Nerd @ Work

When Salesforce is life!

Tag: Trailhead

[Salesforce / Lightning] Of the #Lightning afraid be not!

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On January 16, 2017

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I was introduced to the Lightning world at its very beginning by Jeff Douglas when I was an active member of the Top Coder community.

At that time there were soo few standard components, no way to add a Lightning app / component in a Visualforce Page or easily integrate Lightning with your existing CRM.

Plus it was so hard to make it work, no documentation, no examples, no debugging, but you could feel the beginning of something that would have innovated the platform.

In months the set of components exploded, the posts about Lightning become more and more common, people started sharing their discoveries, trailhead modules were added and the Lightning Design System allowed developers to give their apps the right look and feel.

So what do you need to finally become an expert of this awesome technology?

If you are completely unaware of what Lightning is, start with the Lightning Tralihead Modules:

Once you have a good overview on the technology I suggest to fall into the official lightning guide (always up to date): here you will find everything about the framework.

This is were I first learnt all, well written, easy to understand, covers the whole framework…and it’s free!

Have also a look to the Lightning Design System official site: I suggest you to use this library to make your components as much “Salesforcish” as possibile for a perfect UI experience.

Feeling an expert now?

The next step is to develop something unique and amazing with your new set of skills.

I’ve written in the past years a couple of custom Lightning components (browse here), and this is the good way to master the technology: pick a use case (it can be even a simple component like a progress bar or a related list component) and try to port it in Lightning using the Lightning Design System.

At first you’ll feel a bit uncomfortable but as long as you keep coding you’ll get more and more confidence with the framework and learn more and more tricks, understanding a new way of developing in your CRM.

Don’t be afraid, you’ll never get bored of it, I’ll just get in love with it and appreciate a new and different way to think code.

If you’ve never developed in Javascript you can be a bit puzzled at the beginning, but I guarantee this new way of developing in the platform will increase your programming skills to a new level.

This does not mean you’ll forget all about Visualforce, some customers still don’t use Lightning so the marriage Visualforce + Apex will continue for years, but even if you won’t have any chance to use Lightning with a customer’s project, there is no reason you should not start learning and mastering it!

Next step?

Open your Tralihead account and start learning Lightning, you won’t regret it ! (MVPs never lie!)

[Salesforce / Trailhead] Presenting the “Navigate the Salesforce Advantage” trail aka What is Salesforce?

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On February 20, 2016

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This is a technical blog (“Nerd @ work” say it all) and I usually post exclusively technical stuff.

But in the recent trailhead additions there is a special set of modules that basically answer the question “What is Salesforce and what’s the reason of its Success?”

This is the Navigate the Salesforce Advantage trail and it is meant for those who don’t know anything about the platform and for those who want to better understand the reason of the success.

I may say that if I could have read these modules when I first started making the first steps in the Salesforce platform, I would have understood in few minutes why Salesforce is that awesome…but you know, I discovered it by coding and coding and coding…

What I say before presenting the trail,

Here is a walkthrough of the key concepts of the trail.

Salesforce Success Model

Are you new to Salesforce? Not sure exactly what it is or how to use it? Don’t understand what makes Salesforce special? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’re in the right place. No matter what brought you, we’re glad you’re here.

Salesforce is a platform of connected features that helps you to make your customers love you (I mean not actually you, but your company!)

How do Salesforce do it? It’s success is handled by the following 4 rules:

  • Customer success: “why can’t buying enterprise software be as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com? How can we make it easier for customers everywhere to achieve their goals?“
  • Leadership: “Cloud is still the medium for everything we do. This means all our focus is on innovating the best apps and platform technologies for our customers. This is what we do, all day, everyday.“
  • Innovation: “Our customers drive us to be more innovative. … Because what they can do with Salesforce is truly amazing.“
  • Giving Back: Our 1-1-1 Model: “To us, the business of business is not business. The business of business is to improve the state of the world.“

Salesforce Cloud Benefits

“To answer to what Salesforce is and what it does truly depends on each customers’ definition of success. … So it’s up to us to be their Swiss Army knife and provide them with a neatly packaged range of tools to choose from. … The aim is for our customers to have the right mix of tools at the right time.“

All the platform features help your customers to solve several issues in their business thus increasing their business with super powers:

“There’s a Salesforce App Cloud for That“.

And yes, it is all in cloud, Software As A Service (SAAS)!

“It means that we maintain the infrastructure and do all the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters most to your business.“

Salesforce Technology Basics

Understand the basics of the Force.com platform.

