Survival Guide for duplicate management in Salesforce

On May 5, 2020

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

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.

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.

Warning: Google Chrome’s SameSite Cookie Behaviour Changes – How to face it properly in Salesforce

By Luca Miglioli

On January 2, 2020

In Post

This post is brought to you by Luca Miglioli, an Information System Analyst that works at WebResults (Engineering group) in the Solution Team, an highly innovative team devoted to Salesforce products evangelization.

Some months ago, Google announced a secure-by-default model for cookies, enabled by a new cookie classification system. Changes concern in particular to the SameSite attribute: on a cookie, this attribute controls its cross-domain site behavior, that is if no SameSite attribute is specified, the Chrome 80 release sets cookies as SameSite=Lax by default while previous to the Chrome 80 release (the current one), the default is SameSite=None.
Ok, but what does it mean?

To safeguard more websites and their users, the new secure-by-default model assumes all cookies should be protected from external access unless otherwise specified: this is important in a cross-site scenario, where websites typically integrate external services for advertising, content recommendations, third party widgets, social embeds, etc. and external services may store cookies in your browser and subsequently access those file.

The cross-site scenario, where an external resource on a web page accesses a cookie that does not match the site domain – courtesy of Google ©

These changes are being made in Chrome, but it’s likely other browsers will follow soon: Mozilla and Microsoft have also indicated intent to implement these kind of changes in Firefox and Edge, on their own timelines. While the Chrome changes are still a few months away, it’s important that developers who manage cookies assess their readiness as soon as possible: that’s why Salesforce rapidly notifies its customers and partners with an annoucement (contained in the latest release notes, Spring ’20).
Especially, the announcement explains that:

“Cookies don’t work for non-secure (HTTP) browser access. Use HTTPS instead.”

Check the URL of your website, if it starts with http:// and not https:// then you’ll need to get some form of SSL certificate. It’s probably worthwhile checking all of the links to your pages to make sure they are directing the the https:// version of the page. For example, make sure you are using the HTTPS links if you are embedding Pardot forms on your websites: this was not enabled for our organisation by default, so it’s likely that your organisation may need to do this.
“Some custom integrations that rely on cookies no longer work in Google Chrome. This change particularly affects but is not limited to custom single sign-on, and integrations using iframes.”

1st, 2nd and 3rd party integrations might be seariously impacted. Salesforce recommends to test any custom Salesforce integrations that rely on cookies owned and set by your integration. For example, an application not working as expected could be Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder not rendering in the browser or Cloud Pages/Landing Pages/Microsites returning blank pages. If you determine that your account is affected by the SameSite cookie change, you need to investigate your implementation code to ensure cookies are being utilized appropriately.

Ok, this looks a little bit scary, but don’t worry!

First, developers and admins can already test the new Chrome’s cookie behavior on the sites or cookies they manage, simply going to chrome://flags in Chrome (type that in the URL bar) and enable the “SameSite by default cookies” and “Cookies without SameSite must be secure” experiments.

Test the changes enabling these features in the “Experiments” section in Google Chrome

Second, developers can still opt in to the status quo of unrestricted use by explicitly setting SameSite=None; Secure: only cookies with the SameSite=None; Secure setting will be available for external access, provided they are being accessed from secure connections.

Third, If you manage cookies that are only accessed in a same-site context (same-site cookies) there is no required action on your part; Chrome will automatically prevent those cookies from being accessed by external entities, even if the SameSite attribute is missing or no value is set.

That’s all! You can still find more detailed info here:

Integrating Salesforce with AWS: A beginner’s guide

By Gilad David Maayan

On December 23, 2019

In Post

Salesforce is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides developers with cloud-based environments and resources for building and deploying cloud-based applications. The platform offers a number of modules, each provides different resources.
AWS is a cloud computing vendor that offers a variety of cloud-based compute resources, such as object storage, data lakes, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and development resources. Salesforce and AWS are partners, and offer a number of connectivity options.
This article provides an overview of Salesforce services and technology, and key integrations you can create to establish a connection between Salesforce and AWS.

Salesforce for Developers: Main Services

Below, you’ll find a brief overview of the main Salesforce offerings for developers.

Lightning Platform

A PaaS module geared for fast apps delivery. Lightning’s cloud architecture is based on multitenancy, which means you share cloud resources with other users. Lightning comes with ready-made solutions, automation processes, and API integrations. You can create your own customizations metadata fields and with Apex code.

Heroku

A container-based cloud PaaS. It supports languages and frameworks such as Python, Clojure, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, Scala, and Go. The main advantage of Heroku DX Developer Experience is the user-friendly dashboard, which provides easy-to-use metrics, and API and automation controls.

