Several releases back, Salesforce introduced new productivity tools to help users with their repetitive tasks. The one we are featuring here is quick text; the other is Macros, which we’ll explore on another blog.

Quick text allows users to insert a standard comment or note on a record to answer common questions or record quick comments. Similar to email templates, they allow a company to standardize on the wording used to help maintain consistent messaging across the team.

With Winter ’19, quick text can now be added to tasks and events in addition to other objects. Also added is the ability to organize quick texts into folders, making them easier to share with users.

How To Set Up Quick Text

Quick text comes already enabled in your Lightning Salesforce Org. (In Classic, it is enabled if you have Live Agent.)

You can find the setting by going to Setup -> User Interface -> Quick Text Settings

Using Folders

Here, you will also find the option to enable the ability to share and organize quick text in Folders. Folders help you organize and share quick text. You can create up to four levels of folders: one root folder and up to three subfolders.

Sharing Settings

If you enable this feature it is important to note that sharing settings on folders override sharing settings on individual items. If you shared quick text in Salesforce Classic, those settings are ignored after this preference is enabled. If you decide to disable this preference later, folder sharing is ignored, and individual sharing settings apply.

Update Permissions

After enabling quick text, give users access to quick text by updating their permissions. Use a permission set or update profiles to give your users Read permission on the quick text object. Optionally, you can also give users Create, Edit, and Delete access to let them create and manage their own quick text messages.

How To Organize Your Quick Text Messages

Creating a quick text message is as easy as creating any other record in Salesforce. Begin by navigating to the Quick Text Tab (you might need to go to All Tabs if it’s not immediately shown in your navigation). Here you’ll have the option to search through your existing quick texts, create a new record, or create a new folder.

Let’s begin with creating a new folder called Support Responses.

1. Click on the New Folder button
2. Type “Support Responses” in the Folder Label
3. Click Save

That’s it! You’ve created a folder to organize all common support responses in. You can now control access to these messages by sharing the folder out. The folder can be shared with specific users, users within a role, or public groups.

Next, let’s create the quick text message.

How To Create a Quick Text Message

1. If you’re still in the Support Responses folder, go ahead and click New Quick Text
2. Give the record a name. Call it “Link to Support Hours”
3. In the body you can use Merge Fields to personalize your responses. Enter the message. 
4. Select a category. In orgs created before Spring ’18 that enabled quick text in Salesforce Classic, this field is required, and a default Category is provided for you. In orgs created after Spring ’18, this field isn’t required.
5. Select the channels in which you want the message to be available. For our example, we’ll select Email (it’s already selected by default).

Enable Available Channels

Depending on which features are enabled in your org, these channels might be available.

• Email: for Email actions
• Event: for Event actions
• Internal: works with internal fields, like on the Change Status action*
• Knowledge: for Knowledge articles in Lightning Experience
• Live Agent: works with Live Agent chat in the Service Console
• Phone: for the Log a Call action
• Portal: works in a community or a customer portal*
• Social: for social posts
• Task: for Task actions

6. Click Save

Your quick text message is ready for use. To test out our new quick text message we’ll navigate to a case. Create a new email message. You’ll see the quick text button in the email toolbar.

Locate and click the quick text message we created earlier.

What Else Can Quick Text Do?

Quick text can be used for more than sending emails, of course. For Live Agent, it’s an incredible time saver when responding to frequently asked questions. Use it for capturing structured notes for your records, as well. It’s a great productivity tool that will be sure to please your users.

Have you tried quick text? Let us know what you think below.

“What Exactly Is Salesforce?”

I sometimes run into people that have not heard of Salesforce. It doesn’t happen very often. But when I do, I try to figure out how to best describe what Salesforce is to them.

Me: Salesforce is a Customer Success Platform that allows users to “easily log, manage, and analyze all customer activity in one place with a suite of web-based CRM software.” (Taken from Salesforce, itself.)

Them: Blank stare. “What’s CRM again…?”

Me: “Customer Relationship Management helps companies understand their customers’ needs and solve problems by better managing customer information and interactions — all on a single platform that’s always accessible from any desktop or device.”

Them: “That sounds complicated.”

That’s when I knew it would take a different approach.

How to Actually Describe Salesforce

Over the years, Salesforce has evolved into something incredibly huge. Over 150,000 companies trust Salesforce to manage their customer data. It’s no longer just a Contact Manager (or a CRM). It is so much more than just a database in the cloud.

So how do you describe it? How do you describe Salesforce to someone in your family or circle of friends who may be technical-challenged during holiday feasts and get-togethers?

When I describe Salesforce now, I like to begin by saying it is a database in the cloud that lets you do just about anything you need it to do. At this point, there is often a moment of silence followed by the question, “So you’re a programmer?”

“No, I’m not a programmer,” I tell them. In fact, I know very little about coding, which is what makes Salesforce so awesome. I describe how my role as a Solution Architect/Analyst is to help companies figure out how to best setup Salesforce for their use. In my role, however, I do little to no coding.

