Mike Melone is a Content Marketing Manager at OwnBackup, a global leader in SaaS business continuity and data protection solutions. New to the Salesforce ecosystem, Mike brings a decade of experience in copywriting and marketing to OwnBackup, where he curates original content related to all things Salesforce backup & recovery.

Salesforce is the most secure and available platform in the industry. Yet data protection remains a shared responsibility as it does with all modern SaaS platforms. Customers are responsible for preventing user-inflicted data and metadata loss and corruption and for having a plan in place to recover if it happens. That’s why Salesforce recommends using a partner backup solution that can be found on the AppExchange.

Despite this recommendation, our 2020 State of Salesforce Data Protection survey found that 88% of companies are lacking a comprehensive backup and recovery solution, which may be especially risky with many companies increasing their remote workforce. Furthermore, 69% say their company may be at significant risk of user-inflicted data loss.

Salesforce Data Recovery Service Is Being Retired

Last year, Salesforce announced that they will be retiring their last-resort data recovery service, effective July 31, 2020 because it has not met their high standards of customer success and trust. For customers who aren’t proactively backing up their data, Salesforce currently offers this last resort Data Recovery service. However, at a cost of over $10,000 and a 6-8 week recovery time this service is not an adequate option for many customers. The upcoming retiring of this last resort Data Recovery service is an excellent opportunity to remember that a proactive backup and recovery has always been a required and recommended best practice. Salesforce offers a number of native backup options to minimize your business risk of user-inflicted data loss.

Native Salesforce Options

Weekly Export and Report Exports

Users with “Data Export” profile permissions can generate backup .CSV files of their data on a weekly basis (once every 6 days) or on-demand via user-generated reports. The export can be scheduled and then manually downloaded when ready. Weekly Export backups can include images, documents, attachments, and Chatter files. In the event of a user-inflicted data loss, users must manually restore by uploading their .CSV files in the correct order. Because this process can be challenging OwnBackup has created a free eBook with a step by step process to Recovering Lost Data Using Salesforce Weekly Export.

Data Loader

Data Loader is a client application for the bulk import or export of data. It can be used through the user interface to bulk import or export Salesforce records through .CSV files, as well as Insert, Update, Upsert, Delete, or Export Salesforce records as .CSV files. Data Loader command line can also be used to backup data to or from a relational database, such as Oracle or SQL Server. Restoration of lost or corrupted data would be manual.

These native methods include data, but no metadata. In order to proactively protect your Salesforce platform, you should back up metadata and attachments as well. Without this vital piece, putting the relationships between your Salesforce data objects back in place can become a painstaking process.

Without the ability to maintain relationships, you’ll only have partial restore capabilities. If an account is accidentally deleted, all of the contacts, cases, tasks, and other records will be deleted as well. If you only restore the account, but not it’s dependent child records, your recovery capabilities are only providing you partial coverage.

Having a copy of your data is important to meet the minimum standards of a backup. The real challenge is the ability to restore data back into Salesforce. Plan for regular data recovery testing to ensure that you are prepared for any unexpected data events. You must test your strategy so you’ll be aware of what will actually happen if you were to experience a data loss or corruption. When you test, you may find that you are unable to recover in the time or to the fullness that you require. When testing, check:

Are you able to recover specific versions of document or data or metadata?
Are you able to minimize data transformation during the restoration process?
How does your strategy handle different types of restore processes?
What is the performance and time to restore?

How to Trust in Your Salesforce Data Recovery Plan

At the beginning of this article we mentioned Salesforce recommends using a partner backup solution that can be found on the AppExchange. The reason they recommend this is almost entirely due to the challenges most experience when attempting to recover lost or corrupted data and the fact that metadata cannot currently be backed up using native backup methods.

OwnBackup, a top-rated partner on the AppExchange, is here to help you identify the five concepts that really matter when it comes to a comprehensive backup AND recovery.

1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

For many companies, having unresolved data loss or corruption for over one week could equate to millions of dollars in lost revenue. As you construct your data recovery strategy, you will need to define your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).

The RPO is the amount of data a company can afford to lose before it begins to impact business operations. Therefore, the RPO is an indicator of how often a company should back up their data.

The RTO is the timeframe by which both applications and systems must be restored after data loss or corruption has occurred. The goal here is for companies to be able to calculate how fast they need to recover, by preparing in advance.

What the recovery time and recovery point end up being are deeply influenced by backup frequency, backup retention, your ability to compare current and past data, and to restore just the data that has been impacted. RTO and RPO are two parameters that help minimize the risks associated with user-inflicted data loss

2. Data Integrity

Data integrity means that you should have a complete backup of your Salesforce environment. Backing up a few critical fields or records isn’t enough. Salesforce is a relational database that doesn’t allow admins to manipulate or populate the record IDs. All of the relationships in Salesforce environments are based on these record IDs. In the case of a data loss, a cascade delete effect will remove all of the child records associated with that account.

This is one of the big reasons why an audit trail is not a backup and recovery solution. You never know what the scope of a data loss will be in the future. For that reason relying on field level changes on a subset of objects as a reliable backup solution is a fundamentally flawed strategy.

Therefore best practice is to have a full backup of all of your Salesforce data, metadata, and attachments. You may also want to have a partial, high-frequency backup for critical objects that change more than a few times each day.

