Everyone loves data, I am sure of it…  The key difference though, is most people in their right mind, simply wouldn’t admit it.  Data is useful, particularly in this day and age, in what is now commonly referred to as the Information Age.

Now, you might be thinking I am crazy – and that is probably true – but data is the life-blood of modern-day organisations.  So what happens when can’t query, transform or extract your data because you hit Salesforce API Limits?

Intro to APIs….

Ok, ok – I hear you.  What the hell is an API limit?  For that matter, what the f*** is an API?  And why should you care?

Starting at the beginning (feel free to skip this section if you already know this!)…

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is at its most basic a way programs or systems talk to each other.  I am way over-simplifying things here.  But an API ultimately allows one piece of software to communicate with another piece of software in an agreed way.

Software, like Salesforce, is built to be a relatively open platform.  And they do this by using a number of APIs to allow other bits of software to communicate and link to it.  These links allow developers to do things like query, extract, create or update records within Salesforce with relative ease.

Salesforce supports SOAP API, REST API, BULK API, Streaming API, Metadata API, etc….  So there is a number of ways to access what you need.

Tools you may use as an Admin everyday, use a variety of these APIs.  For example, DataLoader uses the SOAP/REST/BULK APIs depending on its setup.  Likewise Workbench supports APIs too, as it can connect and manipulate data, query the fields, test API connections within Salesforce.

Even tools like Salesforce for Outlook use APIs to query records and insert attachments.  And as an admin this is why you should care.  These tools, along with many others, use APIs to connect to Salesforce.

But with great power, comes great responsibility…

So with all these connections into and out of Salesforce globally, surely that can slow down the platform?

That is what brings us to the Salesforce API limits.

Salesforce is a multi-tenanted platform, meaning no-one company has an exclusive server/computer/machine setup for them, everyone shares the infrastructure which drives the platform.  So being cloud-based, Salesforce needs to ensure the performance of the platform works for everyone.

To do that, Salesforce impose limits.  Governor Limits, Storage Limits, Per User Limits….  All based on the version you have bought from them.

These limits are designed primarily to cap usage of the platform, ensuring stability of the platform and still give a fair amount of flexibility.  All the while, also providing a potential upsell opportunity for extra Salesforce services (eg Data Storage limit).

Salesforce API Limits

Among these limits though are API Limits.  And even though you normally shouldn’t notice there are limits in place, when you do hit the limits – especially when you hit them unexpectedly – it can be a little jarring…

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: REQUEST_LIMIT_EXCEEDED: TotalRequests Limit exceeded.
   at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)

This is the error which stops all work via APIs… If you rely on APIs to connect to your systems – you really don’t want to see this message!

In this example, a connection using the SOAP API to connect into Salesforce has reported the Request Limit has been exceeded…

Diagnosing API usage…

As an Admin, to diagnose the issue the first port of call is to analyse and find out how you hit the limit.

Every org has quick look view at the API limits.  So go ahead – check for yourself.  Go to Setup | Quick Find | System Overview to see what you have within your org (if you have access to the Setup/Config of your org that is…).

Firstly, all this really confirms is what has happened.  Like a car not starting, you have confirmed there is a problem – but you haven’t diagnosed the issue.

When is 24hrs, not 24hrs?

And secondly, when is the 24hrs?  Is it a rolling 24hr period, is it the start of each day local time or even the start of the day in San Francisco?

Well, the good news is this limit is a rolling 24hr period.  Meaning it shows you the last 24hrs, from the time you are checking the limit.  This is important to know, if you have a lot of batch processes which might be scheduled at specific times of the day.

Is that all the information you need?

Does that really help you though?  Overall it doesn’t really give you much insight as to what has really happened within your org.

So, what about Company Information?  There is an API Request Limit there too…. (Go to Setup | Quick Find | Company Information)

Nope… still not much help!  In this example (yes, two different orgs), we can see the API Limits is 98.9% at the limit for the day.  So you will likely start to see problems with API connections…

API Usage Last 7 Days

On the Help page, Salesforce referenced an ‘API Usage Last 7 Days’ report, but didn’t mention where I could find the actual report!

