Utilizing Salesforce Ohana to Become a Successful Salesforce Professional
Working in Salesforce almost every day, all day, I feel my understanding of the platform’s architecture, feature, function, etc… is pretty solid. But, Salesforce is a platform that is always evolving and growing, and more times than not I find myself tackling new features, complex client needs requiring creative solutions, and areas of the Salesforce architecture I touch but on only rare occasions. In addition, I am regularly asked to understand and work with a multitude of 3rd party products to achieve a client’s goals. Over the years as a Salesforce consultant, I have come to know, rely, and turn to the Salesforce Ohana, Salesforce provided tools, and other resources for resolve. Of course a lot of the time my first step is a good old Google search (making sure ‘Salesforce’ is in the search words or use ‘searchtheforce’). Many times that takes me directly to a blog post, Trailhead, or Salesforce’s help library that provides answers pretty quickly. If that doesn’t work, or I know what other resource will provide what I need efficiently, I utilize this list of “go to” places. Of course most Salesforce professionals already know of most, if not all, on this list; I thought it would be nice to compile this ‘resource’ list as a ‘refresher’ for those seasoned and an ‘introduction’ to those new to the Salesforce platform.
Trailhead
Love, love, love Trailhead! Such a great place to learn all about everything Salesforce. They make it fun as well, with earning points, badges, and super badges. I go to Trailhead to learn about new features and functionality, preparation for certification and understanding of new releases, or to refresh my knowledge on features or processes that I’m a little rusty on or have changed enough over time, something I’ve perhaps configured for a client a long time ago and have a new request to do so again. Just remember, Trailhead is your friend!
Success Community & Power of Us Hub
The Salesforce Success Community (and Power of Us Hub for the Nonprofit Salesforce.org world) is really where the Salesforce Ohana comes to life. This is where everyone comes together in the Salesforce community to support each other (customers, partners, ISV partners, and Salesforce employees). There is such a wealth of information and places to get questions solved quickly or to help solve questions for others and give back to the community (Answers). There are so many groups to follow that can really keep you in the loop and up to date on what’s new, what issues others are having, etc… Groups such as 3rd party products, Releases, Salesforce Cloud products, User Groups, and more. As examples, I follow groups such as Release Readiness & Feature Adoption, Arkus (of course), DLRS, Community Cloud, Sales Community, The Blog Group, and WIT to name a few.
Help & Training Library
As I always tell clients, Salesforce has spent a lot of time and resources thoroughly documenting and collecting a vast library of documentation, articles, etc. for everything inside Salesforce. You can access this through your Salesforce instance or through the Success Community or Power Of Us Hub. I still love how I can click on ‘help for this page’ (Classic and in Setup in Lightning) which will take me directly to the Help & Training page relevant for that page in Salesforce. Of course, in Lightning, the “?” Icon for Help & Training is prevalent always at the top right corner.
Salesforce MVPs
They don’t call them Salesforce MVPs for nothing; these are people who have gone way above and beyond to support the Ohana. Many have blogs, podcasts (CloudFocus Weekly), own and manage user groups and community groups. They know a lot and are great people to follow in the community.
Blogs
I find a lot of very creative solutions through blogs I follow or Google. Of course I have to shamelessly plug the Arkus Blog, but in addition there’s Salesforce Ben, Andy in the Cloud, and Salesforce Sidekick to name a few others. Just recently I had a request to come up with a solution for only creating the autonumber under a specific circumstance, I found the solution from a blog post from Salesforce Sidekick.
Salesforce Developer Site, Workbench, & Stack Exchange
If you are a savvy declarative Salesforce professional and build basic code, use SOQL to validate data, write SOQL criteria using tools such as DLRS, etc., then Salesforce’s Developer site is the place to go. Workbench (as mentioned in our previous blog) is a series of tools that allow an administrator to dig into their org - both metadata and data - and do things like find recently deleted records and undelete them or find the source of a flow error by searching through the metadata for the id. One of my colleagues also suggest the Salesforce Stack Exchange. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time myself on this site, I have found solutions here in the past from Google searches and it’s worth mentioning.
These are just my main list; however, there are so many more resources out there depending on what industry you’re in and what your Salesforce needs are, be it simple or very complex. Do you have other great Salesforce resources I didn’t mention you’d like to share, other great Salesforce blog sites? Please feel free to comment below, on our Facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @LeiferAshley or in the Success Community and Power Of Us Hub.