Another best practice for maintaining data integrity includes having restore capabilities that allow both full and granular restore to prevent an accidental overwrite of legitimate changes.

Finally, the integrity of your backups themselves are critical, particularly for companies with internal data security policies or regulatory compliance concerns.

3. Security

Your company is likely required to follow security requirements. Your backup and recovery process shouldn’t be excluded from these security requirements. Saving .CSV files of your Salesforce data within the company hard drive or your laptop should not be considered a best practice. Ideally, your backup data should be saved to trusted cloud storage. To meet compliance requirements the data should also be encrypted both in transit and at rest.

You should also consider the permission settings and accessibility of your backups. With your current backup process, could an inappropriate user access and delete data.

4. Reliability

A reliable backup and recovery plan includes automated change identification, scheduled backups, proactive data change monitoring, and the ability to reach out for technical support if needed.

You should have the ability to automatically identify changes that have occurred in your schema. A tool that can identify what has changed between backups is important for data, metadata, and attachments.

Your backups should run daily at a minimum. Schedule your backups to run on a set schedule which is easy to define and monitor.

With so many end-users with read-write and delete permissions or merge abilities, proactive monitoring is crucial. A reliable data backup and recovery plan allows you to quickly find out when unusual changes have occured or if a backup has failed.

5. Accessibility

Storing data backups outside of Salesforce is a best practice for accessibility. If Salesforce were to become temporarily unavailable, you would still have access to your data and metadata.

Data backup portability is a must for an optimal data backup and recovery plan. Data movement should be able to take place securely and conveniently. Whether you’re looking to conduct more complex reporting on large data sets with BI and ETL tools or want to maintain legacy business continuity and data recovery procedures, your data should be yours to use as you please.

Data accessibility is also a key requirement of GDPR and CCPA. In support of these regulations, you should have full transparency into their data, even backups. To comply with these regulations, you’ll need to be able to search for where a Data Subject’s data, including attachments, resides within their backups. Additionally, you must have the ability to rectify or forget an individual’s data in your backups for full compliance.

Protect Your Data and Maintain Business Continuity with Comprehensive Backup and Recovery

By making the tough decision to retire their Data Recovery service, Salesforce has reiterated their commitment to customer success and trust. Now is the perfect time to reassess your current backup and recovery strategy. Were you completely relying on Salesforce’s Data Recovery service? Why not start backing up with their native Weekly Export service instead? Any backup strategy is better than doing nothing at all.

We’d also encourage you to explore Salesforce AppExchange partner solutions, such as OwnBackup. OwnBackup brings ROI to its over 1,700 customers every day by helping them protect their Salesforce data. OwnBackup customers are almost 3x more likely to notice a data loss or corruption and they feel 3x more prepared to recover.

Now is the perfect opportunity to take a step back and put a comprehensive backup and recovery plan in place to ensure that your Salesforce data has the same level of protection as your other critical systems.

To request a demo and learn more about OwnBackup and our solutions, click here.

Salesforce experts against Covid-19 FTW!

By Enrico Murru

On May 18, 2020

In Post

Global leader in Salesforce recruitment, Mason Frank International, recently got in touch with me about an opportunity for an important project they were working on. In response to the Covid-19 crisis, they have collated expert advice from leading Salesforce MVPs and professionals into an industry whitepaper, of which I am proud to say I am part of.

The whitepaper covers five common challenges many are struggling with at this moment: cost saving, data security, remote working, growing at scale, and business continuity.

I am honored to have been involved in this project, providing Salesforce advice to those who need it. I hope my own and my peers’ insight helps those looking for answers at this unprecedented time.

Please do have a read and share with anyone who would benefit from it: https://www.masonfrank.com/overcoming-business-challenges-with-salesforce/

Thank you, and stay safe!

Salesforce Data Management 101: Know Your Storage

By Gilad David Maayan

On May 15, 2020

In Post

Today’s guest post is delivered by Gilad David Maayan, a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Imperva, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership.

When developing an app, you need to know how data is stored, structured, and organized. This information is crucial when building, maintaining, and updating your software. It can also help you understand what are the capabilities of this build, how far you can take it, and when it will need to be scaled up.

In Salesforce, you can use two types of storage for data and for files, but there are five methods designed for specific use cases — files, CRM, documents, attachments, and knowledge. In this article, you will learn how storage works in Salesforce, including tips to help you avoid hitting your storage limits.

How Data is Stored in Salesforce

When working with Salesforce, there are several reliable and efficient ways to store your data. This includes media files, customer profiles, documents, and presentations. This storage is broken down into two types — data and file.

Data storage includes many fields, such as accounts, cases, custom objects, events, opportunities, and notes. This data is automatically stored within the Salesforce database and you do not have individual control over where specific items go.

File storage includes attachment files, customer content, media, Chatter files, documents, and custom files in Knowledge articles. This content you can individually control depending on how it is created and attached. Below are the five methods you can use for file storage.

Files

Salesforce Files is a storage location you can use to store any type of file. Salesforce has positioned it to replace most of the following methods as it offers more features and functionality. Files enables you to follow specific files, generate links, share files with users or groups, and collaborate on files. In Files, each file can be up to 2GB.

Customer relationship management (CRM) content

Salesforce CRM content is where you can store files that you want to publish and share with coworkers and customers. For example, presentations or content packs. This can include marketing files, document templates, media, or support files. This storage type supports files up to 2GB although this drops to 10MB depending on how you upload data.