The help article advises that you need: ‘View Setup and Configuration’ permission on your to see this report.  I definitely have this permission within the org…. But I still couldn’t find the report: 

Then I was reminded about the fact Salesforce comes with some generic but useful standard reports.  And guess what is included in the folder!?  Yep, an API Usage Report 🙂

But you need to go via the Administrative Reports folder in Classic to view it…  Go to Reports | Folders | Administrative Reports:

If that doesn’t work for you, you can also use this URL hack (thanks to Joshua) to jump to the report within your org:

https://na1.salesforce.com/00O?rt=104&retURL=%2F00O&c=UN&c=FULL_NAME&c=EM&c=CID&c=TS&c=CC&duel0=FULL_NAME%2CUN%2CEM&scope=organization&details=yes

Replace the na1 with your instance.  Below is the same url without the na1.salesforce.com
	
	/00O?rt=104&retURL=%2F00O&c=UN&c=FULL_NAME&c=EM&c=CID&c=TS&c=CC&duel0=FULL_NAME%2CUN%2CEM&scope=organization&details=yes

Diagnosis, complete…

Well… Almost….

The report gives you a great breakdown to see what/who is using up your Salesforce API Limits over the last 7 days.  But it doesn’t fix the overall issue.  The fix itself can be as complex as the software/tool that is causing the API Limit to be used up!

But at least you can now diagnose the issue and decide if you can fix the issue, alternatively if it is something you aren’t likely to be able to fix/reduce you can sometimes buy additional API Limits from Salesforce by speaking with your AE…

Maintaining a clean Salesforce org, doesn’t need to be a battle. Recently, I was watching a great webinar by Kelly & Leanne entitled ‘Cut that Clutter‘. And it got me thinking about how the problems faced by a cluttered Salesforce, and how it can easily consume an Admin’s time and effort. And it not only affects us as Admins, but also our end users! So in this post I am going to recap some of the awesome tips shared in this webinar, and also see offer some additional FREE tools to tackle the problem that so many of us face!

The War Against Clutter

Ok, ok. I admit that this header is full of hyperbole.

But a cluttered Salesforce creates a lot of frustration and anxiety for me. And I assume most it does for most of you reading this too! My personal vendetta against clutter drives me to ensure I am always improving the org for my end-users…

I have previously written about how we started to tame the Technical Debt beast haunting our primary orgs and removed over 2 million records from an org (hint: very manually).

But there is still so much to do…

It is a seemingly never-ending fight. But as Admin’s we are always looking for tools and resources to help us in our day to day Admin Superhero duties. And to help us in maintaining a clean Salesforce org…

Cut that Clutter! – The Recap

Now before we get much further. If you have a spare 30mins I strongly recommend that you watch the webinar as I am only going to briefly summarise it here…

Cut that Clutter! Maintain a Clean Org

If you have hundreds of custom fields on an object, 20+ installed packages and more page layouts than you know what to do with, it’s time to clean your org. ...

YouTube

The session covers the Three-S’s. These are the primary areas to focus on, to ensure your CRM is kept in tip-top shape.

• Security – making sure you know who can see what in your CRM
• Structure – does the setup of Salesforce ensure data security and meet any data governance requirements
• Strategy – how to plan and scale while ensuring you don’t have to keep doing ‘big clean-ups’ each year

If you want to hear more, then please check out the video.

Cut that Clutter: Resources mentioned

Next up, the ladies mentioned some great tools to help you in maintaining your Salesforce org.

From Salesforce:

• Salesforce Optimizer (aka Optimiser in non-US/Canada countries 🙂 ) – I am in LOVE with Optimizer reports. It is such an amazing tool to help you analyse and understand where the Technical Debt is likely to be hiding within your org. This should be your first port of call, in maintaining a clean Salesforce. That is how much I love it!
• Security Health Check – helps you understand any vulnerabilities you may have within your Salesforce. This covers areas like Password Policies, Critical Updates, etc.

From AppExchange:

• Field Trip – this tool is one I install in every org I have managed now for a number of years!! It is a great tool to help analyse and understand just which fields are being populated and used by your end users. It is worth noting, that if you have a field that is always updated automatically by a trigger/workflow… Then it will obviously show as being used, even if that trigger/workflow update isn’t actually required. But overall it will help you understand your org in very tangible way.
• The Permissioner – can help you when mass assigning/removing Permission Sets from your users.

From Trailhead:

Additionally the ladies have set up an Admin Trailmix.