I briefly explain how Salesforce comes set up with so much ready to go right out of the box, and how easy it is to modify it to meet a company’s particular needs, usually wrapping up with a few use cases around sales, marketing, and customer service.

Usually, when I describe Salesforce to my friends and family they’re amazed by how much Salesforce can do. I like to tell them about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how Salesforce is used in devices, in cars, and in robotics. And now we’re also seeing applications for Healthcare and Education.

What Salesforce Means to Me

When you sit back and start thinking about all the things Salesforce can do, it really is incredible. Looking back at that “Big Bang moment” when Salesforce started as a mostly web-based Contact Management tool for sales to where it is now — and where it is going with things like artificial intelligence (AI) — is totally mind-blowing.

This is why I love what I do, and love to describe to people what Salesforce is.

How do you describe Salesforce to your friends and family? Let us know in the comments below.

If you have recently moved to Salesforce Lightning and are now trying to build a report, you might be wondering where are the report formats?

There’s now no longer a drop down where you can choose Summary vs. Matrix, or Joined. So what happened to them? Rest assured, they’re still there.

The New Salesforce Lightning Report Builder

The Report Builder has long been needing a facelift, and now it’s here! The new Lightning Report Builder introduces a new, more modern look and feel to the Salesforce Report Builder.

Since its release as a beta product, Salesforce has been working hard to make improvements. In Spring ’18 we saw the addition of features such as the ability to change your date granularity in your date grouping, easily see your report type used, and more easily change the report name. In Winter ’19 Salesforce is bringing joined reports into the Lightning Report Builder.

But Where Did My Salesforce Report Formats Go?

Lightning Report Builder is the future. Salesforce is actively working to improve it with every release. But what about now? Where are those report formats? The formats are still there, but Salesforce has changed how you access them.

Instead of a drop-down, now when you select to group by a specific field, the report format automatically changes to a summary report.

Once you’ve selected a grouping field for your rows, you’ll notice immediately underneath it an option appears to group your columns.

By selecting a column grouping, you will see your report automatically change to a Matrix report format.

There are still some things that have not moved over from the Classic report writer yet, but they will in time. The new report writer also introduces a slick new feel to the dashboard components making them really come to life.

Where to Learn More About Salesforce Reports and Dashboards for Lightning Experience

For more information on Lightning Report Writer, check out the Salesforce Trailhead: Reports and Dashboards for Lighting Experience. This Unit covers modules like Introduction to Reports and Dashboards in Lightning Experience, Create Reports with the Report Builder, Format Reports, and Visualize Your Data with the Lightning Dashboard Builder.

We Predict Very Happy Health Cloud Users

Salesforce is at it again! The Winter ’19 release is full of amazing new features and enhancements sure to delight any Health Cloud user.

At least three times per year, Salesforce has a major release of new and updated functionality. Be sure to check out the Winter ’19 Release Highlights trail mix to get an overview of all the incredible new functionality being released in Winter ’19.

In the Winter ’19 release, we’re seeing incredible new functionality all across the board. One area, in particular, receiving tremendous attention is Salesforce Health Cloud.

BONUS: Hear About Another Health Cloud Announcement at HIMSS18

In this latest update, Salesforce is including a whole new object model to support Health Insurance services. They’re also introducing new Lightning components, updates to the Patient card, and more!

Health Insurance Data Model

Salesforce has introduced a new data model in Health Cloud to help Payers and Providers simplify and manage integrations for Membership, Benefits, and claims and authorization details. This new model promises to deliver functionality to help organize and make access to patient information more efficient than ever before. Partners like Vlocity have provided solutions to help streamline the user experience even further with their templates and accelerators.

Learn more about the Health Insurance Data Model

Patient Card Improvements

Accessing records from the patient card has gotten even easier with Winter ’19:

• Now from within the Patient Card, you can click links that open record pages in a subtab, helping you to quickly go back to where you were before you clicked
• New pagination functionality now allows you to easily show more information when a Patient Card contains more than ten records
• A new feature now allows you to show images in the Patient Card through the use of Formula Fields

Learn more about Patient Card Improvements

Health Cloud with Platform Encryption

Information security and privacy have always been a primary concern of Salesforce. Out of the box, Salesforce provides a wide range of features to help ensure their customer’s information is secure. For customers that may require a higher level of data retention, audit trails, or policy management, Salesforce has introduced Salesforce Shield.

New in the Winter ’19 release, you can take advantage of Platform Encryption to introduce a more powerful level of security to protect your patient data. Winter ’19 now works with Platform Encryption to help encrypt information kept in some of the more sensitive fields within the Health Insurance and Utilization Management data models.

Learn more about Health Cloud with Platform Encryption

More Winter ’19 Updates to Health Cloud

You can find more information about the Winter ’19 updates to Health Cloud on Salesforce’s Winter ’19 Release Notes site. Salesforce is constantly striving to improve the functionality, security, and overall greatness of Salesforce, and we are here to keep you on top of the biggest and most powerful updates. 