Documents

Documents storage enables you to store a variety of web resources, including logos, email templates, and Visualforce materials. When files are stored here, you do not have to attach data to specific records. In Documents, files can be up to 5MB.

One thing to keep in mind — if you are using an older version of Salesforce Documents storage is still available. However, if you are using Lightning Experience, this functionality has been replaced by Files. When you update your Salesforce, you need to convert your Documents to Files before you can access your data.

Attachments

Attachments is a storage area you can use for files that you want to attach to specific records. For example, marketing campaigns, cases, or contact information. The downside of Attachments is that you can’t share files with links and do not have access to version control. In Attachments, files can be up to 25MB and feeds can be up to 2GB.

Knowledge

Knowledge is a storage area you can use to create and store knowledge base articles. These files can be searched by internal users and shared with customers through your portals or Lightning Platform Sites. In Knowledge, each article can be up to 5MB.

How to Avoid Hitting Your Storage Limits in Salesforce

Regardless of how you store and manage your files in Salesforce, you need to be aware of what your storage limits are and how to make the most of those limits. You should also be aware of what alternative options you have to expand your storage.

Storing data outside of Salesforce

Sometimes, the most practical option is to store some of your data outside of Salesforce. One reason for this is your storage limits. In Salesforce you are allowed:

Data storage—10GB of base storage plus 20MB of storage per user. If you are using Performance or Unlimited versions, user storage is 120MB per. However, the Developer, Personal, or Essentials versions follow different rules with no user data and 5MB, 20MB, and 10GB respectively.
FIle storage—for most plans you get 10GB per organization and from 612MB to 2GB per user. For the Developer and Personal plan you get 20MB, and for Essentials you get 1GB. No user data is provided for these plans.

Even if your data is still within storage limits, keeping redundant or unnecessary data in Salesforce can cause issues, including:

Degraded performance
Inaccurate reporting
Inefficient searches

To avoid these issues and ensure that your limits are not exceeded, you might consider adopting a cloud storage service. These services can provide scalable, cheap storage that you can connect with API or third-party extensions to your Salesforce system.

For example, Azure File Storage by NetApp can provide a standard file system format that you can use from anywhere, including hybrid systems. Or, AWS S3 services can be connected for unstructured storage and any type of data.

Cleaning up unwanted data

Maybe you do not want to store data outside of Salesforce or you have already moved data but still want to improve storage efficiency. In these cases, you can focus on cleaning your data. You can do this either manually or automatically depending on the type of data you’re trying to eliminate.

For manual clean-up, Salesforce provides a native deletion wizard. You can use this wizard to eliminate old accounts, contacts, activities, leads, or cases. To identify data that is safe to remove you can run a report to see when data was last used and eliminate things before a certain date. Or, you can individually delete data as users inform you it’s no longer accurate.

Another option is to use extract, transform, load (ETL) tools to pull your data, process it (removing unnecessary data), and load the remaining data back in. This option enables you to script clean-up based on whatever parameters you’d like. However, it can be a lengthy process and requires the help of external tools, such as Salesforce Data Loader or Informatica.

Archiving data

During your data downsizing, you will probably find data that you no longer need in your system but that you don’t want to delete. For example old client files that you need to keep for compliance, historical customer reports, or knowledge base articles for legacy products or services.

If you have data like this that you want ‘just in case’, archiving is your best option. Archiving enables you to export data from your system, compress it for efficiency, and store it wherever you prefer.

Often, the previously mentioned cloud services are a good option for this. Many services have cold storage tiers available that are much cheaper than on-premise storage. These services enable you to store large volumes of data that you rarely need to access and can eliminate worries about data corruption or loss due to hardware failure.

Conclusion

Salesforce comes with a specific data management build that you need to comply with. The two basic data types are data and files, and these are sorted further into five organizational types — files, CRM, documents, attachments, and knowledge. However, you do not have to use all of these. Recent Salesforce change enables you to store most of these elements as files.

Whichever structure you choose, be sure to continually monitor and optimize your storage. Adding monitoring on a regular basis can help you optimize both performance and billing. To avoid hitting your storage limit, you can store data outside of Salesforce, clean up unwanted data, and archive cold data.

Survival Guide for duplicate management in Salesforce

By Dario Finotti

On May 5, 2020

In Post

Dario is senior consultant and project manager @ TEN,the first Salesforce italian partner.
Totally in love with Salesforce from 2013, he achieved 9 certifications so far and an extensive experience on projects’ implementation.
Based in Milan, he’s passionate about Formula 1 and basketball.

Duplicate management on crm is always a hot topic during a Salesforce implementation. Data is often stored in different silos like your ERP, E-commerce, Marketing tool.

When you migrate customer data from different sources in your Salesforce org, there are a lot of options out there to help on duplicate issues. One of the best ways is to implement a SSOT (Single Source of Truth) with Salesforce Customer 360 or an MDM tool, but this option could affect the budget.

In this article you can read one of the less expensive ways to find and merge duplicates in Salesforce.