Security: “At Salesforce, trust is our #1 priority. Data is one of the most valuable assets that each one of our customers possesses.“

Multitenancy: “every customer shares the same infrastructure and runs on the same platform. It’s that simple“

Metadata driven architecture: “When we talk about metadata at Salesforce, we’re talking about our metadata-driven architecture that allows each customer to customize their own instance of Salesforce. … Salesforce separates our customers’ customizations into a special metadata layer, so we can update and improve our platform in the background without touching any of their data or customizations”

Fast app development: “Building an app with Salesforce is different. There is no installation of hardware and software, and there are standard options for defining security and user access, creating reports, and making the app social and mobile. Metadata allows us to have all of this pre-built in a separate layer for our customers, so all they have to do is add any customizations they may want as icing on the cake. … Point-and-Click Configuration for all, Custom Code for developers“

Salesfoce Ecosystem

“Our ecosystem was created to help customers get access to whatever they need, whenever they need it.”

It’s the power of the Community that makes the platform so powerfull.

How to keep in touch with all of us?

  • Dreamforce: this is a HUGE event where you’ll meet people from all over the world
  • Attend a local event: join a local User Group or Developer Group
  • Explore the AppExchange
  • Consult with an Implementation Partner

How huge the Community is?

“We developed the online Salesforce Success Community as a place where business users, admins, partners, and employees can go to find answers, get synced up with their local user groups, help new customers get started, and get active in a community of enthusiastic and innovative people.“

Meet Our MVPs
I’m one of them now, you can catch me and ask wathever you want, we are here to help!

“The most incredible thing about our MVPs? Not a single one is an employee. They put in all this time and effort for the good of the Salesforce community, and we recognize them for their leadership, knowledge, and ongoing contributions. These individuals represent the spirit of the community and what it is all about!“

[Salesforce / Trailhead] Christmas Trailhead Gifts

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On December 18, 2015

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Have you been a good or a bad boy this year?

It doesn’t matter to TrailheadClaus, so he put new modules under the tree for you!

At first we have a new trail for advanced administrators.

This includes Event Monitoring and Lightning Connect modules and the new Advanced Formulas module.

This module explains advanced features of the formula fields’s synthax, allowing to reach a high level of proficiency on this important feature of the platform, including examples and use cases with a great diversity of scenarios.
Do you wanna the a Formula Expert? This is your chance!

The next module is about callouts in Apex, Apex Integration Services:

What is a Callout? How to make a REST callout? And what about SOAP? How to test them? Follow this module and all your questions will be answered.

On the beginner admin trail an awesome Lightning Chatter Basics module, that guides you through the Chatter Lightning experience:

This is a complete and easy guide on how to use and configure Chatter in Lightning mode.

The Lightning Data Management module helps admins and developers to import CSV data in your CRM using the Lightning experience mode

The Application Lifecycle Management modulo has been edited and improved to better explain application lifecycle management (how to deploy in sandbox, production, version control, …):

Last but not least a trailhead comes with a new awesome project, Build a Battle Station App: create the CRM for your Death Star, so you can manage its resources and report all your supplies!

And if you complete it before December 31st you can win awesome prices!

[Salesforce / Trailhead / Winter16] The Lightning fever: follow the trailhead!

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On September 15, 2015

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Excited about the latest Lightning Experience announcement?

Me too but unfortunately it was published when I was on vacations without any internet connection, that’s why I read it days after its release, but I just thought “WOW!”.

with great power comes great responsibility, and the guys at Salesforce.com knows it, so they created some cool Trailhead modules to get you started, whether you are a developer, admin or a user.

Learn about why and how you can migrate to the new Lightning Experience, which are the differences and enhancements that has been made.

Watch the new Setup menu in action, saless tools, reporta and dashboards, customize the User interface and plan your rollout strategy: you can even decide which user will be using the new Lightning experience!

These set of modules are useful to understand user management, reports and dashboard creation, app customization (layouts, objects, fields) all with the new Lightning Experience interface.

If you are an experienced Salesforce.com admin you may find some of these modules way too easy, but I bet you’ll still find some new feature you didn’t know/expect!

Developers! That’s what we (most of us?) are!

These modules help you dig into the Lightning Experience as a developer: how can you use the Lightning Components? Is Visual Force dead (don’t worry, the answer is NO)?
The best feature IMHO? The Lightning Design System, finally a unique set of styles and HTML components to build custom applications with a look and feel that is consistent with Salesforce core features — without reverse engineering Salesforce styles!

…Without reverse engineering Salesforce styles!!!!

Finally some cool hints for users and how to use the new Lightning Experience interface (standard objects, list views appearance, dashboards, reports and feeds).

Next step (as usual)?

[Salesforce / Trailhead] Trailhead MEGA RELEASE (DF15 Edition)

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On August 7, 2015

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Dreamforce ’15 is coming and with it we expect awesome news from the event.

I won’t be part of it, and this is a super duper sad thing (I REALLY wanted to watch the Foo Fighters live 🙁 ), but this does not stop me from following the event from home.

If the online stuff is not enough, you can do the Get Ready for Dreamforce trailhead module, an interesting and funny module to discover the most important things of the event: agenda, places, social media infos (who to follow to be uptodate), where to get free gadgets (and swag) and some important details about San Francisco (weather, what to pack in your baggage).