Have a New Salesforce Org?

If you purchased a new Salesforce org, you may be wondering where to begin setting it up. In this blog we’ll explore a few of the essential areas to review and configure to help get you started.

When you first sign into your new Salesforce org you will see that it is preconfigured with most of the basic things a company would use. In fact, you could start using it the moment you sign in. But more likely you’ll need to configure some features to make sure that your Salesforce org is setup to support your company’s processes. As a Senior Solutions Architect, here are the basic steps I recommend to cover your “getting started” phase.

Start with Trailhead

This is the first place to start. Salesforce Trailhead is an incredible resource for training. All your users should go through the basic trailheads designed to familiarize them with general Salesforce usage. Trailheads are easy to use and generally pretty entertaining. Users will earn badges and advance their levels as they complete Trailhead modules.

To begin your journey with Trailhead I’ve assembled this collection of Trailhead modules. Use this New Users Trailmix to get started. Then explore on your own the thousands of other possibilities, like the ones in Learning to Use Salesforce: A Beginner’s Guide.

Clear Your Demo Data

When you first login to your new Salesforce org, it will be preconfigured with basic settings, as well as data. The first thing you’ll want to do is clear out the demo data. Do this before you add any new data to Salesforce. This helpful document will guide you through mass deleting the trial data: Mass Delete Salesforce Demo Data.

New Salesforce Org Design Considerations

When you begin planning your design, focus on the following key areas.

Security

Design how records will be shared by configuring Organizational Wide Defaults (OWA). Will you have a tight, restricted-visibility Salesforce model? Or will everyone “see” everything?

Determine what users can do with Profiles and Permission Sets. Will users have the ability to create reports, export data, delete data, etc.?

Domain

Improve user experience by defining a domain. Using My Domain, you can customize your login page with your own branding and make it easier for using links-to-records in the future.

Templates

Salesforce provides a great collection of out-of-the-box communication templates to get you started. However, they truly are samples. You’ll want to use them as a reference tool to create the templates you will need going forward.

List Views

Again, Salesforce has provided numerous standard views that will support many of your needs, but views are one of the most powerful tools available to help users find and work with their data. Think of views as queries that return a list of data like “Show me new Leads this week” or “Show me my Accounts” or “Show me Opportunities closing this month.” Views are easy to create and configure to support your business processes.

Users

Once you’ve implemented your design and setup the basic configuration, you’ll need to go live and you can start creating users. You’ll want users in place before you start migrating data into Salesforce or creating your Sandboxes. You can use tools like Data Loader to make loading users a lot easier than entering them one at a time.

Sandboxes

Sandboxes are where you will test your changes and write your code before moving it into your production (live) environment in the future. Before you create your Sandbox you should configure as much as possible in your new Salesforce org. When you create a Sandbox, it takes a snapshot (mirror image) of your Salesforce production environment.

Begin Designing

Now that your new Salesforce org has been cleaned up, you’re ready to begin configuring it for your use. This is where you’ll want to spend a bit more time mapping out what needs to change to best support your business. Salesforce is incredibly flexible and easy to change on the fly, but some changes can take more effort than others. Over time some changes will certainly increase in difficulty, so as you map out your design, keep scalability in mind. Don’t paint yourself into a corner by designing features now that will not scale later! This is where the team at  Perficient can help ensure a path forward for success.

Key Takeaway

Setting up a new Salesforce org can be fun. It’s like having a blank canvas to paint on and the possibilities are limitless! There are design considerations you’ll want to make up front, as well as process design for things like Change Management to ensure that your use of Salesforce in the future continues to be successful for you and your team. The team at Perficient can work with you to develop a solid strategy to make sure you get the best use out of your new investment.

Could your business use richer analytics? What about making use of the data you already have? Salesforce has done a fantastic job at helping Administrators get an idea of “who changed what,” especially in respect to data and configuration.

With the History object, most organizations have what they need to see what changes were made to a record, by whom, and when. In most cases it even shows what the value was before the change and after — this information can even been included in reports.

However, some organizations require further detail. This is usually in response to regulatory requirements to ensure that field audit history is specific enough and retained long enough to satisfy the regulations. To solve for this, Salesforce has provided Field Audit Trail.

Field Audit Trail helps provide forensic details of field changes in an org. It goes beyond the 18-month, out of the box storage for field history and takes it up to ten years! And, with a number of new tools, it extends the functionality of what you can do with this information, allowing you to automate logic based on certain conditions, and there’s even a pilot currently to help with anomaly detection.

Field History

Out of the box Salesforce can track up to 20 fields per object using field history and retains that information for 18 months. The benefit of this is displayed on the record in a related list and is even reportable.

Field Audit Trail uses a similar experience but extends those limits to track up to 60 fields and will retain as much as ten years.

Policy Configurator and Condition Builder

Using the Policy Configurator, administrators can now offer extended automation to help ensure compliance. Plus, with Condition Builder they can now act on these policies and enforce certain conditions, such as logging in with certain mobile device versions.