Standard Duplicate Management

Duplicate management in Salesforce is a real time process that let you block during creation of new leads, accounts and contacts or alert and report on potential duplicates.It’s included in your Salesforce license and implementation is divided in simple steps:

Create a matching Rule

Select the object:

Give a name and choose fields to consider for looking duplicates (example account name, Shipping street)
Type of match (exact, fuzzy) for each condition

Save:

Create Duplicate rules:

Identify object where find duplicates (example account)

Define Actions (allow/block), and record exclusion
if you block no record creation will be allowed
if you allow is possible to choose to alert users during creation and report on specific objects
Associate matching rule (up to 3) used to find duplicates (created in the step before)
You can also decide to use standard matching rule provided by Salesforce

Hints

Matching rules are cross object, for example you can compare Accounts with Leads or with Contacts and vice versa.

If you choose alert on action you can report on duplicate object. This option let admin or super users to decide if merge or not potential duplicates manually and create tasks with process builder like a reminder.

Automate your merging activity

What should be a solution to automate merging? If you have a lot of records, merging manually could become time consuming.

An economic solution is an appexchange product: Cloudingo. The logic is similar to standard duplicate management, but this solution gives more powerful tools that let you automate the job!

These are the main steps.

Create Filter

Choose your Salesforce object (example Account)

Don’t worry about privacy, Cloudingo doesn’t store any data outside your Salesforce org.

Select Fields for match

Select fields to consider for looking duplicates (example Account name,Billing street)

Exclude records

Consider if you would like to exclude certain types of records from the dedupe process. For example partner account and finally save

Automation rules

Create a new rule, choose the object and give a name

Decide how merge records

Is where you define the specifics of how you want Cloudingo to merge your duplicate records.

Every rule created before needs to be associated with an automation.These are main steps to follow:

Master record selection

Decide in a group or record which is the master, for example most complete or first record.
Order groups by a date
If you have chosen a master definition that may results in more than one record having the same value, you can break ties using created or modify dates

Field value selection

Here you can define how all field values on the record must be populated.

For example the most common or the value from the newest record in the group.

You can also choose to override the master value or override only if fields are blank (master enrichment).

In the section specific field values, you can set rules for specific fields on the object. These rules will supersede any settings above.

This is useful for:

Modify logic on external ids fields, to preserve original values on master and avoid mix up keys.
Sum all record values together in a field to determine what value to set on the master.

The final section defines situations where Cloudingo will not merge records or the entire group of records.

Remember to assign the rule to the filter you want to apply!

Dedupe dashboard

You can create a lot of filters and apply the same automation rule or different to everyone. The result is easy to view in your dedupe dashboard:

Groups represent the number of groups of account duplicated
Matches are the single account potentially duplicated

Schedule automation

Here you decide when the rules have to run an merge duplicates with automation rules set before.

Before setting your schedules, consider to run filters in a correct time slot, for example when users activities are reduced and there are no automatic batch uploads from your middleware or from other systems.

Hints:

It’s strongly recommended to connect first your full sandbox environment and test dedupe results before running on production. You can easily migrate filters and automation from test to production in Cloudingo.

Be careful not to lose data

Your legacy systems may need to maintain data or keys for your duplicated account. If this is your case, you can consider implementing a simple trigger to get back accounts deleted by Cloudingo in your recycle bin and write it in a custom object.

Your records will maintain original values on fields and will be related to the master account.

Summary

In a parallel stream is very important to understand how to prevent duplicate generation, for example promoting customer registration instead of guest purchasing.

There aren’t magical hints for good working filters, it’s all related about data. If the original database is dirty, you can think about cleaning and enriching with external services before applying dedupe filters.

This guide is not a final solution, but can help you to understand and find a cheaper way to manage duplicate issues.

How to Secure Salesforce Workloads: Tips and Best Practices

By Gilad David Maayan

On March 28, 2020

In Post

Salesforce provides security controls for your data, categorized according to organization, object, field, and record level. To properly secure your Salesforce workloads, you must first understand the Salesforce data security model, as explained in this article. You will also learn tips and best practices for data sharing, auditing, session configuration, and encryption.

Salesforce Data Security Model

Within Salesforce, you have full control over what information users can access. This extends to articles, records, and individual fields. Each security concern is categorized into a level, which enables you to control certain aspects of security.

Organization Level Security

Organization level security settings enable you to determine who has access to your Salesforce system, including from where and when.

At the organizational level, you can define:

IP restrictions—determines what IP addresses users can access data from.
Login access—determines timeframes when users can access data.
Password policies—determines the life cycle of passwords, required complexity levels, and reusability.

Object Level Security

Object level security settings enable you to guide how objects are handled, including creation, access, and modification.

At the object level, you can define:

Profiles—determines who is allowed to do what with objects. This is based on individual users with individual create, read, edit, delete (CRED) settings.
Permission sets—enables you to extend permissions granted to user profiles in a standardized way.

Field Level Security

Field level security settings enable you to restrict specific fields according to user profile. For example, you can determine who can see an employee’s compensation information. For those without permission, this information is hidden from view or access.

Record Level Security

Record level security settings enable you to determine how and by whom records are accessed or shared.

At the record level, you can define:

Organization-wide sharing defaults—determines how freely records can be accessed if profile permissions are not defined.
Role hierarchy—enables you to grant tiered permissions. This grants higher level users, such as supervisors, access to all data of the users below them.
Sharing rules—determine how you can share information and who with. You can use these rules to define lateral sharing or to allow access outside your organization.
Manual sharing—enables you to grant record limited sharing permissions. For example, if only one specific user needs access to a record.