This covers a number of modules covering: Salesforce Profiles/Permission Sets, User Authentication, Data Quality, Data Management and finally Reporting & Dashboards.

Extra, extra! Two more tools to add to your Salesforce Cleaning toolkit…

Now for the bonus round.

There are always so many tools and ideas out there helping admins when maintaining a clean Salesforce org. And I am only skimming the surface with these next two tools…

Compare Permission Sets & Profiles

When watching the webinar, albeit not live, I started shouting at my screen.

During the Security section, there was a point around Profiles/Permission Sets. As an admin it is a mammoth task to compare all profiles/permission sets and what they might grant access to within your org. This can be kryptonite to Salesforce Superadmins…

There was a recommendation to switch off Enhanced Profile View, and then compare the permissions… But why do that? Especially, when there is a secret weapon at your disposal?

Perm Comparator by John Brock is that secret weapon!

Seriously… More people need to know about this tool! And I am not even on commission! 🙂

Stop duplicates in their tracks…

Salesforce hasn’t always been an admin’s best friend when it came to cleaning an org…And without getting all ‘back in my day’-ish…

But there was a time Optimizer, Security Health Check and those tools simply didn’t exist.

There was also a time Salesforce didn’t have an easy way to prevent duplicates… Admins had to either buy other tools to identify and manage duplicates, or create complex formulas and validation rules to try and prevent exact match duplicates.

But when planning your strategy for maintaining a clean Salesforce, you should investigate the in-built duplicate management tools from Salesforce.

After all, what good is cleaning up your security (profiles, access policies, passwords) and clearing out fields you don’t use any more – if your end users are still swimming in duplicate records?!

The in-built feature will take care of the basics, but depending on your use case, there may still be a reason to buy a tool like Cloudingo or DemandTools (just to name a few).

What is in your toolkit?

As I mentioned I only skimmed the surface here… And this is a topic I can (and will likely) write more about in the future. I have rambled more than enough for now…

So to wrap up the post, feel free to add any other suggestions or recommendations for your ‘Cleaning Salesforce Toolkit’ into the comments section below.

Simple put, GDPR is inescapable for those dealing with individuals within the EU.  In the last post we took a look at what GDPR is and how to start preparing for it.  Additionally, within the next month we also have Spring ’18 release going live.  So the good news is there is a number of GDPR features included to assist Admins prepare…

Recap: What is GDPR?

General Data Protection Regulation, otherwise known as GDPR, is the new privacy regulation coming into force in 2018.  It will replace the EU’s previous Data Protection Directive, and align privacy laws and regulations across all EU member states.

Part of the GDPR is the retention and removal processes re: personal data after a period of time.  Companies should only retain personal data for as long as needed.  So for example, if you have contact details of a person which is linked to contract data you may need to retain it for 7 years.  Versus simply having a contact on a mailing list, retaining the data for this long may not be justifiable.

For more details, take a look at my last post for the what/when/how of GDPR.

GDPR: Be Prepared

GDPR is ultimately an update to a number of data/privacy regulations across the EU.  But the easiest place to start for most companies is to map out and understand the following: 

• where your data comes from. (eg web-to-lead, email-to-case, data.com, users entering in the data),
• how it gets used/stored. (eg are there integrations which also use the data, is it stored outside of Salesforce, are records stored in standard and custom objects within Salesforce),
• what business processes which clean up or remove data. (ie how long does your company need hold onto personal data for (and for what purpose)? Is there already a process to remove personal data?)

Once you understand there where, how and what of your data, you will then understand where the following features and changes may help and support you.

Spring ’18 & GDPR Features

Data Privacy Records (aka Individuals)

Spring ’18 release brings with it a new setting under Company Profile within Setup.  The setting to enable Data Protection and Privacy, will expose the new object ‘Individuals’ within your org.

This new object connects to either a contact or lead record within Salesforce to store data privacy settings for that person. So for example you can store the customer’s preference re: soliciting products and services.

A key note here is that in the preview instances of Spring ’18, Individuals it isn’t treated like other objects and doesn’t have a standard tab available to access the object.