You can extend the capabilities of Heroku with services such as Enterprise (with 24x7x365 support with a 30 minute SLA), and Elements (additional languages and services, fully managed services). You can also host your Heroku operations in a private cloud, while maintaining smooth integration with Salesforce.

Einstien

Einstein Platform Services provide Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources for Salesforce developers. The purpose of the platform is to make your applications smarter, as the name implies. To that end, Einstein provides the following services:

Einstein Vision—a computer vision module that enables image recognition
Einstein Language—a natural language processing module

You can use Einstein Platform Services to train deep learning models in the cloud. As in any Salesforce service, it comes with APIs and Apex for integration and customization. Einstein Analytics enables AI-based data analyses.

Trailhead

A learning center for Salesforce skills, which offers a variety of educational modules. You can read guides, sign up for classes, and earn certifications. There are modules for companies, as well as a huge community-based hub. Everything is available online through the Trailhead website.

Salesforce Technology

Salesforce uses metadata, APIs, and containers to enable its technology. To enable quick deployment and scaling, Salesforce runs Kubernetes in production on bare-metal throughout their cloud infrastructure. This kind of architecture enables Salesforce to provide fine-grained microservices for Salesforce end-users and developers alike.

You use containers to pack your apps, metadata to describe the structure of your development artifacts, and APIs to enable connectivity between Salesforce services, third-party vendors, and connected devices and technology. These three main technologies make the Salesforce app development process fast and simple.

Salesforce and AWS Integrations

There are many use cases and integration methods. This section focuses on AWS, but you can find more information about Salesforce integration here.

1. Integrating Salesforce with Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an affordable object storage and archive offered by AWS. Typically, you would do this integration in order to build a data lake on S3. To move data from Salesforce to S3, you need to use the Amazon S3 connector. You’ll find more information here.

2. Integrating Salesforce with Amazon Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service for processing events. To do this integration, you need a Salesforce account and an AWS account. Once you set up your account, you need to create a connection between Salesforce and AWS API gateway. You do this by creating open authentication. Then, you need to configure the data flow, and “tell” Salesforce to subscribe to AWS Lambda events. Here’s a step-by-step guide that shows you how to do this integration.

3. Integrating Salesforce with Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service for performing S3 data analysis with standard SQL. This type of integration is more complex, because you would need to create more than one integration. First, you need to connect Salesforce with S3, then connect Salesforce with Lambda. Once you transfer data from Salesforce to S3, you’ll be able to query it using Athena. Here’s a guide that shows you how to do this.

4. Integrating Salesforce with AWS PrivateLink

AWS PrivateLink creates secure and private connectivity between AWS services, AWS-hosted on-prem apps, and Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). This is a built-in AWS feature that enables integration between AWS and SaaS offerings from AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners, such as Salesforce. In May, Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink, which enables connectivity between private Heroku Postgres databases and AWS VPCs, was made generally available. This connection is easy and fast. You can learn how to create it here.

Conclusion

Secure and simple integration between your development PaaS and your cloud resources is vital for business continuity. You’re using these APIs to transfer data, listen to data, and establish connectivity between systems, devices, and networks.

Native integration is a major advantage, because it was created especially for the two connected points. Security is typically covered well in these scenarios, and the connection fits the two vendors (or in house services) in a way that necessitates little to no configuration. In other cases, like integration #3 in this article, you would need to set up the connection.

Take the time to assess your situation, and find out what kind of integration you need. Experiment with free tiers, make use of community knowledge base, and keep security concerns in mind as you create your integrations. Data is valuable, and you don’t want just anyone listening on your connections.

Salesforce Winter ’20 Highlights

By Claudio Marzorati

On October 3, 2019

In Post

Our week’s trailblazer is Claudio Marzorati, who will be listing some of his favorite Winter’20 Salesforce platform release.

Claudio is a Senior Salesforce Developer @ Sintegra s.r.l. (Milan). He worked with different retails that allowed him to increase his technical background on several aspects.
From analysis, to development, to the direct relationship with the customer, nothing is left to chance.
Other passions are running and travels!

In this article I summarize the most important features introduced in the new release.

General Update

Access the Recycle Bin in Lightning Experience

You no longer have to switch to Salesforce Classic to access the Recycle Bin. You can now view, restore, and permanently delete the items in your Recycle Bin and the org Recycle Bin. Now you can access the Recycle Bin by selecting it in the App Launcher under All Items or personalizing your navigation bar. Or add the Recycle Bin tab for your org in the Lightning App Builder.

View Records by Topic on the Topic Detail Page

If you enable topics from your organization, now you can view records by topics as in the below image.

You must enable a permission in your profile to use topics, as below. Actually (before Winter ’20) you have to navigatore from Setup – Topics for Object Settings in order to enable object by object which fields are candidate for topics detection.

Save Ink and Paper with Printable View for Lists

Printable view for List View is finally available also in Lightning Experience.

