to store their data within the platform using Data Extension or List. Depending on the data size either a Data Extension or a List is used and then accordingly it is used for sending emails/messages.
List vs Data Extension
Use Lists when:
Why use Tracking?
Tracking allows a user to track performance of an email sent. It is used to keep an eye on the response for an email at the receiver's end.
Content Builder is a very important and commonly used tool/app within Marketing Cloud. It is used for creating and sending emails. There are two paths by using which Content Builder can be accessed.
1) It can be clearly seen on the main page of the Marketing Cloud Platform where all other studios/tools are there.
2) It can be found under Email Studio by the name 'Content' besides the 'Overview' tab.
In today's world branding is everything where every Organization, Business, Individuals are finding new ways to market their name.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the largest and powerful platforms which Organizations are using to increase their revenue by expanding their client and customers database.
Sales and Marketing team works in coordination and can split the customers and prospects into different groups categorically. This allows users to further personalize messaging for each segment and speak to customers on a specific level which in turn will lead to an increase in customer loyalty and sales.
Briefings
Elevate is a zero code platform where administrators can configure the Giving Pages. It eases the process for fundraising efforts for non profits and educational institutions. Giving pages are web pages that allow organizations to accept donations and sync all the payments with the Salesforce NonProfit Success Pack (NPSP).
The dedicated set of commands that simplifies the development strategies and automates the building process while ascertaining the work associated with the Salesforce organization is termed as Salesforce CLI. Salesforce CLI supports and speeds up the development process for both developers and admins at the same time and it sets that statements are considered powerful for the development of the line interface according to the rules included with the Salesforce organization.
A clean and consistent database is the recipe for keeping the business successful and error-free. Several factors can compromise the data quality. To get maximum return on investment for your Salesforce org, it is critical that data is clean with minimal duplicates.
We cannot avoid duplicate records in our database completely, and with multiple users adding data into the system, we are bound to have records that are the same. It is thus necessary to have an administrator who regularly reviews and provides remedy for these duplicates. There can be implications, if we do not remove the duplicates and it might cause harm to the Business Platform and environment.
A piece of software that allows customers to engage with the business and perform basic tasks and access certain information without the need for a human agent to interact with them is termed as Chatbot. Chatbot allows the customers to create connections and interact with the business after hours or when they are not able to reach you through other means.Chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users. It acts as an automated virtual assistant, capable of communicating with people through SMS on instant messaging platforms, forums, and onsite live chat apps. Chatbots do have limitations too but they are making a smarter platform over time.
PandaDoc upgrades Salesforce and simplifies how sales teams generate, customize, and eSign professional-looking proposals. It makes it easier for the sales team to create, track, and eSign documents, all within Salesforce. It smoothes end-to-end workflow, automates tasks and keeps teams producing consistent collateral at lightning speed. Further, it locks content on documents, uses a signing order, and sets approval rules to check all the boxes while still getting sales proposals out in a timely fashion. PandaDoc’s real-time document status updates are accessible in Salesforce to let one know exactly who and when prospects are interacting with your documents and these features give the ability to act quickly at the most preferred times. PandaDoc also benefits from having all deal-related conversations and negotiations on proposals, contracts, and agreements embedded within Salesforce platform.
There is no doubt that anyone in a customer-facing B2B role has a challenging time and therefore Salesforce Applications are critical to increase productivity. Salesforce Appexchange is rich in native apps to help turn your Salesforce into your next sales engine. Salesforce apps for data enrichment do help in business platform success. Sales organizations and sellers rely on apps that excel their business platform and make them meet their customer’s expectations. Let us look at a few Salesforce applications that are user-friendly to the Sales Users and can increase productivity.
TaskRay is a popular application for Salesforce for managing projects in AppExchange. TaskRay can ensure that the teams can handle the influx of new customers. So, with Salesforce-native TaskRay app one can standardize processes, manage resources, and free the team up to focus on more important things—like building customer relationships. It helps the customers to quickly see the benefits of the products and services by delivering an exceptional post-sale experience. TaskRay follows through with the promise of the purchase and creates happier customers from the moment the deal is completed. TaskRay helps the team to be more productive, efficient, and collaborative and it is a 100% native Salesforce application.
The marketplace that offers thousands of solutions and services which extends Salesforce is known as AppExchange. It is a Salesforce Marketplace that helps customers to discover solutions and services. AppExchange helps Salesforce Admin or Users to find tools and talent to unleash their company’s productivity. For Salesforce ISV vendors it is the primary marketing tool that helps in promoting their solutions. The listing states the solution, pricing, support and other details so that the customers can estimate if the offering is right for them or not. AppExchange classifies the listings into one or more business areas, like sales, marketing, or analytics.
Salesforce DevOps ensures Admins & Developers can make changes and work through the software development process in the most efficient way possible, with minimum errors and disruption. Accelerating this as a career is the growth journey of the Salesforce Platform. A solid DevOps team maximizes the benefit of pioneering Salesforce technology. This career option helps companies answer the real business questions and deliver next level Sales, Service and Marketing and thus enhances the Business Platform. This field of career is in high demand and in a Survey, we gathered the information that on average, across all DevOps processes, 85% of teams already use or plan to adopt them in 2021.
Creating Digital Marketing Campaigns is now easy with Pardot. Pardot is a software as a Service (SaaS) marketing automation platform by Salesforce that offers email automation, targeted email campaigns and lead management for B2B sales and marketing organizations. Pardot tracks customer behaviors. Drip campaigns, lead management with nurturing and scoring and campaign segmentation are offered by Pardot and it features analytics with marketing ROI tracking.
Conga Composer is one of the most popular apps on AppExchange which enables Salesforce customers to customize, streamline and scale document generation and reporting for unlimited use cases across all organizations and industries. It is a composer that can automatically populate richly formatted templates with data from any standard or any custom object in Salesforce and send it via a variety of delivery options. From a button or link on an object in Salesforce, the administrator configures Composer Solutions for end-users to run Composer.
Social Studio- that became part of Salesforce through an acquisition, called ‘Radian6’- which connects marketers, sales teams, and customer service teams to the social channels. Social Studio allows users to publish relevant content, listen to what customers are saying about the particular brand, and that engages customers to create meaningful and successful relationships.
Advertising Studio is used to coordinate campaigns with social, mobile, sales, and customer service efforts. Ad Studio or Advertising Studio lets you get engaged with your customers and prospects. Ad Studio has three applications, namely: Advertising Audience, Journey Builder Advertising and Lead Capture. Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio enables you to enhance the email marketing goals with advertising platforms so that it encourages to connect with new or existing customers easily.
Really, it is more than a flat and typical platform; rather it is a key component of Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform; where one can discover features and sophisticated tools to connect with their customers to a vast margin and can excel in all business ways. It is none other than Mobile Studio.
Salesforce Blockchain is a distributed ledger platform designed for Customer relationship Management (CRM). It is a low-code platform that can build trusted partner networks that share distributed and verified data. The growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography is what blockchain is about. Moreover, blockchains are resistant to modification of their data because once recorded, the data cannot be altered without altering the other subsequent blocks. It feasibly manages blockchain networks, workflows, applications and contracts through clicks instead of complicated codes.
Salesforce Web Studio is the platform that lets you collect customer data and create personalized content for landing pages, microsites and mobile apps.
What is a landing page? It is that page which has static or personalized content, linked from an ad with a predefined set of products or information, or linked from an email. Subscribers are provided with more information in the landing pages. For referential information and transactional processing; landing pages are useful.
What is an Email Studio? How does it work? Why is it important? Yes, it is another marketing concept. Salesforce Email Studio is the tool used for sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. Every message sent to the customers can be included in the board area of Email Marketing. Email Marketing involves using Email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. It enhances a merchant’s relationship with current and previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business. This has emerged rapidly alongside the technological growth of the 21st century. Basically, transactional mails and direct Emails are trending.
