Tag: Admin

Almost exactly 1 and a half year ago I’ve been contacted by Alok Dhuri from Packt Publishing asking me if I was interested in writing a Salesforce guide.

At that time I still was a Salesforce MVP and, on my career’s checklist, I missed the authoring experience.

Since I was a child, writing a real book has been one of dreams: the only problem is that I’ve never been an artist, so writing a novel have never been an option (although I really REALLY want it was).

It’s at the age of 27, after my MsC degree, I tried to write a PHP related book for newbies: as a self-taught programming learner (I took an Electronic Engineering MsC but I learned programming all by myself), I really love to help others to achieve knowledge with less effort.

That book never saw the light, although I still have the draft on my archives (I lost the digital copy but still have a printed copy).

In 2009 I joined WebResults as a junior Salesforce developer and in 2013 I started Nerd @ Work blog with a cool technical post about a Salesforce workaround that had, and still have, much appreciation on the community.

That was the time I understood that I had enough knowledge to share to the world: it was an important step in my career, because I finally understood that, although I’ve always been a humble guy, I could give and help people just by telling them what my experience taught me. Post by post, challenge by challenge, Nerd @ Work became a known blog among the Salesforce Ohana community.

Busy on my daily work, side projects, ORGanizer for Salesforce and, recently, on authoring 2 books, I started getting help from the Ohana with awesome guest blog posts, but I try to write as much as I can.

The first book: let’s start with advanced stuff first

Although I really wanted to write something for newbies, the guys from Packt Pub. suggested me to write a guide about Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification, which I took as an amazing opportunity…after all I haven’t ever written a book, challenge accepted!

After almost 6 months, the book was out on the book shops and I had an amazing blast when I saw it on the Dreamforce 2019 book shop (picture below).

Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide by Packt Pub. at Dreamforce 2019

Next book please!

Writing Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide was a blast, but it was an advanced book and I knew it couldn’t become a best seller.

Unfortunately few months after the publication, on March 2020 I lost my Salesforce MVP status, which honestly made me feel down regarding my Salesforce Ohana involvement: I didn’t understand why, even after publishing a book, hosting my blog, running a well known browser extension used my thousands people, the status was not renewed but, after the first days of sadness, I thought that it was just a new challenge for me.

Fortunately, on the same March 2020, Alok came back with the title I was looking for: Hands-On Low-Code Application Development with Salesforce.

Finally a book for newbies, where I can try to introduce people to our beloved technology, speeding up their involvement with Salesforce, trying to help companies with an heavy shortage of Salesforce professionals.

The pandemic was striking across the world and a psychologically heavy lock-down hit Italy between March and middle May 2020. we lost a dear friend, Steven, that’s why I decided to dedicate this new book to him and all other Codiv19 victims.

I didn’t have much free time as I though home working could bring, so keeping in time with chapter schedule has been hard during the past months: a mean of 2-3 chapters per month, should have brought the book to life in November 2020 and, luckily, we managed to end at the beginning of October, anticipating by one month…not bad!

Hands-On Low-Code Application Development with Salesforce by Packt Pub.

But how does writing a technical book work?

The schedule

The first step needed when writing a book is the Table of Contents (TOC) creation: what we’ll be talking about?

I usually use a personal knowledge tool (such as Atlassian Confluence) to host these files, so I can quickly update them by accessing them whenever I need from any device.

The TOC is not definitive and it is possible to change chapter order or even chapter descriptions; indeed this is the final approved TOC:

A Brief Introduction to Salesforce
Building the Data Model
Mastering Formulas
Cleaning Data with Validation Rules
Handling Dynamic Configuration
Security First – The “Who Sees What” Paradigm
Be a Workflow Champion
Setting Up Approval Processes
Process Builder – Workflow Evolution
Designing Lightning Flows
Interacting with Actions
All about Layouts
The Lightning App Builder
Leveraging Customers and Partners Power with Communities
Importing and Exporting Data Declaratively
Learning about Data Reporting
The Sandbox Model
Deploying Your Solution
Salesforce Ohana – The Most Amazing Community around

For each chapter you need to provide:

expected page count
chapter extract
learning objectives

To keep up with the schedule I literally printed out a calendar for the next months so I always had the whole schedule on sight range, as shown below.

Each chapter has a first draft release date when the guys at Packt Pub. reviewed all the content in terms of English grammar, chapter structure and all not technical stuff: I REALLY want to thank Prajakta Naik and Tiksha Abhimanyu Lad for surviving my awful English writing!

After one or two review iterations, each book is then evaluated by a technical reviewer: I’ve been supported the whole time by my Ohana friend Fabrice Cathala, who happily joined the team and helped me in tweaking and increasing coherence in the narration on the chapters content with his vast Salesforce knowledge as a prominent Salesforce technical architect and evangelist.