But a gentle word to note before we go through how to set this up.  As with any changes to a production system, it will require planning before setting this up to ensure it works for your processes.  A number of these changes below may also require assistance from a developer or changes to your marketing platform via API.  This is not entirely a point and click setup…

1. Activate the feature within Setup

Lightning: Setup -> Company Settings -> Data Protection and Privacy
Classic: Setup -> Company Profile -> Data Protection and Privacy

This will expose the new Individual object, with the standard fields within your org.  Most of these fields are created for the purpose of tracking opt-out requests and personal preferences.

Some examples include:

If a contact opts-out of geo-location tracking, you can store that preference here.

You can even store the D.O.B of the person and indicate if they are considered a minor or not.  (You might need to do this as minors carry different standards for elements like data retention under GDPR.)

And good news is you can also add custom fields to this object if you wish to.

2. Update Page Layouts

Add field to relevant page layouts on contact & lead objects.  Salesforce also suggests to rename the field label from ‘Individual’ to something more meaningful to your users.

3. Existing Contacts/Lead Records

There is a code-based solution to create data privacy records for existing contacts & leads within your Salesforce, which also includes code for handling person accounts.

I won’t go through the code here.  But if you are interested, you can take a sample of the code here.  Remember you will need to execute this somehow (ie start the code running), so you may need help from a developer friend(s).

4. New / Changes to Preferences

Finally, you will also need to plan how new records get managed within Salesforce.

Will an Individual record be created when a contact or lead is created?  What about field updates / etc?  Do you do this via a trigger in Salesforce or via API from your email platform?

And what do you get at the end of this?  A new record of course … 🙂

Data Quality & Duplicate Jobs

GDPR features in Spring also come in the form of expanded functionality.  Spring ’18 release provides an update for its out-of-the-box duplicate management to allow Admins to run a duplicate job.

Previously matching rules would run when a record was being added or updated by a user.  This would then either alert the user or block the user, depending on how the Admin had set it up.

But in Spring ’18 release, us Admins can now run a “Duplicate Job“.  This allows you to use (or create) a matching rule and then run a search within Salesforce to find duplicates.  Once a Duplicate Job completes, you will be able to take action by comparing and merging records, right from the summary page.

Changes to Web to Case and Web to Lead

Spring ’18 release also brings another GDPR feature.  This time there is a slight update to how failed Web-to-Case and Web-to-Lead emails are handled.

When a Web-to-Case and Web-to-Lead fails an email is generated automatically to advise.  This email will no longer include any personal data inserted by a third-party application.

Data.com for UK/Ireland Contacts

This only impacts users who are using Data.com Prospector or Clean.

Data relating to contacts stored within Data.com Connect (only UK & Ireland) will now be removed from the Connect database.

Also the Clean Status field on a Contact/Lead records will be changed to ‘Not Found’.

Wrap Up

As you can see there is a lot to cover, and Salesforce is enabling businesses to become GDPR compliant with all the GDPR features in Spring ’18.  There is still more to read in the Release Notes for Spring ’18 if you are using other tools like Pardot, Inbox or a developer (specifically around Event Logs).

There is support at hand, and if you haven’t already I would strongly recommend completing the Trailhead modules setup for GDPR Basics (and there is also a trail for US Privacy Basics too).

Additionally Salesforce has a new section in the Help for Data Protection & Privacy.

And finally there is a basic scenario guide, which looks at a number of common requests and suggested actions/things to consider to be compliant under the various privacy laws (including GPDR).

There has been a lot of attention surrounding GDPR.  But what is it?  Why does it matter?  How will GDPR affect your Salesforce?  What responsibilities do you have as a Salesforce Administrator?  And what can you do to prepare?  So many questions!  In this article we take a quick look at these questions and some additional resources available to you, when preparing for this change.

What is GDPR?

First up, let’s take a look into what exactly GDPR is.

General Data Protection Regulation, otherwise known as GDPR, is the new privacy regulation coming into force in 2018.  It will replace the EU’s previous Data Protection Directive, and align privacy laws and regulations across all EU member states.

It is primarily aimed at giving individuals more control over how their data can be collected, used, and stored.  While also extending the rights of individuals to have their data removed/deleted.

One key point to note.  Even though this is obviously applicable for all EU countries, it may also apply to any business which deals with personal data of an individual within these countries.  So if you are in USA, India or even Fiji – but dealing with personal data from an individual living within the EU – GDPR will still apply.

When will GDPR take affect?

The legislation will take affect from the 25th May 2018.