Salesforce provides customer relationship management software and also applications based on sales, customer service, marketing and analytics. Salesforce certifications are in high demand. Salesforce Maintenance Exams are required to keep your Salesforce credentials valid. With ever changing Salesforce platforms, one needs to keep one’s knowledge up-to-date. In 2018, following changes were made for Salesforce Maintenance Exam:
An era of Digital India and a period of online strategies! The world has become in reach of our fist. We are technically advanced and thus the virtual and real scenes are really helping us to reach our goals and to fulfill our dreams. Communication always did connect us for our betterment and for our upliftment. Likewise, here we can say that a mobile phone has really made our life easy and hassle free.
Dreamforce is one of the largest conferences in the world. It is Salesforce’s massive event and used to have over 170000 attendees occupying most of San Francisco over a 4-day period in the 2nd half of every year. It will cost you liberally but one can enjoy discounts based on partnership and organisation. In the wake of the pandemic, Dreamforce has adapted to cater on a virtual ground too. They also organise on-demand events. Salesforce is nothing but it is a software that helps break down the technology silos between departments to give companies a complete view of their customer everywhere they interact with your brand.
Smart vCard makes it easy to export and import your Salesforce CRM Contact information as vCards. Smart vCard is available on AppExchange. Smart vCard allows for exporting Contact information one at a time or in multiples. Contact information can be exported from Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Users. You can also import multiple contacts from a VCF file on a single click. Nimble AMS helps in creating and managing a stellar membership experience for processing orders, managing events, and analyzing your organization’s data. As Nimble uses Person Accounts so we have added two custom fields in our Smart vCard app that are SmartvCard__Email__c and other is SmartvCard__Organization__pc which are added to Account object in Nimble. To populate these two custom fields, we have created a flow which will trigger when the field's values of NU__PersonEmail__c and PrimaryAffliateName__c are changed.
As a Salesforce partner we often build flows that have utilities across different businesses. With minor changes the same template of flow can be used in different scenarios. In such cases it is helpful to take the flow and copy it to another org, and then make the necessary changes to the flow in the new org. In this blog we explain how Flows can be copied from one Salesforce org to another.
Automation or the practice of having software and machines perform routine tasks, is taking over and is here to stay in almost every industry around us. Salesforce Flows are precisely that. It is an automation tool that provides declarative process automation for the Salesforce app, experience, and portal.
A client had requirements that they want to enter leads on a mobile device when they visit a conference. Since she meets several people in the event, she needs a simple form with only a few fields. In this article, we explain how such a requirement can be implemented using lightning flows.
Automation, or the practice of having software and machines perform routine tasks is taking over and is here to stay in almost every industry around us. Salesforce Flows are precisely that. It is an automation tool that provides declarative process automation for the Salesforce app, experience, and portal. Salesforce gives us the functionality through Flow Builder to fully automate a guided visual experience. It has very high functionality as it can be implemented in almost all processes to bring some form of automation.
What Is MFA and Why Is It Important?
As data security is one of the most important agendas for every organization, it’s important to implement strong security measures to protect your business and customers.
Usernames and passwords alone are not sufficient protection against unauthorized account access. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides an extra layer of security apart from user name and password against threats like phishing attacks, credential stuffing, and account takeovers.
It is often needed to calculate the number of days spent in each stage for an opportunity. This helps the management to identify bottlenecks and trends in sales. As an example, if opportunities are taking too much time on the Qualification stage, then management can take necessary steps to expedite this phase. In this blog we share an implementation of this feature using Flows.
In this article we provide a sample implementation of an EMI calculator using Salesforce Flows. A screen is built that takes three inputs: Amount of the loan, interest rate, loan tenure in months. The formula used for calculating the EMI is
Hydra is a lightning component which helps organizations to clone the records of any object. It also gives the functionality of bulk cloning, User can clone any number of records. Hydra is just like Astrea Clone but Hydra implements similar functionality as a lightning component.
Smart currency converter is a lightning component used to convert a currency from one unit to another.This component is very easy and simple to use. User just needs to click to convert currencies.
This component can be added to any detail page and thus saves time. Users do not need to switch to another platform just to convert the currency which could create chaos.
The free app supports effortless visualization of object hierarchies in Salesforce. Astrea Object Hierarchy graphically displays two-level child hierarchies related to a particular record. Often there is a need to display child and grandchild records for a record. This app facilitates this functionality.
Once the App is installed in the org. We can add an 'Astrea Object Hierarchy' button to the detail page of any standard or custom object through the page layout. By default, it is available for standard objects like Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunities and there is a provision to create the same button for custom objects.
Salesforce flows is a powerful tool to automate complex actions. Users just need to drag, drop and enter the logic. Flows is a tool which works just like code logic without using a programming language.
This is a use case where we are sending email alerts to the sales manager when the opportunity amount drops by 25%. This would help sales managers to approach their opportunities easily.
Salesforce continues to take more and more technical updates in Flows. Every Salesforce release flow contains powerful enhancements. In the Winter ’22 Release of Salesforce, we could find many enhancements related to Salesforce Flows.
Auto-Layout Can Now Connect To More Elements
Salesforce flow helps the users in automation and makes their work easy. A schedule triggered flow starts at a specified date and time with a specified frequency. So the user does not have to again and again do the thing manually and it saves his time.
If the User has not logged in for the past 90 days, we want to deactivate the User automatically with a note that the user has not logged in for 90 days.
Several businesses have long term projects or delivery schedules. At times in these businesses the payment is received after project completion. A project might continue for several months/years. To plan for revenues and profits in such businesses a concept of Present Value is important.
Salesforce to Salesforce is a feature which allows organizations to share records among Salesforce organizations. Partners and Customers can collaborate within and across Salesforce organizations more easily and effectively. Users can create connections among two Salesforce organizations and publish or subscribe objects with selected fields between two orgs. Users can share the records and get updated data easily without a single line of code.
Multi Factor Authentication is a feature which prevents unauthorized access to User’s accounts. An organization's prior agenda is to protect their user’s data and prevent it from any cyber attack. This multi factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to protect the Salesforce account and data.
Astrea Clone is an application made by Astrea which helps any organization to clone any record be it a custom object or a standard object. This application allows cloning of a record up to two levels i.e. it also gives an option to clone child objects or related lists. Users can clone a record just by clicking a few buttons. For example if you are cloning an account, you can also clone the related contacts and cases.
Chatrules is an application launched by Astrea to ease the process of following and unfollowing the records on the basis of business rules created by the users. It helps the organization to track important records easily.
Chatrules supports six standard objects: Account, Contact, Opportunity, Lead, Case and User. Users can also see the dashboards and have the statistics about the chatter in their organization.
Astrea Unit Converter is a Salesforce Lightning component. Using this component, the User can convert various Units from one type to another. This component allows you to check all types of metric conversion of measurement units, for example: weight, area, temperature, time, pressure, speed, force, volume, data storage, energy, degree, number converter etc.
Salesforce has been the market leading Customer relationship Management platform for the last several years. It brings automation, integration, data visualization and many more such features. Salesforce trailhead has existed for a few years now, as the learning and training platform but it focuses more on users and developers. As a result, Salesforce partners were dependent on trailhead courses, Salesforce documentation and blogs from different websites to upgrade their skills. Traditionally partners have used these resources to provide best solutions to their customers.
Astrea barcode component is a free salesforce lightning component. It allows the user to generate barcodes and convert any text to barcode i.e. in binary format. This app provides facility for every field of all standard and custom Objects in Salesforce.
As business people, all of us need to answer the question: Can we manage our time such that the right time is allocated to the right activity?
Yes, we can manage our time, such that it gives us extra time to spend in our daily life. People who can time-manage effectively enjoy having more time to spend on hobbies or other personal pursuits. Managing time well leads to more opportunities and less time wasted on trivial activities. But we all need a tool to manage all things and in Salesforce with help of flow we can create a process to maintain all the things.
Salesforce is a highly versatile Customer Relationship management software and slack is the most commonly used communication software for businesses. So why not integrate the processes between the two platforms?
