In this short blog we are going to talk about a few of the new features in this release cycle we are really excited to get our hands on over the coming weeks. In-App guidance enhancements Admins now have the option to specify whether an in-app guidance prompt shows for all record types or a particular record type. Targeted prompts There has also been further enhancements whereby you can specify an element on a page to show a prompt to the user specifying guidance they need to see at that time. We are going to enjoy playing around with this feature, as it will allow us to personalise prompts for our users. Einstein search for all In this current release Einstein search is now turned on as default and at no additional cost. Allowing everyone to take advantage of this artificial intelligence driven feature. Take control of which objects users see in search Admins can know choose which objects Einstein search should include in search results, depending on their profile. Fields inline editing in Salesforce reports You can now update more fields in reports, please remember to use this feature you will need to enable the functionality. It will allow you to edit date, picklist, and lookup fields. A powerful feature that gives Admins the ability to correct data directly in the report itself. We can’t wait to give it a go, it's going to save us a lot of time with some of our data cleaning! Manage your Salesforce account Your account app let you manage your invoices and products, a useful tool to stay on top of everything Salesforce billing related. These a just a few of many amazing new features coming our way as part of the Winter ’22 release. We hope you have some fun giving them a go. If you would like any further information on any of these, get in touch at realsystems.info@mungos.org.
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Morning meeting
Our morning team meeting usually consists of checking in with other colleagues, discussing areas of work for the different charities we support. I then go ahead and assess our helpdesk and respond back to any new queries that have come through. We work with a range of different charities and not for profit organisations and provide vital daily support. Our helpdesk is a highly popular package, whereby organisations can save money by having a virtual service where we manage the system and support users with everything related to Salesforce. How cool is that! Dashboards and reports One of the partners of a multi-agency database we built has been in touch to find out if we are able to support them with building reports and to enable a visual representation of the data that is currently being stored in Salesforce. At the end of the Google Meet I suggested that we put together some dashboards for them as this seems to be a really good solution for their team. We talk through their specific requirements and start working on building those reports and book in a demonstration for them of how a dashboard would look. Training After lunch I check my calendar and start preparing for a scheduled training session to undertake for some new users for a local authority that uses Salesforce to combat homelessness. I have already set up a training environment whereby the new users can actually practice whilst I deliver the session. This is really useful as they get practical hands on experience and get to try out the system straightaway. The training guides have already been uploaded onto Salesforce, which they can always revisit. Data exports Onto the next task of the day after a cup of coffee, which is to securely prepare data exports for all of the charities we support. This part of our overall support package on offer and it means that we have an extract of data in the eventuality of any information or data needing to be recovered by the organisation. Data uploading I have had an email request from an outreach team to bulk upload data pertaining to new registrations onto the system to save time. I start reviewing the spreadsheet sent to us and start mapping out what will go where and send them a confirmation email to let them know it’s all done. Job done and saves them an awful lot of time not to worry about manually inputting individual records. Ongoing system changes I have had a phone call from one of the leading HIV charities to make some changes to their existing system and to create some new users for them. A systems is constantly evolving and being updated to meet the needs of the users. We work closely with all of our organisations to see how we can make things easier and streamlined as part of our support package. I go through their requirements in more details deploy the changes from our sandbox to the production org and woohoo all systems go! End of day meeting Finally our afternoon team catch up at 4.30 pm, which involves reviewing how the day has gone, and somehow moves onto talking about Elon Musk and Space. Just before we wrap for the day! If you are interested in finding out about our various different packages available to charities and not for profit organisations, please feel free to get in touch. Which Salesforce events should I attend?
There are a huge number of Salesforce events out there, from small user groups and sector-specific events to juggernaut conferences like Dreamforce. With the world moving online, the last year has seen even more opportunities to take part without the need to travel to a different city (or even country) to attend. With events lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days, it can be hard to discern which ones to attend and whether it will be worth your time. So we’ve put together this list of 5 events coming up in the next few months with an honest run down of what to expect. Preparing for your Administrator certification webinar Date: 16th March 2021 Time: 11:00-16:00 Cost: Free Good for: An in-depth look at how to pass your admin certification If you or a colleague have started to develop your Salesforce skills and would like to take it to the next step by becoming a certified Salesforce professional, the free Certification Day webinars run by Salesforce are a great resource. They’ll run you through how the exam is structured, the different areas you’ll need to have confidence in, and give you a high-level look at some of the fundamentals in each area. You won’t walk away ready to take the exam, but you’ll have a solid idea of how and what you need to study. Plus, every attendee gets a $40 discount voucher for a certification exam (the exam normally costs $200). Find out more (you’ll need to register with Trailblazer) London’s Calling Date: 19th March 2021 Time: tbc Cost: £7.36 Good for: Tips and tricks for administrators and developers London’s Calling is a not-for-profit community-organised event. It’s not specifically for charities, but focusses on practical advice for Salesforce users across all sectors. From having a look at the session names, I’d say this one would be most useful for Salesforce admins and developers with a few years’ experience. Sessions will include ‘Formulas and life hacks for the everyday admin’ and ‘Must know NPSP config. and automations’. Find out more Non-profit user group Date: 25th March 2021 Time: 14:00-15:30 Cost: Free Good for: Networking and problem-solving with other UK non-profit users The London non-profit user group are holding their first meeting of the year on 25th March, focusing on Event Management. Because it’s specifically a non-profit group, the focus is always on affordable and easy-to-implement solutions, and there’s usually time for general questions amongst the group as well. Find out more (you’ll need to register with Trailblazer) Salesforce.org non-profit summit Date: 21st April 2021 Time: 13:00-16:30 Cost: Free Good for: An overview of Salesforce products available for non-profits and a roadmap of future features From previous experience, the Salesforce run events tend to be more focused on showcasing particular products at a high-level, often geared towards potential customers or existing ones looking to expand the features they’re paying for on the platform. So it might be most useful for you if you’re not particularly familiar with Salesforce and want to hear about how non-profits utilize it in their work. I expect the summit will showcase the Non Profit Success Pack (for fundraising), Case Management (for case work with service users) and Program Management (for running program delivery). The breakout sessions are likely to be a good opportunity to discuss solutions with other people from the sector – I’ve got some absolute gems from breakout sessions in the past! Find out more Salesforce.org Education Summit Date: 16th June 2021 Cost: Free Time: tbc Good for: An overview of Salesforce products available for educational organisations and a roadmap of future features As above, but with a specific slant towards educational institutions, I’d expect to hear about the Education Data Architecture (EDA) and tracking a student journey on Salesforce. Find out more Whilst 2020 wasn’t the year that many of us hoped it would be, we’ve taken a look back at four of the great things that we have still be able to do this year whilst adapting to our ‘new normal’ working environments!