What is ‘personal data’?

Another thing to consider is how GDPR will redefine what is considered to be ‘personal data’.  Overall the definition has been clarified and it will include ways modern technology allow an individual to be identified.

Personal data, relates to any information which can identify an individual.  This could be either directly (for example a person’s name) or indirectly (a unique online identifier/ID or geolocation data).  The purpose of GDPR here is to clarify and provide stronger governance towards what is personal data.  Especially when compared to the preceding legislation.

What can you do to prepare?

At this stage it is worth pointing out this is something that potentially needs company-wide buy-in and support especially from your organisation’s leadership team.

Educate

The first step is to be aware of the changes, we have taken some of the first steps here.

Salesforce is trying to support its users through the pending change. The responsibility though relies on end-users to ensure compliance.  And to that end they have published a Trailhead module to support their users.

The Spring ’18 release also includes a number of changes to support users with GDPR.

Kick-off

If your company hasn’t started the process to confirm compliance, then it is worth having a discussion with your manager or with your companies designated Data Protection Officer.

GPDR is an enhancement from previous legislation so the changes required might be small, but it is important to understand how those changes could impact to your business.

For example, say your business relies on email marketing.  Your contact lists may not contain details on how the individual’s consent has been attained.  With GDPR, it may be worth investigating your requirements for that data and plan how to reconfirm or get consent.

Which leads us nicely onto the next step…

Map your data processes

A key to being able to understand any risks relating to GDPR and your Salesforce is to map out how data enters your Salesforce org.

Is it a web-to-lead form?  Or perhaps a landing page describing your products that tracks user behaviour via Marketing Cloud?  Or do your sales team import contacts via Data.com?

What happens to it once it is in Salesforce?  Is it stored as leads, contacts, person accounts?  Do you have custom fields on objects containing personal data?

This is a chance to get all these flows down on paper.  And remember to include if there are any prompts for user opt-in and what the purpose of the data is.

Are there any other resources to help me?

So as we wrap up here, it is worth mentioning that we have only just started to scratch the GDPR surface.

The changes come into affect in May, so there is still time to prepare.  And if you were compliant with previous legislation like the Data Protection Act here in the UK, then GDPR may be an extension of your existing processes.  But don’t take this as legal advice!

There are a number of great resources available to help companies with this transition.

For Salesforce users:

• as previously mentioned, I would start with Trailhead.
• Salesforce has now also published a Data Protection & Privacy guide in the Help section, and
• check the Spring ’18 release notes, as there are a number of features changing (or added to the platform) due to GDPR

Additionally, I found a number of site relating to GDPR when preparing this post:

• Data Protection People has a post called, ‘The perfect CRM system for GDPR compliance’
• Next port of call, the ICO has published a 12 step e-book relating to GDPR.
• SalesforceBen also has an e-book detailing GDPR.
• And finally (and if you are really interested) here is an 88 page document from the EU relating to GDPR

Data is such a big focus for anyone working with a CRM, Salesforce is no exception.  Previously we looked at migrating data into Salesforce.  But what happens when you need to remove data?  Cleaning a Salesforce org can present a few challenges.

Say you need to clean your Salesforce org and delete/archive, because…  you might have gone over your Salesforce data allowance?

This is what happened to us recently.  One of the orgs my team manages went over its allocated Data Space, and we started getting emails / calls from Salesforce to remind us that we have used up our allowance.

We had a choice, buy more storage (at Salesforce’s very inflated data prices).  I mean c’mon it is 2017, 1TB with Dropbox/Google/Onedrive/etc is only around $100/year…

As you can probably guess, this wasn’t our “go to” option, so we had to find out what we had in Salesforce vs what we needed, and then make a decision…

Legacy org & technical debt

The org in question was what I deem a “legacy org”, and has had presented a few challenges over the years.  It has been an active Salesforce org since 2003. And without constant love and attention has built up so much technical debt because it was never actively managed/improved/developed…

Even relatively simple things like enabling and rolling out Chatter were never done – even years after Chatter launched.

As the company has grown, obviously so has the data stored within the org.

Add into the mix that new apps installed in the org which have driven a sudden increase in the volumes of records being created (eg telephony integration and training people to log calls).  And hey-presto data storage & how we are using it is suddenly a priority.

Where is the data?