Zapier is a tool which lets the user connect one online service with the other without any code required. Zapier lets the user send information bidirectionally either from Salesforce to slack or slack to salesforce just with a few clicks. The user can connect more than two apps and can automate the entire workflow. Zapiers Zap definition includes triggers (that defines the criteria when integration is to be initiated) and actions (that defines what action is performed, like what data should be transferred).
Dreamforce 2021 is a highly-anticipated event, held completely virtually and is set to take place December 09’ 2021! It’s always one of the biggest events of the year and this time uniquely New York experience. Trailblazers packed with energy, innovation and to learn new things from new speakers. Dreamforce is a learning experience where you can attend keynotes and also get to experience how they’re leading through change, you’ll hear about new ways to work, and we’ll all get inspired by visions of a brighter future and also hear insights from the experts.
Magic mover for notes and attachments to lightning experience is an application available on AppExchange that helps an organization to convert attachments to files and classic notes to enhanced lightning notes in an easy manner. This app is best used in salesforce classic. This tool is intended to be run by system administrators. This app does not allow email attachments to get converted to files. Salesforce only supports Files and Enhanced notes and recommends converting the existing attachments and classic notes to Files and Enhanced notes respectively.
In Salesforce, The standard contact matching rule and standard lead matching rule identify duplicate contacts and leads using match keys, a matching equation, and matching criteria. They’re activated by default. Quite often we have several contacts with the same email addresses. Duplicate contacts can impact the productivity of our users. In this blog we explain how to identify contacts or leads with the same email address.
Matching Rules will identify ‘what field’ and ‘how’ to match. For example, ‘Email Field, Exact Match’ or ‘Contact Name, Fuzzy Match’ . They don’t do anything on their own.
Slack is one of the most commonly used chat platforms for business communication. Salesforce has announced “Salesforce for Slack” which allows the user to communicate in real time without switching between Salesforce and Slack. It allows the user to send updated, deleted or newly created Salesforce records to slack and also provides the facility of sending different types of alerts to slack. This integration will result in an increase of team collaboration and productivity.
The Salesforce CRM and slack integration allows the user to search and share Salesforce Contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities and some more standard objects. The Salesforce for slack app is available for all editions and in both lightning and classic experiences.
Data loss can have huge implications for an organization. Organizations store critical information including clients, employees, cases, orders in the Salesforce organization.
So, for this Salesforce has launched a product named Backup and Restore at Dreamforce. Salesforce Backup and Restore is a product to help organizations to protect their data against any unexpected system and human errors by automatically creating backup copies of business data.
CPQ software, also known as Configure Price and Quote, is a term used in B2B (Business-to-Business) industries to describe software systems that allow sellers to quote complex and configurable products. It aims to provide accurate pricing given any product configuration scenario.
CPQ software is used to fulfill a specific purpose: to increase efficiency at the most basic level of the sales process and reduce any and all forms of possible errors in complex quote generation.
Salesforce Interaction Studio was released as an extension to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for providing real-time customer behaviour tracking and customer experience customization. This real-time reporting can be across channels like a brand's website, social media accounts, mobile apps etc. A single engagement profile is created for a user’s interaction with all the different channels a brand has. This provides a holistic view of the customer’s interaction and subsequently, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be used to follow-up with relevant content, promotions, discounts etc.
During the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has the goal to help people to work from anywhere in this new all-digital world. And the Salesforce developers should have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this world by using Slack to surface the information their customers need at their needy time.
On July 21, 2021, Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack Technologies, Inc. Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce said - “We couldn’t be more excited to have Slack as part of the Salesforce family, combining the #1 CRM and the trailblazing digital platform for the work anywhere world”.
In the modern era, mobile devices have become the most popular and useful gadget. It provides numerous benefits such as instant communication, social networking, web surfing, GPS, and various other productivity mobile applications.
Mobile applications which are also known as apps have become the most crucial part of every organization. Everyone wants to incorporate apps in their workflow to easily access their work from anywhere.
Have you ever been trying to analyse your salesforce data by its location and wished that you could view it on a map? Or maybe you would like that you simply could make your field sales teams more efficient by giving them a tool that quickly and simply plans the simplest router for their daily visits, and that they can fit more customer visits in every day … Introducing Salesforce Maps!
Salesforce always amazes their Trailblazers by providing them with new learning platforms to empower their knowledge, skills, and many more. Again Salesforce surprised their Trailblazers with the New Trailblazer Community experience. In the TrailheaDX 2021, Salesforce announced the Reimagined Trailblazer Community.
The new Trailblazer Community brings the Community and Trailhead together into one unified platform. It will empower everyone whether they are new to the Salesforce or they are experienced Trailblazers.
Email-to-Case in Salesforce is a standard feature that automatically converts an email into a case. It also automatically populates some of the case information which in return saves the manual efforts.
Salesforce Email-to-Case is used when you have more than one support email address that agents handle manually. If your company has multiple support email addresses and processes then you can configure more than one Email-to-Case channel.
Auditing plays a vital role for every organization so as to keep their data organized and secure. They always need some audit software by which they can manage the login details of the employees and to trace their activities.
For this, Salesforce introduced a hidden gem: the Audit Trail feature to monitor the setup changes in your organization. Let’s deep dive in about - What is the Audit Trail and How to view the Setup Audit Trail in Salesforce.
Salesforce never misses a chance to amaze their Trailblazers. Likewise, Salesforce brought the TrailheaDX 2021 event on June 23, 2021. It is the event of the year for all the Trailblazers including Developers, Admins, Architects, IT leaders, Partners, and for others as well.
The TrailheaDX 2021 was truly a big event for all the Trailblazers where they get a chance to grasp a lot from the experts and also take in a lot of knowledge about Salesforce innovations and new products.
ID is a technical short form of Identifier. The concept of Id is one of the most basic concepts of Salesforce. In the Salesforce world, record id identifies a row in a table, or a specific record. For Example let’s consider your client Jane Smith who works at SSS Inc. Jane Smith is stored as a Contact, and SSS Inc is stored as an Account in Salesforce.
Trailblazer.me is a one stop solution which helps a trailblazer to access multiple Salesforce related communities and sites with a single login. It is your digital resume which highlights the skills achieved, experience in different domains of Salesforce and an overview of your learning progress over Trailhead, Appexchange and other Salesforce related sites.
Tableau is a powerful and fastest growing data visualization tool used in the BI industry that is helpful in transforming raw data into very easy to understand format for everyone. Tableau allows users to create Data visualizations in the form of ‘Dashboards’ and ‘Worksheets’ and provides a quick analysis. The resulting information from the data using Tableau can be easily understood by all professionals in an organization.
Tableau is a Business Intelligence tool that enables you to create interactive and attractive visualizations in the form of dashboards and worksheets which is collectively said as workbook, to gain Business insights for the better development of your company. It allows non-technical users to easily create customized dashboards that provide insight to a broad spectrum of information.
Salesforce enhances the user engagement of an organization with Salesforce Communities whether it is for Customers, Partners or Employees. These users can have different use case options or functionalities that can be added into a Salesforce communities as per the need.
Since its inception, Salesforce Lightning components have provided a new look & feel and better way to use Salesforce. It is certainly a long journey covered starting from many restrictions in changing anything without code to easy customizations & component options.
Documentation is very essential for any user whether working on a new system or accessing a new functionality or for admins to check existing system and troubleshoot. Whatever the case be a documented system always pays off at the time of need and reduces the amount of time & effort required otherwise.
Project management has continued forever now and with it project evaluation comes into the picture. With the dynamic industry changes and rapid development it’s more important than ever to evaluate projects effectively.
Metadata is often defined as DATA ABOVE DATA which is fine and gives some idea but when we say “Metadata in Salesforce” it is a simple way of understanding the objects & field structure in Salesforce. Metadata in Salesforce describes the structure of objects, fields and also the page layouts and Metadata describes many more structures in Force.com.
Field Service Lightning (FSL) is part of the Salesforce Service Cloud suite, a management tool that enhance field service management by automation and integration of tasks for agents, dispatchers and mobile employees. Therefore provides a streamlined service experience with an intelligent and productive workforce.