Delete Field History Permission

A new permission now allows specified individuals to delete historical information, if needed. It would require going through the API.

Use Case

Someone accidentally added credit card numbers to a name field. It logged the numbers in the history tracking. Then, they tried to fix it. Field History again logs that credit card number in the database. GDPR may require that the company wipe instances of that credit card number.

Real-Time Events Pilot

Starting in Spring 2018 a new pilot was made available to some Salesforce customers which provides new real-time events tracking and anomaly detection. New architecture is used to capture user behavior in Salesforce. You can now stream, store, and take action for each of these events. It supports the synchronous policy condition evaluation and actions for the real-time event and following event streaming and event storage use cases for customers with real-time security and performance monitoring use cases.

As you can see, Field Audit Trail is so much more than just history tracking. It’s now using this information to get richer analytics and use that data that’s already collected to help enforce behaviors in the system. Could you see the benefit of Field Audit Trail in your business?

As mentioned in our intro blog, Salesforce Shield: Bringing Compliance to the Cloud, customer information security is critical to Salesforce’s success. In this blog, we’re going to take a look at another part of Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption.

When regulations require more protection

Your data is already very secure. But to meet the increasingly demanding requests of information regulations, your organization needs to demonstrate further efforts to lock down certain specific data values. Salesforce now provides Platform Encryption to customers that require that additional layer of protection. For example, healthcare organizations with service groups may need to encrypt case fields such as subject, comments, details, any contact info. What is important to note about Platform Encryption is that it is not intended to solve for who can see what within an org. Platform Encryption is intended to encrypt data written to disk.

What Shield Platform Encryption is and what it is not

What Shield Platform Encryption solves

• Regulatory Compliance
  • GDPR does not mandate you encrypt data
    • It suggests it today, but does not mandate it
    • Customers with GDPR needs should understand that encryption alone does not make them GDPR compliant
  • Internal Policies
  • Contractual Obligations
  • Unauthorized Access to the DB
    • This is the very unlikely scenario that Salesforce would be hacked. This ensures that the customer’s data does not leak out.

What Shield Platform Encryption does not solve

• Sharing model
• Object or Field Level security
• Data residency Solutions
• Encryption for non-Salesforce Data
• Protection against Social Engineering
• Masking

Before investing in Platform Encryption, you’ll want to make sure you’ve solved all of these use cases with existing functionality. More often than not, the needs evolve around access control. This is not encryption!

Benefits of Platform Encryption

Platform Encryption encrypts sensitive data at rest while allowing customers to control the lifecycle of their encryption keys.

Key strengths of Platform Encryption include:

• Strong full probabilistic encryption schemes
• No hardware, no software, no integrations – it is 100% native
• Transparent encryption and encryption services
• Mobile-ready, natively
• Seamless release upgrades
• Scalability and resilience
• Negligible performance impact
• Most of the critical business functionality is preserved
• Leverage native search
• Minimal impact on field length

Shield Platform Encryption for Compliance

Whether you’ve been working with Salesforce for years or you’re new to Salesforce, your Audit team is asking for information regarding the security and compliance of the information stored in your Salesforce environment. Right out the gate, Salesforce meets the rigorous demands of various industry certifications including:

• ISO 27001/27017/27018 Certifications
• EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Certification
• TRUSTe
• Payment Card Industry (PCI)
• And much more.

You can read more about Salesforce’s continuous efforts around Trust and Compliance here.

How to set up Platform Encryption

Setting up Platform Encryption does not require that you are a security expert or a developer even. You don’t need to write any code or have a background in information security — everything is metadata-driven.

There are, however, some important limitations to be aware of before enabling Platform Encryption.

Platform Encryption limitations

Performance

When enabling Platform Encryption customers may see some performance degradation, particularly during night time batch jobs where the data needs to be decrypted and encrypted.

Encrypting Historical Data

Data going forward would be encrypted, but prior to enabling Platform Encryption, historical data would need to be handled a little differently.

Salesforce can help here. Open a ticket with Support and they can quickly process large amounts of data as needed.

Filtering Fields (Reports and List Views)

Filtering encrypted fields with probabilistic encryption is not supported. Use Deterministic instead (Exact Match and Case Sensitive only).

SOQL

Referencing encrypted fields in SOQL/WHERE clause is not supported. Encrypted fields cannot be sorted.

Portal

Encrypted standard fields cannot be set up on the legacy portal orgs.

Cloud Limits

Shield Platform Encryption is not extended to other clouds such as marketing cloud, Pardot, SalesforceIQ, Heroku, and Thunder at this time.

Trial Orgs

Not available in customers’ trial org type.

Shield Platform Encryption Best Practices 

Before taking on Platform Encryption there are recommended best practices to follow to ensure a successful implementation.

Define a Threat Model

Be sure to understand what it is you are solving for. Quite often, existing functionality will be sufficient.

Encrypt only where necessary

You’ll want to run through a proper data classification exercise to understand what the specific needs are.