Manage Security Contacts for Your Org

Keeping key members of your org in the know about security incidents is important to us. You can now designate your org’s security contacts in Salesforce Help so that if an information security incident impacts your org, your contacts are notified. From Salesforce Help, click Support & Services | Manage next to Customer Security Contacts on the My Profile Settings tile. Here you can add, edit, or delete the email addresses of your security contacts.

Mobile APP

New Mobile App arrives the week of October 14, 2019

Give Your Users Custom Record Pages on Their Phones

Custom Lightning record pages are no longer restricted to desktop. Now you can create record pages tailored to the needs of your mobile users that they see only when viewing the page on a phone. When you create a record page in the Lightning App Builder, you can select a page template that matches the form factor that you’re designing the page for. Preview what the page looks like on different devices using the form factor switcher. When you activate your page, you can choose which form factors to make the record page available on: phone, desktop, or both, depending on which form factors its template supports.

List and Related List Components Are Optimized for the New Salesforce Mobile App

We updated the List View, Related List – Single, Related Lists, and Related List Quick Links components to support mobile navigation and the new Salesforce mobile app. When you place the List View component on a record page, a View More button loads more records in batches, so you can easily get more records or scroll to the information you want. The Related Lists component groups all your related lists in one section and no longer includes News and Twitter. The Related Lists component also uses a View More button for efficient navigation.

File

Set File Sharing to Inherit Record Settings

When attaching files to records, you can have the files inherit the sharing settings of those records. For instance, when a user can edit a record, you want them to be able to edit the files on that record, too. Now you can set the default sharing permissions on files that are attached to records. The preference lets files follow the sharing settings of the record.

For new orgs this option is enabled by default, in other case it must be activated from Setup – Salesforce Files – General Settings, as below.

With this option you can inherit the sharing setting of a record. For example a file attached before you enable this option appear as below

Then became

Remove a File from a Record Without Deleting It Everywhere

Sales Cloud

Contacts: Customize Opportunity Contact Roles for Better Tracking and Reporting

Opportunity contact role customization options give you the flexibility to track and attribute revenue to roles, titles, and individuals. With custom fields and page layouts, validation rules, and Apex triggers, you can design an Opportunity Contact Role to match your specific sales and reporting processes. You can capture new data, such as titles and roles, to help your sales reps be more efficient in targeting the right contacts.

Accounts: Customize Account Teams to Better Support Team Selling

Team selling involves complex account relationships. Now you can manage those relationships better in Salesforce. Collect more information by adding custom fields, buttons, and links to account team layouts. Use validation rules, Apex triggers, Process Builder (NEW), and workflow rules (NEW) with account teams to help keep data clean and minimize manual data entry. You can now report on account teams, too.

View Opportunities Owned by Your Team with One Click in Lightning Experience

The new My team’s opportunities list view is based on role hierarchy. Sales managers can use it to easily see all the opportunities owned by their direct and indirect reports without creating a list view.

Price Book Entries: Track Changes with Field History Tracking and Audit Trails

Price book entries now support field audit trails and field history tracking, so now you can easily track changes to price book entry fields.

Develop

Lightning Web Components: Open Source

To develop off-platform Lightning web components, see https://lwc.dev/

Add Lightning Web Components as Custom Tabs

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<LightningComponentBundle xmlns="http://soap.sforce.com/2006/04/metadata">
    <targets>
        <target>lightning__Tab</target>
    </targets>
</LightningComponentBundle>

Share CSS Style Rules

To share CSS style rules, create a component that contains only a CSS file. Import the style rules from that CSS file into the CSS files of other Lightning web components.

DOM API Changes

Attention! In Winter ’20, code can’t use document or document.body to access the shadow tree of a Lightning web component. For example, code in a test can’t call document.querySelector() to select nodes in a Lightning web component’s shadow tree.

To fix see the guide: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/rn_lwc_dom_api.htm

Aura Components in the ui Namespace Are Being Retired

The ui components are scheduled for retirement in all Salesforce orgs in Summer ’21. Use similar components in the lightningnamespace instead. Retiring our legacy components enables us to focus on components that match the latest web standards in performance, accessibility, user experience, and internationalization. See the list of replacement: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/rn_aura_ui_deprecate.htm

Callouts Are Excluded from Long-Running Request Limit

Every org has a limit on the number of concurrent long-running Apex requests. This limit counts all requests that run for more than 5 seconds (total execution time). However, HTTP callout processing time is no longer included when calculating the 5-second limit. We pause the timer for the callout and resume it when the callout completes.

Changed LWC

See full list: https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/rn_lwc_components.htm

New Apex Classes

Formula Class in the System NamespaceThe new System.Formula class contains the recalculateFormulas method that updates (recalculates) all formula fields on the input sObjects.

At the moment that’s all.

See you in Spring ’20!