I’m not gonna be preset at DF15 but doing this modulo I almost cried thinking of how cool it would be to be there!

…next year Salesforce…I promise…

[sniff … wipe away all tears … pretending nothing happened…]

The next trailhead modules I’ve succesfully passed (I’m quite a maniac about those kinds of gamifications) are CRM Basics, Accounts & Contacts and Leads & Opportunities: these are super basic modules for Salesforce noobs that introduce you in an easy and funny way to the use of the basic standard entities of Salesforce CRM, that is Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities.

Even if you are an experienced Salesforce Admin/Dev, try these modules: as I always say, there is something new to learn, expecially in things you are sure you master!

The last module added to this MEGA RELEASE is a cool modulo about a feature I promised myself to study but I unfortunately had no time to get deep on: Event Monitoring.

This is a cool new feature that came with Summer ’15 Platform Release: you can extract events that occur on your ORG, using the new EventLogFile object.

An event could be a login, logout, report exportation, Visualforce load, Sandbox creationg/update, API call, etc.

The events can be extracted via REST APIs: if you are not a DEV the modulo will teach you how to make a REST API call.

And if you don’t want to make a REST API call at all, you can download every log files usign the Salesforce Event Log File Browser app:

Here are the supported events (29):

  • Apex Callout
  • Apex Execution
  • Apex SOAP
  • Apex Trigger
  • API
  • Async Report
  • Bulk API
  • Change Set Operation
  • Content Distribution
  • Content Document Link
  • Content Transfer
  • Dashboard
  • Document Attachment Downloads
  • Login
  • Login As
  • Logout
  • MDAPI Operation
  • Multiblock Report
  • Package Install
  • Queued Execution
  • Report
  • Report Export
  • REST API
  • Salesforce1 Adoption (UI Tracking)
  • Sandbox
  • Sites
  • Time-Based Workflow
  • URI
  • Visualforce

One of the best examples that the module points out is the “Monitor of data loss”:
…Imagine that a sales representative leaves your company and joins a major competitor. Later, you find out that your organization is losing deal after deal to this other company. You suspect that your former employee downloaded a report containing leads and shared it with the competition. If you’d been using event monitoring, you could have caught this bad behavior before it cost your company sales.

Have you ever had loading problems with certain Visual Force pages? When you load it, it works like a charm, but when the customer loads it, it usually go timeout.
Now you can finally measure day by day how VisualForces are being rendered (times opened, viewstates, time required to load, ….).

EventLogFile are exposed 24h after their creation and are available only for 24 h: that is to say you can query / download EventLogFile of yesterday for 24h (till the platform releases the new EventLogFile files).

You can require a 30 days validity for EventLogFile objects (this is not a free feature).

A lot of stuff, uh?

[Salesforce / Trailhead] The beginning of your Force.com journey

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On March 20, 2015

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Few days ago the Salesforce team released 4 new Trailhead modules, and I decided finally to have a look at it…with my style.

What is my style?

I may say “all in” or “all or nothing” style.

I decided to do all the modules and see which topics were covered (and how deeply).

With year of Force.com development it’s been quite easy for me to complete in few hours all the modules, but I haven’t earned all the points available (I did some mistakes when answering to questions) and I must admint I also learned something (expecially in modules I don’t play a lot in my job).

After 16 modules I have to say this is a really good starting point to start learning the basics of the Force.com platform, and sometimes the documentation goes deeper than you could expect, covering important aspects that sometimes you find out only after months of “real world” practice.

The Trailhead modules page lists all the modules in alphabetical order, but you can follow the 3 steps on the Trailhead main page to have a better study order.

Recently some cool modules have been added:

  • Process Automation: you learn the basics of process automation and the new Process Builder and Visual Workflows tools, cool ways to get your complex processes up and running in few clicks!
  • Chatter Basics: this useful module teaches the basics of setting up Chatter on your org to improve social collaboration
  • Lightning Components: this is my favorite modulo above all, I love Lightning Components and can’t wait to see them out of the Beta stage. Learn base and advanced aspects of this new powerful framework
  • Visualforce Mobile: learn how to create slick and smooth visualforce pages on the Salesforce1 mobile platform

This is the complete list of available modules:

And (awesomely) these are “can’t wait” upcoming modules:

  • Reports & Dashboards: Build real-time reports and charts to visualize key business metrics
  • Apex Integration Services: Integrate with external apps using Apex REST and SOAP services
  • Asynchronous Apex: Write more efficient Apex code with asynchronous processing
  • Visualforce & JavaScript: Use JavaScript to enhance and customize your Visualforce pages
  • App Deployment: Learn best practices for team app development and lifecycle management

Stay tuned for more modules!

I’m gonna definitely suggest all my Company’s interns to start learning Force.com using Trailhead, a funny and awesome way to learn the Force!

And once for all:

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