Read the Platform Encryption Considerations

Read through this document for more detail about the limitations and considerations to better understand the impact to your org.

Create a strategy for backing up and archiving key data

Salesforce provides weekly backup functionality that allows its customers to fully backup their Salesforce data. There are also other options to help customers ensure their information is backed up. Make sure you explore these options and have a clear strategy before proceeding.

Communicate to your users

Make sure your users are aware of these changes and the impact to your org so you’re not flooded with support requests.

Analyze and test AppExchange apps before deploying

Work with the vendors you use (or plan to use) to make sure they are going to support what you are encrypting.

Getting started with Platform Encryption for your business

As you can see, Platform Encryption is not a quick fix to data security. It is designed to solve for very specific needs around encryption and brings along quite a few considerations that may have significant impacts on your org.

Before taking on Platform Encryption, it is highly encouraged that you reach out to Perficient to further discuss your needs and how we can help provide expert guidance during your implementation.

If you haven’t heard, Salesforce Shield is a bundle of products that Salesforce has put together to help customers meet strict regulatory requirements concerning their data.

Click here to learn about Salesforce Shield

Salesforce Shield Components

• Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring
• Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail
• Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption

Most successful businesses are not built on a hunch. That’s where data comes in. However, with access to so much data, one of the challenges many companies face is how to gain insight into activity in the database.

Traditionally, administrators have used reports to understand record population, field consistency, login times, and more. Those details are valuable and necessary to ensure the health of your Salesforce environment. The problem is, they only paint a small picture of what is going on in your database.

Salesforce event monitoring provides a wealth of information to help administrators improve their system and for companies to protect their data.

What is Salesforce Event Monitoring?

Salesforce event monitoring is like an amazing crystal ball! (Psychic not included.)

Use event monitoring to provide detailed insight into who is accessing data (and from where), analyze trends to help with adoption, and identify bottlenecks, resulting in improve performance.

Let’s take a look at five different areas of Salesforce event monitoring.

1. Event Logs

Designed as an API First service, Salesforce event monitoring helps you to use data that normally wouldn’t be possible through the user interface. Salesforce stores the information gathered by the event logs in an API object called EventLogFile. The Event Type field in the EventLogFile object supports 45 events presently. See a list of those event types.

Today, the event log captures information on a daily basis. However, Salesforce is working on a beta allowing for hourly data capture. At this time the hourly information is only available through the API and not supported by the analytics app, but this gives you a glimpse into where Salesforce event monitoring is headed.

2. Data Visualization

Using Salesforce Einstein analytics, you can visualize the data helping you to identify trends and make decisions based on how users are using information.

Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring is like your own crystal ball. Image: Fotolia

3. Real-Time Events

Real-time events support the synchronous policy condition evaluation and actions for the real-time event and following — even streaming and event storage use cases for customers — with real-time security and performance monitoring use cases. This is currently in pilot. Customers can reach out to Salesforce if they would like to participate.

4. Transaction Security

There are many ways policies can be used to encourage users to stay within guidelines intended to protect your data.

Use transaction security policies to act on events in real time by establishing condition actions. For example, if your organization restricts browsers or browser versions, by establishing a policy you can ensure only accepted browsers are used for accessing your data. Or, prevent users from logging in from multiple devices.

5. Machine Learning

With Salesforce’s event monitoring and machine learning capabilities, you can identify anomalies in events to help you become aware of potential data leakage risks. Salesforce is providing a pilot for anomaly detection which looks at 60-90 days of data to formulate a baseline, then tries to find a significant deviation from standard behavior.

If an anomaly in behavior is detected, Salesforce will send the administrator an email with a survey to determine the risk level. This is currently focused on Salesforce Core Cloud only for the pilot.

Learn More About Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring

The best place to learn about Salesforce Shield event monitoring is the Trailhead trail on the subject. After completing it, you should be able to name several event types supported by event monitoring, define event log files, state at least three use cases for event monitoring, and describe the API-first approach to development.

Salesforce event monitoring has the capability to unlock information and help administrators take their Salesforce environment to the next level. It is a key tool in an administrators utility belt that may not unleash a sixth sense, but it’s the closest thing to a crystal ball as you can get.

Is your company using event monitoring? Let us know in the comments below.

Salesforce has always been known for the incredible investments they have made in ensuring their customer’s data is safe and secure. They have to — data is their business.

Without the high level of trust that customers have in Salesforce’s security, Salesforce would not be the #1 CRM solution in the world. But some customers require an additional layer of security and privacy due to constant changes in information regulations. In order to meet those needs, Salesforce has come up with Shield.

Would you benefit from seeing who is doing what with sensitive data or knowing the state and value of your data going back up to ten years? Salesforce Shield can do all this and more.

What is Salesforce Shield?

The misconception about Shield is that it is not a single product. Actually, Salesforce Shield is the name given to a bundle of three products. Salesforce sells these individually, or as a bundle under the name Shield. Most customers find that it makes more sense to purchase the bundle, as they work together to help provide an additional layer of security to a customer’s data.

