About Me


I am a Londoner with a Salesforce addiction.

I started working with Salesforce in late 2012 when my then employer became a customer, but it feels like it has been part of my life for so much longer. 

 In 2019 I left my role as Salesforce Solution Architect and Head of CRM at Wilmington plc where I juggled overseeing the support of 450 Sales Cloud users and 700 Chatter users with further developing the org and on-boarding new divisions. 

Now, as a Salesforce Certified Instructor I train those new to the platform as well as working as a freelance consultant.

Starting off as a Solo Admin I threw myself into the online and London community to 'find my tribe' for some much needed support and advice, and of course I found it by the bucket load.
I am very happy to give back to the community by leading the London Women in Tech Community Group, being one of the organisers of London's Calling, as well as writing a blog here at louiselockie.blogspot.com and by talking at community groups and events such as London's Calling (x5), Salesforce London World Tour (x7), French Touch Dreamin' (x2), Southeast Dreamin', WiTness Success, Midwest Dreamin', Yeur Dreamin', InspireEast (x2), Surf Force, Virtual Dreamin', SEA Dreamin' and now nine times at Dreamforce. See here for a full list of my speaking appearances.

In February 2017 I was named one of the Winter '17 class of Salesforce MVPs. It is an honour and a responsibility that I am proud to carry, and I was thrilled to be renewed for a 5th term in 2021.

As well as being a Certified Instructor, I currently hold 16 Salesforce certifications including Application Architect, and in May 2016 I was the London recipient of the #AwesomeAdmin Award which brings with it the prestigious Golden Trailblazer Hoodie.


Happily, in 2020 I was selected to be an Application Development Lightning Champion.
This was later renamed to Salesforce Champion - Platform, before the programme was retired in 2021.



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It's fun (and essential) to play in the sandbox

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I sat for, and passed, the Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer certification earlier this month and it really was a reminder of the importance of sandboxes for all Salesforce admins and developers. This exam, being part of the architect track, is pitched at a more technical level than that of your average admin, but proper use of sandboxes does not require this kind of experience and is definitely not just for developers. Last year I wrote a series of posts entitled Best Practices and Recommendations for New Admins and one of the Tools from post four was Sandboxes . Here is a deeper dive into the world of Salesforce Sandboxes. I was shocked recently to hear a tale of an end customer having no sandboxes in use at all. There really is no excuse, sandboxes are available to all customers. How many, and what type, depends on your edition. Here is a handy grid to tell you how many you have access to out of the box. You can, of course, buy more. Why make it complicated
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Customising the Help Menu!

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Who knew?  I have to confess that I was late to this party and did not know this was an option until this month (May 2020). So if I have been tragically unaware of this feature, then maybe you were too. Consider this post an attempt to rectify that. Why Customise Your Help Menu? Why should we care? Why is this worth reading about I hear you ask, and I will answer. In my experience the number of users each Salesforce Admin or Helpdesk Exec has to support does not leave them with the capacity to quickly respond to every user's questions. There is often a backlog, and cloning machines do not yet exist. We also know that users getting stuck and feeling frustrated can kill adoption, which is the enemy of a successful Salesforce implementation. Now I know that every good Salesforce Admin has spent a lot of time and care creating detailed user guides for their colleagues, but how many of these users remember where the guide is saved at their time of need? Not many..... which is why it is
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Trailhead: The Salesforce CPD Scheme

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Many of the industries my company works with have mandatory CPD schemes for their qualified practitioners. In order to retain their status as a licensed Accountant or Solicitor individuals must show that they are continuously developing their professional skills. One reason for this is to prevent said professionals from getting rusty, to keep that grey matter active, but another is to encourage members to stay abreast of new developments in their field. Those of us who are certified Salesforce professionals have similar obligations. Three times a year we need to pass the maintenance exams of each track in which we are certified in order to retain our certification. But as Salesforce has never been the kind of company to leave its community to fend for themselves, Trailhead was created to aid and encourage our continuous development. Trailhead isn't just there to help us pass our exams though, far from it, Trailhead is for the whole ecosystem. Trailhead is used by empl
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