Education Cloud provides institutions the right balanced management solutions allowing schools to cater to the scattered needs of students, staff, alumni and donors. With the Education Cloud these campuses can truly become a connected one with a 360 degree view of students and other components of the institution across the lifecycle.
Zillow is a popular real estate and rental marketplace devoted to empower consumers with data, encouragement and intelligence around the place they call home, and connecting them with the best local qualified who can help. It operates the most popular collection of mobile real estate apps, with more than one dozen apps across all major platforms. It freely distributes all of its property data to anyone who wants it, alike charging/paid people.
Within the Salesforce ecosystem, Lightning plays a very crucial role in increasing a Salesforce org look and feel with a contemporary UI. Salesforce Lightning provides users with a new look, new features and advanced design system for the Salesforce org. If used effectively Salesforce lightning interface can lead to increased productivity.
In Einstein Analytics the dashboard can be broken into multiple pages, each with a specific focus and audience
Einstein Analytics uses SAQL behind the scenes in lenses, dashboards, and explorer to gather data for visualizations. We can modify the existing SAQL queries & write new queries according to the requirement.
Data Migration process in Salesforce projects requires lot of sincere effort and proper planning to get data to be uploaded correctly in Salesforce Instance.
Salesforce Lightning Extension is a library of features created by the Lightning Product management team with addon features to increase productivity for users and offers a different set of functionalities including the new dark theme for Salesforce, hiding components for users and grabbing links
The client had a requirement to integrate slack Account of the Organization Team to their Salesforce instance. They need to post the Contacts and Tasks information from Salesforce to Slack. Main challenge is to post task details by same username in Slack who has the ownership of the tasks.
Quip platform is a place where developers can integrate solutions directly into the Quip canvas. Apps works on cross-platform and inherit collaboration and social features as well as notification and offline capabilities.
The Salesforce records are the key touch points for all information required for any object in Salesforce and the Files, Notes & attachment can help in organizing the Salesforce org better and sometimes becomes crucial for users.
The client had a requirement to integrate WhatsApp Account of User to their Salesforce instance. They want to store the personal Chats, Group chats in Salesforce for different business purposes.
“Merge Duplicate Cases”:
Astrea Case Merge (a tool natively built by Astrea IT Services) is one of the lightning Component built to save you falls through the cracks in Salesforce Service Clouds.
Hi all! Have you ever thought of embedding the Einstein Analytics Dashboard in every Salesforce Experience? I think maybe some of you would have. So, be happy because you can add the Analytics Dashboard in Salesforce. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to add Einstein Analytics Dashboard on Lightning Page or Visualforce Page.
In this blog where we are going to share some useful features of Einstein Analytics. Today, we are going to discuss how to append and merge multiple datasets into one dataset in Einstein Analytics.
Dataflow editor will be used in order to achieve this. We will create a new data flow and will use the newly created data flow for merging the Datasets
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a session and user authentication service which allows a user to log in and access several connected systems with a single set of credentials. This eliminates the need to login in different systems separately in a single session, and saves time of the user. In the backend, we can also log user activities and manage user accounts. This also leads to increased security.
Client
Client is a subsidy organisation of IBM. It is headquartered in USA with a strength of 200+ employees.Lightning - a collection of technologies for the Salesforce platform, consisting of Lightning experience (new UI for Salesforce), Lightning Design System (CSS Framework that facilitates users to easily style the apps) and Lightning Framework (A Javascript framework that enables users to create single page applications and Lightning Components), has been in vogue for quite some time now.
Tooling API exposes metadata information of Org, we can access Metadata information using REST or SOAP. Tooling API retrieve the small piece of metadata, we can use this to develop an interactive application or tools for developers. This can be used to fetch the metadata such as Apex classes, Apex triggers, custom objects, custom fields, Visualforce Pages, Users, Apex Component etc.
The Lightning experience configuration converter helps in converting the Salesforce org Javascript buttons to Lightning components, quick actions or other solutions. With just few clicks, this tool scans all the Javascript buttons and then converts them to simple components that are easy to use and then deploys everything to the org.
This tool can currently be used to convert few Javascript buttons and not all. This tool converts the javascript buttons as components, actions or other custom buttons based upon the functionality of the original button. Javascript buttons are defined to have multiple degrees of complexity. For now, the tool supports simpler “url-hack” implementations.
ServiceNow, a software-as-a-service provider, provides technical management support and help desk functionality to IT operations. It also supports real time communication and resource sharing.
ServiceNow easily integrates with other tool via its REST API. There are many successful ServiceNow integration with external tools like Salesforce, etc. In Salesforce - ServiceNow integration a User can access and exchange information between both the systems.
Klipfolio is a cloud dashboard platform for building capable business dashboards for your group or your customers. It has a lot of option to connect your data for the visualization. It supports numerous APIs from a variety of different app providers.
Klipfolio support built-in formula editor so that you can transform, filter, combine data before visualizing it. You can view your Dashboards from your desktop, mobile, TV and tablets. Also you can share these visualizations with your teammates by granting access to them.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics(Wave Analytics) is a new cloud based analytic tool which helps in creating powerful Reports and Dashboards from large amount of enterprise data. Also, Wave Analytics enables anyone to get immediate access to powerful data insights through its point-and-click visual interface of your org. Einstein Analytics allows you to bring in data from your Salesforce orgs, as well as from your external sources. A user could get instant visualizations that show how your business is doing.
In current time Facebook has become an easy way to reach and connect with your Customers. Through Facebook’s app and services you can easily get in touch with right people and gather their attentions for the smooth functioning of your business. Facebook Page helps people to connect with your business and Facebook Ads help them to find your business. Facebook provides various metrics related with your Pages and Ads. These metrics contain very useful information. We have discussed these metrics in the description of the charts.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics(Wave Analytics) is another cloud-based analytics tool that aides in making effective Chart and Dashboards utilizing your vast information. Einstein Analytics enables you to get information from your Salesforce orgs and in addition to your other External Sources. Data preparation tools given by the Einstein Analytics enable you to effectively control and clean your information. By building up the Dashboard from this information you can track your business.
With the new release approaching the readiness for the same should be a priority in every Admin’s mind. With many new changes/additions one of the updates that can affect users in day to day life is the URL change in Lightning Experience and Salesforce Mobile. From the Summer 18 your URL format will change for standard apps, console apps, and the Salesforce mobile app. The change has been done for a good reason of enhancing security and to counter the issue of being directed to an unexpected location.
Einstein Discovery is an alternative of sophisticated Data Models which provide AI powered analytics to discover relevant patterns based on data provided by various stakeholders. Einstein Discovery is used to find insights and understand patterns across millions of rows of data in almost no time. Using Einstein Discovery, we can understand what happened, why it happened and what to do next.
Service Cloud Einstein plays vital role in improving services offered to customers by enterprises. Service Cloud Einstein helps to understand insights of customers problem by analyzing their emails, messages and posts on social media.
Do you own a company that receives a lot of emails? Have you assigned employees for segregating emails into categories and then transferring these emails to the concerned section in your company? If so, then here’s a solution to your problem, which saves not only your investment in terms of money but in terms of time as well.
With the help of Salesforce Einstein you can create a system that automatically categorises all your emails and forwards it to the concerned section. You just need to provide the model with the data mapped to labels, that is, provide the emails that your company has received in the past along with their mapping to departments. This data can then be used to “train” Einstein. Once this model is trained on the data provided by you, you are good to go!
Are you still assigning Leads to owners manually? Have you been investing a lot of time analysing whom should I assign this Lead to? If so, here’s a solution to all such problems. With Salesforce Einstein all of this process can be made much simpler.
Einstein analyses the description of the Lead and accordingly assigns it to the owner.
Once the owner is assigned through Einstein he/she can be notified through EMail using simple Apex code.