Salesforce Shield Event Monitoring

Event Monitoring provides detailed insights into what is happening with your system. With Event Monitoring, you can see statistic regarding performance, view user behavior, and analyze trends. With all this data at your fingertips, you can better understand user behavior to drive targeted user adoption strategies, or identify anomalies potentially signifying a security concern, and so much more…

Learn more about Event Monitoring

Salesforce Shield Field Audit Trail

Field Audit Trail expands the out of the box capabilities Salesforce already offers its clients and allows a customer to retain up to ten years worth of field history. This extended history is often needed to meet the rigorous demands placed on some customers for regulatory purposes.

Learn more about Field Audit Trail

Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption

A much-needed solution in a world of increasingly complex regulations, Platform Encryption was designed to help customers that need more than the [already amazingly] secure environment Salesforce provides.

Salesforce data is already well-secured when in transit. Salesforce already provides field level encryption out of the box. This feature is used to further encrypt your sensitive data at rest using your own keys or provided keys. But remember, this is not for every customer; Platform Security was designed to meet specific needs for a customer’s particular compliance or contractual obligations.

Learn more about Shield Platform Encryption

Salesforce Shield Trailhead

Secure Your Apps with Salesforce Shield trail

Trailhead, the go-to learning platform for all things Salesforce, offers a free training on Salesforce Shield. This lesson is focused on teaching users “how to establish governance and enforce compliance policies in your org.”

Get started on the trail Secure Your Apps With Salesforce Shield

With data privacy and security at top-of-mind for all companies, it is vital to understand the ways you have available to protect yourself and your business. Customers with complex governance and compliance needs are under even more stringent guidelines. We hope to demystify Shield and help you determine if it is the right fit for your organization.

If you haven’t had a chance to see it or try it, you should immediately sign up for a developer org and see what all the fuss is about. What exactly is Lightning Experience? Lightning Experience is a next generation Salesforce UI that delivers many new features to benefit sales teams of all sizes. Salesforce did more than develop just a new “skin”. They redesigned how Salesforce works. It has been described as not just a new UI but a whole new operating system. It literally changes the way sales users work with information in Salesforce.

Salesforce has been working on this upgrade for a number of years now with its inception beginning with mobile. With the heavy adoption of smart phones and tablets users have become accustomed to the fast, responsive designs of a well-developed mobile application. Salesforce decided to take the lessons learned from Salesforce1 and apply them to the desktop to help users sell smarter and sell faster.

During Dreamforce 2015, I wrote about some of the features announced for the Lightning Experience such as Account Insights, which brings news and information about a user’s accounts to their home page, updates to dashboards, and a whole new Opportunity page design. In this blog I’ll show you how to enable Lightning Experience and what some of the current considerations are before making the switch.

Considerations Before Enabling

Like any new software product, Lightning Experience is in its infancy and will evolve over time. It’s available to the general public as part of Winter ’16. It will take some time before every feature or function in Salesforce is supported. As of right now, there are a number of things that are not yet available. For example, if your organization is using Person Accounts, at this time you will not be able to use Lightning Experience. Salesforce will be adding this ability to Lightning Experience very soon however. A few other features not yet available, but likely to come soon, include: Assets, Campaigns and Campaign Members, Contracts, Forecasts (critical for many sales organizations), and more. For a list of features not currently available in Lightning go to Salesforce’s page, What’s Not Available in Lightning Experience. Be sure to read through this before you take the plunge. 

Turning on Lightning Experience

Salesforce has purposefully made it simple to enable the Lightning Experience. They made sure that we could slowly turn it on in our organization and try it out. When you enable Lightning Experience it will only be available by permission. This allows administrators to setup permissions for a select group of users to pilot. This is always a recommended first step to implementing any new upgrade. Of course, this comes after testing in Sandboxes to make sure your current business processes continue to work as expected.

To enable Lightning Experience in your org, navigate to the Setup menu and click on Lightning Experience. You’ll be brought to a page with information, resources, and a number of supporting features for your consideration such as Account Insights, Social Accounts, and Notes. Once you’ve selected which features to enable, move on to the permissions. 

The easiest thing to do is to create a Permission Set for Lightning Experience. Give the Permission Set a name that’s easy to refer to such as Lightning Experience User and grant it the permission “Lightning Experience User”. You’ll be able to assign this permission set to one or more users allowing for a controlled roll-out.

Now that you have the features selected and the permissions set up, the only other thing to do is to turn it on! The final step looks something like this:

Once you’ve enabled Lightning Experience, your users can simply switch to the new design by logging into Salesforce, clicking on their name and choosing “Switch to Lightning Experience”. That’s it! You’ve enabled Lightning Experience. Users with the permission to use the Lightning Experience will have the ability to click back on their name and return to the classic Salesforce UI that they are used to.

Seeing Lightning Experience for the First Time

Now get ready to oooh and aaah….