Salesforce Security Best Practices

When configuring or auditing your data security settings, there are several best practices you should apply. These practices can help you increase the overall security of your data and ensure that customer and employee privacy is protected.

Data Sharing

Data sharing policies often aren’t used exclusively for security purposes but these policies can significantly impact security.

For example, you should carefully choose between hierarchical sharing and use of Public Groups. Keep in mind that hierarchical sharing provides a higher tier user access to all data of those below them. In contrast, Public Groups enable you to define sharing rules regardless of where users fall in a larger hierarchy.

You should also take care with how you allow owner sharing. When records are shared manually by owners you have limited ability to track who has access. You can use the Developer Console to manually identify which records are shared but this is not practical on a larger scale. Additionally, when records swap owners, this information is lost. The lack of visibility this creates can be a liability if owners are sharing sensitive information without approval.

Audit Regularly and Watch for Vulnerabilities

As with any system, you should make sure to regularly audit your configurations and settings. Audits can help you identify configurations that have been changed manually or automatically due to updates. It helps you identify users or roles that are no longer valid and that should be removed. Auditing can also help you identify inefficiencies in your current roles and groups and point to how these aspects can be streamlined or refined.

It is also a good idea to regularly check for Salesforce security vulnerabilities in a vulnerability database, and take action if necessary. There is also a standard SalesForce procedure that allows you to perform a full security assessment and penetration test of the SalesForce platform to ensure it meets your security requirements.

Session Settings

Session settings provide you control over individual user sessions, including verification and timeout settings. Verification settings enable you to specify whether or not multi-factor authentication is needed. This is activated via the “Raise session to high assurance” setting. This feature is available for a variety of data and services, including reports, dashboards, and connected applications.

Timeout settings enable you to define for how long a session is authenticated and for how long inactive sessions should persist. When setting this, you need to find a balance between convenience and security. You don’t want your users to have to log-in every thirty minutes but you also don’t want sessions active for hours after a user is done with the system for the day.

Shield Platform Encryption

Shield Platform Encryption is a natively integrated service that enables you to encrypt your data in-transit or at-rest. You can use it to extend the built-in encryption that comes with Salesforce by default.

With Shield Platform you can encrypt a range of data, including:

Fields—includes a range of standard and custom fields
Files—includes attachments, notes, PDFs, and images
Data elements—includes analytics, search indexes, Chatter feeds, and Change Data Capture information

Shield Platform Encryption works via keys managed either by you or Salesforce. If you use Salesforce managed keys, you can create keys based on a master secret and organization-defined key material. If you wish to manage your own keys, you can use the Cache-Only Key Service to fetch the key as needed.

Apply the Principle of Least Privilege

When creating permissions, access controls, and roles, be sure to enforce the principle of least privilege. This principle specifies that only the minimum functional amount of access is provided. These limitations help reduce the damage that users can accidentally or purposely create. It also limits any access provided by compromised credentials.

Conclusion

Salesforce provides you with the majority of the features and tooling needed for basic security. The organization level enables you to configure access control, object level is for profiles and permissions, field level restricts access to fields, and record level enables you to create a record access hierarchy.

Once you configure your security settings, you should set up sharing procedures, audit regularly, configure and monitor session restrictions, encrypt data, and apply the principle of least privileges.

Marketing Cloud and Deployment Manager: the beginning of a new love story

By Alex Rogora

On March 12, 2020

In Post

This post is delivered by Alex Rogora, an Analyst and Cloud Administrator specialized on Marketing Cloud. Thanks to this multipurpose profile – a computer science background, university degree on Communication and several years of work experience in mail marketing – he is member of the Solution team for WebResults (Engineering Group), that studies new technologies released by Saleforce.

The life of a Marketing Cloud consultant can be hard, especially when it comes to migrating configurations from one Business Unit to another.

Of course, some assets or Data Extensions can be shared between multiple BUs in the same environment, but if we talk for example about customer journeys, automations, or data model, the only solution was to replicate the configuration manually without any type of support.

This was true until few months ago, when the Deployment Manager made its quietly debut on the AppExchange.

As reported in the dedicated page, Deployment Manager is a Salesforce Labs app that “allows users to import/export Marketing Cloud campaign configuration”.

Easy, clear and even free: let the revolution begin!

WHAT CONFIGURATIONS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

The first features enabled in April 2019 were the canvas structure of customer journeys and in a short time the export of Data Extension schemas were added as well.

To be honest, not every element that make up the journey is replicated at the moment: for example the entry source is missing and for some activities there is only the placeholder, but it’s a good place to start.

Source journey (1) and deployed journey (2)

For Data Extensions, the snapshot is limited to the fields, while the contained records are not exported. But in my humble opinion I think this is right, because we have privacy constraints and often the data in a test BU is different from that used in production.

A few months later the Deployment Manager added a partial support for deploy automation and, in certain cases, also for the related activities contained.

For example, if the automation contains a query activity, the extracted JSON file will also contain the information to generate the activity itself and the corresponding destination DE. While, unfortunately, in the case of “send emails”, neither the related activity nor the associated creativity will be created, but we’ll only see the placeholder in the automation step. Fortunately, the import report is quite descriptive and allows you to obtain useful information on the individual elements copied.

Finally, the Deployment Manager supports the possibility to export attribute groups of the data model.

In this case the deployment process seems to be quite complete, because both the attribute sets and the necessary DE are automatically exported.