For Lightning components, Salesforce added a new Feature - Lightning Data Service (LDS) in its Winter ‘17 release. We can use LDS in our Lightning components to perform various CRUD operations like create, read, update or delete a record without the use of any Apex code. This automatically gives us enhanced performance and UI consistency.
Overview
We provide the services to integrate Quickbook online functionality with Salesforce CRM. We also prepared a Quickbook online app which provides bidirectional syncing between Quickbook online objects customer, invoice, products and payment with Salesforce objects account, invoice, product and payment.
Google Analytics provide a lot of useful data related to our website like users, sessions, new users, pageviews/session, session duration, channels through which users are coming, regions from where we are getting maximum hits and a lot more. By using this data we can know boost our business.
But how to convert this data into useful information? Yes you are right, by using Salesforce Einstein Analytics.
Meteor is a Javascript framework written on top of Node JS. Meteor is basically used for hybrid application (web browser, Android, iOS) development. Meteor supports Full Stack web development. Meteor applications are mostly written using HTML, CSS, Javascript (ReactJS, AngularJS, VueJS, BlazeJS), jQuery etc. on client-side. For server side Javascript can be used as Meteor being written on top of Node JS, and Node JS supports Javascript on server side also.
Salesforce is a cloud based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Salesforce can also be used as database in Meteor based applications.
“Meteor is to Node.js as Rails is to Ruby.”
Key to Meteor is hidden in its name only: speed. If you want to develop reactive hybrid application (for iOS, Android and Web Browser) on Node JS, in less duration of time, then Meteor or Meteor JS is perfect choice.
Meteor is a free open source MVC (Model View Controller) based Javascript Web Framework. Meteor is written on top of Node JS. Meteor is Isomorphic Development Ecosystem, i.e. same code can be used on both frontend and backend. Meteor application uses Javascript on both frontend and backend that’s the reason behind Meteor being referred asFull Stack Javascript Framework.Meteor was developed by Meteor Development Group on January, 2012. Latest stable release of Meteor is 1.6, released on November, 2017. Figure below depicts overview of Meteor platform.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics(Wave Analytics) is a new cloud based analytic tool that will help you to create powerful reports and dashboards from your large amount of enterprise data. Also Wave Analytics enables anyone to get immediate access to powerful data insights through its point-and-click visual interface of your org. A user could get instant visualizations that show how your business is doing.
We have made some advanced charts in Einstein's Analytics on Salesforce Standard Objects- Opportunity, Account and Case.
Artificial Intelligence is concept of allowing machines, softwares to mimic humans in task of learning, analysing, understanding, decision making etc. AI is powered by large amounts of data. AI has been around for decades but became popular recently. The main reason for this change is increase in amount of data and availability of cheap and efficient hardwares.
Today the world is generating digital data at a such rapid rate that 90% of data in the world has been generated in last two years and it is predicted that during next eight years, the amount of digital data produced will be 40 zettabytes which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth. The type of data created is expanding across almost every industry such as Healthcare, Telecom, electronics, manufacturing, entertainment etc.
RAISER EDGE
Raiser Edge is software that is used by Nonprofits to raise funds and to do online marketing. It is helpful for non-profit organization of different scales to operate their office and generate funds.
It helps in managing online donation, registration, email communications and targeted fundraising campaigns – to acquire, engage and cultivate donors.
Overview
Salesforce communities come with an inbuilt password change functionality. However, we can override this functionality to implement a custom password change page for users to provide them with a more personalized outlook. For this, we can either customize the default password template in Visualforce or create new password change pages to use in place of the default page.
Overview
While working with Domain Branding the main challenge is Security. It become crucial when it comes to authentication and confidential data. For security Salesforce have it’s own security mechanism. Salesforce use secured protocol (HTTPS) for the authentication of users. and provides them access of data and service based on their permissions. We are highlighting the details for domain branding in Salesforce.
Smart Barcode is Lightning ready Salesforce Application. This app is used to generate the Barcode and convert any Text to the Barcode. User can use this app for any field in any Standard and Custom Objects.
Smart Barcode can be used, lets take an example of organizations where Salesforce is used to track hardware and print inventory items as barcodes. This will allow them greater ease of processing hardware and also the remote agents could use it to scan barcodes of remote hardware to confirm receipt.
We often receive requests from customer that requires creating identical contacts or leads to support their business campaign. As there is no standard feature to clone campaign members in lightning design, it becomes a monotonous task to create same contacts/leads number of times and users used to the Salesforce finds it hard to do as it comes as a standard feature in native Salesforce. The component Astrea has developed, identifies this and solve the problem by providing the cloning functionality.
Object Hierarchy is a free Salesforce native app on AppExchange. It graphically displays two level child hierarchy related to a particular record. If used within an account record, it will display all child contacts, accounts, Opp etc. of the related account and also the children of the child object.
The App displays two level child hierarchy related to a particular record in Salesforce Org where user can Expand and Collapse the Hierarchy as per their requirement.
KayakoConnect is a free Salesforce app available on appexchange KayakoConnect. This app connects Kayako with Salesforce and Salesforce with Kayako i.e. two-way connection is established through this app. It supports point and click graphical UI which is simple and easy to use.
The app provides bi-directional sync functionality hence a wide variety of features are available for connecting Salesforce to Freshdesk and vice-versa.
Have you ever faced the challenges of having your Org populated with unwanted and sometimes harmful data, despite having a number of rules and strict Governance Policies your Org captures unwanted data. Have you ever thought of having an automated tool that checks the health of your Org, i.e. that checks the data and instance it contains. Well considering these regular unwanted situation for a Salesforce User Astrea has combined a set of rules to form an App that checks Code Quality, Metadata and Other Metrics.
We had a requirement from one of our client, they want us to show the Live Dashboards/Reports on Salesforce Objects in Salesforce using Standard functionality. We suggested a workaround using Klipfolio as Salesforce Dashboards are not live and reports used in these charts are scheduled to refresh after a certain interval of time. The minimum interval for reports refresh in Salesforce is once in a day.
Field Service Mobile Apps most commonly refers to companies who need to manage installation, service or repairs of systems or equipment. It can also refer to software and cloud-based platforms that helps in field service management. Its is basically an online system that helps organizations deliver efficient services onsite by tracking requests or activities.
An outstanding field service app is the one which plays an important role in customer satisfaction. If the complaints and requests are figured out and solved on time, the customers are always content with the app.
The Campaign Member Helper is a Lightning component that allows users to search for leads/contacts and add them to a campaign as campaign members. The component also supports deletion of campaign members.
The key features of the components are:
ServiceNow is a popular on-demand, cloud-based IT service management platform. It facilitates in managing Help Desk, Service Management processes, IT Operation Management, Security Operations, etc.
ServiceNow provides REST API to connect the ServiceNow instance with other external systems.
Have you ever had a need of splitting opportunity among your team members, like if there are a large number of tasks and you have to assign them to different people. Have you thought of doing this in lightning. Well you can do this easily with Astrea’s new Component Opportunity Split.
Opportunity Split is a Lightning component which splits the amount of any Opportunity among its team members. It mimics the standard Opportunity functionality of Salesforce Classic.
This free Salesforce lightning component displays News Headline from various news sources like Fortune, CNN, BBC, Business Insider, Google News, BBC Sport, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, Reddit, The New York times, The Verge etc.
SmartNews provides news headlines from multiple channels, you can also read full articles, by clicking on the article title. This will take the user to the News source site.
Astrea Clone is a Salesforce App that helps organizations to clone a record of an object. The users can mention values for the fields that need to be in cloned records. Astrea Clone has many features which can help minimize the work in cloning object records. Astrea Clone supports all standard and custom objects and allow users to clone a single as well as bulk records in a button click.
Hydra is a lightning component which helps in creating multiple copies of any record of any object along with its related lists. The user can mention the number of clones to create and can clone any number of object records in short period of time. The user can also make changes to the values while cloning which will get reflected in the newly created records.
View All Activities is a Salesforce native lightning component. The component is used to display all the activities (Events and Tasks) related to a given record of a particular object. It has simple point and click graphical user interface easy to use.