For an org which has grown from around 50-100 people in 2003, and a very simple business processes.  The question was how could we be using up out data storage suddenly?

Why now?  How do we get to the bottom of what is happening?

Admittedly it wasn’t something we had kept an eye on.  So the first port of call was the setup menu.

As you might know Salesforce offer a section in the Setup menu called ‘Storage Usage’, which is quite basic but gives you a snapshot of where your data and file storage is used.  To use it, go to Setup -> in Quick Find, and search for ‘Storage Usage’.

Boom, there it was.

The org with over 23,000,000 records…

The org had ballooned to over 23,000,000 records.  Shocking as our number of accounts are a fraction of that overall volume.

What was even more shocking for us was that it was two objects consuming almost 70% of the total storage!

The two objects in question: Tasks & Email Messages…

<sarcasm> Oh joy! </sarcasm>

Not all objects are equal

Why was I so *not* excited that it was Tasks & Email Messages using up our storage?

Salesforce Tasks & Archiving

Activities in Salesforce have a unique feature which means they get archived by Salesforce after a set number of days.  This is typically around 365 days of being closed (but there are a few caveats to that), and can also be extended if you request it from Salesforce.

This is an issue, as once archived you can no longer use the standard Salesforce reporting to analyse.

And due to the sheer volume of records (over 12,500,000), it was even crashing Dataloader/Workbench/Developer Console when trying to export the data.

When I did manage to get the export, by trying to filter by created year, the file was still too big to view in Excel.  Also we were limited to just Excel, which meant we hit a brick wall.

Email to Case & Email Messages

This org heavily relies on Email-to-Case.  And when received, the email is stored in the EmailMessage object.

Additionally all auto-response emails are also saved against the case, in addition to any replies from the customer.

Great for keeping track of all communication.  But once again creates some difficulties when trying to report and analyse.

Also as an email gets saved against a case, it also creates a task.  So we end up with a sort of duplication, with a task and an email message created and linked to the same case.

Getting the data out of Salesforce

In the end we contacted Salesforce Support, as we couldn’t use normal methods to export and clean the data.

The only suggestion that Salesforce could provide was to schedule a data export of the objects we wanted to export and analyse.  Simple enough…

Anyone who has used this feature will know the output of this is zip files, which contain CSV files inside.  Great it was going to be small enough to work with!

Nope… Each CSV was still over 1,000,000 rows.

Excel still was too unusable to analyse the data.  At this point I really was wishing for something like Access/MySQL to load the files into.

Enter CSVSplitter, a really simple tool that allowed us to split the CSV files down into smaller more manageable chunks.

Once they were broken into the smaller files, then we were able to start analysing the tasks.

Analysing the data

The road to cleaning a Salesforce org is paved with lots of data to analyse!

You need to understand what you have, before you can understand what you need.

So we started analysing the data.  And we dissected the data in many different ways to understand what was driving the volume we were seeing.

We looked at tasks created by month and year.  Were there specific users who created more than others?  Were there common subject lines – which might point to auto-generated tasks.

Our Salesforce, had never ever been cleaned.  And we have used tasks in the past to drive system automation within the business.  So where relevant, these records could go!

Archiving the data

So we had analysed the data, now to archive it somewhere in case we actually needed to reverse the process. (FYI – while researching this post, I found this useful guide to creating a Archiving Policy for your company).

Though storing the records outside of Salesforce and then trying to restore in the case of a profile would be painful if we had to.  But at least we had a fall back plan, and if needed the business could still use in reports.

In addition a lot of care was taken in being conservative with what we are removing and working with various stakeholders to ensure the different departments were on board with our plan.

Now we could start the actual cleanup!

Cleaning a Salesforce Org: 2,600,000 records deleted (so far)…

I have to admit, this part ended up actually feeling strangely cathartic.

Being able to delete over 2.6 million records from an org was also a first for me 🙂

We essentially identified the records to be deleted, creating a CSV file of the IDs of the records we wanted to delete, and then use Dataloader to remove the record.

Once we started with the tasks, we were able to then also move on to other records and start an overall clean out of Salesforce.  Opportunities, Accounts, Cases… All are now in scope and we have created a data clean-up roadmap and are making great headway.

We have a long way to go still, but at least we can start to let go of the legacy data past.

And most importantly, make Salesforce a focused CRM for the sales and customer service teams, so it is easier for them to use.