But this is only the beginning clearly.

With a look to the near future, hypothesis predict about content builder folder organization, asset and the completion of existing journey features.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Well, it’s very simple.

Once installed through AppExchange in both BUs, the source and the destination one, Deployment Manager allows you to export the configurations you want to copy by creating a JSON file that can be easily downloaded.

This snapshot contains the metadata of the journey, DE, attribute group, or automation without any customer data or campaign data. The exported file can therefore be easily re-imported into the target business unit, even in different accounts.

Create the snapshot and import it in the new BU

Wait, wait..wait!

Did you just say also in different accounts? Yes, even in BU belonging to different marketing cloud enterprises.

And want to know another amazing thing?

We can export / import multiple configurations at the same time, in the same snapshot, with few clicks!

It is possible to export / import multiple configurations at the same time

So, even though there is still a bit of stuff to fix / add, it’s clear that this app allows all customers to decrease the effort needed for production deployment processes, while also minimizing the risk of error during this phase.

Deployment Manager is also a useful ally for Salesforce partners, because it allows you to easily recreate configurations previously implemented in other environments in the customer’s account and you can also store a snapshot for templating, backup, auditing, or version control.

And the audience quickly noticed it.

Deployment Manager was one of the highest rated sessions in the Partner Lodge at Dreamforce 2019 and it’s also the 2nd most downloaded Salesforce app which allows partners to streamline account creation, migration and setup.

Believe me, we will hear more about it in the next months!

For more information:

“Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide” made it to the Best New Salesforce eBooks to read in 2020

By Enrico Murru

On January 27, 2020

In Post

BookAuthority Best New Salesforce eBooks

I’m happy to announce that my book, “Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide: Unleash your Salesforce administration superpowers with an advanced training certification guide”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best New Salesforce eBooks.
BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thank you for all your support!
The book is available for purchase on Amazon.

Get brand new ideas with Advanced Communities’ “Ideas Management”

By Stas Dunayev

On January 24, 2020

In Post

This guest post has been written by Stas Dunayev, a Managing Director and Valentina Naumenko, a Head of Marketing at Advanced Communities (London based consultancy), a highly innovative team devoted to Salesforce Community Cloud evangelisation.

I decided to give AC a spot on my Nerd At Work because I used their great product on a personal project regarding the Salesforce Ohana Italia, and what a better way to promote a product that is available for free for our Salesforce Ohana! (ed)

We are Advanced Communities and we specialise in Salesforce Community Cloud. We have lots of Community Cloud components on AppExchange and we would like to introduce our most popular component – AC Ideas.

The main point of our Community Ideas Component is to facilitate the Ideation process. In plain English, this means your customer or partner or even your own employee can create an Idea and other members of your customer/partner/employee community can then view, comment and, most importantly, vote for that Idea. After voting, you can see which Ideas are the most popular ones and decide whether to implement them or not.

The Ideation process can be employed by companies and organisations of all sizes and across all industries as an important part of product design.

To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need first and foremost to listen to your users as this allows you to succeed in both growing your business and retaining your existing customers. You might be familiar with the Ideation process already as Salesforce as a company uses Ideas extensively for its own products. On the well-known IdeaExchange site (https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaSearch), Salesforce users have created thousands of ideas suggesting improvements and missing features and collectively contributing to the success of new Salesforce releases. If Salesforce uses it, why can’t your company do the same?

Ideas Management used for Salesforce Community Cloud platform can provide fantastic benefits for any business: it allows firms to interact with clients as well as partners and to engage with their personnel within a community thus providing an opportunity to generate fresh ideas.

The Ideation process includes the following steps:

Generating and Gathering a great number of ideas from all your stakeholders that then can be filtered and selected into the brightest, most appropriate or most ingenious ones.
Reviewing. The status board enables you to easily review all submitted ideas and to reward your best contributors
Evaluating and Communicating keeps your community audience informed about the ideas status updates.

AC Ideas, an Idea Management created by Advanced Communities, provides you with a complete set of tools at each stage of the Ideation process. AC Ideas can help you leverage the power of Community Cloud and crowdsource new ideas as well as collect employee feedback and provide valuable insights to help you grow your business.

By employing AC Ideas, you will be able to:

Understand your customer or partner needs.
Stay in touch with your employees.
Step beyond straightforward solutions and generate innovative ones.
Explore new directions which you may not have encountered before.
Ask the right questions to your stakeholders and listen to their answers.
Measure and quantify customers’ demand.

AC Ideas is a lightning solution developed for Salesforce Community Cloud which allows you to get invaluable feedback from your customers and to identify their pain points or missing features in your products and services. The ideation process can and should help you with planning and creating a roadmap for your products.

So let’s take a look at how AC Ideas works.

1. After installing the component and setup of its settings, your users can start generating new Ideas. To do this, they can login to community, go to the Ideas page and click ‘Post an Idea’ and fill in details – the key information about an idea: its title, categories and description.

2. Now a new idea is posted! For more efficient management of published ideas there is a list of useful features:

Comments and Votes give your community a voice and provide clarity on what matters most.

Votes Threshold: set up the vote threshold, e.g. after exceeding the set threshold, the Idea will automatically change its status from ‘New’ to ‘Accepted’ and the product manager will get notified of this via email.