You can download the app from Appexchange View All Activity.
Have you ever thought of obtaining reusable charts directly after installation of App from Appexchange. Have you ever been able to look comprehensively into organisation, team, and individual performance for Services and Support team. Have you thought of an App which can add the charts to the detail page of Account, Lead, Opportunity, Case, etc. Well thinking about this situation Astrea has developed an App which automates this situation by automatically creating charts from reports individually or in bulk.
FinancialForce.com delivers ERP at Customer Speed. The FinancialForce covers business operations on the core document types such as Sales Invoices, Purchase Invoices, Credit Notes, and Journals. These operations permit the creation, editing, posting and other document specific business functions such as Invoice Schedules.
Pardot is a marketing automation tool. It helps an organization to automate the entire sales and marketing process. It helps in managing the projects and reports at one location. Also it keeps track of all the leads and prospects across the organization. Pardot is completely customizable so that user can personalize it to fit their requirements.
Desk.com
Desk.com is a SaaS (Software as a Service) help desk and customer support product which is accessible on the cloud. Before 2014, it was known as Assistly and then was acquired by Salesforce. It was rebranded by Salesforce as a “slick social customer support software”.
Desk.com differentiates itself from Salesforce's other service platform in that Desk.com specifically targets small businesses with its features and functions.
We were working on developing Klipfolio Charts using Salesforce Data. Klipfolio has Standard Salesforce Connector to connect with Salesforce which we were using. Klipfolio has recently launched a new feature under this Salesforce Standard Connector i.e. Simple SOQL Query Mode. Earlier either we had 2 options Importing Salesforce Report or SOQL Queries to get Salesforce data in Klipfolio. But now this new release under this connector provides an easy to use interface for building Salesforce dashboards. Now user can simply select Objects and Fields from Drop-down and Search Bar.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics Cloud is a powerful BI Platform which is powered by Artificial Intelligence. Salesforce recently revealed this platform for its CRM Customers. This platform has opened path to several amazing features for CRM users, enabling them to use advanced reporting with predictive intelligence instead of legacy based old analytics. The data may be inside SFDC or may reside in the other external system. You can explore your data to discover new, unexpected insights for your business. Based on the latest data you can create dashboards to continually monitor key business metrics and you can also know how your business is going on by getting instant Visualization.
What is CPQ ?
CPQ systems are in demand in the market, especially for the companies using Salesforce. Well, that is all for a good reason as they are indeed a very useful tool to boost the sales of any company with fast, efficient and accurate sales documentation.
The results that customers have experienced with CPQ implementations represents a really big impact that this adoption can bring and it is mentioned in the sections below how it can be be useful to you.
Astrea CaseMerge is a free Salesforce Lightning Component which merges duplicate Cases according to the dynamically selected multi-criteria.
This component merges the duplicate child Cases to the master/parent Case along with their associated Emails, Attachments and Comments. To download this component go to this link.
Salesforce does not provide any standard functionality to check and manage duplicate Cases. There was no standard way to merge duplicate child Cases and their associated lists into the parent Case having same Email threads coming from same customer.
Eventbrite is a market leading web-based event management system designed to make ticketing system and registration easier for any type of Event for Individuals, Organizations, or Businesses. Virtually anyone else can use the platform like any Cloud based CRM applications users etc, for e.g Salesforce, Zoho etc. It also facilitates to publish the tickets across Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking tools directly from their site's interface.
Wave Analytics (Now Called - Einstein Analytics) is a game changer technology which brings Business Intelligence to the organisations with greater insights of decision making on Business data. Its a cloud-based platform for connecting data from multiple data sources, creating interactive dynamic views of that data, and sharing those views in certain apps.
Some of the great features of Einstein Analytics include - Facility of Instant Visualisation of Salesforce (Sales, Service, Marketing and Community Cloud Data) or External Data, Create Dashboards with Pre-built Templates (Widgets and Widget Wizards), Mashup of Multiple...
On November 10, 2017, Progress announced plans to discontinue Telerik Platform. They will continue to support Telerik Platform until May 10, 2018. Telerik has provided this six month transition period to customers so that they can shift their work from Telerik platform to some other platform.
In this blog, we will discuss migrating hybrid apps developed on Telerik platform to PhoneGap build.
Stay up to date on Salesforce Certification maintenance requirements by this new tool - Credential Status Report Tool
Salesforce has now created a new tool that allows tracking of one’s certifications and maintenance requirements. It has now made easier to know what next steps are to be taken and when maintenance requirements are due.
This tool is very simple and easy to use. The tool can be downloaded easily from the Website https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/credentials/verification.
Sales is an indispensable part of any business and Sales Reps spent a long time lining up all the leads that they want to call. They open every record to makes calls to the leads with the Phone number in the system. So, the phone number is the key to breakthrough a deal at all times. But this Phone Number may not always be the right one and we can imagine that the scenario may occur that more than 50% of the number are not verified and the rep will either get some message from operator or it will not connect.
Salesforce Professional Edition does not support Apex language directly, So it became difficult to consume any API or external JSON / XML data into Salesforce. This article will focus on the automation for consuming the data into Salesforce from external sources.
Conga Composer is a popular and powerful tool for document automation. It save time to create templates for proposals, quotes in many different formats. It works great when you are creating or merging the merging the reports or data into any template. We can create Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML email & PDF documents in Conga composer.
A must attend event next year for Salesforce developer and admins is about to take place. In year 2016, Salesforce tried something new - they launched a developer-centric conference in June that is more focused and more targeted to developers and admins: TrailheaDX. This is for the continuous third year for TDX. It's like a mini Dreamforce with sessions, keynotes but all content is targeted towards developers and admins. TrailheaDX 2018 will be taking place on March 28th and 29th, 2017 at San Francisco, CA.
Our experience with Salesforce economy certainly makes us feel very confident that the future is in Salesforce and the new specialized areas of IoT, AI and analytics boost this to another level.
There is a recent IDC study on the Salesforce Economy and it clearly shows that Salesforce and its ecosystem of partners and customers will create 3.3 million jobs and $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide by 2022. for every dollar earned by Salesforce, the ecosystem will gain $5.20. We are amused to see this increase from last year, and the way things are moving within the Salesforce Economy.
Dreamforce is Salesforce annual event where Salesforce customers, partners and employees participate to share knowledge and discuss upcoming features. Dreamforce is one of the most important and popular technology shows. It hosts more than 100,000 attendees from all across the globe every year. Dreamforce this year is being held from November 6th to 9th, 2017 at San Francisco, CA.
People planning to attend Dreamforce usually start preparing for it months before the event. Which sessions to attend, which keynotes should be kept on top priority, planning business meetings and so on are on the picklist of the people attending Dreamforce.
Omnichannel—a new buzzword in business world—means to seamlessly deliver customer services/support on multiple channels. Omni-Channel is a Salesforce feature which comes under the “Service Cloud Module” released as a Beta in Summer ‘15 and was then improved in Summer and Winter ‘16 release. Salesforce continues to improve the Omni-Channel functionality with each release. Omni-Channel is an important part of Customer Service Solution that facilitate a Call Center to route any type of incoming work item including Cases, Chats, or Leads—to the most qualified, available agents in the Call Center. Omni-Channel integrates seamlessly into the Salesforce Sales Or Service console.
The world today has moved from the computer age to a mobile driven one, where a major part of the population owns a smartphone. Businesses also seek to take advantage of this shift, to provide a better overall consumer experience. If you are a business and are thinking of getting an app for your company, here are a few reasons as to why an app might be the best option for you.
As one of the most rapidly changing and evolving industry, matching with the new technology can be a tricky choice for some. The construction industry has clearly a different picture and position when it comes to technology. The development and advancement in the industry needs no proof and to match or add another value to make a company more favourable and professional new technologies and tools are coming in the market.
