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.

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 Follow @davidgiller 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.

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?