Monday, March 25, 2019

Convert a Person Account to a Business Account with a Flow

Converting a Person Account to a Business Account using Salesforce Flow Builder

If you've worked with Person Accounts in Salesforce, then you know that they can be a great solution for B2C organizations, combining the Contact and Account records to a single 'person' entity. Person Accounts can also be the source of a lot of headaches for Salesforce Admins. One of these potential headaches is converting one account type to the other.

Converting a Person Account to a Business Account (Organization) and vice versa requires manipulating the records directly - and every other blog post I could find discussed using Data Loader to accomplish that. But what do you do if you want to let your users perform the conversion? Or maybe you still want to keep this as an Admin function, but you want to be able to do this from the UI, instead of having to prepare and load CSV's every time this is needed?

Let's talk about a bit of the background and challenges before we get into the actual process of converting them...


Monday, October 24, 2016

Salesforce Data Loader on Linux? Can it be?

I've been a Salesforce Admin and Developer for about 6 years, and throughout this entire time I've just used my Windows work computer.

In my past, though, I loved using Linux and missed that feeling of experimentation, messing with system-level settings, and freedom- not being tied to Microsoft's operating system. Some issues with my Windows installation recently made me extremely frustrated - enough so that I just said "Enough! I'm going back to Linux!"

So I backed up my computer, and decided to install Ubuntu - a very popular distribution of Linux.
After a few hours of setting things up 'just like I want' and challenges getting my company's email set up - I felt like I have a good working environment, and went back to my actual work.

One of the first things I needed to do was use Dataloader to update a large amount of records.
Oh oh.
What?
There is NO version of Data Loader for Linux?
What the hey, Salesforce?

Friday, October 21, 2016

Want to be a Salesforce Developer? Well look what we have here!


As a co-leader of the New York City Developer User Group I've had the please of running a series called "Apex Workshop" with Luke Cushanick .

The series was designed to teach users with established Salesforce Administrators experience to start the amazing journey to kick-start a developer career, or simply to allow administrators to understand code and know more about how the platform works.

On our first couple of runs, we held the classes in NYC once every two weeks.

Now, however, we have been teaching these classes as Webinar - which means you can join us and/or catch up with all the previous sessions!

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Know Your Users But Make Sure They Know You

users [yoo-zers] : Those pesky annoyances making it difficult for you to complete your work, always interrupting with their questions and requests.
As an administrator of a Salesforce Organization you likely spend much of your time dealing with your users. How much time depends on how your company utilizes Salesforce, what adoption rates are at, the size of your team, and many other factors.
But how does knowing your users help you do your job better?
Even more important - should you make sure your users know you?
What does that even mean?
How would you even go about it?

Let's dive in.

Friday, August 5, 2016

Journey To The Center of A Salesforce Career

This post is not like the others.

I started this blog with a very specific goal in mind: provide value-added knowledge to the community; things I've learned, discovered, or came up with over the past few years. I didn't want to bog down this blog with abstract stories or repeat what is already plentiful on the interwebs.

With that said, I was recently encouraged by Cheryl Feldman  - a dear friend, a leader in NYC community, and a Salesforce MVP to share a little about myself, and tell a small part of my story.

This post is about my journey.
If you are just getting into the Salesforce world, I'd like to share with you how I got into Salesforce. How it boosted my career and gave me a sense of satisfaction that is still strong years later.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Celebrate Your Contacts' Birthday Without Code!


UPDATE 2: Additional feedback highlighted another issue - the process would not 're-schedule' the post correctly when changing the birthdate. This has now been resolved by tweaking the entry criteria for the second step from Great than 'TODAY()' to Not Equal 'PRIORVALUE([Contact].Next_Birthday__c)

UPDATE:After posting this article, reader's feedback made me realize there were a few things that needed 'improvement' - specifically, I've updated the entry criteria for the first action to account for updates to the birthdate field, and overhauled the formula used to calculate the next birthday to address birthdays which occur later in the year.

Salesforce provides many automation tools that allow administrators to get a lot done without writing one line of code. In some instances creating the automation is straight-forward and quick, and others require a bit of thinking and planning.
There are definitely some things that are still not possible to achieve without writing some code, but that list continues to get smaller as Salesforce improves their tools and release new ones.

NYC User Group Leader, and recently appointed Salesforce MVP David Giller  posted a question on the Success Community yesterday, asking if there is a way to use Process Builder to automatically post a chatter notice, mentioning a contact owner on a contact's birthday.

This may seem impossible, or very simple - depending on your experience with Process Builder.
The same process can be used to e-mail a contact a happy birthday e-mail, or really anything you can do from Process Builder.

Read below for a step-by-step guide on how to implement this.

Monday, July 25, 2016

Easily Use Salesforce to Track Your Salesforce Work

We keep telling our users that 'If it's not in Salesforce it does'nt exist'
The benefits for the Sales and Customer service teams is evident and significant - so why shouldn't you heed your own advice?
Are you already using Salesforce to track the work you do on the platform?
If you are not, think about what you can immediately gain:
  1. Master List
    No more forgetting about an e-mail you received a just before you left for vacation
  2. Report on your success
    Create reports that you can share with your boss or even with your users
  3. Keep your users in the loop
    did you start working on their request already? Is it complete?
  4. Audit / History
    What did you do over the last month? Who asked for it? Did someone approve this change?
  5. Use Chatter
    Chatter is an amazingly useful collaboration tool - use it to work and communicate with your users
Yeah, that does make sense, doesn't it?
But what is the fastest way to set something like this up?