For the Salesforce Ohana Dreamforce has always been an event to look forward to and get inspired. Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce conference for Salesforce customers, partners and employees. This year the event is scheduled for November 6th to 9th. Salesforce every year has “Road to Dreamforce” episodes which help visitors prepare for Dreamforce. This article is based on the first Road to Dreamforce event (July 11, 2017) by Salesforce. It includes interesting updates about Dreamforce 2017 for newbies as well as veterans.
When a Klip is populating large amount of data in an unorganized manner there may be a chance the performance of the dashboard may decrease. Sometimes it is harder to tune performance issues after the Klip development. So there are some important considerations which we can follow while doing the Klip/Dashboard development. These considerations will help in building optimised Dashboards/Klips.
Date Picker is an effective custom functionality that user can implement in any Klipfolio dashboards (For e.g Facebook Dashboards, Hubspot CRM Dashboards, and Google Spreadsheet etc) to populate the data for the particular date range. It can be implemented at Dashboard Level or at Klip Level.
We are working on a Loyalty Program to provide it as a SaaS. To provide it as a SaaS one of the challenges in front of us was the automation of payment from Customers. In order to facilitate quick, easy and effective payment system we decided to do integration between Stripe API and Salesforce.
Stripe is a US technology company, operating in over 25 countries, that allows both private individuals and businesses to accept payments over the Internet. Stripe focuses on providing the technical, fraud prevention, and banking infrastructure required to operate on-line payment systems.
Barcodes are a cost-effective and reliable method to improve efficiency and reduce overheads in any Commercial Activity. They can be used to automate the data capture and its identifications. This could include pricing or inventory information or Quote or Invoice Slip etc. Barcodes make it possible to track each and every commercial activity precisely For e.g inventory levels can be identified/reduced, products specifications can be identified through scanner, location of products can be tracked, Invoice details can be identified etc.
Do you ever feel the urge to send emails from Salesforce with link to a record, like for the reminding of the open case to an Agent or notifications to users or partners. Have you ever thought of using a short URL than a two lines long link for your Salesforce Records. Well if both the situation has an affirmative then you might have also looked for a service that might shorten the URL for you.
Salesforce has announced that in Winter 18 release the ‘Notes and attachments’ related list will no longer have a upload attachment button and users will be required to follow salesforce files after this. Through this salesforce gives a good option as Salesforce file gives user more capability to share, preview and revise their uploaded files.
FreshBooks is a cloud-based accounting software service designed for small businesses and service providers that send invoices to clients and get paid for their time and expertise. It tracks time, create invoices, track expenses, provide reports, design estimates, send follow up emails, and allow the team members and clients to log in into the account.
Lightning in Salesforce provides a new zeal of working on the platform and also a very engaging UI experience. From an Admin view, there are lot of things scheduled but can be sometimes missed, specially the meeting or calls scheduled for the day. The classic experience task and events reminder were missing in the Lightning and were very much required for any users to manage the work effectively.
Lightning Components are simply the individual parts that make up a Lightning App page. Components are configurable, can be placed using drag-and-drop, and user friendly. They are also native components, customizable, and designed in accordance with the new Lightning Experience. Lightning Components can allow the Salesforce admin to efficiently create a personalized user experience and provide the business with the right content to get results.
WebMerge is an online platform that allows you to easily collect data, populate a document and send it to any contact automatically. It provide you with flexible document types, dynamic content, and delivery options that fit to your business needs.
Freshbooks EasyConnect is a Salesforce lightning ready native Application build. It is used to connect Salesforce with Freshbook and vice-versa. It supports Point and Click graphical user interface which is simple and easy to use.
People who are relatively new to Salesforce have the urge to get certified in order to grow their experience over the Salesforce platform. There are hundreds of resources available on web that can be used to prepare for the certifications. We will discuss about some basic resources for Salesforce Certification in this article.
Amanda is a tool for Salesforce Administrators that searches for a field across all the classes, pages, workflows and other apex components. It also presents the whole data in a tabular form along with a chart depicting pictorially the references of the chosen entity.
Salesforce has always evolved new changes to enhance customer experience. From Summer ’17, users will not be able to use the Notes & Attachments related list to attach files to records. They will be required to use the Files related list instead.
The Lightning Experience is a totally different and new user interface designed to provide people a more user friendly experience of working on salesforce effectively. The lightning Experience almost has all the features present in the salesforce. In fact it also combines the new features and intensifies them all to give a better experience.
Salesforce uses the Lightning term as branding for a set of different products and concepts. At times there is confusion in Salesforce Community about these concepts. In this article we give a quick overview of these terms.
As you know Klipfolio has evolved over time, making the experience of building a marketing dashboard easier, smarter and faster. Some new features were added to Klipfolio with every evolving stage having new look and feel.
Sending mails to user on the click of a button from the detail page of a record, Creating a button that opens a popup dialog with a welcome message containing the user's first name, or creating a link that displays a country-specific Google map. We have been performing many such complex tasks in Salesforce Classic for years using custom Javascript buttons.
Diwali is a time to celebrate and spread happiness. Astrea celebrated Diwali this year on 24th October, 2016. All the employees actively participated in the event with great enthusiasm. It was a two day event.
Dreamforce is Salesforce annual event where Salesforce customers, partners and employees participate to share knowledge and discuss upcoming features. Dreamforce is one of the most important and popular technology shows. It hosts more than 100,000 attendees from all across the globe every year. Dreamforce this year was held from October 4th to 7th, 2016.If you were caught up with other sessions and have missed out some of the important keynotes at Dreamforce 2016, here is a list of the keynotes and their recordings for 2016 Dreamforce.
In Summer 16 release Salesforce has provided additional support for mapping addresses to latitude and longitude and comparing distance between addresses. In this article we look at a simple implementation of a use case involving Geocode that demonstrates how powerful and easy to use the Geocode feature of Salesforce is.
Adobe Echosign is one of the top most and popular electronic signature paid application on AppExchange. It gets the contracts for an organisation e-Signed instantly by performing simple point and click actions. It is available via Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and can be easily integrated into the business systems you are using today like Salesforce. Through this app, one can easily customize and merge Salesforce data into documents also known as templates. The signed documents gets automatically stored in Salesforce. One can hence track the signed documents or the documents that are out for signature very easily.
The Lightning Design System is a design framework for building enterprise apps that gives you look and feel similar to Salesforce Lightning Experience. It’s clear, consistent, modern, flexible, more efficient and very easy to use as salesforce has done all the hard work making the whole experience beautiful, thus setting a new standard. The Design System makes it easy for you to build applications that comply with the new Salesforce Lightning look and feel.
The market for data quality tools is becoming more profound and competitive these days. There are many tools available for bulk import and export of Salesforce data. Demand tool is one of the prominent data quality and Data clarifying toolset that can be used by Salesforce users for cleaning, importing, exporting and deduplicating bulk data. Its Interface makes import and export of data very easy and hence makes it popular among users.
Salesforce University 2016 promises to be an exciting event for everyone in the Salesforce landscape. You can enhance your expertise as an Admin or Developer or a Marketeer, and also get Salesforce certified by giving certification exams. The aim of the conference is to provide comprehensive training on different Salesforce modules.
With an auspicious start of the new year, Salesforce has introduced a lot of new features with Spring ‘16. Along with the new features for Lightning Experience, Analytics, Service Cloud, etc. Salesforce has also introduced Work Orders that extends support for team service, to have better understanding which will help in taking adequate decisions.
The business app store as most of us are familiar with, is a place from Salesforce where the third party applications can be downloaded to enhance the Salesforce experience. AppExchange features thousands of enterprise and small business applications for all types of industries and users and can be accessed from here.
IFSC INDIA helps you find the IFSC code, Location and ATMs of banks in India. IFSC codes play a vital role for performing net banking transactions and electronic shopping transactions at e-commerce sites. With IFSC INDIA, you can find the IFSC Code of any Indian bank with ease.
TAX CALC is an application that helps you to calculate your taxes on the basis of your various income and deductions. It also provides some recommendation that helps you to save your taxes.