Got your own ‘lesson learned’?  Share your tips…

I have worked in org’s where hitting the data storage limit was expected and almost required.  As we deployed tools like FinancialForce which create a lot of records (and they need to).  So we simply bought more data.  But it really depends on your scenario, as every orgs needs are a little different.

Have you been in a similar situation?  How did you decide what to archive?  Did you use any specific tools to help you?

As part of this issue, we were able to make a business case for getting tools like DemandTools (paid app).

And I am currently investigating Passage Tech’s ‘Storage Helper‘ and ‘Rollup Helper‘ (both have a limited free version) to see if they can help profile accounts to then identify what records can still be removed and archived from Salesforce.  But I will save the details for another post later 😉

One struggle every Salesforce admin faces, is how to get users inputting the right data. Free form text fields with no format or structure to them. And then trying to report on these fields becomes a nightmare! So how do you then make sure your users are entering in the correct values? That is where the wondrous (yet often overlooked) field type called a ‘picklist’ comes in…

And picklists within Salesforce can help you structure data while guiding your users to complete fields as needed. While recent releases have also added to their versatility. In turn, this can help you as an Awesome Admin setup your Salesforce data more effectively.

So let’s go back to basics and dive in to Salesforce Picklists!

You keep saying picklist!!!!!

Let’s take a quick step back to make sure everyone has the same understanding of what a picklist is.
A picklist is ultimately a way to present several values to the user, and restrict what then select as a value in the field.
As an example, a status field when selected could show ‘To do’, ‘In Progress’ or ‘Done’ in the picklist.

Two types to rule them all.

Now we start getting into the fun stuff. And yes, I know I am a bit of a geek! In Salesforce there are two basic types of picklists available for an Admin to create, the regular ‘Picklist’ and ‘Multi Select Picklist’.

The primary difference is illustrated below, where a ‘Picklist’ only allows one value to be entered at a time, while Multi-Select picklists allow a user to select more than one value.

Flexibility with global control

Picklists and world domination… Not coming to a cinema near you!

Seriously though, as you can hopefully see picklists give you a fair amount of flexibility. But what if you want the same picklist options available across different objects in Salesforce?

As of Winter ’17 release, you can now define a common or global set of values for any picklist in your org to use. To do this for a new picklist you can go to:

In Classic: Setup -> Create -> Picklist Value Sets
Or in Lightning: Setup (via the little gear icon) -> Object and Fields -> Picklist Value Sets

And as added extra, the Summer ’17 release allows you to promote any existing picklist values and turn it into a global value set. Simply go to the picklist you want to promote, and you will see a button on the top of the page.

Picklist ‘gotchas’

Picklists are very handy in ensuring your users add the right value into the field. But because of the way they are structured there are a few things to remember when setting up and using picklists.

1) Record types:

Have you ever wondered why one user will see an option in the drop down, but someone else can’t see that option? The combination of record type and the profile of the user defines what she/he will see on-screen! (Don’t worry though, this one gets even the most seasoned of admins.)

2) Dependant picklists:

Alternatively, it could be a dependant picklist. This is where the value of one field, controls what options are available in the second field. An example of this could be on an Opportunity – where you have two picklists – the ‘Stage’ field and ‘Lost Reasons’.

You might want to display a list of ‘Lost Reasons’ if the user selects the ‘Stage’ of ‘Closed Lost’. Thereby allowing you to once again guide the user in what the valid options are.

3) Using Dataloader and picklists

Picklists are ultimately just text when Salesforce looks at it at the database level, so be mindful that when loading in values via Dataloader.

Any new values in the file being loaded into Salesforce may appear unless you tick the ‘restrict picklist values’ option on the field (or setup a validation rule).

4) Picklists in formulas

Picklist values are technically stored as a text value in Saleforce, however when using them in any advanced formula within Salesforce, like a validation rule, remember to use the function ‘ISPICKVAL()’.

For example, say we have a picklist field with the name ‘Industry’ and you wanted to see if a picklist value was set to ‘Financial Services’, you would use the formula like so: ISPICKVAL(Industry, “Financial Services’)

So there we have it. In a few short minutes, we have covered the basics of picklists! Exciting right 🙂 Now go forth and structure your data! Any business that values data quality will thank you for it!