3. And finally, you get a clear structure of your ideas, obtained by using a Categories Hierarchy, as well as Filters and Advanced Search, that allows you to organise your Ideas page in the most efficient way.

*Categories Hierarchy, Filters and Advanced Search.*

Since the component was launched on AppExchange it has been installed multiple times and is in use by thousands of companies and organisations.
The main version is free and does not have any restrictions.

A paid Enterprise version is also available with lots of extra features and is in use by companies such as Australia Post, Mulesoft and Financial Force from this link.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud: Latest Features and Updates

By Gilad David Maayan

On January 20, 2020

In Post

The consumers of 2020 want to access and purchase products and services anytime and anywhere. They are always connected and engage with e-commerce brands through chatbots, social media, and marketing emails.

Consumers often expect to instantly find and buy the product they are looking for. This is why e-retailers want to create a smart, and easy shopping experience in every media channel. You can achieve these goals through the use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce recently announced some new features in its Commerce Cloud platform. New features include artificial intelligence, inventory availability and more. Read on to explore some of these new features.

What Is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that lets you manage products, promotions, content, and pricing. From the operational point of view, the platform offers different functionalities over multiple channels like mobile, web, social, and store. SFCC integrates with your order fulfillment channel and with your back-office tools.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud key features include:

Omni-Channel platform—SFCC integrates your physical store with your online store to improve customer experience and grow your business.
SaaS solution—SFCC is a SaaS solution that enables real-time access to information about your online and offline operations.
Flexibility—SFCC enables customers to return products anywhere they want. In addition, shoppers can save time by paying online and picking up the product from the store.
E-commerce website management—SFCC provides a Content Management System (CMS), and Operations Management System (OMS). The e-commerce store does not require programming experts to work on the backend. SFCC provides a wide audience reach with compatibility to all popular operating systems like Windows, Android, and iOS.
Personalization—SFCC offers a personalized shopping experience by analyzing customer behavior. As a result, store owners can promote unique content that is appealing to specific users.
Seamless upgrades—Salesforce constantly rolls out many new features and updates. Updates are available in the administration panel and the installation does not require any technical intervention.
Internationalization—SFCC enables users to manage multiple stores from a single back-end. As a result, store owners can integrate things like multi-language and multi-currency.

Newest Salesforce Commerce Cloud Features

Top-shelf shopping experiences are critical in the competitive e-commerce landscape. One way of doing so is through Artificial Intelligence (AI). That is why Salesforce recently integrated AI-powered features into the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Below is a quick review of the newest Salesforce Commerce Cloud features and how they can transform e-commerce brands.

1) Einstein AI-Based Visual Search

The term visual search refers to a product search, which is run with a photo instead of text and keywords. Recent reports reveal that 62% of millennials prefer visual search over any other search technology. In addition, brands that offer voice and visual search will increase their revenue by 30% in 2021. The visual search market is estimated to reach $28.4 billion by 2027.

To address increasing customer expectations, Salesforce announced the Einstein Visual Search. Einstein is an AI-based feature that enables users to search, shop, and discover promotions through photos. Shoppers upload an image from their mobile device and the Einstein Visual Search automatically finds a visually similar product.

An AI algorithm improves the search capability of Einstein when various users upload different images. SFCC enables image optimization and uploads from smartphones through services like Cloudinary. Retailers can extend the feature to include uploads from laptops or desktops.

2) Einstein Recommendation Engine

Recommendation engines enable retailers to offer the right product to the right customer at the right time. The result is an increased conversion rate and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Experts indicate that up to 31% of e-commerce store revenue comes from product offer personalization. Another report indicates that 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine.

Formerly, the Einstein recommendation engine was only available in the SFCC storefront. The new update enables retailers to integrate Einstein recommendations beyond their e-commerce site through an API. Merchants can now personalize user experience on mobile apps and across customer service and marketing channels.

3) Inventory Availability Service

This new feature enables e-commerce sores to activate a fulfillment center and in-store inventory across multiple digital channels in real-time. As a result, retailers can use programs like buy online, browse by store or, pick-up in store. The new feature also supports spike periods with high-volume requests like holidays.

4) Developer Sandboxes

Developer sandboxes isolate development work from your production environment until you are ready to deploy changes. Sandboxes provide a training environment for developers and enable them to test changes against users and versions of production data. You can set up a sandbox in minutes and deliver innovation to the e-commerce website faster.

5) Commerce API Explorer

The new Commerce API Explorer allows developers to search across an API library and test different functions and calls. This new one-stop-shop for all Commerce APIs in a single portal and easy-to-use user interface allows developers to design and test new experiences more efficiently.

6) Salesforce Commerce Cloud Pricing Model

SFCC has recently changed its pricing model to a range that enables smaller merchants to use the platform. The new pricing is based on a Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) model and offers three core options—Starter, Growth and Unlimited. GVM is the total gross revenue of an e-commerce store in a given period.

The Starter option is for single store retailers and stores with up to two price books. The pricing starts at 1% of GMV. The Growth option is for retailers with up to five stores and up to 10 price books. The pricing is set to 2% of GMV. The Unlimited option is for merchants with larger demands.

The new pricing is more appealing because there are no significant ‘upfront’ license costs. However, this approach may not appeal to a niche business model or non-standard audiences. SFCC features are mainly focused on what the majority of B2C retailers find compelling.

