*Pun overload Alert*
As a Salesforce MVP it is often believed that we know everything about the Salesforce platform – no yoke! While that may be true for some MVPs (and non MVPs for that matter – you smarty pants), I confess, I am not one of them. That doesn’t mean that I get work done by winging it, no. I do have a very good understanding of how Salesforce and features within the platform work. However, the platform is huge and to claim that I know everything about the platform would be, well, silly. Let’s cue in the perks of being a Salesforce Administrator for multiple Orgs.
As a Salesforce Administrator providing Admin support for multiple orgs, big and small, I find myself learning something new about Salesforce almost everyday.
For me, it is the not so obvious small features in the Salesforce platform that have me squawking with delight. Now while you may already know the below, I was chuffed that Salesforce taught me these 3 cracking things this week.
Cloning Records
The Clone Button in Salesforce allows users with the ‘Create’ permission to replicate a record and its fields on standard Objects. Simple stuff, right? Well like most features in Salesforce there are certain considerations to take into account.
Here are a few things I learned about cloning this week:-
1) If you have read-only access to a field, the value of that field isn’t included in the cloned record.
2) You are unable to clone Accounts, I guess as a way to prohibit double yolkers (which in this case is not a good thing). Always good to know, ey?
If you wish to clone Account records then Ste Mo has posted an inpec-(k)-able custom button solution here. Or maybe you would like to clone child records in Salesforce? Well that is also possible here thanks to Salesforce Ben’s egg-xcellent post!
Entitlement Business Hours
As an Administrator part of my role is to implement new features that help streamline business processes. This month that feature has been Service Cloud – Entitlements. In short Entitlements helps support agents determine whether a customer is eligible for support. For more information on Entitlements, cluck here.
If you are familiar with Entitlements, you will know that your company Business Hours in Salesforce determine your entitlement process. If you are not familiar, fear not. You can learn everything you need to know about how business hours work with entitlements, and how you can override your business hours, here. With this in mind, this week I learned that Business hours on entitlement processes aren’t supported in change sets. But wait, don’t let that ruffle your feathers as there are solutions!
To transfer entitlement processes from one org to another you can: –
1) Create the entitlement process from scratch in the new or
2) Use an alternative method to transfer the entitlement process, such as the Force.com Migration Tool or
3) Remove the business hours from the entitlement process before adding it to a change set.
All egg-ceptional solutions if I do say so myself.
Professional Edition
Recently I have been working with a client who uses Salesforce Professional Edition. Now, having not used the Professional egg-dition in the past, I was certainly in the dark when it came to some of its limitations. You can learn more about Salesforce Editions by clucking here.
This week I came across a few obstacles that I was able to overcome (ish). The first issues came with the Standard User Profile. Now you may/not know that the Professional Edition limits your access to permissions on standard profiles and by limits I basically mean that there is no way to customise profiles – bummer. So if a user is not able to perform certain actions then there is literally only ONE solution – a Permission Set. Yup that’s right, this editions only allows you to create one Permission Set to open up access. So chose which permission you want to include wisely 😉
The second issue I came across was with the limitations on mass updating records. Since the Professional Edition does not support Data Loader, nor unmanaged Apex thus ruling out anonymous apex, mass updating required a little more brain power. However, with a hard-boiled attitude (comes naturally with the Admin role) it didn’t take long before a solution came along and I was reunited with thee old faithful AppExchange and one of my favourite apps – Mass Edit, Update and Delete which you can find more information on here.
There is also another NEW solution to your Professional Edition limitations thanks to the all new Lightning Editions. Yup, you read that right. Thanks to the on-going Lightning roll-out, Salesforce has announced Lightning Editions which contain enhanced features to all the Egg-itions, including Professional.
These are just a few golden nuggets of information that Salesforce gave me over the past week. I wonder what it will be today?
See you next week.
Jenny