If you plan to write a book, be aware that you may find yourself stuck with a new draft to write, an editor review to check and a tech review to finalise: and this is not your only job!

Time management is essential, you made a commitment and, if you are like me, you REALLY want to keep your word and finish what you started!

Pay attention to…

Check your page count: I have a tendency to write too much
Balance content depth versus page count: depending on the audience you are talking to, try not to write too much and simplify the explanation
Follow a coherent narrative style: it is your book, choose your style and don’t be afraid to adopt an informal writing…I love to put some humour (even if a tech book is not the perfect place to tell a joke!)
Use external references: there’s a plenty of stuff on the net, avoid copy&paste of tables or lists, simply add a reference / highlight box with a link to the external resource where the reader can read further details
Take good screenshots: save with good resolution and avoid typos (I’m known for writing tons of typos…). I suggest to save pictures on a dedicated folder (one per chapter) so, if you ever need to make some modifications, you have the original version
Take a note of each step in your examples: if your book has examples, take notes of any configuration/customisation, you may need to execute the same steps again in the future if you need (for example) to take another screenshot and, believe me, after few months from that writing you may forget what you were doing
Not forget the final goal: during the writing you may find weeks where you believe you want to give up, you may be stressed, but remember that this is pretty normal, it is the so called writer’s block, and if you are not an experienced author, well…soon or later you’ll fill this awful feeling

Finally the publication

But at the end of your journey finally the book gets published: this is an amazing feeling and now you have to wait patiently to see reviews coming from all around the world, hoping that the efforts you did to write those hundreds pages have been worth a bit at least, and maybe helped someone in achieving some knowledge.

I really love the feeling of taking a copy of my own book, turn the pages, and randomly read an sentence and check if I’ve been clear enough.

My free copies of the book, a cool gift from the publisher

Writing a book is an interesting and formative journey, if you believe you have something to tell the world, start a new authoring project, think of a cool title, plan your content and start writing: believe me if I tell you this is not a waste of time!

If you want to start a Salesforce career give my book a try and let me know if you enjoyed it!

[Salesforce / Interview Tips] Preparing for a job interview as a Salesforce Administrator

By Enrico Murru

On December 4, 2018

In Post

Becoming a Salesforce Administrator is often the entry route into the world’s number one CRM technology, but this doesn’t make the job interview process any easier for prospective admins.

As the most prominent role in Salesforce, the competition for a job as a Salesforce Administrator is particularly high. In Mason Frank’s 2018/19 independent Salesforce salary survey, 70% of respondents reported being a Certified Salesforce Administrator, far higher than any other certification. With other candidates waiting in the wings, you need to be sure your interview goes perfectly to guarantee the job offer, and that comes down to preparation.

A job interview for a Salesforce Administrator role can take many forms, and so you’ll need to be prepared for several different lines of questioning. Your interviewer won’t just be interested in your technical experience as an administrator, they’ll also want to know how you see CRM as part of a larger business, and use this to test how much you’ve researched their organisation. In addition, they’ll also want to get to know you as a person.

Read on for a series of tips on how to prepare for your next job interview as a Salesforce Administrator.

Testing your technical knowledge

Ultimately your prospective employer will want to learn how skilled you are on the Salesforce platform, and so you should expect to be asked technical interview questions. A Salesforce Administrator is quite a varied role, and so technical questions you may be asked can be quite broad. You could be asked something very functional such as ‘what is a roll-up summary field’, or perhaps something a little more scenario-based, such as ‘how do you share a record and in what circumstances would that be expected?’

One thing that you need to be aware of going into the job interview is that your interviewer may have no experience using Salesforce, or alternatively they may be a Certified Technical Architect.

With this in mind, it’s not enough to simply have a good working knowledge of Salesforce, you need to be prepared to explain technical concepts in plain language so that a non-expert will understand you. Having technical knowledge is one thing, but being able to communicate your knowledge to a layman is another thing entirely, so practice this before the interview.

Testing your experience

While knowledge is valuable, application is power.

Salesforce Trailhead is a fantastic education portal and is responsible for launching the career of thousands of Salesforce professionals, but it won’t provide you with that all-important practical experience that employers are looking for. This is why experience is incredibly valuable, and so you should be prepared to discuss the projects you’ve worked on and what you learned from them.

If you’ve worked as part of an implementation team, be ready to discuss the technical elements as well as the challenges you faced and how you overcame them. If you’ve ever experienced data loss or a data breach, be ready to discuss how you discovered the event and how it was resolved. Don’t be afraid to discuss challenges and mistakes made—this is what experience is all about, and will set you apart from the other candidates.