Image Source: Salesforce

The navigation bar on the left expands and collapses like the navigation bar in Classic Salesforce. On the right, users will have the Assistant to show them upcoming tasks, appointments and other activities. Assistant is also actionable. From this pane users can create appointments, make phone calls, and perform many of their usual tasks. Then in the center users will see their performance from their opportunities, recent records, top deals, and if you enabled it, Insights.

Opportunities Refresh

The Opportunities Home and Opportunities pages have been redesigned as well. The Home page provides an overview of opportunities as cards and allows sales users to easily drag and drop opportunities into stages. The Opportunities Home page will also alert sales users to opportunities that require their attention.

The Opportunity page also received a complete redesign. The new page is designed for users to take action. From the opportunity page sales users will see everything they need to work on an opportunity in one place, and have the ability to take action such as send an email, log calls, schedule appointments, and more. The Activity Timeline gives an overview of open tasks and appointments, and a history of completed activities.

Reports and Dashboards

Let me just say, Reports and Dashboards look amazing in Lightning Experience. First of all the Dashboard screen has been upgraded to allow for more Components than the three that we’ve been limited to for so long. The new dashboard is more than just aesthetically pleasing. The updated visuals help users visualize data and make it more actionable or make more informed decisions.

Final Thought

There’s so much more to Lightning Experience than what was covered in this blog. It will take time to mature before Lightning Experience is ready for everyone, but in my opinion Salesforce really knocked it out of the park with this one. There are plenty of resources available if you’re interested in finding out more. Trailhead is an incredible way to learn about new Salesforce features and experience them first-hand. You’ll also find volumes of information available through Help, in a well-designed user experience, giving you all the information you’ll need to decide if Lightning Experience is right for your business.

Interested in learning more about Lightning Experience? Connect with our Salesforce experts. 

This year’s Dreamforce has seen the announcement of many remarkable new features such as Lightning Experience, IoT built on Thunder, and a great deal more. But one of the most exciting keynotes to look forward to this year, in this author’s opinion, is the new Admin keynote. It’s in this session that admins get recognition for the amazing work they do building solutions and solving problems for their companies. It’s also where we find out what, as configurators are the cool nuggets that are going to make our lives easier, and help us look like heroes to our customers.

2015’s Admin Keynote started off with a high-energy cheer show by CHEER San Francisco, full of great acrobatics, death-defying stunts, and excitement. OK, maybe not death-defying. But the energy was definitely there.

Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris opened up discussing the Customer Success Platform. Parker described that there are currently 1.7 million community members submitting millions of ideas to his product team. He also highlighted Steve Molis for answering over 40,000 user questions on the community. With that recognition he also awarded him the lightning bolt that we saw during the opening keynote with Marc Benioff.

Following Parker was Sarah Franklin, VP, Admin Marketing for Salesforce. Sarah recognized admins with incredible stories and backgrounds that have become successful Salesforce admins in their organizations starting with almost zero technical skills. Sarah welcomed to the stage Krystal Carter, VP, Legal Management Consulting Duff & Phelps.

Krystal’s story started as an office administrator. She has since spent the past 15 years working with several different customers using Salesforce, and now has moved into a position of leadership at Duff & Phelps. Krystal described the key skills of a Salesforce Admin include solving problems, but more importantly the ability to listen. She described the ability to listen as key to understanding your user’s needs and goals. Additionally, she describes that a strong leader is also a strong mentor, sharing their knowledge with others.

To demo Lightning Experience was Shawna Wolverton, VP, Product Management at Salesforce. The demo began with how to setup Lightning. She describes that the path for customers considering Lightning Experience are:

• Trailhead for learning about Lightning Experience
• Setup toggles to easily enable it
• Permissions to roll-out Lightning Experience to specific users instead of the entire organization

The highlight of the new setup in Lightning Experience is the new Object Manager. All objects in one place with an intelligent search. A new feature on Object Manager includes Quick Create. This new feature allows admins to quickly create the things they do most often, such as users, email templates, objects, etc.

Page customization in Lightning Experience launches a new page builder. The new builder allows admins to easily move components around a page without code. Custom Components can be downloaded from the AppExchange or built. No additional work needs to happen to make pages compatible and responsive on iPhone, iPad, or Android. On the AppExchange for Components more than 50 partners have contributed to the exchange. One additional new feature discussed was that customization for objects now allow for up to 25 roll-up summary fields.

A new feature on the home page allow users to update their own goals. The assistant give users a list of what is most important, including what they next actions are. The Home Page can be customized similar to object pages. To admins, this means being able to drag and drop components onto the home page just like you would with the object pages.

