Louise Lockie's Letters from London

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 ...

I recently presented at the inaugural Virtual Dreamin' , and my session was entitled Give Your Users a Helping Hand with In-App Guidance . My session talks about the Prompts In-App Guidance functionality and not the Walkthrough feature as this is a paid add-on and requires a MyTrailhead subscription. I prefer to highlight the items to which we all have access, rather than the chargeable extras. In this presentation I talk through seven different use cases as well as demonstrate exactly how easy they are for every admin to create, deploy, and monitor. In-App Guidance is a gift to your user and to yourself. Provide step by step prompts, leave recommendations and tips, as well as documentation, all for your users right from within the Salesforce UI. Give them the answers before they realise they need them, and cut down on those support tickets. In this session we’ll go through some of the best use cases for In-App Guidance, leaving you empowered and inspired to build them out in your...

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...

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and they are right, we can't go back and do over, but we can share what we have learnt and allow others to benefit from our experiences. This was my approach to the session I presented at the Admin Theatre at this year's London World Tour. My talk was entitled  Best Practices and Recommendations for New Salesforce Admins . The role of Salesforce Admin brings with it a lot of responsibility, but thankfully also all the tools and support to enable each of us to be successful. When we start our Salesforce journey, however, we don't come with all this knowledge fully formed so here are my recommendations and tools to help everyone make the most of the available features. For ease I am splitting my tips up into Best Practices, Recommendations, and Tools, and then into Setup, Reporting, and Productivity. Part one  here  covers Setup Best Practices. Part two  here  covers Reporting Recommendations. Part three here cov...

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and they are right, we can't go back and do over, but we can share what we have learnt and allow others to benefit from our experiences. This was my approach to the session I presented at the Admin Theatre at this year's London World Tour. My talk was entitled Best Practices and Recommendations for New Salesforce Admins . The role of Salesforce Admin brings with it a lot of responsibility, but thankfully also all the tools and support to enable each of us to be successful. When we start our Salesforce journey, however, we don't come with all this knowledge fully formed so here are my recommendations and tools to help everyone make the most of the available features. For ease I am splitting my tips up into Best Practices, Recommendations, and Tools, and then into Setup, Reporting, and Productivity. Part one  here  covers Setup Best Practices. Part two  here  covers Reporting Recommendations. Part four here covers To...

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and they are right, we can't go back and do over, but we can share what we have learnt and allow others to benefit from our experiences. This was my approach to the session I presented at the Admin Theatre at this year's London World Tour. My talk was entitled Best Practices and Recommendations for New Salesforce Admins. The role of Salesforce Admin brings with it a lot of responsibility, but thankfully also all the tools and support to enable each of us to be successful. When we start our Salesforce journey, however, we don't come with all this knowledge fully formed so here are my recommendations and tools to help everyone make the most of the available (#Safe Harbor) features. For ease I am splitting my tips up into Best Practices, Recommendations, and Tools, and then into Setup, Reporting, and Productivity. Part one here covers Setup Best Practices.    This post (part two) covers Reporting Recommendations. The Sal...

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing and they are right, we can't go back and do over, but we can share what we have learnt and allow others to benefit from our experiences. This was my approach to the session I presented at the Admin Theatre at this year's London World Tour. My talk was entitled Best Practices and Recommendations for New Salesforce Admins. The role of Salesforce Admin brings with it a lot of responsibility, but thankfully also all the tools and support to enable each of us to be successful. When we start our Salesforce journey, however, we don't come with all this knowledge fully formed so here are my recommendations and tools to help everyone make the most of the available (#Safe Harbor) features. For ease I am splitting my tips up into Best Practices, Recommendations, and Tools, and then into Setup, Reporting, and Productivity. This post (part one) covers Setup Best Practices. Number one in my list of setup best practices rela...