Something else that employers value highly is your ability to work on a collaborative project. As an Admin it’s unlikely that you will be working completely independently, so be prepared to talk about your communication skills, requirements gathering, and ability to work within the confines of a project timeline, using examples from your previous experience.

Testing your cultural fit

It’s essential you have the skills and experience to perform the job you’re being interviewed for, but your prospective employer will also want to get an idea of who you are as a person. After all, they’ll likely be spending around 40 hours a week in your presence, so it’s important they employ someone who they’ll enjoy working with—you should also be confident that you’ll enjoy working with them as well!

Given that your technical knowledge and experience come with the territory of being a Salesforce professional, getting your personal character across can often be the most nerve-racking element of a job interview, but this shouldn’t be the case. Just be yourself and communicate your goals and ambitions clearly.

It’s always a good idea to think about why you entered Salesforce technology and where you eventually want your career to take you, as long as you can relate this to why you want the job you’re interviewing for and how this will help you achieve your goals.

Being a successful Salesforce Administrator is about more than just doing the job, it’s about finding ways to maximise the value of Salesforce in an organisation, and making yourself indispensable as a result.

[Salesforce] ORGanizer Chrome Extension Version 0.5 is live!

By Enrico Murru

On March 1, 2017

In Post

Dear ORGanizer users, we have reached beta version 0.5, that means we are half way to version 1.0!

For anyone that doesn’t know what the Salesforce ORGanizer Chrome Extension is, download it for free from the Google Web Store and, believe me, you won’t be disappointed for sure!

As usual, if you find ORganizer useful please cast a vote on the store!

This release comes with important major and minor new features and several UI fixes.

OAuth login
Automatic data backup
Very Important Queries and Scripts (VIQ and VIS)
Other improvements

OAuth login

The ORGanizer allow login with username and password along with token if the Login with token flag is active.

If your company’s password policies prevent you from using the ORGanizer to store passwords, from now on you can enable your browser to user OAuth: by requesting an access token the ORGanizer store (only locally and with encryption) an access token so it can requests a valid session Id without knowing the user’s password.

This means that you need to authorize every instance of the ORGanizer you have installed, so you need to input password at least once for every laptop you own.

How does it work?

Create or edit a new Account by clicking on the ORGanizer extension icon and select YES in the Login with OAuth (no password) section:

With this configuration the password field is not mandatory.

The first time you try to login with the above user (or if the authorization of the ORGanizer app has been revoked by admin, read later for how this is done) you are redirected to this internal page:

Remember which username you are about to authorize and click the link.

You are then requested for your username and password:

And to authorize the ORGanizer App (in this screenshot you are seeing the stage app):

This app requires web and API access (otherwise the Extension cannot work).

Once authorized you are then redirected in the following page:

where the access is validated and the access / refresh token stored locally (encrypted, no remote syncronization is done). You can proceed with login or simply close the app.

The next time (ever after days) you login with this user you are automatically provided a valid access token to enter in your ORG.

This authorization process occurs while setting up a new connection or when an App in no more authorized in your ORG.

To revoke an access token, jump to Setup > Users > select the user you want to revoke and go to the OAuth Connected Apps section:

Revoke each OAuth token issued (you can find multiple instances of the Connected App).

If you want to block the whole Salesforce ORGanizer Chrome Extension Connected App jump to Setup > Connected Apps OAuth Usage:

You can even remove the single user that are using it:

Automatic data backup

On the ORGanizer Chrome Extension’s Options page there is a new section:

The extension automagically saves a local copy of current ORGs and Accounts configuration every time you change a value from the Popup (or change encryption password).

You can set the maximum backup stack size (maximum is 100, minimum is 0) and download a specific backup.

Remember that the Reset all data! and Reset all local data! actions affect the backups aswell.

The bigger your ORGs and Accounts configuration is, the bigger is the local storage needed. Keep an eye on the new gauge on the SYNC/LOCAL QUOTA section:

Very Important Queries and Scripts (VIQ and VIS)

You can name queries and scripts you use often in the Very Important Queries and Very Important Scripts sections on the Quick Console.

V.I.Q.

V.I.S.

You can name a new query/script, select a saved one or delete one.

Remember that every query / script is only stored locally and affects the local storage limit seen in the previous chapter.

You can download a backup of all VIQs and VISs in the Options page:

Other improvements

The Quick Describe plugin’s search now filters objects based on key prefix:

The Options page now shows a link to the main site FAQ page and every section has a ? link to get some help.

Reset the Quick Console size and position (it can become too wide or can move outside the window if you are playing with Chrome’s window):

When Salesforce is life!