Staying connected with each other and our customers We can’t look back on 2020 without mentioning the drastic change in communication that our team, and every other team out there has gone through. As a team who were used to working closely together in an office, once we began to work from home we quickly had to make sure we adapted to make sure we could keep in contact. We made use of tools like, Quip, Google Meet and Google Chat to make sure that we stayed supported as a team and were still working together effectively. Before March 2020 arrived we were a team who loved getting out to visit our partners, so we had to make sure that we swapped our visits to regular catch ups by video call instead. A lot of our customers work with vulnerable people and so we worked quickly to find out what they needed to capture on their databases in relation to their clients and COVID-19. New project to help capture information about rough sleepers in COVID-19 emergency hotels After the pandemic hit, Real Systems were involved in building a new system to help with the allocation of rough sleepers to hotel rooms across London. Due to the emergency nature of the project this was a fast paced piece of work with very short deadlines for the team to meet, but was successful in providing a quick solution for the needs of those involved. Two Lightning Community roll-outs completed Back in February, Real Systems worked hard with one of our partners to roll-out Lightning Communities to their users. We used this opportunity to gain as much feedback as possible from the users to make improvements to their experience at the same time. We also rolled out a programme of re-training as part of this, running a number of onsite training sessions. With our next planned Lightning Community roll-out due for July, we had to change the way that we remotely worked with users to gain feedback, get their involvement in testing and deliver training after the roll-out. Support and training was provided by video session rather than in person, for our second roll-out of the year. New packages offered from Real Systems 2020 has also been the year that we have changed what services we can provide to customers, with more options available even to organisations who don’t have a Salesforce system that was implemented by Real Systems – - Helpdesk support service for users - No obligation health checks - One off developments - User training sessions and materials If your organisation needs a way to capture important work carried out with the people that you support, or you have a Salesforce database that isn’t working as you hoped it would for you, then contact us to see what we can do to help you. We’re looking forward to continuing to support all of our customers in 2021! The holiday season has arrived, even if it looks a little bit different this year! Hopefully both you and your Salesforce users have some well-deserved time off planned, and I want to help you switch off and relax during your leave. Here are some tips for Salesforce admins to make sure you can get in the festive spirit. Make sure your users are informed of reduced support hours Let’s start with the basics. Maybe you have a team for Salesforce support, or perhaps you’re a solo admin- either way, it’s likely that your users rely on your technical expertise and will need to know of any reduced support hours over the holidays. As well as the usual out-of-office, you can make use of rich text components in Lightning or custom home page components in Classic to display this information to all users upon login, or if your organisation uses Chatter you could post an announcement. Complete a back-up If you are going to have a period of total downtime and normally use Salesforce’s Data Export tool, chances are you might miss a scheduled back up, so it would be a good idea to do a manual export just before the holidays. Think about delegated administration Do you have delegated administrators who can perform basic, restricted tasks like password resets or unlocking users in your absence? If not, have a read up and consider whether this might a good time to give it a go. Empower users to support themselves as much as possible This one will stand you in good stead all year round! Do your users have everything they need to attempt troubleshooting before they come to you? Do they have guidance documentation, videos or how-to sheets? Think of the one area of support that you’re most called upon for. How could you tweak the system or upskill users to need this support less often? For instance, let’s say you have an approval process and users keep getting error messages because they’re attempting to submit records that don’t meet the entry criteria. Perhaps you could prompt them with In app guidance. Or if it’s a custom object you could take advantage of the great new feature from the Winter ’21 release, Dynamic Actions, and only have the Submit for Approval appear when the record meets the relevant criteria! Think about whether case or approval assignments need temporarily tweaking If you have any cases or approvals that are generally assigned to just one user, could you consider having a queue or a delegated approver? This would allow your users to cover each other more effectively and keep processes flowing smoothly during the holidays. Give your org some festive flair! We’ll end on my favourite one- once you’ve got the nuts and bolts in place, why not have some fun and add some festive touches to lightning pages on your org? Here I’ve used Themes and Branding in Setup to create a temporary theme for the holidays: And here's the result! I hope you found these tips helpful. The only thing left to say is happy holidays!
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