Arkus Pro Bono Day - Spring 17
As part of Arkus’s commitment to giving back to our communities, we host at least two Pro Bono Days each year, where we invite local nonprofits to join us in the office for learning and free consultations. This spring we focused on tools that admins can use to better support their Salesforce orgs.
Duplicate Management
We started the day with Peter White sharing some great information on managing duplicates in Salesforce. We learned the importance of understanding our data sources and what impact that can have on the likelihood of having duplicate records in a database.
We learned about resources for learning more about duplicates, including Trailhead, and the Salesforce native Duplicate Management setup. We got a live demo of setting up matching rules and duplicate rules, and we talked about the host of third party apps that can help an admin dedupe their existing data.
Duplicate management is an important part of an administrator’s role. Peter also shared some of his tips here on the blog.
Tips and Tricks for Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries
Following duplicate management, we learned some use cases for the open source tool Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS) from Ashley Leifer. First we learned the difference between Master-Detail relationships and Lookup relationships. Where a Master-Detail relationship allows rollup summary fields natively, lookup relationships don’t. Enter DLRS!
DLRS allows an administrator to declaratively (using clicks, not code) define a trigger that searches for related child records in a lookup relationship and rolls up the information. We learned about some of the coolest features from DLRS, including the ability to roll up text information or formula fields.
Ashley then walked us through the tool with real-world use cases. We saw an example of rolling up Affiliation information to a Contact to see an individual’s previous workplaces. We also saw a custom Expense object rolled up to a Campaign.
Introduction to Workbench
We finished the morning with an introduction to Workbench from James Bujold. Like DLRS, Workbench is a Salesforce tool that helps an administrator do even better by their org and their users. Workbench is a series of tools that allow an administrator to dig into their org - both metadata and data.
He walked us through use cases for Workbench, including using the query builder to find recently deleted records and undelete them or finding the source of a flow error by searching through the metadata for the id. Perhaps the highlight for the group was the Password Management utility, which allows an admin to set or reset a user’s password and assign specific text as a new one (temporarily).
We love sharing knowledge and empowering admins, and our favorite part of these events is sitting down afterward and talking about the real challenges that our participants face every day. Thank you again to those that joined us, and we look forward to seeing more of you at our next one.
Have more use cases for these tools? Just want to say hi? Follow us on Twitter, on the Salesforce Community, Facebook, or chat with me @thesafinhold.