Conclusion

Digital commerce is no longer just a shopping cart. In fact, 21.8% of the world’s population shops online, which makes online shopping responsible for 11.9% of all retail revenue worldwide. For this reason, retailers can leverage Salesforce Commerce Cloud to deliver enhanced shopping experience through AI-powered commerce services, APIs and a robust partner ecosystem. Some of the most well-known brands use Commerce Cloud, including Under Armour, Fila, GoPro and more.

For more info about the Commerce Cloud product click here.

The world’s largest independent Salesforce market survey: key findings for Italian professionals

By Enrico Murru

On January 7, 2020

In Post

It’s been another exciting year in the Salesforce ecosystem. We’ve seen expanded strategic partnerships, brand new products, and revolutionary integrations made possible by Salesforce’s savvy acquisitions in recent years (MuleSoft and Tableau, to name just a couple).

Salesforce is one of the fastest-moving tech ecosystems on the planet. That’s why it’s so important to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of a once humble CRM technology that’s now growing into the most-dominant business software across all markets and industries. We helped create a monster!

Released annually, the Mason Frank Salary Survey is the largest independent study of the Salesforce community. It’s an invaluable resource for Salesforce professionals, partners, and customers looking to gather insights into the working culture of the technology ecosystem, and to benchmark salaries, benefits and market trends.

With thousands of Salesforce professionals and employers surveyed, we can use Mason Frank’s research on product trends and job market depth to steer growth in businesses using Salesforce technology. For candidates, learning which skill sets, technologies, and certifications maximise earning potential is extremely useful.

You can, of course, download the report in full for free on their website, but here are my highlights from the 2019/20 survey report, along with findings that may be of particular interest to Italian members of the Ohana.

What is the top Salesforce product in 2020?

It’s unsurprising to see Sales Cloud maintain its position as the top Salesforce product in 2020, given that the technology is ultimately sales-focused, as well as the market dominance of Sales Cloud in the CRM world.

Service Cloud has risen to the third most-used Salesforce product over the last months, and this is unsurprising given the recent developments in the technology.

Just recently at Dreamforce, it was announced that Service Cloud would now benefit from integration with Amazon Connect, empowering contact centre agents with access to customer information across multiple disparate systems. Service Cloud Voice will also perform real-time sentiment analysis to gauge common customer problems and position relevant solutions to reduce average case handling time. It’s a great time to be a service cloud user!

Which Salesforce certifications maximise earning potential?

IT research firm IDC recently predicted that the demand for Salesforce technology would create 4.4 million new jobs by 2025. This is fantastic news for Salesforce professionals, who are already in high demand, but which certifications will open up the most opportunities and earning potential?

Of all respondents to Mason Frank’s survey, 71% were Salesforce-certified, with the Admin certification being the most popular cert (88% of certified talent held the Salesforce Certified Administrator credential). Of those who weren’t certified, 72% said they were working towards this certification.

Salesforce Developer was recently named in the world’s top 10 jobs, and we can see from the report that only 36% of certified talent hold the Platform Developer I certification; only 10% had achieved Platform Developer II. Given the current and anticipated skills gap, balanced against the low percentage of Salesforce-certified Developers, there’s clearly opportunity for those looking to move into this role.

Certification in any form is likely to open earning potential. The survey found that 44% of certified talent experienced a salary increase after certification, with an average pay rise of 24%. What’s more, two-thirds of these certified professionals indicated their employer paid for their cert exam, so risk/reward is firmly in the favour of ambitious professionals.

What other factors impact earning potential?

While certifications can count for quite a lot, they aren’t everything. By far the largest factor impacting earning potential is experience, with 86% of survey respondents considering this to be significant, compared to just 62% who felt the same about Salesforce certifications. Similarly, 76% also considered exposure to large products to be an important factor.

Only 31% of respondents thought a university degree was an essential factor in earning potential, and 30% considered it not important at all. This question was extended to whether they thought a degree was important when working generally with Salesforce, and 63% indicated they didn’t consider it important. Given the culture of the ‘accidental admin’, these feelings support the idea that Salesforce is an accessible technology even to those without a technical or academic background.

An Italian working in Salesforce

Members of the Milano and Cagliari Salesforce Developer Groups will share the sentiment that it can be difficult to find accurate local market data on Salesforce, but fortunately Mason Frank drills down salaries across all major European countries.

We can see that the average salary across core Salesforce roles (Admin/Dev/Functional & Technical Consultant) in Italy tends to start at around €20,000. Junior Admins can earn up to €26,000, while Junior Consultants and Developers can command salaries between €30,000 and €35,000.

Moving into senior roles, Admins tend to max out at around €32,000, which is where most make the jump into a specialist role. Senior Developers, Functional and Technical Consultants earn between €40,000 and €50,000.

Salesforce continues to enhance functionality of Marketing Cloud, primarily through integrations, making this skillset very in demand. It’s worth noting that even Junior Marketing Cloud Consultants and Specialists can start at €30,000 and earn up to €48,000 when they accrue enough experience. Looking for a specialist area? This could be it.

I hope this exploration of Mason Frank’s findings has been helpful—you should definitely be using this type of market intelligence to set you apart from your peers, so use it when finding your next job, employee, or Salesforce solution to fully benefit from the report.

Looking for more insights? Download the Mason Frank Salary Survey 19/20 in full for unique sentiments on technologies, salaries, and culture in the Salesforce ecosystem.