Pigeon is an application that enables users to synchronize their contacts between Phone and Salesforce. It supports two-way synchronization of contacts between Salesforce and phone. The user can select which contacts to upload before synchronising. The Pigeon app is useful in exporting contacts from Salesforce to your phone contact
Chatrules helps users to follow and unfollow Chatter records on the basis of rules created by users. By defining simple rules Salesforce administrator can ensure that users will follow or unfollow Chatter records. The key features of Chatrules are:
File helper is a tool which helps user to effectively manage their Chatter files and attachments. It can be used by Salesforce administrators to manage space utilization of Salesforce files and attachments. The Admin can use the app to find out which attachments are taking the most space and then work with the user to reduce space. User can monitor all released versions of a Chatter file and attachments with detailed information like release date, space occupied, number of likes etc.
Dolly is a cloning application for Salesforce administrators. This app is useful in cloning Salesforce objects and its fields. This supports point and click graphical user interface which is very simple to use.Dolly is a free app. It is available for download from AppExchange at.
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000000qb65EAA
Dreamforce this year was held from September 15th to 18th, 2015. It was an event to remember especially for the launch of Salesforce Lightning and for energizing sessions. Astrea presented in three sessions at Dreamforce 2015. Naveen Gabrani, CEO, Astrea IT Services, was the speaker along with other speakers for these sessions.
Dreamforce is Salesforce annual event where Salesforce Customers, Partners, Developers participate to share knowledge, upcoming features. Dreamforce is one of the most important and popular technology shows. It hosts more than 100,000 attendees from all across the globe every year.
Salesforce users all over the globe have a number of tasks and meetings to attend to each and every day. Sometimes the burden of meetings reaches an extent where a person tends to forget about a meeting that was scheduled maybe 10 days before it actually happens. This is bound to happen with the kind of hectic schedules and fast lives that people are leading nowadays. Getting a reminder before or on the day of each meeting would definitely be helpful for such people. To make this possible
Many Salesforce users are unable to get a printed copy of their contact lists which contains either all contacts or some specific ones. This proves to be a major setback for many users across various industries. But not anymore, Astrea IT services has come up with a brilliant app called ‘Print It’ that solves the issue mentioned above in a highly efficient manner
Product development Organization (PDO’s) are Salesforce consulting partners that have the unique distinction of successfully designing, developing and launching commercial apps for Salesforce AppExchange.
This article contains links to a number of valuable tips on Dreamforce that have been posted by some of the top players in the cloud industry. Most of these tips were initially meant for visitors of Dreamforce 2014 but even so they are still relevant for those visiting this year.
AppExchange has reached the mark of three million downloads. Many more milestones like this are on the way. AppExchange success is success not just for Salesforce, but also for Salesforce customers and partners. As a partner, AppExchange has been a constant support and provided a platform to grow, for us here at Astrea.
Salesforce1 is a new mobile application provided by Salesforce. The Salesforce1 platform accelerates the development and deployment of apps. Salesforce1 can be accessed by appending /one/one.app in base URL of you Salesforce org. It is 100% cloud platform.
The BMC Remedy ITSM (IT Service Management Suite) is provided with a number of OOB (Out of the Box) web services that can be used to create, query and modify requests. The most common integration is with the Incident Module. Commonly, integrations to these web services are from third party applications that can consume these web services and perform actions such as to create, query and modify requests. Interfaces can be written in a number of languages, such as Salesforce, Java, ASP, C, .NET, etc. to interact with these web services.
Recently we did an Integration of Dropbox and Klipfolio using Java. The goal of this integration is to show the metadata information of files and folders from Dropbox account to the Klipfolio-Dashboard with the help of Dropbox Core API. Klipfolio is an online dashboard platform for building real-time business dashboards that contains KPI, Reports using Charts etc.
Many times there is requirement in which we have to migrate data from oracle database to our salesforce org. This requirement can be achieved using Talend ETL Data Integration tool. This open source tool can be downloaded from https://www.talend.com/download.
In the standard people tab under the community, we can search the users but we cannot add additional fields to the search criteria or add more fields to search results. So we cannot identify the user if there are users with the same names until we click on the user link and check for the other fields like email, title etc and again back to the tab. This does not create a good user experience. Also the standard tab does not allow users to search for fields other than name...
Salesforce launched Visualforce Remote Objects with Spring’14 release.Visualforce remote objects are proxy objects that you can use to perform DML operations on Saleforce objects and these do not counts towards API limits.
This article explains how to send an email notification when someone commented on your Idea in Salesforce instance. This can be achieved through apex trigger. This trigger will work using standard Idea and IdeaComments objects.
There may be a scenario where we would want to capture certain field values of a child record to a parent record's related records in Zoho CRM. For example, there may be a scenario in which, we would like the capture the "Potential Type" of Potential record into its parent Account record's related Contact records.
Dreamforce 2013 is fast approaching. It is scheduled from Nov 18th to 21st this year in San Francisco, a couple of months later as compared to the last year's schedule.
Dreamforce team is expecting more than 100,000 attendees this year, making it one of the largest conferences of its kind anywhere in the world. The experience can be mindboggling for a first time attendees. Although the tips below are targeted towards newbies, some of them may be useful, even if you are a Dreamforce veteran.
We recently completed a project involving integrating Salesforce with PHP. The article describes that there is one external server which contains MySQL data base and Php scripts or Web services
PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP is now installed on more than 244 million websites and 2.1 million web servers.
Instead of creating a record in Zoho Creator view and then pushing it into Zoho CRM, there is another way of storing the record straight into Zoho CRM. We may create a stateless form which can act as a web form that is embedded in a website. This form data can be submitted to any service or used to update a record in another form/application, without persisting data in Zoho Creator. The Deluge Get URL and Post URL task can be used to get/post data to external websites or other Zoho Creator applications.
LiquidPlanner is an online project management tool and claims to be the first Software as a Service (SaaS) project management solution with integrated features for Scheduling, Collaboration, Time Tracking, Analysis and Reporting. LiquidPlanner’s online project workspaces provide a flexible structure for project/portfolio grouping, drag-and-drop reorganization, custom project and task fields, filtering, project access controls and change history, and unlimited clients, projects, tasks, and events in each workspace.
Geckoboard has an online development environment, Widget Editor that can be used for integration. Custom Widgets API is used to create custom charts and widgets for dashboards, visualizing the data on Geckoboard.
Since past few releases, Chatter has been one of the main thrust areas of Salesforce. The Spring ‘12 release continues that tradition. This article summarizes the main Chatter features in Spring ‘12 release.
Salesforce had introduced a Beta version of Schema Builder in Winter 2012. Although the feature remains in Beta, a few important features have now been added to Schema Builder. In Spring 2012 release Salesforce has introduced ability to create new objects and fields directly from Schema Builder, besides improving the user interface of the tool.
A good practice that Salesforce recommends is that Apex test cases create their own test data. They should not assume that certain data is present in the Salesforce instance. However this was not enforced. As an example a developer could...
In Spring 2012 release, Salesforce has introduced a new feature called System Overview. The primary function of this feature is to display your current Salesforce usage. Out of the maximum permissible resources that you are allowed to use, how much are you currently using? This is what System Overview displays.
The System Overview is available in your Setup area on the left hand top, just below Force.com Home. The information displayed in System Overview is shown in the following sections –
A common requirement when working with dates is to display the week number for the date. The formula below provided at Salesforce discussion forum works beautifully.
MOD(FLOOR( (Date__c -DATEVALUE(“2006-01-01″ ))/7),52)+1
Let us take couple of examples to illustrate how this works.
Visualforce provides a simple tag to create hyperlinks. This tag is called commandLink. The main advantage of using commandLink tag over the standard HTML <A href> is that commandLink allows us to use Apex methods and variables.
commandLink takes two attributes.
In a recent project, I had a requirement to run SOQL queries with dynamic object and field names. At the development time, the object name to be queried, field names to be displayed, and the even the number of fields to be queried was also not known. These were coming at runtime. My first attempt was creating a SOQL query something like
select :fieldname1,: fieldName2, :fieldName3 from :objectName
where objectName, fieldName1 etc were String variables.