On the roadmap for Spring ‘16+ may see some of the following:

• Service, Platform coming on line including:
• App Builder Customization
• Person Accounts
• Account Teams
• Opportunity Teams
• Campaigns
• Product Selector
• Advanced Charts

Next on stage was well-known Salesforce personality, Mike Gerholdt, Admin Evangelist. Mike described his journey as a beginner admin nine years ago to his role now as Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. He discussed Salesforce’s recommendation to admins approaching rolling out Lightning Experience to be thoroughly planned and a well-thought-out process. He said that the path can be broken down into three core strategies:

1. ​Learn
2. Get Hands-On
3. Engage

To begin learning, Mike recommended admins begin with Trailhead. Salesforce has prepared several new Lightning Trails and Badges on Trailhead for admins and users alike. He pointed out that to date admins have already earned over 50,000 Lightning badges since the new content went live. Additionally the new Lightning Design System for building pixel perfect apps comes with Sample Code to help admins and developers to have a starting point when creating new apps.

Lastly, as part of the Engage strategy to roll out Lightning Experience, Mike recommends implementing a strategy to engage users. For example, he suggested creating a Chatter group and collecting feedback – but not to stop there. Admins should engage with their users and take the time to talk to them directly and discuss what there pains and frustrations are.

The admin keynote definitely succeeded in getting the room excited over what’s to come with Salesforce. The suggestions were absolutely spot on. One of the main takeaways from this keynote was that the resources are out there for anyone interested in becoming an admin. The support from the community around Salesforce is outstanding and making it possible for anyone to be a successful admin.

Trying to figure out what sessions to attend at Dreamforce can be one of the toughest things to do during one of the most exciting weeks of the year. And then there is just getting to the sessions on time in order to make the most of your week at this absolutely epic event. But one of my favorite types of sessions are the Circles of Success. These sessions focus on specific challenges in a round-table like environment and foster dialog and ideas between the participants. One of the participants today said for him these sessions are like therapy.

I had the opportunity to sit in a session titled “Weathering the Storm of Change Management” this morning. My table had participants from small local companies with a couple of hundred users to large global companies with thousands of users and many different Salesforce orgs. Despite the differences in scale, there was still a common challenge experienced by everyone at the table: how do we manage the chaos of change with a solution as easy to configure as Salesforce in a fast-paced business environment?

Our table focused on the challenge of user adoption. This topic alone really needs more than an hour’s discussion. It can often be one of the main contributors to a failed solution implementation. Nonetheless, it is an area of pain for nearly every organization, whether new to Salesforce or a longtime customer.

Many issues result from not having a solid user adoption strategy. Of course, the first thing we think about is people not using the system. But that is usually just a small part of it. Other issues that impact the health of the solution include quality of data issues, difficulty with onboarding new hires, solution knowledge and awareness, misplaced expectations, and in the big picture of all of this, a measurable negative impact to revenue.

User adoption is a science and an art. There are numerous books written on this topic as well as excellent blogs written by other Perficient authors on this site. But one key takeaway that came out of today’s discussion was drawing a distinction between Stick vs. Carrot approach. Both are necessary in a good user adoption strategy. But like everything else, there needs to be a balance between them.

Traditionally, the stick approach has been employed to drive use of a solution. The stick is often realized as the top-down-driven messaging of use the solution, “or else”. Perhaps not worded as strongly as that in most organizations. However, the idea is the same.

Often companies seek to drive adoption by leaning on the management and executive sponsors to create policy to state that all users are required to login and use the solution a certain way. While it’s important to have executive sponsorship helping to promote the use of the system, this should not be the only motivator strategy because it can lead to users finding the quickest and easiest way to enter what they have to in order to make sure they’ve met the minimum requirements of the policy’s expectations. The balance to the stick is the carrot.

The carrot is the “how does this benefit me” or “what’s in this for me” explanation that users are looking for when they are using Salesforce. Users need to find value in the solution beyond the requirement of entering data that seemingly provides no immediate and direct value to them. Consider the messaging to your users and leverage identifying areas that will improve their quality of life directly from the use of Salesforce.

For example:

Time Savings – Identify inefficient business processes and build solutions in Salesforce to address them thereby making it easier for users to get the same results in a fraction of the time.

• That paper form you had to use to create an account in the ERP has been deprecated and now everything can be entered through Salesforce.
• The excel sheet you used to have to fill out each week to communicate your forecast or pipeline numbers to your manager is no longer needed because we can pull that information from what you enter into your opportunities.
• The emails and phone calls and cat herding you had to do to get an approval for your quote can now be done by the push of a button.

Support through Motivation – Consider transparency to incentives and other strategies to help motivate users to want to use the system.

• Being able to see commissions real-time (or near it) on an opportunity or dashboard is a powerful incentivizer to promote desired behavior in a system.
• Use Apps to employ a points-based system tied to incentives to drive behavior. In the Circles of Success session, our table discussed using an Appexchange app called SuMo. There are several apps on the Appexchange that provide this kind of functionality. This particular app happened to be used by one of the participants very successfully. Using an App like SuMo you can drive behavior through goals in the solution and provide incentives around performance. This is often referred to as Gamification. You’ll find many articles online discussing strategies on this topic.

These are just a couple of strategies that we discussed during our session today. As I said, it just begins to scratch the surface of addressing User Adoption. I recommend exploring and reading more around User Adoption. Consider partnering with Perficient to help define a strategy, and be sure to include it as part of your overall Change Management strategy.